Render Me

Daniel Benjamin tries to reassure me that the Bush administration won't have the CIA send me off to Syria to be tortured, naming this myth number five about rendition:

5. Pretty much anyone -- including U.S. citizens and green card holders -- can be rendered these days.

Not so, although the movie "Rendition" -- in which Witherspoon's Egyptian-born husband gets the black-hood treatment and is yanked from a U.S. airport and taken to a North African chamber of horrors -- is bound to spread this myth. A "U.S. person" (citizen or legal resident) has constitutional protections against being removed from the country through rendition, and there have been no incidents to suggest the contrary. In fairness, though, the ghastly case of Maher Arar -- a Syrian-born Canadian citizen who convincingly says he was detained at New York's JFK Airport, handed off to Syria and tortured -- is way too close for comfort.

Not only is the Maher Arar case too close for comfort, but I don't understand, in practice, what my remedy is. If, say, my little brother Nick got nabbed and sent to Syria to be tortured, he'd hardly be in a position to file suit -- he be being held secretly in a Syrian prison.