Do you realize ...

what we did to this man? Our agents kidnapped him, tortured him in Afghanistan, then released him - several months later. Turns out that we had brutalized an innocent man because his name was similar to that of an actual terrorist suspect. Khaled el-Masri says that while in one of our secret prisons known as "the salt pit" he was beaten, sodomized, humiliated, and subject to inhuman conditions. Oh - and though it was known he was the wrong man by April at the latest, he was not released until the end of May, over four months after we had kidnapped him. His family had no idea what had become of him and had left Germany for Lebanon in his absence.

Here's El Masri's account of the moments before he was forced aboard an airplane to depart for his cell in Afghanistan:

"I heard the door being closed. And then they beat me from all sides, from everywhere, with hands and feet. With knives or scissors they took away my clothes. In silence. The beating, I think, was just to humiliate me, to hurt me, to make me afraid, to make me silent. They stripped me naked. I was terrified. They tried to take off my pants. I tried to stop them so they beat me again. And when I was naked I heard a camera."

Apparently this was followed by an anal search. Hooded, ears plugged, chained to the bare floor of the aircraft, he was drugged until arriving in Afghanistan where he was transported to one of our prisons in the trunk of a car. His treatment got worse from there. Now free and asking us, through our courts, for an apology and compensation, El-Masri has been brushed aside. The US Supreme Court rejected his appeal of a lower court ruling that even if everything he alleges is true his "private interests must give way to the national interest in preserving state secrets." This is not the first case in which we have refused to hear complaints from a victim of rendition on grounds that it would compromise national security, a doctrinally shaky and, in practice, morally abhorrent abdication of the judicial role.

We did all of this. Ours have been the deeds of animals. It will not do to point our fingers at the Boy King or George Tenet or Cheney. Unless we repudiate what these men have done and take action to make it right, we are no better than they. I humbly suggest you stay home from work on November 6th and ask everyone you know to do the same. It won't begin to atone for our sins, but it's a start.