In LA

From the “your tax dollars at work” department: According to the Washington Post, the CIA has set up secret torture prisons in 8 unnamed foreign countries. No congressional oversight. A blanket approval from the President of all CIA actions related to counterterrorism made this possible.

Part of the whole “proud to be an American” concept gets a little sullied when it turns out that we too are whisking people away in the dead of night to sit in a dark solitary cell with no representation and be starved, sleep deprived, and tortured. And apparently this treatment has been given to people who are not terrorists, such as Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen wrongly accused of having attended terrorist training camps in Afghanistan.

Before I get too depressed, I’d like to acknowledge that it’s nice to live in a country where the press can freely report on such things and the reporter and publisher don’t end up in the gulag. It’s obvious from the article that some in the CIA are not comfortable with these practices, and are probably risking plenty to leak some details to the press. And the fact that the CIA thought congress and the U.S. public wouldn’t stand for these shenanigans and thus had to keep them so secret is a hopeful sign — if the majority of the public were willing to accept such practices we’d be in an incredibly sorry state.

And now back to your regularly scheduled depression over “the human condition” as expressed in U.S. politics.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 1st, 2005 at 8:07 pm and is filed under Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.