Disappearances

Hitchens:

...let's stipulate that there may conceivably have been a moment of national emergency—a "ticking bomb" moment, if you insist—when the rules were bent a bit. But if this emergency rule-bending is then institutionalized, and kept a secret from Congress and the courts and the voters, and becomes a regular bureaucratic practice known only to an unelected and unaccountable few, then you have created a secret state within the state and are well on the road to becoming a banana republic. The next stage, very often, is that certain inconveniently damaged secret prisoners have to be made to "disappear," as in the death-squad regimes of Latin America in the days when the CIA ruled that roost as well. I am very much afraid that this will be the next awful disclosure we read about.

See again the brief account of Hassan Ghul.