Torture By Any Other Name
Gregg Miller of the Los Angeles Times is reporting that the Obama administration has quietly approved the CIA’s rendition program, which permits the Agency clandestinely to abduct suspected terrorists anywhere in the world and return them to their countries of origin for interrogation and prosecution. The procedure has been rightly referred to as torture by proxy, but it has a number of credible advocates including CIA’s former Bin Laden task force chief Michael Scheuer, who helped design the program. Scheuer has allegedly said that if rendition is discontinued there will be a major terrorist attack on the US within the next year.
Scheuer might be right, but for me the case has not been made because the actual results of the program are shrouded in the usual bureaucratic secrecy that makes it impossible to make a sound judgment on its efficacy. If it were actually a tool that has unambiguously saved thousands of lives, one would at least have to consider it seriously, but the several renditions reported in the media have been instances of bureaucratic bungling. Also, there are the libertarian perspective and the need to restore America’s tarnished reputation. It is difficult to imagine by what authority the United States takes upon itself the license to abduct people off the street and repatriate them. And who will be abducted based on what evidence – Muslims only? Will it include the followers of the late Meir Kahane, Tamil Tigers, FARC guerrillas, Turkish Grey Wolves? David Koresh clones?
Obama reportedly will refine the program by only permitting rendition to countries where torture is not part of the judicial system and where the suspects will get a fair trial. If that is so, one must ask “What is the point?” The original intention of the program was to torture to get otherwise unobtainable information, wasn’t it? If the suspects are guilty of terrorism offenses and it can be demonstrated, try them in an American court. If not, leave them alone. A quasi-legal remedy that works outside the established judicial system is no remedy at all.
If true, hat would be an extraordinarily bad choice of Bush policies to continue. I’d have maybe gone with the cheese tariff.
Here’s a link to the story, in case people can’t find it…
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/middleeast/la-na-rendition1-2009feb01,0,5099258.story
And who will be abducted based on what evidence – Muslims only? Will it include the followers of the late Meir Kahane, Tamil Tigers, FARC guerrillas, Turkish Grey Wolves? David Koresh clones?
This is the question. It looks as though we are just outsourcing our torture. Clinton was much more focused on stifling domestic right-wing dissent than Bush was. Will our new Democrat re-establish that trend? If he does, and couples attacks on Koresh types with flights to Egypt for “enhanced interrogation”, then his human rights record might really be as bad as Bush’s.
Phil Giraldi wrote:
“Scheuer might be right, but for me the case has not been made because the actual results of the program are shrouded in the usual bureaucratic secrecy that makes it impossible to make a sound judgment on its efficacy.”
But Phil, doesn’t this argument “prove too much” as a law professor might say? If you are going to insist that no program be so shrouded then aren’t you in effect saying that we should get rid of all clandestine operations and many many if not all just straight intelligence agencies and programs too?
Just as with your question about who gets abducted, it strikes me that the answer is the same that Richard Helms once gave justifying the existence of the CIA by noting that to a degree we just have to have some trust that the people there are good, decent citizens. And even knowing that you are always going to have betrayals of that from time to time, occasional stupidies and etc., I think most people feel that’s a worthwhile bet.
I think it also reinforces the lesson of the Bush years that the one thing we ought to regard with very deep seriousness is political meddling in the intelligence and clandestine world. It’s with that, after all, that I think we saw the worst things happen over the last eight years, with the Bushies then predictably turning on this same world they had tried to corrupt and blaming it for their own buffooneries.
Scheuer seems as decent and honorable a guy as possible, and don’t forget that the one thing that Tenet said in his memoir was that our tough interrogation process was far and away the single most important factor in disrupting al Queda, preventing another attack on us and etc.
That said all this seems to me to just show even further the incredible damage our Mideast policies and George Bush’s tenure have inflicted on us. Without those policies or tenure I don’t think we’d have this problem with Moslem fundamentalists at all and we wouldn’t need to be tearing ourselves up with this kind of discussion about mere means. As much as I think one can defend an Obama-modified rendition program, I sure as hell don’t like it, and sure as hell hate what emotion it stirs against us in the arab and moslem world.
The real solution isn’t to just amend the rendition program this way or that, or abolish it in favor of domestic trials even or etc., it’s to change our entire bloody Mideast policy so that we aren’t making these enemies in the first place for no good reason.
If your ingredients make for a bad cake, you are never going to be really happy with any technique you use for baking it.
Cheers,
Scheuer seems as decent and honorable a guy as possible, and don’t forget that the one thing that Tenet said in his memoir was that our tough interrogation process was far and away the single most important factor in disrupting al Queda, preventing another attack on us and etc.
It is possible that Tenet has buyer’s remorse or just wants his worse decision to be viewed positively by history. “Tough interrogation” techniques are either torture or they aren’t, and if they are, they ought to be prohibited, no matter what Al Quaeda is purported to think.
TomB makes a number of very good points – its the policy that stinks and that’s what we should be looking at, but there’s a fat chance that we’ll see any changes in that area. He is absolutely right that to a certain extent you have to trust your intelligence people to do the right thing and behave honorably, but I have seen no real evidence that torture has ever made America more secure, quite the contrary.
And having been inside the system itself, I would have to note that there are plenty of people who will salute and do what they’re told, consequences and ethics be damned, so I have a real problem with the dimwits who I know are lurking the corridors at CIA who think torturing someone is for God and country.
Like MattSwartz, I believe that Tenet is an unreliable source for anything except self promotion. Having myself dealt with terrorists, I strongly believe that good treatment of detainees produces the best results in terms of intelligence. Torture is a door that should never be opened for all kinds of reasons.
Yeah I would hasten to say that I wasn’t meaning to defend torture at all as we were just talking about Obama’s new rendition program which is supposedly torture free.
I also have no doubt that you do have some lunkheads inside CIA just like you have lunkheads inside everywhere. But my main point again is that it sure is crappy that we have to be talking about/flirting with any of this stuff—rendition, black prisons or etc.—over the Middle East.
As to Tenet I found him interesting. Of course everyone feels that he covered himself in excrement essentially, even accepting his explanation of what he meant by “slam dunk” and how Cheney used that against him. But he never struck me to be like so many of the other Bushies so that, for instance, he at least always seemed to have at least some sense of affiliation and pride in his agency, and that’s not nothing compared to many if not most of the ego-maniac reptiles we had under Bush. Can anyone inside the Pentagon feel anything but embarrassment and disgust at how Rumsfeld for instance didn’t just allow but indeed *liked* the idea of Feith et. al. to be essentially speaking in their name/lobbying for war and etc.? And while not a reptile it seems to me even Colin Powell sure didn’t do State all that proud.
Thus when I heard about that passage in Tenet’s book talking about how our interrogation process had indeed been by far the most valuable tool we had found against al Queda I figured okay, *maybe* here was the guy just protecting his arse. But then I read and heard from Scheuer and I thought, well now, when *this* guy seems to confirm what Tenet said, for no apparent good reason other than its accuracy … and then when I’ve seen no-one else *denying* the essential truth of that either, it got me suspecting that there’s probably some validity there. And it does make some sense too. But you Matt and Phil are still right in the end analysis; we don’t know for sure by any means.
Again; not meaning to be cheerleading for torture, and just P.O.’d that we have to be talking about any of this kind of stuff vis a vis the moslem/arab world which by most if not all rights ought be our natural friends.
Cheers,
‘Gregg Miller of the Los Angeles Times is reporting that the Obama administration has quietly approved the CIA’s rendition program, which permits the Agency clandestinely to abduct suspected terrorists anywhere in the world and return them to their countries of origin for interrogation and prosecution.’
Extraordinary rendition is sending someone to be tortured. Rendition in and of itself is not. Obama is not continuing the extraordinary rendition program.
http://obsidianwings.blogs.com/obsidian_wings/2009/02/the-la-times-on-rendition.html
Quite right rawshark, though it would seem that even a rendition program without torture as the objective would lack any sort of due process. Several of the rendition cases that we know of turned out to be cases of mistaken identity, so on balance I have to think that it is a program that does more harm than good. As TomB notes, Tenet and Scheuer might be speaking candidly when they state that rendition has been the most important weapon against terrorists. I guess until we know more about the program and what it has actually accomplished we can only speculate, but personally I hate to give anyone the authority to grab someone off the street and fly him to a prison somewhere in the third world.
‘though it would seem that even a rendition program without torture as the objective would lack any sort of due process. ‘
Why is there a lack of due process?
And rendition isn’t a program, it’s law.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rendition_(law)
‘Several of the rendition cases that we know of turned out to be cases of mistaken identity, so on balance I have to think that it is a program that does more harm than good.’
I would agree that the Bush administration wasn’t very selective as it gathered bearded men in Iraq and Afghanistan and sent them to Gitmo. And they were jerks for rendering suspects to countries that tortured. That still has little to do with Obama’s executive order which did not in any way state that the US would continue the policy of extraordinary rendition.
‘As TomB notes, Tenet and Scheuer might be speaking candidly when they state that rendition has been the most important weapon against terrorists.’
I think they were referring to extraordinary rendition. Politicians and the like are masters at confusing an issue by deliberately saying rendition rather than extraordinary rendition.
‘but personally I hate to give anyone the authority to grab someone off the street and fly him to a prison somewhere in the third world.’
No one is being grabbed off the street…unless we’re talking about the whole extraordinary rendition thing again. The part where we send people to places that we know practice torture is not being continued.
extraordinary rendition != rendition one is a subset of the other and is illegal and immoral
See what I mean about how the wrong-headedness of our policy gets us into these terrible insoluble arguments about the mere means used to pursue same?
On the one hand I say I don’t see why we should shrink from ever rendering *anyone* from place A to place B so long as it isn’t being complicit in their torture. Say that instead of the mostly young, addled moslem fundamentalists we are fighting now we instead were hunting the Aum Shinrikyo cult who had and were attacking us with poison gas and the ebola virus and anything else they could get their hands on because they thought all non-Asians were spawn of the devil. I should care about their due process when snatching one of these cultists who might just not have done anything to us yet off the street in whatever country they are hiding in and delivering them to Japan for prosecution for things they did there? Pfui.
(And, technically, even though I know Phil didn’t mean it that way, you are only entitled to “due process” if you are physically in the U.S.—or now with that new S. Ct. decision in Gitmo too but only because the Supremes said that Gitmo was such a special place. But either in this country or in Gitmo, that’s the only place you’re entitled to DP, acknowledging again that Phil clearly just meant it as short-hand for fundamental fairness of a sort.)
And yet … in the end I agree with Phil here that no we ought not be doing in essence the same thing as we are now since I don’t think we are in anywhere near that kind of moral/ethical/political position vis a vis these muslim fundamentalists and etc.
And in addition it just stinks otherwise too in our present situation. Firstly, obviously, we probably aren’t using rendition just to get these folks prosecuted in their homes; we are using the *threat* of same to get them to blab. And that’s because even if their own countries supposedly don’t “torture” them we know damn well that their version of humane imprisonment is enough to make anyone sweat blood.
So in the present situation it not only smells of an utter arrogance on our part that we aren’t entitled to, but it looks devious and skanky and nasty too, which is precisely the opposite affect we want to be projecting to the arab and moslem peoples I think. Like Phil says, if we got a big enough beef against them, bring ‘em here and prosecute ‘em here.
But I still wouldn’t say that we ought never render anyone, ever. Nuts, even … George Bush to Gaza, anyone? Nancy Pelosi to McMurdo Station?
Cheers,
Wow! This turns out to be a lot more complicated than when I read the article and wrote the blog piece! If Obama seriously intends to cut the torture aspect out of the rendition (and he seems to be), that would be a great leap forward as I don’t see that torture has ever made any of us safer (though I might be wrong as I obviously don’t know what the government knows). But it still seems to me that there is some agenda hidden here. If all this amounts to is judicial rendition it would be turned over to the Justice Department, right? If it is being done by CIA we are talking about snatch operations, interrogations, and maybe even a room in the soon-to-be greatly enlarged Bagram prison. I suspect that someone will figure out how to game the system to make it do something unintended, i.e. seize innocent people and torture them. If doing so truly would save our republic, God bless, but I’m not convinced that the past seven years has actually accomplished that or anything else. That said, I do endorse sending George Bush to Gaza and Pelosi to the far side of the moon. My heart also bleeds for Mr. Daschle’s memory lapse when it came to declaring his car and driver on his taxes. What we really need around here is a new American Revolution. Throw ALL the bums out….
The practice of Rendition was STARTED by Clinton. It was basically a Democrat clandestine torture policy, continued (and due to 9-11 more frequently used) by Bush, and now as one of his first moves in office: continued by Obama… so.. Two out of Three American “War Criminals” are Democrats! So, either it is equally wrong or it is equally acceptable, in which case all Dems must stop referring to Bush as being a war criminal, or they must concede that Clinton and Obama are every bit as guilty of war crimes as Bush. Personally, I opt for the only other possible view.. Rendition is a necessary evil approved by three Presidents for the purpose of protecting Americans. And that’s fine by me.