A Call to End All Renditions [ it is time for Obama to put up or shut
up ! ]
http://www.truthout.org/021109A
Marjorie Cohn, in an article for Jurist, presents legal background
and
analysis on the United States's practice of rendition under the Bush
administration, and examines the legal opinions offered so far by the
Justice Department under President Barack Obama.
Binyam Mohamed, an Ethiopian residing in Britain, said he was
tortured
after being sent to Morocco and Afghanistan in 2002 by the U.S.
government. Mohamed was transferred to Guantanamo in 2004 and all
terrorism charges against him were dismissed last year. Mohamed was a
victim of extraordinary rendition, in which a person is abducted
without any legal proceedings and transferred to a foreign country
for
detention and interrogation, often tortured.
Mohamed and four other plaintiffs are accusing Boeing subsidiary
Jeppesen Dataplan, Inc. of flying them to other countries and secret
CIA camps where they were tortured. In Mohamed's case, two British
justices accused the Bush administration of pressuring the British
government to block the release of evidence that was "relevant to
allegations of torture" of Mohamed.
Twenty-five lines edited out of the court documents included
details about how Mohamed's genitals were sliced with a scalpel as
well as other torture methods so extreme that waterboarding "is very
far down the list of things they did," according to a British
official
quoted by the Telegraph (UK).
The plaintiffs' complaint quotes a former Jeppesen employee as
saying, "We do all of the extraordinary rendition flights - you know,
the torture flights." A senior company official also apparently
admitted the company transported people to countries where they would
be tortured.
Obama's Justice Department appeared before a three-judge panel of
the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Monday in the Jeppesen
lawsuit. But instead of making a clean break with the dark policies
of
the Bush years, the Obama administration claimed the same "state
secrets" privilege that Bush used to block inquiry into his policies
of torture and illegal surveillance. Claiming that the extraordinary
rendition program is a state secret is disingenuous since it is has
been extensively documented in the media.
"This was an opportunity for the new administration to act on its
condemnation of torture and rendition, but instead it has chosen to
stay the course," said the ACLU's Ben Wizner, counsel for the five
men.
If the judges accept Obama's state secrets claim, these men will
be denied their day in court and precluded from any recovery for the
damages they suffered as a result of extraordinary rendition.
Two and a half weeks before Obama's representative appeared in
the
Jeppesen case, the new President had signed Executive Order 13491. It
established a special task force "to study and evaluate the practices
of transferring individuals to other nations in order to ensure that
such practices comply with the domestic laws, international
obligations, and policies of the United States and do not result in
the transfer of individuals to other nations to face torture or
otherwise for the purpose, or with the effect, of undermining or
circumventing the commitments or obligations of the United States to
ensure the humane treatment of individuals in its custody or
control."
This order prohibits extraordinary rendition. It also ensures
humane treatment of persons in U.S. custody or control. But it
doesn't
specifically guarantee that prisoners the United States renders to
other countries will be free from cruel, inhuman or degrading
treatment that doesn't amount to torture. It does, however, aim to
ensure that our government's practices of transferring people to
other
countries complies with U.S. laws and policies, including our
obligations under international law.
One of those laws is the International Covenant on Civil
Political
Rights (ICCPR), a treaty the United States ratified in 1992. Article
7
of the ICCPR prohibits the States Parties from subjecting persons "to
torture or to cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment."
The Human Rights Committee, which is the body that monitors the
ICCPR,
has interpreted that prohibition to forbid States Parties from
exposing "individuals to the danger of torture or cruel, inhuman or
degrading treatment or punishment upon return to another country by
way of their extradition, expulsion or refoulement."
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