What Have We Become … Again?

Outsourcing torture all over

It took the Iraq invasion to get me off the couch in mid-career. Then came Abu Ghraib and extraordinary renditions. I began my op-ed on the latter like this:

Gulfstream’s executive jets are popular with U.S. intelligence agencies, and luxurious. More luxurious than destinations their manacled and diapered passengers have disappeared to thanks to “extraordinary rendition,” also known as “outsourcing torture.”

For terror suspects en route to exotic prisons in Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, and Uzbekistan, the tranquilizing suppositories are complimentary.

The masterminds of those atrocities never stood in the dock in the U.S. or the Netherlands. I despair that the people resonsible for this won’t either. The New Yorker‘s Sarah Stillman explains:

One Saturday morning in early September, I got a WhatsApp video call from eleven strangers locked inside a secretive detention camp in a forest in Ghana. Their faces looked glazed with sweat and stricken with fear. In the background, I could hear birdsong and the drone of insects. An armed guard watched over the group as they huddled around a shared cellphone.

“There are big snakes here, and scorpions!” a male voice with an American accent called out.

“My stomach is really hurting, and we have to beg for food,” another man said.

A third added, “We fear we’ll be tortured and killed.”

A car salesman and a real estate agent introduced Stillman to their plight. One prisoner had worked for UPS, another worked in his mother’s catering business. A third “composed R. & B. music.” Some hed fled to the U.S. for asylum. That was before January 20 of this year.

All of them had been taken from the United States against their will. Nearly all had been granted forms of legal relief that bar the government from deporting them to their home countries. At the heart of the protections they’d received was one of the most basic and sacrosanct concepts in both U.S. and international law: non-refoulement. This principle means that no nation should intentionally deport or expel people to a place where they are likely to face torture, persecution, death, or other grave harms.

The Catch 22 of the Trump 2.0 administration is that it has no principles.

I mentioned the group Trump disappeared to Eswatini back in September. Digby reported in October on a man freed from prison after a life behind bars for a murder he didn’t commit. Upon his release, ICE snatched him for deportation before he could go home. She asked, “What the hell have we become? My God“

I haven’t finished reading Stillman’s piece. It brings back bad memories and I need a break. I spent time on Twitter yesterday and this morning until my very spirit felt drained. The shameless lies and casual cruelty were too much. What have we become … again?

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