“[In] September [of] 2006, [Bush] confirmed the existence of secret US prisons run by the CIA in foreign countries, some of which openly permit the use of torture. This fact, and the US practice of ‘extraordinary rendition,’ by which ‘suspected terrorists’ are transported to these secret prisons, had been an open secret since Seymour Hersh first reported on the matter in a New Yorker article in May 2004. But Bush’s admission — together with the ensuing public debates about the new Army interrogation manual that still permits the use of ‘water boarding’ … and the formal establishment of special tribunals to try ‘enemy combatants’ to circumventHamdi v. Rumsfeld —have made the convergence of US foreign policy with domestic policy, and US military protocol with domestic penology, a matter of public record.”

Ben V. Olguín, Toward A Pinta/o Human Rights? New/Old Strategies for Chicana/o Prisoner Research and Activism