Revisiting an old ghost

I was rifling through some old papers today in my study and I came across some handouts from my International Constitutional Law Seminar at Jones Law School. One of the handouts had accompanied a presentation that a classmate had done about "extraordinary rendition." If you've never heard the term or are a little fuzzy on it, Extraordinary Rendition is rationalization at its finest.

The U.S. says to itself "hey, these people are trying to kill us...therefore anything we want to do to them is justified for national defense." "Yeah, but we have these laws, both at home and abroad, that say we can't just do anything to people that we want to do. How do we get around that?"

Extraordinary Rendition is the answer. In a nutshell, we transfer people outside our borders or collect them somewhere in the world and transport them to a country that has very few human rights laws. If it's not illegal there, we're not breaking the law, right? Uhm, yeah, ya kinda are. Maybe not the letter of the law, but the spirit of America. I highly doubt that the Founding Fathers shipped people to Spanish or French colonies and tortured them to protect our Constitution.

Yet this is what we did - both under Bush and under Clinton - lest you think I'm playing favorites - although the torture practices of Cheney/Bush (in that order since that was the chain of thought command) were enormously worse.

Not convinced? Watch this and see if you're proud of the policy.

First a preview of the Frontline video...


And if that got you on the edge of your seat, here's the real deal.

http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/rendition701/video/main.html

Now this country has had the term "unlawful enemy combatants" since before the World Wars. These types of war-time criminals are nothing new. What was new, was the bravado and stealthy, shiftiness with which our country rationalized treating criminals badly. Held for years with no charges. Children taken and beaten. For the express purpose of using pain and brutality as information-gathering methods.

Folks THAT'S NOT WHAT AMERICA SHOULD BE ABOUT!!!

Of course there's going to be a segment of people reading this that says we should be able to do anything to anyone trying to hurt us or who wont help us stop the death of innocents. If you haven't learned by now that the world isn't always black and white...that it's not always clear as to who the bad guys are and whether they're even giving you good information...I'm afraid for you. That's not even addressing the notion that we're not supposed to subject ANYONE to pain and suffering. We're supposed to be better than that.

If you're defending this by saying "Jesus would support righteous self-defense" then heaven help you, there's no changing your mind anyway.

Let it be known, I'm not bringing this up to sling hash at any side in particular. There are enough skeletons in the closets of everyone to throw the proverbial Oingo Boingo "Dead Man's Party." I just happened to see this on my desk and thought I could illuminate something that others had either avoided or buried under the rug.

I love this country. I'm not one of those people who thinks we've always been a terrible place and have a history of pain that outweighs the good we've done as a nation. I'm proud of us. That's why using pain and torture to protect ourselves is even more terrible. We are not a nation of Chuck Norrises, kicking ass first and finding out the story after the dust settles. We are a nation Mr. Smiths. Standing up for the little guy, but still defending ourselves when the time is right.

This issue will return sometime soon and now you're armed.