Academic

Bob Woodward on extraordinary rendition and assurances of non-torture

By Tung Yin

Rendition is the use of any non-extradition process to obtain custody over a person in a foreign jurisdiction.  Kidnapping a person from, say, Mexico to bring them to stand trial in the United States is a form of rendition.  Extraordinary rendition is a subset of rendition where the person is captured from one foreign country to be delivered to another foreign country.

The Clinton Administration started using extraordinary rendition to send suspected terrorists to other countries, generally to be prosecuted.  George W. Bush's administration used it to send such unsavory persons to be interrogated by foreign governments.  Most of these governments were known to engage in very harsh interrogation tactics, if not torture (not to mention harsh punishments for convicted criminals).  Because the Convention Against Torture, which the United States signed, prohibits the sending of persons to other countries "where there are substantial grounds for believing that he would be in danger of being subjected to torture," U.S. practice has been to secure assurances that the persons being rendered would not be tortured.

I must admit that I have been skeptical about whether these "assurances" are at best pro forma and at worse orchestrated charades.  But there's an interesting passage in Bob Woodward's new book, Obama's Wars, where outgoing CIA Director Michael Hayden flips out after seeing nominee Leon Panetta imply in his confirmation hearings that the CIA had knowingly rendered suspects to be tortured.  Hayden gets word to Panetta that he had better "walk[] that sentence back tomorrow in his public testimony, or we will have the spectacle of the current director of the Central Intelligence Agency saying the prospective director . . . doesn't know what he's talking about."  Taken alone, that might be written off as just political butt-covering.

However, *before* delivering that message, Hayden -- according to Woodward -- checked with the counterterrorism center chief, who answered that the CIA always sought assurances.  Hayden pressed harder: "And beyond the assurances, you used all the tools available to an espionage agency to ensure they're living up --"

The counterterrorism chief reportedly responded: "All the time."  Woodward's narration indicates that this meant "the CIA was using spies and communications intercepts from phones, computers and room microphones to ensure foreign intelligence services were not torturing the suspected terrorists dispatched to them by the agency."

If Hayden were only interested in browbeating Panetta, that conversation would have been unnecessary.  Of course, one can argue about whether the chief misled Hayden, but it's hard to imagine that the chief and Hayden would have staged this private conversation just in case Woodward or some other reporter happened to ask about it two years down the line.  One can also dispute whether the monitoring steps are enough in reality to ensure that rendered suspects are not being tortured.  But there seems to be some objective evidence that the CIA went beyond pro forma assurances of no torture in connection with the renditions.

* All this rests, of course, on Woodward's reliability/credibility as a journalist.

Full post as published by The Yin Blog on October 11, 2010 (boomark / email).