Here’s what one former constitutional lawyer once promised about the practice of extraordinary rendition, that is the delivery of terrorism suspects for interrogation to other countries where they might be tortured:
“This means ending the practices of shipping away prisoners in the dead of night to be tortured in far-off countries, of detaining thousands without charge or trial, of maintaining a network of secret prisons to jail people beyond the reach of the law.”
And of course that promise, like the ones about cleaning up Wall Street and reforming Washington in Movingforwardville, meant absolutely nothing. Oh, we’ve closed the CIA prisons (but we don’t actually know what the CIA is doing or whether there are other prisons being used by non-CIA personnel).
Does torture continue? We don’t know. Habeas corpus remains a distant dream, and extraordinary rendition continues.
This time we’ll be sending along a State Department bureaucrat, who might suggest the destination country isn’t a paragon, but essentially the United States of America continues to be complicit in torture, kidnapping, and the destruction of what used to be the rule of law. It’s business as usual, just as it is on Wall Street.
Such a policy is both cowardly and unnecessary, since very little if any actionable intelligence has been produced as a result of these practices (this being the real story of the 2004 CIA Inspector General’s report and the obstruction of justice that attempted to quash it).
Gorilla thinks: “When I’m spirited away in the dead of night to be tortured, it’ll be comforting to know there’s a dip along for the trip!”
