EXTRAORDINARY RENDITION….Over at Obsidian Wings, Katherine has a guest post about a proposal from Dennis Hastert to ease up on those annoying UN conventions against torture. In particular, he wants to allow the federal government to suspend UN torture protections for anyone they define as a suspected terrorist. This would allow the feds to take people picked up in their terror sweeps and ship them to foreign countries with a known history of torturing prisoners unless they could prove “by clear and convincing evidence that he or she would be tortured.”
Please note: suspected terrorists. And it’s now up to the defendent to prove he would be tortured ? an obvious sham since this is clearly an impossible task.
The technical term for this is “extraordinary rendition,” one of those lovely CIA phrases from the 60s designed to protect tender suburban sensibilities from the reality of what the United States government is proposing to do: ship terrorist suspects overseas so that someone else can torture them for us.
Go read the whole post. And then call your congressman.
