THIS IS POST-9/11 AMERICA:

The CIA Gulfstream V jet touched down at a small airport west of here just before 9 p.m. on a subfreezing night in December 2001. A half-dozen agents wearing hoods that covered their faces stepped down from the aircraft and hurried across the tarmac to take custody of two prisoners, suspected Islamic radicals from Egypt.

Inside an airport police station, Swedish officers watched as the CIA operatives pulled out scissors and rapidly sliced off the prisoners' clothes, including their underwear, according to newly released Swedish government documents and eyewitness statements. They probed inside the men's mouths and ears and examined their hair before dressing the pair in sweat suits and draping hoods over their heads. The suspects were then marched in chains to the plane, where they were strapped to mattresses on the floor in the back of the cabin.

So began an operation the CIA calls an "extraordinary rendition," the forcible and highly secret transfer of terrorism suspects to their home countries or other nations where they can be interrogated with fewer legal protections.

One of the many problems with this behavior, of course, is that the United States is using police powers in another country. In fact, that, and the Swedish law forbidding "degrading and inhuman treatment," which the C.I.A. thugs obviously violated, could get the United States into a lot of hot water, according to the investigator who spent 10 months documenting the U.S. practice of "extraordinary renditioning" on Swedish soil.

I was especially struck by the C.I.A. thugs cutting off all of the prisoners' clothes and making them put on new ones. That is exactly what child abductors do when they kidnap children from stores. At the bookstore where I work, we are told that, if a child has gone missing in the store, to try and get a description of the child's shoes, because usually the abductor will put different clothes on the child and even cut the child's hair, but does not usually think to take off the shoes.

So now we have the intelligence arm of our government functioning like the sickos who kidnap little kids from stores, never to be seen again alive.

Several other bloggers have commented on this story, one of them being Ezra Klein:

I want to say this once and I want to say it clearly: Our. Country. Tortures. We don't have a few loose cannons wielding bull whips and tasers, we have a government whose official policy is the encouragement of extraordinary rendition, which is to say shipping our captured off to other countries for torture. Public protestations that we extract promises of humane treatment are simply insulting. If they were true, why do we need to send prisoners to other countries?