December 27, 2005, It's another slam dunk...
Yes! And it counts!
With apologies to Marv Albert, we give you this account of the CIA-- the agency that proved so brilliant at assessing the extent of Saddam's vast cache of weapons of mass destruction (recall its former director saying that the presence of such weapons was a slam dunk)-- was given authority to randomly pick up people off the streets of the world under suspicion of being swarthy and then spiriting them off to be tortured at some neutral third country under contract to the Company, and is now... wait for it... investigating itself.
Note that one of those mentioned as subject to extraordinary renidition was our old pal Australian national Mahmoud Habib, who was mentioned in my interview with Joshua Dratel, attorney for fellow Australian David Hicks...
Also mentioned is a German named Al-Masri...
Let's just say that the United States and its spy agency has been... behaving less than in an ideal manner. Maybe this is what's necessary to protect us from terrorists. (That's bullshit, of course-- following actual laws-- our own and those of other countries, not to mention basic principles of basic human decency-- won't really undermine our ability to combat terrorism any more than having to do so precludes us from combatting any other crimes.) Alas, the outcry about it seems to be coming entirely overseas... Americans just don't give two shits about any of this. (Of course, it's not as if, say, we had an opposition party raising its concern about an abusive government, either.)
Oh well. If our Imperium should last 1,000 years, none shall say that this was its finest hour.