Posted by Juan Non-Volokh:
"Rendition" Realities:
David Ignatius has [1]a thoughtful and provocative column in today's
Washington Post about "rendition."
Rendition is the CIA's antiseptic term for its practice of sending
captured terrorist suspects to other countries for interrogation.
Because some of those countries torture prisoners -- and because
some of the suspected terrorists "rendered" by the CIA say they
were in fact tortured -- the debate has tended to lump rendition
and torture together. The implication is that the CIA is sending
people to Egypt, Jordan or other Middle Eastern countries because
they can be tortured there and coerced into providing information
they wouldn't give up otherwise.
Ignatius notes that espionage and interrogation experts tend to doubt
that torture works. As a friend with experience in that area put it to
me: Torture makes people tell you what they think you want to hear,
when what you want is the truth. Nonetheless, rendition may result in
the torture of terrorist suspects when they are sent to countries
where such methods are legal. Does this mean rendition should be
prohibited? Ignatius is not so sure.
Before you make an easy judgment about rendition, you have to
answer the disturbing question put to me by a former CIA official:
Suppose the FBI had captured Mohamed Atta before Sept. 11, 2001.
Under U.S. legal rules at the time, the man who plotted the
airplane suicide attacks probably could not have been held or
interrogated in the United States. Would it have made sense to
"render" Atta to a place where he could have been interrogated in a
way that might have prevented Sept. 11? That's not a simple
question for me to answer, even as I share the conviction that
torture is always and everywhere wrong.
References
1. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A18709-2005Mar8.html
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