Extraordinary renditions are expanding
The Bush administration has expanded the offshoring of torture to include torture dungeons in Ethiopia. This article in Der Spiegel (via True Blue Liberal) says:
Terror suspects have been questioned by US officials in Ethiopia after being transferred from Somalia and Kenya. The captives included Europeans who were detained, interrogated and then released without charge.
Read that last sentence again. These people are being tortured and released because they aren't actually terrorists. Our government is torturing people, including those they know to be innocent, and these savages are doing it outside any possible framework of accountability:
In total more than 100 terror suspects are thought to have been arrested in Somalia and Kenya and transferred to Ethiopia to face interrogation by US officials.
[...]
Swedish citizen Munir Awad, 25, who was only released three weeks ago, told DER SPIEGEL that he had travelled with his 17-year-old girlfriend Safia Benaouda, also a Swedish citizen, to Mogadishu in December. ... He says they were sometimes beaten or choked and only those who cooperated were allowed to sit or were given something to eat.
[...]
According to the newspaper [the Sunday Times of London], flight records show that 85 other prisoners were transferred to Ethiopia for interrogation, and that these included 11 women and 11 children.
The government in Washington confirmed to DER SPIEGEL that "in the past few months a number of prisoners have been questioned in Ethiopia." Up to 200 agents of the CIA and FBI are thought to be currently based in Addis Ababa.
Agents of the United States government, our government, are torturing people beyond the reach of US courts and then releasing them. This cancer on our society doesn't just include prisons in Poland and Romania; it extends who knows how far, into who knows how many countries. We cannot know how many people, whether innocent or not, have been tortured in our names, and we cannot know how widespread the problem is. This must stop, and it must stop today. Bush has degraded and debased our nation long enough; he has sullied the principles our soldiers are allegedly dying for, and he has pulled our nation down to the level of the tin-pot dictator he overthrew.