What else are they hiding?

What could be fairer than the lex talionis: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth?\nThe answer is, of course, the Bush Directive: freedom for glory.\nIn the post-9-11 world, God's replacement for an ailing Pope, George W. Bush, has been granted deistic powers on Earth. Bush is only too happy to oblige. After 2,986 lives were mercilessly extinguished that Tuesday afternoon, the response was mercilessly extinguishing the lives of countless thousands of innocents in the systematic carpet bombing of Afghanistan and Iraq. And like so many Americans, I shook my head and voted for Kerry.\nBut in a Feb. 28 New York Times column titled "It's Called Torture," and again in a March 6 Times article, "Rule Change Lets C.I.A. Freely Send Suspects Abroad to Jails," it's come to light that the president, working through the CIA, has finally overstepped the bounds of basic human decency.\nThe still-classified practice is known as "extraordinary rendition." Essentially, the CIA and the Justice Department have been granted the unusually broad sweeping power to kidnap a human being and ship him or her without charges or trial to countries that are known to use torture as a means of forcing these stolen lives to speak.\nAs if suspending due process wasn't enough for the United States, we've now crossed the line into pure Orwellian territory. And this, after the president flew around the world preaching "the rule of law and the respect for human rights and human dignity."\nOne such human being is a Canadian (because Bush's jurisdiction doesn't stop at the border) named Maher Arar, according to the Times article. He has a wife and two children. He was wrongly accused of having ties to "terrorism." A year after his abduction and subsequent torture by the Syrian government, he was returned just as secretly as he was taken.\nThe article also asserts that the Syrians were unable to find any link between Arar and terrorism. \nOther detained persons include Khaled el-Masri, who was flown to Afghanistan where he was "beaten and drugged." Another man, Mamdouh Habib, was "beaten, humiliated and subjected to electric shocks" for 40 months before being released without being charged, according to the Times.\nFrightened? We should be.\nHow many more people will "disappear" at the hands of a Stalin-esque secret police force on a whim and be subjected to cruel torture and unusual punishment? How many more people will never see their families again? Will never have their freedom returned? How many men, women and children will it take until we say enough is enough?\nWe're a nation built on laws -- on fundamental principles of human rights -- yet our government, this administration, is torturing people by proxy. \nPerhaps more chilling than the thought of a human being lying bloody and beaten on the floor of some foreign prison is the fact that this program of rendition is "lawfully conducted."\nThe Bush White House denies the program exists, but former White House officials estimate 100 to 150 living, breathing, free human beings have been flown to Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Pakistan.\nThe unnamed official quoted in the March 6 Times article claims that the United States receives assurances that the detainees are being treated humanely, but God only knows what that really means. If they really were being treated as human beings, why have they been denied due process, and why are they not in American prisons?\nLand of the free, indeed. I'm ashamed to call myself an American anymore. We impeached Clinton for less, even Nixon resigned, but a regime that endorses torture policies is where we need to draw the line. We ousted President Hussein for similar practices in Iraq; is it time we ousted President Bush?