Originally published on the CGS blog on June 17, 2007.
Dan Simpson, a retired U.S. Ambassador and Pittsburgh Post-Gazette columnist/associate editor, penned a great opinion piece on “extraordinary rendition” and the betrayal of U.S. principles in Wednesday’s Post-Gazette.
Money quote:
For me, it takes me back to the days of working in U.S. embassies with repressive governments that showed little respect for the rule of law. These were countries such as Burundi, apartheid-era South Africa, Bulgaria, Zaire and the Central African Republic. In those places, the United States tried hard to keep tabs on political prisoners — people whom the host governments detained, locked up and frequently never brought to trial. In many cases, the American embassy, the prisoners’ families and local human rights groups — if there were any — were the only ones trying to monitor these people so that they would not just disappear from view, perhaps to die.
The idea that it is now the United States doing such things — and that it is American human rights groups who are working with the families and friends of people to see that they don’t just disappear into a CIA jail in Poland or Romania, or into the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo, or, perhaps worst of all, into some prison in Iraq or Afghanistan, never to be seen again — is painful and shameful.
What are we doing? What are we becoming?
If you’re asking these same questions and believe that the United States should be above torture and rendition, if you want to know more about what you can do to make a difference, take a look at our Endtorture.net web site.
