The Exterminator writes torture into law:

on October 8, the House Republican leadership—with Speaker Dennis Hastert and Majority Leader Tom DeLay in charge—rolled over the Democrats to pass the 9-11 Recommendations Implementation Act, H.R. 10, ostensibly to enact recommendations by the bipartisan, independent 9-11 Commission to actually make our intelligence apparatus live up to its name. As drafted—with no input at all from the Democrats—section 3032 of the bill empowers the secretary of homeland security to remove “certain aliens,” including those on American soil, from the protections of the international Covenant Against Torture (which the U.S. signed) when the secretary finds those “aliens” a danger to the U.S. Then—dig this—section 3033 gives this imperious secretary of homeland security essentially unchecked power to deport or transfer a foreign person to any country in the world—regardless of whether the foreign person is a citizen of that country or has ever been there. This means, as debate in the House conclusively confirmed, that this person detained by us can be sent to countries that torture their prisoners, so that the torturers can extract information from them that our interrogators can’t. And some of these detainees have no U.S. charges against them. As noted here before, these “extraordinary renditions,” as they’re known in the torture trade, have already been conducted secretly by the CIA.

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