extraordinary rendition

Throughout the Bush administration, Bush officials — including the president, as you can see here – consistently said that “this government does not torture people.” The Bush administration also promised that it doesn’t send prisoners to be tortured elsewhere.
The Obama administration is now saying the same thing.
Today, it assured reporters in a background briefing with [...]

The New York Times has a blockbuster story this morning about the infamous secret prisons — or “black sites” — operated by the CIA for housing and interrogating high-value terror suspects. The article contains new details about the locations of the sites:
One jail was a renovated building on a busy street in Bucharest, Romania, the [...]

Seeking to dismiss criminal fraud charges against him, Raymond Azar, a 45-year-old Lebanese construction manager working for an English contractor, has charged that he was seized in Afghanistan and tortured before before being sent to Virginia to face trial.
Scott Horton reports on the case and provides links to all the court documents on The Huffington [...]

After my post yesterday updating the status of the Obama administration’s ongoing efforts to conceal evidence that British resident and former Guantanamo Bay prisoner Binyam Mohamed was tortured, Ed Brayton, a fellow with the Center for Independent Media and author of the blog Dispatches from the Culture Wars, asked me whatever happened to that promise [...]

This case has dropped a off the radar screen lately, but Bob Egelko at the San Francisco Chronicle today reminds us that the Obama administration is still fighting on three different fronts release of information that would likely show that U.S. officials tortured British former Guantanamo detainee Binyam Mohamed.
Mohamed is one of the plaintiffs in [...]

The American Civil Liberties Union yesterday, along with Alkarama for Human Rights, asked two U.N. special rapporteurs to investigate the “extraordinary rendition,” detention and torture of Abou Elkassim Britel, an Italian citizen and one of the victims suing Jeppesen Dataplan, the subsidiary of Boeing the allegedly helped the CIA carry out the Bush administration’s torture [...]

Maybe it’s a cultural thing, but Canadians seem so much more willing to apologize for their mistakes than Americans do.
According to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, a committee in Parliament is planning to recommend that the Canadian government compensate and apologize to three Arab-Canadian men who were imprisoned and tortured in Syria, due partly to information [...]

The media have overlooked substance and context to focus on her style, but Judge Sonia Sotomayor has provided a window into her views on executive power and national security along the way.

After losing its argument before a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals that the “state secrets privilege” requires the dismissal of a lawsuit by alleged torture victims, the Obama administration today has asked the full Ninth Circuit to re-hear the case, which was the first challenge to the Bush administration’s “extraordinary rendition” [...]

Despite the Obama administration’s surprisingly vigorous arguments that the case had to be dismissed to prevent disclosure of “state secrets,” the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit today reinstated the case of Mohamed v. Jeppesen Dataplan, in which five victims of the CIA’s notorious “extraordinary rendition” (transfer to torture) program sued Jeppesen, a [...]