Media reports describe suspects being arrested, blindfolded, shackled, and sedated, or otherwise ,
December 5 ,
2005
In a number of cases, suspects to whom the procedure is believed to have been applied later appeared to be innocent.
Outsourcing Torture: The Secret History of America's "Extraordinary Rendition" February 17 ,
2005
,
2006 .
However, The European Parliament enquiry expressed concerns that the Central Intelligence Agency had conducted more than 1,000 secret flights over European territory since 2001, some to transfer terror suspects. Agent's names repeatedly came up in the investigation -- which was said to suggest a pattern of operations, and flight configurations were highly suspect. See
CNN article April 26 2006, and
New York Times article of 27 April 2006 .
;
Rendition
:In law, rendition is a "surrender" or "handing over" of
Persons or
Property , particularly from one
Jurisdiction to another. For criminal
Suspects ,
Extradition is the most common type of rendition. Rendition can also be seen as the act of handing over, after the request for
Extradition has taken place.
;Extraordinary rendition
:This term is not defined in international law. Its use is often criticized as '' commented that this "must rank as euphemism of the year.
2005 it became notorious as the term used by the US to describe what it does when it hands over terrorist suspects and other enemies to third countries that are rather less scrupulous about human rights than we are." [http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,19269-1963018,00.html .
The planes used in extraordinary renditions are not leased by the
CIA , but instead they are owned by a CIA
Shell Company . The shell company has no employees, no business premises, and no website. In lieu of these, it has a CIA-contracted lawyer who provides a mail drop, registers the company with the state and the planes with the
FAA , and interfaces in other necessary ways with government agencies and the public. The lawyer provides many of the legal services needed by a normal company, including a place to serve legal papers and court documents on the company.Ownership of aircraft
The procedure was developed by , where they were turned over to the Egyptian
Mukhabarat , which has a reputation for brutality. This arrangement suited the Egyptians, as they had been trying to crack down on Islamic extremists in that country and a number of the senior members of Al Qaeda were Egyptian. The arrangement suited the US because torture is banned under both US and international law.
The argument for rendition made by defenders of the practice is that culturally-informed and native-language interrogations are more successful in gaining information from suspects. For instance, interrogators of one terrorist suspect prayed to Mecca five times per day in the presence of the suspect until he became willing to talk
'Rendition' Realities by David Ignatius
Washington Post ,
March 9 ,
2005 ; Page A21. Nevertheless, there have been many reports of the use of torture by these governments on suspects rendered to them.
The first individual to be subjected to rendition was Talaat Fouad Qassem, one of Egypt's most wanted terrorists, who was arrested with the help of US intelligence by
Croatian police in
Zagreb in September 1995. He was interrogated by US agents on a ship in the
Adriatic Sea and was then sent back to Egypt. He disappeared while in custody, and is suspected by human rights activists of having been executed without a trial.
In the summer of 1998, a similar operation was mounted in
Tirana ,
Albania . Wiretaps showed that five Egyptians had been in contact with
Ayman Al-Zawahiri ,
Osama Bin Laden 's deputy. During the course of several months, Shawki Salama Attiya and four militants were captured by Albanian security forces collaborating with US agents. The men were flown to Cairo for interrogation. Attiya later alleged that he had electric shocks applied to his genitals, was hung from his limbs, and was kept in a cell with dirty water up to his knees.
- "'Snatches', or more properly 'extraordinary renditions', were operations to apprehend terrorists abroad, usually without the knowledge of and almost always without public acknowledgement of the host government ... The first time I proposed a snatch, in 1993, the White House Counsel, Lloyd Cutler, demanded a meeting with the President to explain how it violated international law. Clinton had seemed to be siding with Cutler until pp. 143-144
