First, more on Maher Arar:

Arar was held in a federal cell for 13 days while he was interrogated about a man US intelligence believed was linked to al-Qaeda. Arar told his captors that he had never met the man in question, although he had worked with his brother on a construction project.

Then one night two plainclothes officers came for Arar, placed a hood over his head, secured his hands with plastic cuffs and shackled his feet in leg irons. He was taken from the federal jail to the airport, where he was placed on the Gulfstream V jet. The plane flew to Washington, DC, then to Portland, Maine. It stopped once in Rome, then landed in Amman, Jordan. During the flight, Arar recalls that he heard the pilots and crew referring to themselves as members of the "Special Removal Unit".

Arar was held in a cell in Amman for 10 hours. He pleaded with his captors to release him or allow him to talk with a lawyer. They refused. He was placed in a van and driven across the border into Syria, where he was handed over to a secret police unit. He was taken to a dark underground cell and immediately his interrogators began to beat him with battery cables. The beatings went on, day after day.

Back to Jordan, where St. Clair says:

...the CIA runs a "ghost prison" for the detention, interrogation and torture of some of the most senior members of al-Qaeda captured by US forces over the last three years.

According to St. Clair, Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed are part of this group of prisoners.

Khalid Sheik Mohammed, a suspected planner of the 9/11 attacks was captured in Pakistan in March, 2003. Mohammed was reportedly taken to a US base in Afghanistan for his initial interrogation and then was sent to the prison in Jordan, where he was subjected to range of tortures, including the infamous "water-boarding" technique, where the victim is bound tightly with ropes to a piece of plywood and then dunked in ice cold water until he nearly drowns.

The water-boarding method was one of several varieties of torture approved by President Bush in an executive order issued in February 2002. Bush's order, which exempted the CIA from compliance with the rules of the Geneva Conventions, was extended seven months later by an August 2002 memorandum signed by Assistant Attorney General Jay S. Bybee. The Bybee Memo (largely written by his deputy John Yoo) called for the continuation of CIA interrogation methods, including rendition, and blessed as legal methods of physical and psychological coercion that inflicted discomfort "equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death".

According to St. Clair, the C.I.S. has 24 secret interrogation centers around the world. He details the White House legal memos, particularly those authored by former deputy assistant attorney general the Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel (now a Berkeley law professor) John Yoo, claiming the Genva Conventions don't apply to these prisoners and Congress can't limit the President's options on how to deal with them.

Yoo contends that the Bush administration is free to ignore US laws against torture. "Congress doesn't have the power to tie the hands of the President in regard to torture as an interrogation technique," said Yoo. "It's the core of the Commander-in-Chief function. Congress can't prevent the president from ordering torture."

Yoo claims that if Congress has a problem with Bush flouting its laws, the solution is simple: impeachment. He also argued that the US public had its shot at repudiating Bush's detention and torture program and instead endorsed it. "The issue is dying out," Yoo told the New Yorker magazine. It "has had its referendum."

As to the Cheney authorization, St. Clair says:

Qs in so many cases with the Bush administration, it appears that Dick Cheney himself gave the greenlight for the kidnapping and torture scenario. Cheney even dropped a public hint that the Bush administration was going deal savagely with suspected terrorists. During an interview on Meet the Press, a week after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Cheney said that the administration wasn't going to shackle itself to conventional methods in tracking down suspected terrorists.

"A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies, if we're going to be successful", Cheney said. "That's the world these folks operate in. And so it's going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our objective. We may have to work through, sort of, the dark side."

How long do you think it will be until John Yoo is nominated for a federal judgeship?