In all the discussion about President Obama’s planned closure of Guantanamo Bay and other special prisons, one order has gone largely unnoticed: the one that preserves the practice of extraordinary rendition.
According to the Portland Independent Media Center, Obama opted to sign an order retaining rendition — in which terror suspects are detained without charge and then deported to a third party nation for interrogation, keeping US hands (technically) clean — while simultaneously shutting down the CIA’s secret prisons, restoring the ban on torture, and of course closing Gitmo.
Said one anonymous administration official:
Obviously you need to preserve some tools — you still have to go after the bad guys. 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.
Since rendition’s best known as a back-door method of allowing suspects to be tortured, it’s hard to see what those parameters might be — or how it squares with the new administration’s stance on torture by American hands.
Interestingly, though, Human Rights Watch is on board with the new order, noting that there’s room for rendition “within limited circumstances.”
Interesting. I do genuinely have faith in President Obama’s scruples on this issue, so I’ll keep an open mind for now — but I’ll be keeping a wide open eye on the news, too.
(Via the HumanRightsNews Twitter feed, which you should most definitely subscribe to if you want to get beyond the MSM on things like Darfur, Gaza, Sri Lanka, and other hotspots.)
Photo by nyghtowl (Creative Commons)
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4 Comments... join the discussion!
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Hey Sarah, I agree, it's worrying. Though I am (slightly) comforted by a) the quasi-transparency on the issue (even if the media is largely ignoring it), and b) the administration's apparent awareness of the very, very fine line they are walking here. The last admin (cough) didn't think they ever did anything wrong, as far as I can tell, so the awareness is, well, something. I guess. One of the more high-profile rendition cases was Maher Arar, the Canadian man who spent 10 months being tortured in a Syrian prison despite no terror ties ever being proven, and since he's from my very own hometown it's an issue I've followed closely. I'll be keeping a close eye on this as things go forward.
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As much as I love President Obama (and really hate to be critical of him), the practice of extraordinary rendition (itself a semantic turn of phrase that obscures the actual practice, though that term precedes Obama) concerns me deeply. As I've written elsewhere–and what many Americans, at least, seem unwilling to acknowledge–is that closing the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay is only going to be a symbolic gesture if the administration fails to address other practices of rendition, torture, and the evasion of the standard practices of democratic justice. We merely move our problems elsewhere or call them something different, drawing attention away from the most controversial places–Abu Ghraib (which is about to reopen and has been renamed) and Guantanamo–never really addressing the underlying issues that are of critical importance.
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does Obama want to have his terrorist cake and eat it too? America can no longer afford to be fuzzy and resign itself to loopholes that allow human rights to be trampled!
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