A few days ago, the State Department issued its annual report on human trafficking around the world. It set off several months of deliberation that will last until President Bush decides, one day next fall, which countries will lose foreign aid because they harbor slave traffickers or fail to help victims.

On that day, the White House press office ought to put up a movie screen in the briefing room and play the movie clip of "Casablanca" in which Claude Rains famously declares: "Round up the usual suspects." Last year's report listed 16 countries as the worst malefactors, among them Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman and Malaysia — allies all. But in October, the president's final "determination" listed only Burma, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba and North Korea, the bete noirs of the Bush administration.

When the White House publishes this year's determination next fall, you can safely place money on the assumption that President Bush will list the usual suspects once again. After all, the administration blacklists the same five nations, more or less, in every annual report it publishes — on human rights, drug trafficking, terrorism, religious freedom and democratic development. More egregious offenders are let off the hook.

Why does this matter? Over the years, Congress and the White House have set up offices to study and report on these problems because each of them is of serious concern to large numbers of people in Washington and around the country. Some of them, including drug trafficking and terrorism, actually cause grave problems in the United States.

And yet, year after year, when the White House gets the reports, it blows them off.

Consider the annual report on drug trafficking, published in March. It lists 21 nations as major drug-producing countries. Among them is Afghanistan, which grows 95 percent of the world's opium poppies, used to make heroin. Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, likes to say that by appealing to the farmers' better natures, he can persuade them to stop growing poppies. So far that strategy hasn't worked — anywhere in the world.

What's more, Taliban guerrillas extort kickbacks from these farmers. With that money, billions of dollars, the Taliban buy weapons used to kill American and NATO troops. Does any other country's drug problem more directly harm the United States? Bolivia's, perhaps. Bolivia's president, Evo Morales, is also president of his nation's largest coca growers union. Coca, of course, is used to make the cocaine that floods the streets of American cities. Morales is urging his people to grow ever larger crops.

Colombia, Mexico and Peru are also listed. They rank among the world's largest producers of marijuana, cocaine and heroin, principally for the American market. All of them stand to lose U.S. aid if the president puts them on his list.

And yet, when the president issued the government's official determination last fall, he cited only Burma and Venezuela. Burma produces methamphetamine, but Venezuela produces nothing. Besides being on the usual suspects list because President Hugo Chavez continually hectors and challenges Washington, its only significant narcotics infraction is that it does not effectively prevent drug traffickers from traversing its borders.

The pattern continues with the Human Rights report, which was first published during the Carter administration. The authors of that law did not set up any specific penalties. Instead the report relies on humiliation. No country wants to be listed among the world's top 10 human-rights violators.

Saudi Arabia executes people for uttering complaints about Islam. Egypt beats up people who try to vote. But they are not among the usual suspects, so they are not listed. Instead, the State Department cites Sudan, Uzbekistan, Syria, North Korea, Burma, Iran, Zimbabwe, Cuba, Belarus and Eritrea.

The annual terrorism report cites Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan and Syria — not Pakistan, al-Qaida's new home. The report on religious freedom cites Saudi Arabia and China as wild-card picks. But the other nations are, wouldn't you know it, Burma, Eritrea, Iran, North Korea, Sudan and Uzbekistan — not Iraq, home to a continuing, murderous Sunni-Shiite religious war.

In this country you'll find few defenders of the usual-suspect states. But what's the point of spending copious time and money researching and publishing these reports if the only nations penalized are those with which the U.S. has minimal relations and even less influence? For other nations, administration officials devise tortured circumlocutions to explain away the problems. Many of these states then hold up Washington's exoneration as a badge. See, they say, we don't need to do anything at all.

Joel Brinkley is a former Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent for The New York Times and now a professor of journalism at Stanford University. Reach him at brinkley@foreign-matters.com.