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| 11/23 |
| 2009/2/2-8 [Politics/Domestic/Election] UID:52497 Activity:nil |
2/1 Pres. Obama keeps rendition
http://www.latimes.com/news/la-na-rendition1-2009feb01,0,7548176,full.story
\_ This does not mean what you (or the LA Times) think it means.
\_ More on how this article does not mean what you (or the idiotic
LA times) think it means:
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/02/02/renditions
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2009_02/016703.php
http://harpers.org/archive/2009/02/hbc-90004326
\_ Wait, so snatching foreign citizens off foreign soil is okay if
they don't go to Gitmo? Remember, Gitmo hasn't closed yet (and
never will, actually).
\_ As long as they get speedy trials and swift application of
American justice within our judicial system, I have no
problem with it. -liberal
\_ So when rendition occured under Clinton's watch (sending
suspects to other countries, not the US) was it
objectionable?
\_ Surely you mean rendition as initiated by GHWB?
Also, the Harpers article does a very good job of
drawing the distinction.
\_ Way to completely misread all of the above articles! Plus
a nice bit of wingnuttery at the end there with your
"never will." |
| 11/23 |
|
| www.latimes.com/news/la-na-rendition1-2009feb01,0,7548176,full.story Obama preserves renditions as counter-terrorism tool The role of the CIA's controversial prisoner-transfer program may expand, intelligence experts say. By Greg Miller February 1, 2009 Reporting from Washington -- The CIA's secret prisons are being shuttered. And Guantanamo Bay will eventually go back to being a wind-swept naval base on the southeastern corner of Cuba. But even while dismantling these programs, President Obama left intact an equally controversial counter-terrorism tool. executive orders issued by Obama recently, the CIA still has authority to carry out what are known as renditions, secret abductions and transfers of prisoners to countries that cooperate with the United States. Current and former US intelligence officials said that the rendition program might be poised to play an expanded role going forward because it was the main remaining mechanism -- aside from Predator missile strikes -- for taking suspected terrorists off the street. The rendition program became a source of embarrassment for the CIA, and a target of international scorn, as details emerged in recent years of botched captures, mistaken identities and allegations that prisoners were turned over to countries where they were tortured. The European Parliament condemned renditions as "an illegal instrument used by the United States." Prisoners swept up in the program have sued the CIA as well as a Boeing Co. subsidiary accused of working with the agency on dozens of rendition flights. But the Obama administration appears to have determined that the rendition program was one component of the Bush administration's war on terrorism that it could not afford to discard. The decision underscores the fact that the battle with Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups is far from over and that even if the United States is shutting down the prisons, it is not done taking prisoners. "Obviously you need to preserve some tools -- you still have to go after the bad guys," said an Obama administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity when discussing the legal reasoning. "The legal advisors working on this looked at rendition. It is controversial in some circles and kicked up a big storm in Europe. But if done within certain parameters, it is an acceptable practice." one of Obama's orders appears to preserve the CIA's ability to detain and interrogate terrorism suspects as long as they are not held long-term. The little-noticed provision states that the instructions to close the CIA's secret prison sites "do not refer to facilities used only to hold people on a short-term, transitory basis." Despite concern about rendition, Obama's prohibition of many other counter-terrorism tools could prompt intelligence officers to resort more frequently to the "transitory" technique. The decision to preserve the program did not draw major protests, even among human rights groups. Leaders of such organizations attribute that to a sense that nations need certain tools to combat terrorism. "Under limited circumstances, there is a legitimate place" for renditions, said Tom Malinowski, the Washington advocacy director for Human Rights Watch. "What I heard loud and clear from the president's order was that they want to design a system that doesn't result in people being sent to foreign dungeons to be tortured -- but that designing that system is going to take some time." Malinowski said he had urged the Obama administration to stipulate that prisoners could be transferred only to countries where they would be guaranteed a public hearing in an official court. "Producing a prisoner before a real court is a key safeguard against torture, abuse and disappearance," Malinowski said. CIA veterans involved in renditions characterized the program as important but of limited intelligence-gathering use. It is used mainly for terrorism suspects not considered valuable enough for the CIA to keep, they said. is because renditions for the most part weren't very productive," said a former senior CIA official who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the subject. The most valuable intelligence on Al Qaeda came from prisoners who were in CIA custody and questioned by agency experts, the official said. Once prisoners were turned over to Egypt, Jordan or elsewhere, the agency had limited influence over how much intelligence was shared, how prisoners were treated and whether they were later released. executive order on lawful interrogations, Obama created a task force to reexamine renditions to make sure that they "do not result in the transfer of individuals to other nations to face torture," or otherwise circumvent human rights laws and treaties. The CIA has long maintained that it does not turn prisoners over to other countries without first obtaining assurances that the detainees will not be mistreated. html the agency had to make a determination in every case "that it is less, rather than more, likely that the individual will be tortured." He added that the CIA sought "true assurances" and that "we're not looking to shave this 49-51." Even so, the rendition program became a target of fierce criticism during the Bush administration as a series of cases surfaced. In one of the most notorious instances, a German citizen named Khaled Masri was arrested in Macedonia in 2003 and whisked away by the CIA to a secret prison in Afghanistan. He was quietly released in Albania five months later after the agency determined it had mistaken Masri for an associate of the Sept. Masri later described being abducted by "seven or eight men dressed in black and wearing black ski masks." He said he was stripped of his clothes, placed in a diaper and blindfolded before being taken aboard a plane in shackles -- an account that matches other descriptions of prisoners captured in the rendition program. In another prominent case, an Egyptian cleric known as Abu Omar was abducted in Italy in 2003 and secretly flown to an Egyptian jail, where he said he was tortured. The incident became a major source of embarrassment to the CIA when Italian authorities, using cellphone records, identified agency operatives involved in the abduction and sought to prosecute them. Defenders of the rendition program point out that it has been an effective tool since the early 1990s and was often used to bring terrorism suspects to courts in the United States. Among them was Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, who was captured in Pakistan and was convicted of helping orchestrate the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Because details on the rendition program are classified, the scale of the program has been a subject of wide-ranging speculation. investigation by the European Union concluded that the CIA had operated more than 1,200 flights in European airspace after the Sept. The implication was that most were rendition-related, with some taking suspects to states where they faced torture. But US intelligence officials contend that the EU report greatly exaggerated the scale of the program and that most of the flights documented by the Europeans involved moving supplies and CIA personnel, not prisoners. Instead, recent comments by Hayden suggest that the program has been used to move no more than a handful of prisoners in recent years and that the total is in the "midrange two figures" since the Sept. |
| www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/02/02/renditions -> www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/02/02/renditions/ this Los Angeles Times article from yesterday that claims -- citing anonymous "current and former US intelligence officials" -- that the Obama administration has preserved and continued the Bush administration's "rendition" program that created so much (justifiable) outrage around the world. The LA Times article is wildly exaggerated and plainly inaccurate. The Washington Monthly's Hilzoy have typically thorough explanations as to why that is the case. Anyone with any doubts should read both of their commentaries. Suffice to say, the objections to the Bush "extraordinary rendition" program were that "rendered" individuals were abducted and then either sent to countries where they would likely be tortured and/or disappeared into secret US camps ("black sites") or sent to Guantanamo and accorded no legal process of any kind. There is absolutely nothing to suggest that Obama will continue any of that and, as Hilzoy documents, there is ample basis to believe he will not. Unfortunately, I don't have the time today to dissect the Times' claims in detail, but Horton and Hilzoy both say virtually everything that should be said on the topic. People who have long argued that there is no difference between the parties, that "the system" is irrevocably corrupted, and that Obama will change nothing, who are eager to claim that their "no-difference" worldview has already been vindicated by the 11-day old administration ("See! After 11 days, it's proven that Obama is no different than Bush, just as we've been saying"); Members of the intelligence community who do not want any new limits imposed on their activities and thus, hiding behind anonymity, use these leaks to pressure Obama not to impose them ("intelligence officials say that Obama is just pretending to change these policies in order to fool/placate the Left, but he knows and believes we urgently need these powers to keep the US safe and he will therefore keep them in place"); and, Establishment media figures, eager to depict Obama as supportive of, rather than hostile to, prevailing policies, because they spent the last eight years supporting and enabling those policies as integral servants of the political establishment and do not want Obama's election to be perceived as a repudiation of that establishment and its various behaviors. I want to be clear: none of this is to say that Obama won't continue many of the worst Bush policies. He very well might (even in the case of rendition) and, in other cases, he probably will. The point here is that there are all sorts of groups eager to claim that Obama has already decided to embrace Bush policies before there is any actual evidence that he has done so, or -- as here -- even when there is evidence that he hasn't. For that reason, these reports about what Obama "intends" to do ought to be taken with a huge dose of skepticism, especially where, as here, it is fed to uninformed, gullible reporters by anonymous intelligence operatives. As I find myself repeating quite often, it makes no sense to attack (or praise) Obama for predicted actions. It's possible that the group I referenced in item above may turn out to be right, or it's possible that those who see Obama as some transcendent, transformative change agent will be. I doubt either of those two extremes will be vindicated, but what should determine one's judgment on that question is what Obama actually does, not what anonymous reports claim he "intends" to do. Those who reflexively criticize every Obama action because they predicted long ago that he would be the same as Bush and want that prediction to be vindicated are but the opposite side of the same irrational coin as those who find ways to justify everything Obama does because they long ago placed the type of faith in him that no political leader should ever enjoy. Second, I have a question for those who believe that rendition, in all cases (even when it's not used to disappear individuals or send individuals to countries where they will be tortured), is inappropriate and wrong: Suppose (for the sake of discussion) that: the US learns exactly where Osama bin Laden is located in Pakistan; there is ample evidence that bin Laden perpetrated the 9/11 attacks and (ii) is in the advanced stages of planning new imminent attacks on the US; and the Pakistani Government is either unwilling or unable to apprehend bin Laden in order to extradite him to the US for trial. Further suppose that efforts to compel the Pakistanis to do so through the UN are blocked (because, say, China or Russia vetoes any actions). What, if anything, is the US (under current facts) permitted to do about Osama bin Laden, who -- we're assuming for purposes of these discussions -- clearly perpetrated the 9/11 attacks and is in the process of plotting new attacks? As far as I can tell, the options would be: drop a bomb on him and kill him with no due process; enter Pakistan, apprehend him, and bring him to the US for a trial (ie, rendition); Those who are arguing that rendition is illegitimate in all cases (rather than in the torture-enabling and disappearance-causing forms used by Bush) have the obligation to answer that question specifically (and the same question would pertain to a common criminal -- say, a mass murderer -- who flees the US to a country which refuses to comply with its extradition obligations to send the accused murderer to the US for trial). UPDATE: One other point: the claim is often made that there was nothing new about the Bush administration's "extraordinary rendition" program because they did nothing that the Clinton administration, which pioneered the program, didn't also do. The record in this regard is unclear in several respects. Clearly, nothing even remotely approaching the scope of the Bush administration's program was attempted before 2001, and there's no evidence, at least that I'm aware of, that any abducted individuals were simply "disappeared" to American-run facilities. The New Yorker's Jane Mayer documented, the US most certainly did abduct and "render" people to torturing countries under the Clinton administration. Here's but one example she describes: On September 13, 1995, US agents helped kidnap Talaat Fouad Qassem, one of Egypt's most wanted terrorists, in Croatia. Qassem had fled to Europe after being linked by Egypt to the assassination of Sadat; Croatian police seized Qassem in Zagreb and handed him over to US agents, who interrogated him aboard a ship cruising the Adriatic Sea and then took him back to Egypt. Hossam el-Hamalawy, an Egyptian journalist who covers human-rights issues, said, "We believe he was executed." She also details the 1998 abduction of numerous individuals in a joint operation by the CIA and Albanian government: Over the next few months, according to the Journal, Albanian security forces, working with US agents, killed one suspect and captured Attiya and four others. These men were bound, blindfolded, and taken to an abandoned airbase, then flown by jet to Cairo for interrogation. Attiya later alleged that he suffered electrical shocks to his genitals, was hung from his limbs, and was kept in a cell in filthy water up to his knees. Two other suspects, who had been sentenced to death in absentia, were hanged. Yet in those cases, Mayer suggests (citing CIA agent Michael Scheuer, who designed the rendition program) that there was legal process underlying the abductions, as they had all been convicted of serious crimes, mostly in abstentia. There, the purpose was to return convicted criminals to their homeland, not to have them tortured for interrogation purposes. By contrast, few if any of the individuals "rendered" during the Bush years were convicted of anything. Mayer also cites claims that there were numerous safeguards to ensure no innocent person was "rendered" -- safeguards which disappeared during the Bush years. pdf - p 27): As always, it's worth underscoring that while the blatant disregard for, and systematic violations of, international norms were far worse in the Bush years than ever before, that behavior in general, in the US long pre-dated January, 2001. Ikonstan smartly modifies the hypothetica... |
| www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2009_02/016703.php Obama preserves renditions as counter-terrorism tool": "The CIA's secret prisons are being shuttered. And Guantanamo Bay will eventually go back to being a wind-swept naval base on the southeastern corner of Cuba. But even while dismantling these programs, President Obama left intact an equally controversial counter-terrorism tool. Under executive orders issued by Obama recently, the CIA still has authority to carry out what are known as renditions, secret abductions and transfers of prisoners to countries that cooperate with the United States. Current and former US intelligence officials said that the rendition program might be poised to play an expanded role going forward because it was the main remaining mechanism -- aside from Predator missile strikes -- for taking suspected terrorists off the street. "The legal advisors working on this looked at rendition. It is controversial in some circles and kicked up a big storm in Europe. Leaders of such organizations attribute that to a sense that nations need certain tools to combat terrorism. "Under limited circumstances, there is a legitimate place" for renditions, said Tom Malinowski, the Washington advocacy director for Human Rights Watch. "What I heard loud and clear from the president's order was that they want to design a system that doesn't result in people being sent to foreign dungeons to be tortured -- but that designing that system is going to take some time." Malinowski said he had urged the Obama administration to stipulate that prisoners could be transferred only to countries where they would be guaranteed a public hearing in an official court. "Producing a prisoner before a real court is a key safeguard against torture, abuse and disappearance," Malinowski said." If the LA Times is right to claim that the Obama administration has left open the possibility of extraordinary renditions, that would be a huge problem. Here it helps to have spent some time reading the actual orders. Ensuring Lawful Interrogations" contains the following passage: "Sec. Nothing in this order shall be construed to affect the obligations of officers, employees, and other agents of the United States Government to comply with all pertinent laws and treaties of the United States governing detention and interrogation, including but not limited to: the Fifth and Eighth Amendments to the United States Constitution; articles 93, 124, 128, and 134 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, 10 USC 893, 924, 928, and 934; section 1003 of the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005, 42 USC 2000dd; section 6 of the Military Commissions Act of 2006, Public Law 109 366; Nothing in this order shall be construed to diminish any rights that any individual may have under these or other laws and treaties." No State Party shall expel, return ("refouler") or extradite a person to another State where there are substantial grounds for believing that he would be in danger of being subjected to torture. Obama orders people to comply with the Convention Against Torture, and that Convention states that we cannot return people to states where there are substantial grounds to believe that they will be tortured. And nothing the Obama administration has done to date suggests to me that they would engage in the kinds of creative reading of legal documents that would allow them, say, to disregard Egypt's long record of torture in making this determination. Moreover, Obama's Executive Order also establishes a commission one of whose goals is: "to study and evaluate the practices of transferring individuals to other nations in order to ensure that such practices comply with the domestic laws, international obligations, and policies of the United States and do not result in the transfer of individuals to other nations to face torture or otherwise for the purpose, or with the effect, of undermining or circumventing the commitments or obligations of the United States to ensure the humane treatment of individuals in its custody or control." So in addition to announcing that the administration will obey the Convention Against Torture, the administration will also study not whether to send detainees off to be tortured, but how to ensure that our policies are not intended to result in their torture, and will not result in their torture. This seems to me like a very clear renunciation of the policy of sending people to third countries to be tortured. His executive order also precludes any kind of secret detention of prisoners, and thus "secret abductions and transfers of prisoners": "All departments and agencies of the Federal Government shall provide the International Committee of the Red Cross with notification of, and timely access to, any individual detained in any armed conflict in the custody or under the effective control of an officer, employee, or other agent of the United States Government or detained within a facility owned, operated, or controlled by a department or agency of the United States Government, consistent with Department of Defense regulations and policies." Note that this has no exceptions for short-term detainees whom we quickly hand off to someone else. The Times cites "Current and former US intelligence officials" in support of its thesis. I don't take the statements of former administration officials as evidence of anything in this regard, since they would not be privy to the Obama administration's thinking. Moreover, there have been a whole lot of "former administration officials" wandering around saying that once Obama got into office and saw how tough things really were, he would be forced to adopt their policies, only to discover that -- surprise, surprise! I don't see much reason to take their opinions as probative this time. Obama officials, of course, are a different story: they would know, and they have no vested interest in believing that the previous administration's policies are somehow inevitable. The Times quotes only one official, who says: "The legal advisors working on this looked at rendition. It's important, here, to note that extraordinary rendition is not the same as rendition proper. Rendition is just moving people from one jurisdiction (in the cases at hand, one country) to another; includes all sorts of perfectly normal things, like extradition, which are not problematic legally. Extraordinary rendition is rendition outside these established legal processes: eg, kidnapping someone abroad so that s/he can be brought to the US to stand trial, or delivering someone to another country to be tortured. The author of the Times article, however, defines "rendition" as "secret abductions and transfers of prisoners to countries that cooperate with the United States." It's not clear whether he knows that rendition includes perfectly normal things like extradition. It's also not clear that he knows that extraordinary rendition includes not just cases in which we transfer a detainee to another country, but cases in which we capture someone abroad and take them to this country to be tried. What is clear, however, is that Obama's executive order prohibits sending people off to other countries where there are substantial grounds to think that they will be tortured, and commits his administration not just to hoping that this will not happen, but to trying to figure out how to keep it from happening. I will continue to watch what the Obama administration does. If they backtrack on their commitment not to engage in extraordinary rendition, I will call them on it. But I don't think that this article provides evidence that they will. Comments (25) Comments What you say may well be true, but a lot of people are not going to look further than the headline. Despite all the abuse directed at the mainstream media, and the myriad cases in which it has messed up in spectaular fashion, some people still assume what they read in the news must be founded in truth. This is all the more so if they were predisposed to believe it in the first place, because it fit their overall impression. The journalism profession has come a long way, to paraphrase Tom Petty, down a dirty road. Somewhere along the way, it discovered that most readers ... |
| harpers.org/archive/2009/02/hbc-90004326 Sunday Los Angeles Times, we are told that Barack Obama "left intact" a "controversial counter-terrorism tool" called renditions. Moreover, the Times states, quoting unnamed "current and former US intelligence figures," Obama may actually be planning to expand the program. The report notes the existence of a European Parliament report condemning the practice, but states "the Obama Administration appears to have determined that the rendition program was one component of the Bush Administration's war on terrorism that it could not afford to discard." Its description of the European Parliament's report is not accurate. It misses the difference between the renditions program, which has been around since the Bush 41 Administration at least (and arguably in some form even in the Reagan Administration) and the extraordinary renditions program which was introduced by Bush 43 and clearly shut down under an executive order issued by President Obama in his first week. There are two fundamental distinctions between the programs. The extraordinary renditions program involved the operation of long-term detention facilities either by the CIA or by a cooperating host government together with the CIA, in which prisoners were held outside of the criminal justice system and otherwise unaccountable under law for extended periods of time. A central feature of this program was rendition to torture, namely that the prisoner was turned over to cooperating foreign governments with the full understanding that those governments would apply techniques that even the Bush Administration considers to be torture. This practice is a felony under current US law, but was made a centerpiece of Bush counterterrorism policy. The earlier renditions program regularly involved snatching and removing targets for purposes of bringing them to justice by delivering them to a criminal justice system. It did not involve the operation of long-term detention facilities and it did not involve torture. There are legal and policy issues with the renditions program, but they are not in the same league as those surrounding extraordinary rendition. Moreover, Obama committed to shut down the extraordinary renditions program, and continuously made clear that this did not apply to the renditions program. In the course of the last week we've seen a steady stream of efforts designed to show that Obama is continuing the counterterrorism programs that he previously labeled as abusive and promised to shut down. These stories are regularly sourced to unnamed current or former CIA officials and have largely run in right-wing media outlets. However, now we see that even the Los Angeles Times can be taken for a ride. |