As the great people’s historian Howard Zinn has pointed out,
Winthrop’s much-quoted description of the 17th-century
Massachusetts Bay Colony as a “city upon a hill”, a place of
unlimited goodness and nobility, was rarely set against the
violence of the first settlers, for whom burning alive some 400
Pequot Indians was a “triumphant joy”. The countless massacres
that followed, wrote Zinn, were justified by “the idea that American
expansion is divinely ordained”.
AMY GOODMAN: That was Maher Arar describing his own ordeal before the House Judiciary and Foreign Affairs Subcommittee. I shouldn’t exactly say “before” the committee; he’s not allowed into the United States, so he spoke via video conference, barred from entering this country. I mean, that is a very graphic description, Maria LaHood. What exactly does this mean, that the US government can take someone from US soil, US citizen or otherwise, and send them off to another country that they know engages in torture?
MARIA LAHOOD: Absolutely, and even that if they intend them to be tortured. And it doesn’t have to be a foreign citizen. This decision is broad enough to affect any of us. Basically, if the federal government decides to do something that it purports to be in our national security to do, they could torture any of us, they could kill any of us, and there would be no relief in the federal courts.
http://www.democracynow.org/2009/11/3/appeals_court_rules_in_maher_arar