Two years ago now, bloggers, editorialists and reporters began to connect the dots on the Bush administration’s policy of “extraordinary rendition.” Extraordinary rendition is the practice by which people are nabbed by the U.S. government, often on U.S. soil, and shipped off to foreign countries where they can be interrogated using means that would be against the law on U.S. soil. Those means are methods of torture.
For an example of what can happen under Bush Administration policy, read about the case of one person so extraordinarily rendered, German citizen Khaled El-Masri. Without any access to a lawyer or courts, and never, ever charged with a crime, El-Masri was beaten, drugged, anally probed and sent to a secret CIA prison in Afghanistan, where he was kept in isolation for months before being summarily deposited by Americans on a hilltop in Albania, warned not to look back and never to tell a soul about what he had suffered in his illegal prison cell.
When cases like this began to surface in 2005, the White House responded by sending out a spokesman, who “did not dispute there had been mistreatment on some occasions but said no one had died.”
Is that the best America can muster any more? Sure, we abduct, beat, drug and imprison people without so much as a fare-thee-well and never a single charge, but at least they’re not DEAD?
What happened to American standards?
What happened to American morality?
And what happened to the United States Congress?
As of today, there is not a single bill proposed in either the U.S. House or the U.S. Senate to end the practice of extraordinary rendition. There is not a single bill proposed in either the U.S. House or the U.S. Senate to address the practice of extraordinary rendition in any way, shape or form altogether. Why not? It’s illegal. It’s immoral. Even if you don’t care about law and morality, it’s just plain stupid from a public relations standpoint.
So why hasn’t a single member of the House or Senate taken it upon themselves to write a little, tiny bill that expressly forbids this barbaric practice?
The answer: they’re too busy writing bills suggesting that their former colleague Mickey Leland be commemorated on a postage stamp, naming a hiking trail after another former member of Congress, or congratulating the winners of the NCAA Women’s Division I Volleyball Championship, or declaring August 16, 2007 to be “National Airborne Day”. That last bill, by the way, has more cosponsorship support than a bill to repeal provisions of the Military Commissions Act. Is that shocking, outrageous, or just depressing?
Tradition dictates that when I write our nation’s leaders on Capitol Hill, I put the words “The Honorable” before their names. (Then my letter gets shoved into a bin to wait for a few months to be tested for non-existent anthrax.) But I fail to see why I should add those words of praise when I communicate with members of Congress when their lassitude in the face of tyranny is so thoroughly unhonorable.
