The Rendition Problem

Ross Douthat has a very interesting, honest post about torture here. (With subsequent posts here and here.) As if by magic, National Review appears with an editorial defending the Bush administration's approach to interrogation here. I don't find it especially persuasive, and doubt you will too. Conor Friedersdorf has more too.

Amidst the debate on torture and "torture-lite" (or "enhanced" interrogation), one element of US policy is often overlooked: Extraordinary Rendition. To some extent you can argue about policies applied at Guantanamo and CIA black sites around the world, but there's no denying, I think, that Extraordinary Rendition amounts to anything less than state-sponsored torture. After all, that's the entire point of the programme: send these guys to dark places (Egypt, Jordan, Syria) where god knows what kind of brutality may be unleashed upon them. Enough, certainly, to meet even Dick Cheney's definition of torture. But when you send a guy to be tortured (and let's not pretend that studied indifference to these men's fates counts as ignorance) you're just as responsible, morally speaking, for his suffering as are those who actually inflict. More so, in some ways, since they're following your orders. Orders given with a nod and a wink, for sure, but given nonetheless.

Now ER is something people don't like to talk about, largely because it's such a grisly, nauseating subject. Also, of course, both parties are guilty: after all, it was a policy endorsed by President Bill Clinton, not something dreamt up by John Yoo or David Addington. Clinton's defenders insist that the policy never ran "out of control" during his time in office; nonetheless on his watch the United States took the view that it had the right to kidnap anyone anywhere in the world and send them off to be tortured by some of the more brutal regimes on the planet.

And of course, whatever elese one may feel about it, ER makes no sense on a strategic level either. On the one hand you have Washington calling for reform and greater openess in the Arab world, on the other you have Washington taking advantage of these same regimes expertese in torturing people. People aren't stupid: they can see that Washington colludes with the very people it says are the problem. No wonder plenty of folk get cynical when they hear the American president waxing lyrical about freedom and human rights and all the rest of it.

There are all sorts of reasons for why Barack Obama may find it hard to close Gitmo quickly. But there's no reason at all - beyond finding the policy "useful" - for him to wait a single day before rescinding the Presidential orders authorising Extraordinary Rendition. Failure to do so will be a moral embarrassment, as well as a political and strategic blunder.

Comments

[Anthony]

It blows my mind, frankly. You've got Dick Cheney as, conspiracy theories aside, much the most voal proponent of this stuff and then he gets up and bangs on about the fact that there's no diplomatic approach to Syria because "We don't negotiate with evil". But you send people to have the shit beaten out of them by the Syrian security services at the same time as spouting this stuff?

I feel like I'm taking crazy pills.

And I say all this as someone who self-identifies as something of a national security conservative.

Can I also say - better journalists please. At no point during this "We don't negotiate with evil" schtick has anyone stood up and said, "Well if these guys are evil, so evil that you can't possibly talk to them, why the FUCK are you using their secret police to do your dirty work for you, you cant-mongering moral whore?"

If we're going to do this stuff, let's at least cut the holier than thou horseshit.

[southpaw]

I could be wrong about this, but my impression was that rendition for purposes of torture is an innovation of the Bush administration.

The first known US rendition was conducted by the Reagan administration in 1987. Fawaz Yunis, who'd hijacked a Jordanian airliner with Americans onboard, was abducted from Cyprus and brought back to the states for trial in US courts. And under the Clinton administration, again as I understand it, the rendered fighters were Egyptian citizens taken from somewhere and delivered to Egypt for trial (though, of course, we all know the Egyptians methods, so that's a bit of a fig leaf).

To the extent we're talking about just grabbing a fellow and taking him somewhere he's probably never been before solely for the purpose of having him agressively tortured, that's a novel innovation of the Bush White House. They're the rottenest buggers we've had in a long while.

[coach outlet]

Your point of view a lot of benefit to me, thank you