Imagine you’re on vacation in a foreign nation.

Imagine that, while on a bus in this country, police officers arrest you and have you detained for three weeks for no reason.

Imagine being drugged, thrown on a plane only to awaken on the floor of a prison in Afghanistan, where you are held for five months. You’re beaten, deprived of normal prisoner rights and finally dumped off at the side of a road in another foreign nation. A nightmare? A plot to a spy movie?

Sadly, these type of situations are not fantasies. This happened to Khaled el-Masri, a German citizen vacationing in Macedonia with his wife and children, after he was mistakenly identified as someone collaborating with al-Qaida members.

This came after two Egyptians living in Sweden were arrested, tranquilized and put on an American jet headed for Egypt, where they were placed in prisons in a nation that turns a blind eye to prisoner abuse.

In a related topic, it was revealed this week that the CIA has been operating secret prisons in eastern Europe, where illegal acts of torture have allegedly taken place, and legal rights of prisoners are non-existent. These camps are in addition to places such as Guantanamo Bay, where prisoners of war are held as alleged terrorists and denied legal rights.

All of these things are undertaken in the hopes of combating terrorism and therefore are ignored and even supported by some in the government.

At what point do we draw the line between national security and human rights? It’s apparent to most people that terrorism is a main concern of our nation and others across the world, and preventing it must be a top priority. But we must not betray our commitment to using our power to increase human rights around the world.

Many people are indifferent to acts such as denying prisoners the right to a trial or holding a prisoner indefinitely without being charged with a crime, because they believe everyone being held is a terrorist. This is simply not the case.

Save for a few senior officials such as Osama Bin Laden, we don’t know if one is a terrorist or not. Therefore, our government has seemingly taken the policy of regarding any and all potential terrorists as being guilty, usually without an investigation, and almost always without trial.

Working under the “anyone we catch is guilty” banner, our government has allowed legal rights to fall to the wayside. Captives in Guantanamo Bay are held without being charged, even though many of them likely have nothing to do with al-Qaida.

We’ve turned a blind eye when our government betrayed the Geneva Convention and our own constitutional guarantee against cruel and unusual punishment. That’s because reports have revealed that prisoners in the CIA’s secret prisons in Europe are subject to the “wakeboard treatment,” a torture method which leads victims to believe they’re drowning.

But there’s a sign things are changing. The Senate voted 90-9 to tack a rule on to the defense budget barring “cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment” of prisoners in U.S. custody – a rule the White House is threatening to veto, or at the very least allow CIA agents be exempt from.

Should the official policy of the world’s supposed human rights leader be to permit cruel, inhumane and degrading torture?

Terrorists are the lowest of the low when it comes to abuses of humanity, using pain and fear to get their points across. Why would we want to stoop to their level?

Regardless of whether you support the war on terror, you should understand the abuse of any fellow humans, be they terrorists or not, is unjustified, and so is allowing CIA agents to commit such abuses.

As a world leader, we must make a statement against torture. If we don’t, it could be you in Khaled el-Masri’s place someday.

Columns reflect the opinion of the author and not necessarily that of the Northern Star staff.