Rendition is a movie about
Extrordinary Rendition, the
U.S./C.I.A. policy of "extrajudicial" whisking suspects away to be tortured overseas. It’s a powerhouse movie, packed with stars, but hard to watch. It has a Hollywood ending, of course, but even with that, it makes its point. Based on little information, we sweep up people; we send them to far-off lands to be tortured; and if they don’t confess [like because they don’t know anything], we keep at it.
- When did all of this start?
- How has it been justified?
The answer to question number two is easy. David Addington got his Office of Legal Counsel operative John Yoo to write a memo that said it was all okay.
Here’s part of the answer to the first question – Dick Cheney on Meet the Press on September 16th, 2001:
MR. RUSSERT: When Osama bin Laden took responsibility for blowing up the embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, U.S. embassies, several hundred died, the United States launched 60 tomahawk missiles into his training sites in Afghanistan. It only emboldened him. It only inspired him and seemed even to increase his recruitment. Is it safe to say that that kind of response is not something we’re considering, in that kind of minute magnitude?
VICE PRES. CHENEY: I’m going to be careful here, Tim, because I – clearly it would be inappropriate for me to talk about operational matters, specific options or the kinds of activities we might undertake going forward. We do, indeed, though, have, obviously, the world’s finest military. They’ve got a broad range of capabilities. And they may well be given missions in connection with this overall task and strategy.
We also have to work, though, sort of the dark side, if you will. We’ve got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world. A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies, if we’re going to be successful. That’s the world these folks operate in, and so it’s going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our objective.
MR. RUSSERT: There have been restrictions placed on the United States intelligence gathering, reluctance to use unsavory characters, those who violated human rights, to assist in intelligence gathering. Will we lift some of those restrictions?
VICE PRES. CHENEY: Oh, I think so. I think the–one of the by-products, if you will, of this tragic set of circumstances is that we’ll see a very thorough sort of reassessment of how we operate and the kinds of people we deal with. There’s–if you’re going to deal only with sort of officially approved, certified good guys, you’re not going to find out what the bad guys are doing. You need to be able to penetrate these organizations. You need to have on the payroll some very unsavory characters if, in fact, you’re going to be able to learn all that needs to be learned in order to forestall these kinds of activities. It is a mean, nasty, dangerous dirty business out there, and we have to operate in that arena. I’m convinced we can do it; we can do it successfully. But we need to make certain that we have not tied the hands, if you will, of our intelligence communities in terms of accomplishing their mission…
I suppose that when he said these things in the week of 9/11, it sounded fine to all of us. We weren’t kindly disposed to people like the Taliban or Al Qaeda. But as is always the case with ignoring oversight, the resultant programs have targeted mostly innocent people, and produced almost nothing of usefulness. This is the part we should’ve flagged, "… we need to make certain that we have not tied the hands … of our intelligence communities." We could have met his goal in a hundred different ways and still provided some safeguards to protect the innocent. In Cheney’s world, oversight is always bad. The result is a program that brings nothing but shame to our country and its government. Extraordinary Rendition became routine, ordinary torture, usually of the innocent, with absolutely nobody looking…
[…] "bright lines" might be summarized as "still alive." Recall this interview on Meet the Press on September 16th, […]