On: Venezuelan men sue aviation firms who flew them to notorious Salvadorian jail

I read today of men taken from one land and flown to a prison in another, their passage bought with a contract for an airplane. This is a hospitality test, but in reverse. It measures not how a society welcomes the stranger, but how efficiently it can make him disappear. The machinery is coldly familiar: the contract, the flight manifest, the sealed cabin. In the markets of Aden or Calicut, a man’s word and his treatment of guests were his bond; here, the bond is a corporate service agreement to transport human beings into darkness.

They speak of civil rights, but I look at the practical detail. Who provided the food on that flight? What was the condition of the road, so to speak, from the tarmac to the cell? The quality of the journey tells you everything about the destination. A society that outsources the custody of the stranger to the lowest bidder has already failed the diagnostic. In Mali, even a condemned man was given water and a place to sleep that was accounted for. This system has created a void of accountability, a chain of custody where each link - the policy-maker, the contractor, the pilot - can claim they only handled one segment.

It is the network map that chills. The connection between a boardroom in one country, a runway in another, and a terror prison in a third. They have mapped a route for suffering, and it runs on schedule. The judge in Delhi and the judge in Timbuktu both sat in open courts; their authority was visible, their judgments known. This is a judgment delivered in the hum of jet engines, a verdict without a face.

They have perfected the journey but lost the path.