One More Hearing

To the list of offensives in previous posts I would like to add the policy of 'extraordinary rendition'—"a highly classified American program in which individuals are seized — abducted — without any semblance of due process and sent off to be interrogated by regimes that are known to engage in torture." Bob Herbert discusses this abhorrent practice in his column in today's Times (alas, his column is only available to the Select—a subject for another post, I suppose).

In that column Herbert writes that there "is no way to know how many people have been seized, tortured or killed. Since there are no official proceedings, there is no way to know whether a particular individual who is taken into custody is a legitimate terror suspect or someone who is innocent of any wrongdoing." Surely an open government, a government of laws, ought to be above such practices: no official proceedings? how can that be a justifiable policy?

What's worse, as Herbert points out, is that this policy has already resulted in the detention—for months, and in the case of Maher Arar in a "rat-infested cell about the size of a grave"—of people later found to have no ties to any terrorist organizations.

Herbert refers to a recent Amnesty International report from 5 April 2006, Below the radar: Secret flights to torture and 'disappearance', in which the policy is described in great, and upsetting, detail. That report describes the policy as involving the transfer of suspects to "states – including Egypt, Jordan and Syria – where physical and psychological brutality feature prominently in interrogations. The rendition network’s aim is to use whatever means necessary to gather intelligence, and to keep detainees away from any judicial oversight."

The report goes on to point out that these 'renditions' involve multiple human rights abuses, including illegal arrest and detention: it goes on to say that every "one of the victims of rendition interviewed by Amnesty International has described incidents of torture and other ill-treatment."

The most offensive quote I've found in the report (also cited by Herbert):
"They promptly tore his fingernails out and he started telling things."

Vincent Cannistraro, former Director of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center,
describing what happened to a detainee who was rendered to Egypt.

Despite assurances from people like Condoleeza Rice that the renditions do not lead to torture, the fact that they have requested assurances from the other countries that torture will not occur is, as Amnesty International argues, "inherently self-contradictory. If the risk of torture or ill-treatment in custody is so great that the USA must ask for assurances that the receiving state is not going to carry out such a crime, than the risk is obviously too great to permit the transfer."

The report is grim reading, but it is important. This policy goes against much if not all that I find laudable in our system of government—it denies the freedom from arbitrary arrest, for one; and any sanction, however circuitous, of torture is inexcusable.

I will allow Bob Herbert the last word on this:
"Congress needs to investigate it, document it and shut it down."