rendition

The latest in a string of lawsuits challenging harsh interrogation techniques could fare better than similar cases.

Breaking news from Reuters:
An Italian judge sentenced 23 former CIA agents to up to eight years in prison on Wednesday for the abduction of a Muslim cleric in a landmark ruling against the “rendition” flights used by the former U.S. government.
The Americans were tried in absentia for the 2003 kidnapping, in a case that garnered [...]

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

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 [...]

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 [...]

Don’t miss Dafna Linzer’s ProPublica report — following up on her post last week about an inadvertently acknowledged secret CIA detainee — on so-called “ghost detainees” believed to held by the CIA but unreported to, say, the Red Cross. If another country did this, we’d probably call these detainees “disappeared,” with all the ugly implications [...]

President Obama just announced that Harold Hongju Koh, the head of Yale Law School and a human rights official during the Clinton administration, will be the legal adviser to the State Department. That’s big news as the administration proceeds with its review of interrogations, detentions and renditions policy. Koh, recall, dramatically testified at Alberto Gonzales’ [...]

Obama on rendition, to The New York Times. I’m transcribing from the audio.

Sen. Kit Bond (R-Mo.) is harping on CIA Director-designate Leon Panetta for saying that people were rendered for torture. “What evidence are you basing that on, or would you like to retract that?”
“The press has identified extraordinary renditions, but no one has quite defined it,” he says, offering a definition. First is “where individuals are [...]

The hearing is wrapping up. Sen. Kit Bond (R-Mo.) laments that some of the Republican senators have left “thinking they wouldn’t get a chance to ask questions.” He wants another bite of the apple on CIA Director-Designate Leon Panetta’s rendition history. “Were you fully advised of the extraordinary renditions that went on” in the Clinton [...]