Of course, those particular non-Americans are terrorists, dictators, dictators' thugs, and otherwise nasty people who one could reasonably say deserve it.

Or innocent bystanders mistaken for, or even cynically denounced without merit. The same legal and practical protections against torturing or even mistakenly imprisoning Americans are deliberately not applied when torturing or imprisoning foreigners.

The U.S. has, and all countries have, to some extent, a double standard, one for citizens and one for non-citizens. In the U.S. the distance between the two different standards has increased gigantically since 9/11/2001.

This may be what Aris was referring to.