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Extraordinary rendition, extraordinary mistake.

Article Excerpt
Mamdouh Habib, an Australian citizen, was living in Sydney with his wife and four children when he took a trip alone to Pakistan to find a home for his family. When Habib boarded a bus for the Islamabad airport to return home, Pakistani police seized him and took him to a police station, where he was subjected to various crude torture techniques, including electric shocks and beating. At one point, he was forced to hang by the arms above a drum-like mechanism that administered an electric shock when touched. Pakistani police asked him repeatedly if he was with al-Qaeda, and if he trained in Afghanistan. Habib responded "No" over and over until he passed out.

After 15 days in the Pakistani prison, Habib was transferred to U.S. agents who flew him to Cairo. When he arrived, Omar Solaimon, chief of Egyptian security, informed him that Egypt receives $10 million for every confessed terrorist they hand over to the United States. Habib stated that during his five months in Egypt, "there was no interrogation, only torture." His skin was burned with cigarettes and he was threatened with dogs, beaten, and repeatedly shocked with a stun gun. During this time, he heard American voices in the prison, but Egyptians were in charge of the torture. In Michael Otterman's book American Torture: From the Cold War to Abu Ghraib and Beyond (Pluto Press 2007), Habib said he was drugged and began to hallucinate: "I feel like a dead person. I was gone. I become crazy." He remembers admitting things to interrogators, anything they asked: "1 didn't care ... at this point I was ready to die."

He was transferred back to the custody of U.S. agents in May 2002. They flew him first to Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan and then to Kandahar. After several weeks, American agents sent Habib to Guantanamo Bay. Three British detainees who have since been released from the prison described Habib as being in a "catastrophic state" when he arrived. Most of his fingernails were missing and he regularly bled from the nose, mouth, and ears while he slept.

Habib was held at Guantanamo Bay until late 2004, when he was charged with training 9/11 hijackers in martial arts, attending an al-Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan, and transporting chemical weapons. A Chicago human rights lawyer took his case and detailed all of Habib's allegations of torture in court documents. After the case garnered national attention through a front page story in The Washington Post, Habib became a liability for the U.S. government. Rather than have his testimony on the torture he suffered in Egypt become a matter of public record, US. officials decided to send him back to Sydney in January 2005--over three years after seizing him in Pakistan.

Unfortunately, Habib's case isn't unusual. There's substantial evidence that the United States routinely and knowingly "outsources" the application of torture by transferring terrorism suspects to countries that frequently violate international human rights norms. As details of the extraordinary rendition program have emerged, politicians, journalists, academics, legal experts, and policymakers have raised serious objections to the policy. It has captured the attention of U.S. legislators, and both the House and Senate Committees on Foreign Relations as well as the House Committee on the Judiciary have held hearings to analyze the policy and examine related cases. Senator Joseph Biden (D-DE), chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations and the Democratic vice presidential nominee, expressed concern that "rendition, as currently practiced, is undermining our moral credibility and standing abroad and weakening the coalitions with foreign governments that we need to effectively combat international terrorism." As the public continues to learn more about the program, calls to end extraordinary rendition have increased, and the next presidential administration will likely be forced to take a stand one way or another on the issue.

The Origins of Extraordinary Rendition

At the most basic level, the term "rendition" refers to the practice of seizing and transferring a person from one country to another, usually for the purpose of criminal prosecution. Ordinary rendition is common in international relations and involves the surrendering of persons to foreign jurisdictions, in accordance with a treaty or enabling statute, and through a stipulated procedure. "Extraordinary rendition" involves rending persons to non-judicial authorities outside of treaty and legal processes. This is usually accomplished through kidnapping and forced transfer from one country to another. "In many cases of extraordinary rendition, it appears that the seized persons are expressly delivered to foreign jurisdictions to circumvent ... constitutional rights," writes David Weissbrodt and Amy Bergquist. "They are rendered in a manner to specifically deprive them of due process and civil liberties protections." In contrast to extradition, the suspect does not go through the legal system of the country where he is arrested. These persons are sometimes called "ghost detainees" and are outside the protections of domestic or international law in any practical sense.

Extraordinary rendition evolved out of pre-9/11 practices intended to facilitate judicial processes. Only after 9/11 did it become a purposive way to evade U.S. legal prohibitions against torture. In fact, the United States has practiced ordinary rendition since the 1800s, rendering criminal suspects...

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