On Thursday, Nov. 5, I suddenly realized alien abductions really happen.

That’s when I read an Italian judge convicted a CIA base chief and 22 other mostly American operatives of kidnapping a Muslim cleric in Milan in 2003. The guy literally was abducted by aliens.

I know it’s not politically popular to refer to Americans in other countries as aliens, but that’s what they are. And kidnapping and hauling people off to other places is just plain abduction.

According to the newspaper report, “Prosecutors said he was snatched in broad daylight, flown from an American air base in Italy to a base in Germany and then on to Egypt, where he asserts he was tortured.”

When I was a little kid, I heard about the execution (some say wrongly) of Bruno Richard Hauptmann, the man found guilty of kidnapping the baby of famous aviator Charles Lindbergh. As a kid, I saw lots of movies before we got a television set in 1952. Torturing was something the bad guys did to the good guys. It was not something Americans did, at least in the movies. In such movies, the bad guys who did the torturing and abducting were aliens, if not legally, than at least culturally.

In those days, we were taught our enemies, the communists, espoused a materialistic, immoral philosophy directly opposed to our Christian faith. The commies acted immorally because they were moral relativists who believed the end justifies the means. Our religion forbad us from immoral behavior any time all the time; we were morally absolutists.

Here’s the Catholic Catechism take on "rendition": Kidnapping brings on “a reign of terror; by means of threats they subject their victims to intolerable pressures. They are morally wrong….Torture which uses physical or moral violence to extract confessions, punish the guilty, frighten opponents, or satisfy hatred is contrary to respect for the person and for human dignity.”

Last week, we marked the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent collapse of communism. Yet we have adopted so much of the communist doctrine that the end justifies the means. Our leaders pose as Christians in opposing abortion and same sex marriage by individuals. But these leaders readily abandon religious and spiritual values in favor of atheist and materialistic ones, including the Marxist belief in the supremacy of economic matters. We condemned the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan that preceded the fall of the USSR, waited a decade and emulated the commies. How well did the doctrine that the end justify the means work out for them in Afghanistan?

Am the only one to wonder how many of those people who flooded municipal assembly meetings to oppose a measure to combat discrimination against homosexuals spoke out in outrage over the introduction of homosexual behavior in Abu Ghraib? How many fetus rights advocates opposing health care reform object to bombing unborn babies and their moms in the Middle East?

The unstated assumption appears to be morality is for little people like you and me, but not for government officials. You commit a crime and you get the death penalty or life imprisonment even if you’re a little kid. But if you commit a crime while working for the government, you continue to draw a paycheck. Just how many CIA agents have been executed for kidnapping?

The stated assumption is that kidnapping and torture are necessary and effective. The politicians say that, but, to my knowledge, they and their supporters have never shown empirical evidence to back their assumptions. Alfred Mc Coy who wrote “A Question of Torture” did a study on the matter and concluded there are short-term gains but history has shown they do not succeed in the long run--except, of course, when saving hundreds and thousands of human lives on TV shows. Unfortunately, real life is not a TV show and, to my knowledge, there is no documented case where torture saved thousands of lives.

The founder of my religion has a take very different from those of today’s politicians and their disciples. Jesus believes immoral behavior not only doesn’t work, but it does the exact opposite. And so he advises humans to consider the lilies of the field and the sparrows in the air and promises that if we seek first the kingdom of heaven, we will guarantee our national security. That point reinforces the lessons of the book of Isaiah: Israel flourished when it obeys God and disregarding God’s commandments again and again jeopardized Israel’s national security.

There is no biblical or church teaching I know that exempts politicians and government bureaucrats from obeying the commandments. The producers of “24” on Fox may do so. But God doesn’t.