[Marxism] Renditions to continue (and expand) under Obama

[Louis Proyect]

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/washingtondc/la-na-rendition1-2009feb01,0,4661244.story
 From the Los Angeles Times
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. Harsh interrogation techniques are off-limits. 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 U.S. 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 provision in 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.

"The reason we did interrogations [ourselves] 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.

"In some ways, [rendition] is the worst option," the former official 
said. "If they are in U.S. hands, you have a lot of checks and balances, 
medics and lawyers. Once you turn them over to another service, you lose 
control."

In his 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.

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www.cia.gov/news-information/speeches-testimony/2007/general-haydens-remarks-at-the-council-on-foreign-relations.html 
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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. 11 hijackers.

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.

An exhaustive investigation by the European Union concluded that the CIA 
had operated more than 1,200 flights in European airspace after the 
Sept. 11 attacks.

The implication was that most were rendition-related, with some taking 
suspects to states where they faced torture.

But U.S. 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. 11 attacks.

greg.miller at latimes.com