alternative hippopotamus

progressive cyberdadaism from our nation’s capital

October 19, 2007

Rendition: It’s What’s for Breakfast

by AltHippo @ 11:22 am. Filed under Bush, NSA Spying

One of the reasons that the fascist piglets at places like NRO hate Hollywood so much is that it has the power to look at… what do you call them? Ideas.

And Rendition, the movie, is enough of a blockbuster (bookbluster?) to raise some visibility to the notion of extraordinary rendition by allegedly democratic republics. Which may raise questions like: is this something we can be proud of?

I lived through the Cold War. What I took from that era is that we would never condone things like secretly taking people off the streets and sending them to invisible prisons to torture them. That’s what made us the good guys and the folks who ran the Kremlin the bad guys.

I like the way Atrios puts it:

As Glenn Greenwald keeps saying over and over again, the Washington conventional wisdom is that spying on Americans without warrants and locking them up indefinitely without charges are the Very Serious Positions. This is a deeply sick political culture in a deeply corrupt and deeply sick city, composed of people who have turned their backs on everything most of us grew imagining this country stood for, and it’s important to support and be inspired by those who “dare” to stand up for what we all thought were American values.

I’ll add that in a WaPo Opinion piece Daniel Benjamin debunks the 5 Myths About Renditions. Kinda sorta, but not really: (emphasis mine)

4. Rendition is just a euphemism for outsourcing torture.

Well, not historically. The guidelines for Clinton-era renditions required that subjects could be sent only to countries where they were not likely to be tortured — countries that gave assurances to that effect and whose compliance was monitored by the State Department and the intelligence community. It’s impossible to be certain that those standards were upheld every time, but serious efforts were made to see that they were. At a minimum, countries with indisputably lousy human rights records (say, Syria) were off-limits. Another key difference: Renditions before Bush were carried out to disrupt terrorist activity, not to gather intelligence or interrogate individuals.

Now, though, the Bush team seems to have dramatically eroded such safeguards. The administration has apparently sent someone to Syria, and Khaled el-Masri, a German citizen, was evidently boosted in Macedonia and interrogated in Afghanistan in a manner that sure sounds like torture. In light of this and other revelations, the criticism that the administration has “defined down” torture looks pretty persuasive. It’s probably a good bet that Congress or the next administration will reform the program, or abolish it outright.

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2 Responses to “Rendition: It’s What’s for Breakfast”

  1. KCinDC Says:
    October 19th, 2007 at 2:47 pm

    That’s a strange piece. Much of the “debunking” seems to be just saying that things aren’t always that way, or weren’t that way before the Bush era.

  2. AltHippo Says:
    October 19th, 2007 at 3:53 pm

    I’ll put it like this, it’s strange if the author believed he was debunking anything. If you look at the opening paragraph:

    With hearings in Congress, legal cases bouncing up to the Supreme Court and complaints from Canada and our European allies, the issue of rendition is everywhere. There’s even a new, eponymously titled movie in a theater near you, starring Reese Witherspoon as a bereft wife whose innocent husband gets kidnapped and Meryl Streep as the frosty CIA chief who ordered the snatch. Like most covert actions and much of the war on al-Qaeda, the practice is shrouded in mystery — and, increasingly, the suspicion that it’s synonymous with torture and lawlessness.

    it sounds like it’s going to a “there, there, chicken little, the sky isn’t falling,” sort of piece.

    Here’s the final quote. Note that it’s more of the “What Chicken Little said. The sky is fubar” variety:

    In fairness, though, the ghastly case of Maher Arar — a Syrian-born Canadian citizen who convincingly says he was detained at New York’s JFK Airport, handed off to Syria and tortured — is way too close for comfort.

    I’m just saying that it’s not clear what the author’s intent is.

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hip·po·pot·a·mus n. A notion, perhaps distinct from conventional wisdom, that needs to be verified by reality-based scrutiny.

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