The Bush Era's Dark Legacy of Torture

It is impossible to tell the difference between the dark stories emerging from Bush's "extraordinary renditions" policy and the Hollywood fiction about horrible torture.

There's a scene in the political drama Rendition where Peter Sarsgaard -- playing a well-meaning but ultimately cowardly senior aid to a powerful senator -- unsuccessfully approaches the icy head of the CIA's counterterrorism unit (Meryl Streep) about the case of Anwar El-Ibrahimi, an Egyptian immigrant with an American wife and child who has been kidnapped by hooded CIA operatives at Chicago's O'Hare Airport on erroneous suspicions of terrorist ties and sent to be tortured in an unidentified North African country (presumably Egypt). Put off by her arrogance and frustrated by her rebuff, Sarsgaard's character says in a stern up-close whisper, "Perhaps I should have a copy of the Constitution delivered to your office."

Streep answers archly: "What are you taking issue with?" she hisses. "The disappearance of a particular man? Or a national security policy?"

To anyone opposed to the government practice of snatching people off the street, erasing any record of their whereabouts, flying them off to a black hole in some human rights-violating netherworld, and subjecting them to sadistic torture techniques in the name of a "war on terror," the answer is painfully obvious. But in our enduringly surreal political era, the question cuts to the heart of the actual debates that are currently playing out on Capitol Hill. More...