(3rd post in a series on the House GOP's attempt to legalize "Extraordinary Rendition". Links: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12.)
I’m about to begin a series of post summarizing specific examples of extraordinary rendition. I will go in chronological order, more or less.
One of the more difficult questions in writing these posts was how to discuss the evidence for and against each suspect’s guilt. I considered everything from:
1) omitting all discussion of the suspect’s likely guilt or innocence, to
2) giving my own one or two word verdict, (e.g. “probably guilty,” “probably innocent”, “unknown”), to
3) a more complex analysis of the evidence or lack thereof of the suspect’s guilt.
In the end I rejected all these approaches. I rejected #1 for two reasons. First, while I strongly believe that it is wrong to torture anyone, I also believe it is much worse to torture an innocent man than a guilty one. There is also no question that I have a different emotional response to a description of Syria’s torture of Maher Arar than to Syria’s likely torture of Mohammed Haydar Zammar, the man accused of recruiting Mohammed Atta to Al Qaeda in Hamburg. Second, I strongly oppose extraordinary rendition and want to convince people to oppose this bill, but I’m trying to act as a journalist in these posts and I don’t want to stack the deck or shade the truth. Deleting all the information about these suspects’ alleged crimes would stack the deck.
I rejected #2 and #3 because I do not feel comfortable judging men to be murderers, attempted murderers or innocents, based on sketchy news reports. Even if I qualify those verdicts I will be making judgments I do not have the evidence to make. And in almost every case here, we only have the case for the prosecution (usually incomplete for security reasons). The case for the defense is missing, because the suspect is still in custody or dead or otherwise unavailable. I would probably have classed Maher Arar and almost all of the people in Guantanamo as “probably guilty” based on some of the early news reports; I would not do so now. (This does not mean that there is not much better evidence for some of these men’s guilt than there ever was for Arar’s.)
In the end, I decided to give some excerpts from the sources I found about what the suspect was accused of and some of the evidence for his innocence and guilt, but not to comment much or draw conclusions. And the focus of this series will be on providing information about the U.S. practice of extraordinary rendition, not on determining whether these men are innocent or guilty.
Some definition of terms would also be helpful. “Extradition” is, according to Merriam Webster’s, “the surrender of an alleged criminal usually under the provisions of a treaty or statute by one authority (as a state) to another having jurisdiction to try the charge.” “Rendition” is a term the CIA started using in the 1990s to describe transporting a suspect outside of legal extradition processes. “Extraordinary rendition” is when the CIA transfers a suspect to another country for interrogation—ordinary rendition, I guess, is when the CIA seizes a suspect and transports him to the U.S. for question. I am dealing only with extraordinary rendition here; I will not describe cases where someone is shipped to Guantanamo.
In practice, it is sometimes hard to separates cases into these three categories. It is not always clear whether we are sending a suspect to a foreign government with some degree of CIA assistance or information-sharing in the interrogation, or sending a suspect to one of the secret U.S.-run prisons in foreign countries. (There is also not a bright line between those categories.) The line between extradition and extraordinary rendition can also be unclear: sometimes a suspect is “rendered” in that we don’t follow extradition laws in transporting him, but we’re sending him to a country where he has committed crimes or acts of terrorism and is facing charges. Sometimes there are charges against him, but they are pretextual, and were written up at the request of the United States.
Since there are these grey areas, and since I am not an expert on either extradition law or U.S. intelligence and covert ops, I am erring on the side of writing about a case.
There is also a fourth category, which does not have a name, where we organize the arrest and interrogation of a suspect in a foreign country where he is not a citizen but travels voluntarily. This comes up in the cases of Ahmad Abou El-Maati, Abdullah Almalki, and Arwad al-Buchi. Since those cases are so relevant to figuring out what happened to Maher Arar and how the CIA works with foreign intelligence services in interrogating suspects, I will discuss them even though they are not technically extraordinary renditions.
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