rssDid Obama Really Create a Loophole for Rendition?
Monday, February 02, 2009 at 5:30 pm
- 9 Comments
This story that ran Sunday in The Los Angeles Times, “Obama Preserves Rendition as Counter-Terrorism Tool”, has caused quite a stir. Swirling ’round the blogosphere, it’s got all sorts of people in a tizzy that President Obama isn’t really ending torture and the Bush administration policy of “extraordinary rendition” of suspected terrorists to torturing countries.
But civil rights lawyers who’ve read Obama’s orders think the concerns are overblown, and the plain language of the executive orders Obama issued in the first 48 hours of his presidency suggest just the opposite.
“The reality is we don’t know what he’s doing or what he plans to do in this area other than he set up a study team to make recommendations on whether and how a rendition program would continue,” Chris Anders, legislative counsel for the ACLU in Washington, told me earlier today.
“People are reading into the provision that it does not take away short-term detention authority from the CIA,” Anders said. “That could be meant to protect a variety of different things. Rendition would only be one of them. But if you look through the executive orders, there are a number of places where President Obama kind of kicked the can down the road in terms of making decisions or putting them off.”
It was, after all, only his second day in office when he issued those orders.
As I’ve reported before, Obama’s orders were important first steps and in some cases largely symbolic moves; most still require the new administration to take many more specific actions down the road — in terms of closing Guantanamo, prosecuting suspected terrorists, and concealing information about government operations that President Bush had deemed state secrets.
“It may very well be that the administration does not yet know enough about either what the CIA has done and can do, or what they want it to do and not to do,” Anders said. “They know they want to shut down the secret prison program, so they did that. But they may have been concerned that they didn’t know enough yet to deal with other kinds of detention the CIA has.”
That doesn’t mean the order leaves open the CIA’s ability to return to torturing people, or to so-called “extraordinary rendition” — the Bush administration’s way of outsourcing torture by sending suspects to other countries that would likely interrogate them under torture. In fact, Obama has specifically committed to abide by the United Nations Convention Against Torture, which specifically forbids extraordinary rendition.
Even Tom Malinowski, the Washington advocacy director for Human Rights Watch, has adopted a similar “wait and see” attitude, favoring to take the new president at his word.
“What I heard loud and clear from the president’s order was that they want to design a system that doesn’t result in people being sent to foreign dungeons to be tortured,” Malinowski told The Los Angeles Times.
As Scott Horton put it in his blog today, “The LA Times just got punked.” Horton attributes the rash of reporting that Obama plans to continue the Bush rendition policies — complete with prisoner abuse and torture — to leaks from disgruntled CIA officials and to the right-wing media. The Washington Times, for example, last week reported that Obama’s executive orders leave open the possibility for the CIA to keep operating its “black sites.”
“The provision illustrates that the president’s order to shutter foreign-based prisons, known as black sites, is not airtight and that the Central Intelligence Agency still has options if it wants to hold terrorist suspects for several days at a time,” wrote The Washington Times’ Eli Lake in his “exclusive” reading of the president’s orders.
My own view is that if you parse every sentence of every order and memorandum issued by the president, you’re going to pretty easily find something that he did not address. Whether you want to label that a deliberate and dangerous “loophole” — or merely a cautious approach that allows further study of a difficult problem — seems to depend on which side of the aisle you’re sitting on.
9 Comments
Comment posted February 2, 2009 @ 6:39 pm
At no point in my story did I say the executive order leaves open the possibility of the CIA to keep operating “black sites.” I said that it allows the CIA to operate “temporary detention facilities,” a phrase I picked up from the Obama administration and repeated by an analyst from the Center for American Progress. That struck me as news, particularly since in the story, I say Obama had just closed the black sites. I don't know if this exemption will mean suspects will be shipped off to countries that torture as they were in the Clinton and subsequent Bush years. I would also add that in my piece, last week, I also quoted Chris Anders, who was not nearly as rosy as he is in this blog post. He said to me:
“If President Obama has taken the CIA out of the prison business, he should also take the CIA out of the short-term jailer business as well.”
Comment posted February 3, 2009 @ 4:52 am
You're right, you carefully did explain that it's only temporary detention that the order would allow. However, to call it an “exclusive” report about a little-known “loophole” strongly suggested, as did your lead, that Obama plans to keep using some form of “black sites” — i.e., secret prisons — to hold people. And the implication was that the people holding them will be up to no good — and maybe abuse and torture. And those suggestions have, along with the LA Times piece, raised lots of fears and complaints that Obama isn't really going to end torture and abuse as he's promised, but will just follow the same old Bush playbook and call it something else.
Along the same vein, I don't think it's legitimate to equate the rendition policies under Clinton and Bush; from what I'm told, the Clinton administration sent people to countries where they'd face official judicial proceedings, not where they'd be held for years in prison and tortured, as the Bush administration did.
Comment posted February 3, 2009 @ 12:50 pm
I think it's pretty clear that Clinton sent suspected terrorists in some cases to foreign jails where they were tortured. I get into this issue in a piece I wrote last month on Leon Panetta, but you can find this stuff in Jane Mayer's reporting and plenty of other places. My piece is here. http://washingtontimes.com/news/2009/jan/15/pan…
As for the implications of my lede or what you think it signifies, well that's a pretty thin reed. I assume my readers speak and understand plain English and they could figure out for themselves whether the new temporary detentions were black, gray, white or whatever. Judging from the web hits the story received when it went out last week, I assume many people had not known that Obama's executive orders had an exemption for these temporary detentions by the CIA. Like you say in your blog post, we don't know from there what any of this will mean, but I think you overshot in your critique of me. As for the LA Times, I think they got it basically right that such temporary facilities strongly imply Obama will continue rendition. We don't know if that will be the kind of rendition to dungeons as practiced by Clinton and W, or some kinder and gentler form of rendition.
Pingback posted February 3, 2009 @ 3:48 pm
[...] Did Obama Really Create a Loophole for Rendition?, which begins: This story that ran Sunday in The Los Angeles Times, “Obama Preserves Rendition as Counter-Terrorism Tool”, has caused quite a stir. Swirling ’round the blogosphere, it’s got all sorts of people in a tizzy that President Obama isn’t really ending torture and the Bush administration policy of “extraordinary rendition” of suspected terrorists to torturing countries. [...]
Comment posted February 5, 2009 @ 8:02 am
The article does not say that Obama will torture or engage in prolonged detention. Instead, it says that he will continue the kidnapping aspects of it. Will liberals criticize this too? http://dissentingjustice.blogspot.com/2009/02/s…
Comment posted February 5, 2009 @ 8:04 am
this issue has created a lot of defensive responses from my fellow liberals. i wonder why….i think overly protesting shows something sinister.
Comment posted February 5, 2009 @ 4:02 pm
The article does not say that Obama will torture or engage in prolonged detention. Instead, it says that he will continue the kidnapping aspects of it. Will liberals criticize this too? http://dissentingjustice.blogspot.com/2009/02/s…
Comment posted February 5, 2009 @ 4:04 pm
this issue has created a lot of defensive responses from my fellow liberals. i wonder why….i think overly protesting shows something sinister.
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