extraordinary rendition

Although the government has said that warrantless wiretapping under the Terrorist Surveillance Program has stopped, the Obama administration has not said that warrantless wiretapping isn’t ongoing under some other program.

Sabrina deSouza is one of the 23 U.S. officials convicted in Italy for the illegal CIA rendition of an Egyptian terrorist suspect named Abu Omar. She concedes the United States “broke the law” in ordering and carrying out the rendition, and says, “we are paying for the mistakes right now, whoever authorized and approved this.”
Wow, [...]

The Second Circuit Court of Appeals just dismissed a landmark lawsuit filed by a Canadian victim of “extraordinary rendition” against former U.S. officials, ruling that torture victims have no right to compensation from the U.S. government, even if U.S. officials were complicit in their treatment.
Maher Arar is a Canadian citizen who was seized in 2002 [...]

The Obama administration just won a round in the lawsuit brought by five alleged torture victims against Jeppesen Dataplan, the Boeing subsidiary that allegedly helped the CIA transport detainees to countries where they’ were interrogated under torture, a practice known as “extraordinary rendition.”

The New York Times’ lead editorial today is a powerful indictment of the Obama administration’s continuation of Bush-era efforts to conceal the facts of U.S.-sponsored torture.
Running through the list of situations that we’ve been reporting on in which the Obama administration continues to conceal evidence of torture — from the efforts of British resident Binyam [...]

Human rights experts say there is a serious risk that some of the Guantanamo detainees cleared for release could face persecution or torture.

Although the Obama administration’s much-anticipated new policy on the use of the so-called “state secrets” privilege, announced this morning, has drawn some praise, civil liberties lawyers and other critics of the use of the privilege don’t think it solves the problem.

The news that Mohammed Jawad plans to sue the U.S. government for his unlawful detention and torture raises the question of whether he can get beyond the hurdles so many other torture victims have faced in similar lawsuits.
Previous cases have been dismissed on grounds that government officials had “qualified immunity” for their actions — meaning [...]

Today’s news that the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights will hear the claims of kidnapping and torture filed against the United States by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of Khaled El-Masri, an innocent German citizen and car salesman subjected to the Bush administration’s extraordinary rendition program in 2003, may not go over so [...]

I’ll be totally honest: I’m swamped with other documents, but Greg Sargent has read through some newly acquired CIA documents from the American Civil Liberties Union and emerges with a portrait of how extraordinary rendition worked. More when I can dig through the document.