Disappearing People

This is a very slippery slope we are sliding on. On it's face one would think that getting information on terror would be our highest priority and that no stone should be left unturned. That is the way it starts.

Rebellion Against Abuse: "Guantanamo, however, is not the worst problem. As The Post's Dana Priest reported yesterday, the CIA maintains its own network of secret prisons, into which 100 or more terrorist suspects have 'disappeared' as if they were victims of a Third World dictatorship. Some of the 30 most important prisoners are being held in secret facilities in Eastern European countries -- which should shame democratic governments that only recently dismantled Soviet-era secret police apparatuses. Held in dark underground cells, the prisoners have no legal rights, no visitors from outside the CIA and no checks on their treatment, even by the International Red Cross. President Bush has authorized interrogators to subject these men to 'cruel, inhuman and degrading' treatment that is illegal in the United States and that is banned by a treaty ratified by the Senate. The governments that allow the CIA prisons on their territory violate this international law, if not their own laws."

Soon it is extrapolated to others that the government deems necessary. Look at the Patriot Act. Designed for one thing now being used in all sorts of investigations against taxpaying Americans and they don't even know and are not allowed to know that they are being investigated.

One of the reasons given for being in Iraq after not finding weapons of mass destruction was to bring freedom to the people. To open the prisons and release people who were being held for no reason other than that they didn't like the status quo. America is becoming more like Iraq than Iraq is becoming like the America that we remember.

This is going to come back and bite us and morally and ethically we do not have a leg to stand on.