Life in Bush’s America

Just a sample:

On New Year’s Eve in 2003, I was seized at the border of Serbia and Macedonia by Macedonian police who mistakenly believed that I was traveling on a false German passport. I was detained incommunicado for more than three weeks. Then I was handed over to the American Central Intelligence Agency and was stripped, severely beaten, shackled, dressed in a diaper, injected with drugs, chained to the floor of a plane and flown to Afghanistan, where I was imprisoned in a foul dungeon for more than four months.

Long after the American government realized that I was an entirely innocent man, I was blindfolded, put back on a plane, flown to Europe and left on a hilltop in Albania — without any explanation or apology for the nightmare that I had endured.

The administration will not apologize or make any redress for outsourcing their torture of this innocent man. To do so would expose a "state secret" that has been in every newspaper in the world and a program of "extraordinary rendition’ that has been publicized globally. The current administration – from its disappearance of critical pieces of evidence in the Padilla case to its refusal to hear el Masri’s case – is behaving like a regime in a banana republic with a lot to hide.