So we run a secret prison, so what?
Tuesday, September 12th, 2006Having admitted to running secret prisons outside the reach of U.S. law and public scrutiny, the Bush administration has chosen to brazen it out. Yes, as a matter of fact we ARE running secret prisons, and now that it’s politically expedient we’ll brag about it. German Chancellor Angela Merkel made the obvious point in her low-key way:
“The existence of such prisons is incompatible with my idea of the rule of law. Even in the fight against terrorism… the ends do not justify the means.”
Ouch. The U.S. claims at all times to uphold the rule of law, and here’s a foreigner pointing out that we do the opposite. And then she reviews an elementary moral principle for a head of state who claims not only to be a moral leader but claims to be on a mission from God. I guess she’s not his girlfriend any more.
Of course they haven’t bothered to explain why the secret prisons were secret in the first place. They like secrets, and they don’t like explaining. I’ve said it before, official secrets are to protect official liars. If they are keeping their European and Asian prisons secret, it’s because there’s something going on there that they don’t want American voters to know about. Even if I didn’t cynically assume that means the prisoners are tortured we have the accounts of some of the victims of “extraordinary rendition,” such as Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen grabbed in New York:
After three consecutive days of beating and interrogation, he said, “I could not take the pain any more and I falsely confessed of having been to Afghanistan.” After the Canadian government intervened, Syrian authorities released him in October 2003 — more than one year after his ill-fated attempt to change planes in New York City — with an acknowledgment that there was no evidence that he was ever involved in terrorism.
Do you feel safer yet?
