I read Bob Herbert's op-ed piece, Outsourcing Torture, in The New York Times with great interest. I did not know that the US government has a Spec Ops group called the "Special Removal Unit". The SRU's charter is to seize individuals and direct them to a second country for 'special actions'. Gee, I never knew it was legal to kidnap a person from one country and send them to another one. Such was the case for a Canadian citizen in 2002.
It's sad that our neighbor to the south can/will/does kidnap Canadian citizens and send them to countries that engage in 'pain and torture' in order to extract information. Now, if the US government sanctions such activities, does this also mean other countries have the same types of Spec Ops teams??
I am no international law scholar but I suspect that kidnapping is still deemed a criminal act even when it is performed by a sovereign state.
I am unsure how the US government has addressed the injustices done to the Canadian person at the centre of the current op-ed piece but, I suspect the US government will not answer questions from the medai. As long as the public is willing to forgo 'freedom' in order to gain 'more security', actions taken by the SRU will be tolerated by that same society. As such, 'May God have mercy on our souls'.
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