This is a link to a rare interview with Robert Grenier, after his “firing” as head of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center. On the NPR site, you can listen to the entire interview with Mary Louise Kelly.

All Things Considered, June 28, 2006
Bob Grenier was was removed in February from his job leading the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center. A rumor prevalent at the time was that Grenier was sacked for objecting to aggressive interrogation and rendition practices.

But Grenier insists that his departure was actually because of a personality clash. Still, he concedes that he’s “not the most popular guy at the White House.”

His status, Grenier says, is due partly to the fact that he’s made clear that he thinks the United States is wrong to keep high-level detainees such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in limbo. Instead, he says, the government should grant the detainees due process under the law. In a rare interview, Grenier speaks to NPR’s Mary Louise Kelly.

This is the full transcript of a Joint Hearing conducted by the Committee on Foreign Affairs to discuss the impact of Extraordinary Rendition on US Foreign Relations. Held April 17, 2007.

Read the full transcript here

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher Speaks before the Foriegn Affairs Subcommittee on Human Rights. Originally broadcast on C-SPAN2

Originally posted on December 5, 2005
by Times Online

…For decades, the United States and other countries have used “renditions” to transport terrorist suspects from the country where they were captured to their home country or to other countries where they can be questioned, held, or brought to justice.

In some situations a terrorist suspect can be extradited according to traditional judicial procedures. But there have long been many other cases where, for some reason, the local government cannot detain or prosecute a suspect, and traditional extradition is not a good option. In those cases the local government can make the sovereign choice to cooperate in a rendition. Such renditions are permissible under international law and are consistent with the responsibilities of those governments to protect their citizens.

Rendition is a vital tool in combating transnational terrorism. Its use is not unique to the United States, or to the current administration. Last year, then Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet recalled that our earlier counterterrorism successes included “the rendition of many dozens of terrorists prior to September 11, 2001″…

Read the full article here.

http://www.dkosopedia.com/

This is a fascinating site, created by an American veteran and patriot, and hosting writers such as Jimmy Carter, “Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, and dozens of other senators, congressmen, and governors.” Rendition is just one of the topics; this is a great site to educate yourself and get a detailed look at all sides of an issue.

This is a direct link to the page that chronicles a time-line of events, stories and press surrounding “secret prisons”:
Click here to view

Bill O’Reilly on the “torture” debate:

This was last year, five years after 9/11. Matt Lauer is questioning Bush about tactics used to gain information about terrorist threats, and whether or not these tactics fall inside of International Law.

This is a very interesting and short article by David Ignatius from the Washington Post that highlights the distinction between rendition and torture. While these terms are sometimes used synonymously , it might serve the issue better to aproach them separately. As Mr. Ignatius says, “…the debate has tended to lump rendition and torture together.”

Note the idea of using a person’s family to exert pressure, but not in the way one might first imagine. In this particular instance, the Arab man describing this technique is refering to bringing in family of the suspect to DO the pressuring; to SHAME the man in question into talking.

If anything, it’s a good reminder that most Arab families do not support extremism, or violence.

Originally posted on March 9, 2005
By David Ignatius
on The Washington Post
David Ignatius

‘Rendition’ Realities
Torture is immoral and illegal, and the refusal to allow cruel interrogation techniques is one measure of a civilized society. But this ironclad moral argument doesn’t necessarily apply to the practice known as “extraordinary rendition.”

Rendition is the CIA’s antiseptic term for its practice of sending captured terrorist suspects to other countries for interrogation. Because some of those countries torture prisoners — and because some of the suspected terrorists “rendered” by the CIA say they were in fact tortured — the debate has tended to lump rendition and torture together. The implication is that the CIA is sending people to Egypt, Jordan or other Middle Eastern countries because they can be tortured there and coerced into providing information they wouldn’t give up otherwise.
The problem with this argument is that it assumes that the CIA believes that torture works. But in 30 years of writing about intelligence, I’ve never encountered a spook who didn’t realize that torture is usually counterproductive. Professional intelligence officers know that prisoners will confess to anything under intense pain. Information obtained through torture thus tends to be unreliable, in addition to being immoral.

The unreliability of torture as an interrogation technique was conveyed powerfully by Jane Mayer in an article in the New Yorker last month. She cited the case of a Syrian-born terrorist suspect named Maher Arar, who was seized at New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport in September 2002 as he was traveling back to his home in Canada. He was then sent to Syria under the CIA’s program of “extraordinary rendition” and, by his account, whipped repeatedly on the hands with two-inch-thick electrical cables.

“Although he initially tried to assert his innocence, he eventually confessed to anything his tormentors wanted him to say,” wrote Mayer. She quoted Arar as explaining his false confession this way: “You just give up. You become like an animal.” The Syrians eventually concluded that Arar was innocent. He was released without charges.

Such stories rightly shock the conscience, and they make you wonder how anyone could ever advocate rendition. But in conversations over the past several years with senior CIA officials and the heads of several Arab intelligence services, I’ve heard explanations for why the practice is used. These arguments for rendition at least ought to be understood as Congress and the public struggle with the moral issues involved.

What’s gained by transferring a prisoner to his home country for interrogation is emotional leverage, according to Arab and American intelligence chiefs. A hardened al Qaeda member often can’t be physically coerced into giving up information, no matter how nasty the interrogator. But he may do so if confronted by, say, his mother, father, brother or sister. That family contact is possible if he’s near home; it’s impossible if he’s in an orange jump suit and warehoused at Guantanamo Bay.

I asked the head of an Arab intelligence service once about the widespread belief in his country that prisoners were tortured. People sometimes referred to his headquarters as the “fingernail factory,” I said, because they assumed that vicious methods were used, such as ripping out prisoners’ nails. This official insisted that torture didn’t work. He cited cases in which prisoners had been broken through softer and more clever measures — applying family pressure or, in one remarkable case, ignoring a defiant, self-important prisoner until he all but demanded to be questioned.

The head of another major Arab intelligence service explained how his men cracked an al Qaeda suspect who had refused to talk to the Americans; their main “weapon,” he said, was that they prayed five times a day in the man’s presence.

These “nice” interrogation stories don’t change the fact that hideous methods have been used in rendition cases. And in some instances, the CIA should have known that torture was likely — and stopped it. That’s wrong; no agency of the U.S. government should ever turn a blind eye to torture. But I think you can oppose torture and still find circumstances where rendition might be appropriate.

Before you make an easy judgment about rendition, you have to answer the disturbing question put to me by a former CIA official: Suppose the FBI had captured Mohamed Atta before Sept. 11, 2001. Under U.S. legal rules at the time, the man who plotted the airplane suicide attacks probably could not have been held or interrogated in the United States. Would it have made sense to “render” Atta to a place where he could have been interrogated in a way that might have prevented Sept. 11? That’s not a simple question for me to answer, even as I share the conviction that torture is always and everywhere wrong.