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The War Profiteers - War Crimes,
Kidnappings & Torture |
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February 1st,
2009 - Obama Preserves Renditions as Counter-Terrorism Tool |
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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 Los Angeles Times 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. In a 2007 speech, [Hayden said,
that] 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. External link: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/washingtondc/la-na-rendition1-2009feb01,0,4661244.story |