That experience is something you cannot describe adequately. Anyone who has ever been arrested by mistake or held overnight in jail will know the feeling, but I cannot find words to convey fully the shock, both emotional and physical, that comes over you in such an experience. Helplessness may be the closest one-word description of that feeling, and yet how pale and inadequate it seems to express the reality. You feel completely cut off from everything and everyone who might conceivably help you, unable to make a move to help yourself and powerless to get in touch immediately with anyone who might help, totally at the mercy of those who have you in custody, not free to go anywhere or take any action unless they allow it. It is as if an iron door has slammed on the world you know and can operate in, and you have entered a totally new universe with its own set of rules and powers and boundaries. Those who give the orders do not have to listen, nor do they ever seem to have to make an accounting to anyone. You, on the other hand, are helpless to say or do anything that might affect your plight for the better.
(He Leadeth Me, Walter J. Ciszek, S.J., with Daniel Flaherty, S.J., Ignatius Press, 1995)
probably not dissimilar to the experience of being subject to rendition and ending up in Gitmo...
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