Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

Twenty-four-year-old Amir Meshal, the son of Muslim immigrants from Egypt, was a lifelong resident of New Jersey when, after living briefly in Cairo with extended family members, in 2006 he decided to go to Somalia to study Islam and experience living under Islamic law. The country appeared to have stabilized and a new Islamic government was on good terms with the United States.

But Somalia wasn’t as stable as Meshal had thought, and as violence erupted there again in January 2007, Meshal fled, along with many Somali civilians. He was arrested in a joint U.S.-Kenyan-Ethiopian operation along the border of Kenya.

[Law1]During the next four months, Meshal says, he was detained and interrogated in three different African countries without charge, denied the right to speak to a lawyer or family member, and refused the right to even appear before a judicial officer. Although a lifelong U.S. citizen with two U.S. citizen parents, Meshal was repeatedly threatened with torture, rendition to another country where he would be tortured, and forced disappearance. And he believes that U.S. officials, who interrogated him more than 30 times during this process, directed his arrest and treatment.

Those claims are the subject of a new lawsuit being filed Tuesday by the American Civil Liberties Union in Washington. Although it’s not the first lawsuit against U.S. officials seeking damages for torture and other mistreatment abroad, Meshal is only the second U.S. citizen to sue for U.S.-sponsored torture. That and a few other distinctive facts in this case may give him some advantages over those that have been dismissed.

“This is a U.S. citizen who was caught in hostilities abroad, and instead of helping him return, U.S. officials abused him and mistreated him and never charged him with a crime,” said Nusrat Choudhury, one of the lead lawyers from the ACLU representing Meshal. “Should they be allowed to do that without helping a U.S. citizen get home, and instead, denying him access to lawyers?”

That’s the question that will face judges in this case. In the past, the government has managed to convince courts to dismiss torture victims’ cases by saying that government officials are entitled to qualified immunity, or that the case would reveal state secrets, or that courts should not imply a right to sue government officials for constitutional violations when the case involves national security and foreign policy. But will courts be so willing to dismiss a case brought by a U.S. citizen, born to U.S. citizen parents, allegedly tortured directly by U.S. officials, and who has never even been charged with doing anything wrong?

American University Law Professor Stephen Vladeck, an expert on constitutional and national security law, says that although doctrinally the cases are not very different, the fact that Meshal is a U.S. citizen “practically, could make a difference to judges,” he said. “It would just highlight how wrong those other decisions are,” he said.

One of those decisions is Rasul v. Rumsfeld, decided by the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals last year. In that case, the court dismissed the claims of four British men who’d been detained and allegedly abused at Guantanamo Bay because, the court reasoned, the federal officials were entitled to “qualified immunity” because it was not clear that Guantanamo detainees had rights under the U.S. Constitution at the time of their alleged abuse.

In that case, though, which is still on appeal (the Supreme Court remanded it back to the D.C. Circuit for reconsideration in light of intervening Supreme Court precedents), the court’s reasoning was based in part on the fact that the plaintiffs were all “aliens” — none were lawful U.S. citizens or residents.

Meshal’s U.S. citizenship may make his case more difficult to dismiss. “Mr. Meshal alleges there needs to be discovery in this case to determine whether what those officers did was objectively reasonable,” said Choudury, his lawyer. “Should an FBI officer think it’s objectively reasonable to threaten a U.S. citizen to send him to place where he will be tortured?”

Interestingly, recently released documents produced in the ACLU’s Freedom of Information Act case against the government have revealed memos written by FBI interrogation specialists in 2002 and sent to Defense Department officials specifically explaining that threatening a detainee with torture, death or disappearance is a violation of the U.S. Constitution and the anti-torture law. That could weaken the government’s argument that FBI officials reasonably thought it was legal to threaten Meshal in 2007.

The most recent case decided that presents similar facts is the case of Maher Arar, dismissed this month for the second time by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. Arar, a Canadian citizen, was arrested by U.S. authorities while he was changing planes at JFK airport in New York in 2002. Arar was held briefly in the states, denied access to a lawyer, then rendered to Syria where he was held in a grave-like cell and interrogated under torture, he says, for almost a year. He was finally released without charge; Syrian authorities acknowledged that they had no evidence against him.

Arar sued the U.S. government for complicity in his treatment abroad. The court last week ruled that he has no right to sue under the U.S. Constitution in this case because the claims would “have the natural tendency to affect diplomacy, foreign policy, and the security of the nation.” As for his claims under the Torture Victims Protection Act, enacted to protect victims of torture in other countries, Arar could not claim compensation from U.S. authorities because it was the Syrians who tortured him, even if U.S. officials knew that he was likely to be tortured when they sent him to Syria, the court ruled.

In addition to the fact that Meshal is a U.S. citizen, his case may stand a better chance because he is suing the actual FBI officials who he claims conducted his interrogation and threatened him with torture, forced disappearance and execution to coerce him into confessing to associations with al-Qaeda that he says he does not have.

“It was a Kenyan jail, but he is alleging that U.S. officials were complicit with those officials in keeping him detained in secret,” said Choudhury. “During interrogations, U.S. government officials threatened to send him to Israel, where they would make him disappear.”

Meshal’s constitutional claims may also fare better because there appears to be nowhere else to bring them — an important factor courts consider. The government claimed that Arar, as a Canadian, could have objected to his rendition before U.S. immigration authorities. (Arar’s lawyers disputed that.)

In this case, there appears to be no alternative means for redress. Meshal has declined to speak to reporters about his ordeal, but according to his legal complaint, while he was in Kenya, Meshal repeatedly asked to speak to a lawyer, to his father, and to the international Committee of the Red Cross; his requests were denied. He was allowed to speak once to a U.S. consular official in Kenya who said he would help Meshal.

Before the consular official could do anything, though, Meshal was handcuffed, hooded and flown to Somalia, where he feared he would be killed, he says. Meshal was deposited in an excruciatingly hot 25-foot-square cave, without windows or toilets. When guards opened the door of the cell, Meshal “noticed that enormous cockroaches were clustered in the corners of the cell and large black millipedes were all over the walls,” the legal complaint charges. Meshal says he was left there, handcuffed in the dark, for two days.

He was then moved to a storage tent where he was given one meal a day of biscuits, marmalade and water. He was left there for about four days until he was transferred to Ethiopia for further interrogation.

The government could still argue that the “state secrets privilege” should doom the case. In many cases charging government wrongdoing in the national security arena, the Justice Department has argued that allowing a lawsuit to go forward would reveal sensitive state secrets and endanger national security. The government’s frequent invocation of the state secrets privilege has become something of a political embarrassment, however. In February, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) introduced a bill, which now has nine co-sponsors, that would severely limit the government’s ability to dismiss cases on that ground. Shortly after, Attorney General Eric Holder in September announced a new policy on state secrets, pledging to use the privilege more sparingly and according to strict new rules. However, he has continued to assert it in situations where advocates say the case should move forward, with the judge simply reviewing any sensitive evidence behind closed doors.

“It seems unlikely the government wouldn’t invoke state secrets again,” said David Luban, a law professor at Georgetown University and expert on legal ethics and international law. In this case, Luban said, the government would likely claim that allowing the cases to move forward would expose sensitive information about the United States’ relationships or agreements with the other countries that Meshal was rendered to. And “if the action is being shut off because of state secrets,” he said, “I don’t think you can get around that.”

“The government can raise that in the course of litigation,” Choudhury agreed. “But that’s not a reason for this case not to go forward.” The government would still have to convince a court that national security would be put at risk simply by responding to requests about the FBI’s treatment of one individual and its role in his rendition and alleged torture. Some courts have been skeptical about that argument, although in the case of German citizen Khaled Al-Masri, a lawsuit filed by a rendition victim against U.S. authorities, a federal judge in Virginia did dismiss the case on state secrets grounds.

And the court could still decide to dismiss the case based on its broader national security implications, as it did in Arar. “What’s been so disturbing is how judges have bent backwards to say this is a new kind of claim,” said Vladeck. In the Arar case, for example, the court cast his claim for compensation for extraordinary rendition as a new kind of constitutional claim that would require the court essentially to create a new right to sue. The court then could easily decline to create that new right, citing the “special factors” involved — in particular, the potential impact on national security and foreign policy. “What’s so distressing about Arar was that the Second Circuit endorsed such a limitless view of special factors,” said Vladeck. “If Arar’s rendition case can’t prevail, then I’m pressed to see what kind of case can win.”

Still, one case has survived dismissal so far. That’s the case of Jose Padilla, a U.S. citizen deemed an “enemy combatant”, who is now suing John Yoo, the former lawyer at the Justice Department who justified torture and Padilla says personally helped to devise his illegal treatment. Although the Obama administration, representing Yoo, tried to have the case dismissed, a federal court in California refused, in part because there was no other way for a U.S. citizen to hold U.S. officials accountable.

Padilla was also the only U.S. citizen to have sued a U.S. official for torture. Until now. Choudhury hopes, at least, that Meshal’s U.S. citizenship might also make some difference. But the outcome is hard to predict. Judges and courts are sharply divided on when a victim of abusive federal government policies should have a right to bring their claims to court.

When the full Second Circuit court ruled in Arar’s case last week, the decision included four powerful dissents.

“The majority would immunize official misconduct by invoking the separation of powers and the executive’s responsibility for foreign affairs and national security,” wrote Judge Barrington Parker, in one of them. “Its approach distorts the system of checks and balances essential to the rule of law, and it trivilializes the judiciary’s role in these arenas,” he continued. The executive’s powers in foreign policy and national security “are not limitless” and their “bounds in both wartime and peacetime are fixed by the same Constitution,” he wrote. The court’s refusal to allow Arar a remedy, he continued, “immunizes official conduct directly at odds with the express will of Congress and the most basic guarantees of liberty contained in the Constitution. By doing so, the majority risks a government that can interpret the law to suits its own ends, without scrutiny.”

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 headlines around the world.

Salim Hamdan, Osama bin Laden's alleged driver, was held in Cuba at Guantanamo Bay prison camp like these detainees. (Department of Defense photo by Petty Officer 1st class Shane T. McCoy, U.S. Navy)

As the pressure grows on the Obama administration to close the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay by January, so too does the risk that some of the Guantanamo detainees cleared for release could be returned to countries where they’ll face persecution or torture, say human rights experts. The men remaining at Guantanamo mostly come from countries that are notorious for torturing prisoners. And the Obama administration has not ruled out returning the men to those places, even though, labeled “enemy combatants” by the Bush administration, they could face retaliation back home.

Meanwhile, it remains unclear whether the courts can step in and stop the administration from returning prisoners to countries known to torture. In April, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the federal courts have no authority to interfere with where the administration wants to send a Guantanamo detainee. The lawyers on that case, Kiyemba v. Obama, plan to appeal to the Supreme Court this month, but in the meantime, men from Algeria, Tunisia, Libya and other countries notorious for abusing prisoners could be returned to those countries over their objections. Their lawyers are now scrambling to try to stop that.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court deferred its decision in a related case on whether to review a ruling that judges have no authority to order Guantanamo detainees released into the United States. The court’s punt came in the case of 13 Uighurs, the Chinese Muslim prisoners who have been cleared for release by the U.S. government but cannot return to China for fear of persecution there. But while the Uighurs in that case have been denied the right to be released into the United States, in a way, they’re lucky; the Obama administration has said it will not return them to China.

To be sure, the administration has also promised not to send any detainees to countries where they’re likely to be tortured. But it has also said that in some situations it will accept “diplomatic assurances” from those countries that it will treat the returning detainees humanely. These are, essentially, promises from a torturing country that it won’t torture a particular individual being sent there. But how reliable are those “assurances” really?

Human rights advocates say they’re not at all.

“The record on diplomatic assurances is extremely poor,” said Joanne Mariner, Director of the Terrorism and Counterterrorism program at Human Rights Watch. “It’s rare we see the text of the assurances, so it’s not clear what they consist of, and whether there’s a post-return monitoring mechanism. But there are some very well known cases in which people were sent to Egypt and Syria with diplomatic assurances, and then were tortured.”

Judy Rabinovitz, Deputy Director of the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, agrees. “We think there are real problems inherently with the reliability of such assurances and the ability to monitor them,” she said. After all, she noted, most of these countries have signed the United Nations Convention Against Torture, but they’re still torturing prisoners. “When you have a country that’s notorious for torturing, how can diplomatic assurances be reliable? They know they’re not supposed to torture. They’ve signed a treaty. How is an assurance worth more than a treaty?”

One of the most infamous recent cases of torture following assurances from a foreign government involved the Canadian citizen Maher Arar, arrested at JFK airport and sent to Syria for interrogation, supposedly with diplomatic assurances that he’d be treated humanely. Arar says he was brutally tortured there. Human Rights watch has released several reports on the increasing reliance of the United States and other countries on such “diplomatic assurances,” and documented that in many cases, they have not worked. What’s more, it’s often impossible to know whether an individual returned has been tortured, since the country that returns the prisoner has no credible way of determining how he was treated, and both countries have an incentive to say the detainee was treated humanely.

Technically, the United States is bound by the Convention Against Torture and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights not to send people to countries where they face a real risk of torture. (The Bush administration argued those laws did not apply to prisoners held abroad.) But as Mariner explained, that often leads those countries to rely on “diplomatic assurances” to say the risk has been diminished. That’s exactly what the Bush administration said it did when it sent terror suspects for questioning under its “extraordinary rendition” program, and many of those suspects claim they were subsequently tortured.

The choice, says Mariner, is either to trust the discretion of the executive branch, or to have some sort of system for deciding the legitimacy of the prisoner’s fears. The D.C. Circuit ruling eliminated the possibility of the federal courts playing that role. That ruling took effect in early September, clearing the way for the U.S. government to begin to return Guantanamo detainees to countries known to torture prisoners.

The administration announced earlier this week that it has cleared 75 Guantanamo detainees for release. The list includes nine prisoners from Tunisia, seven from Algeria, four from Syria, three from Libya, three from Saudi Arabia, two each from Uzbekistan, Egypt, the West Bank and Kuwait, and one each from Azerbaijan and Tajikistan. None of these countries has a strong human rights record.

About 30 of the prisoners cleared for release fear return to their home countries, said Mariner.

Ahmed Belbacha is one such prisoner at risk. He fled his home country of Algeria in 1999 during a civil war between government forces and a militant Islamic group. A former soldier in the Algerian army, he was at risk from both sides. He sought asylum in the UK, where he worked cleaning rooms in a hotel. In 2001, however, while traveling in Pakistan where he was offered free Islamic education, he was captured by the Pakistani Army and turned over to the U.S. military shortly after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. The U.S. military deemed Belbacha an “enemy combatant” because he had attended prayer services led by a fundamentalist sheik, travelled on a fake French passport and received small arms training in Afghanistan. Belbacha was sent to the prison at Guantanamo Bay in 2002. But in 2007, the Bush administration decided that he did not pose a threat and cleared him for release. But by this time, Belbacha was afraid to go home; he fears retaliation and torture from both the Algerian government and radical Islamists.

In 2007, Belbacha’s lawyers told the court that they’d learned that the U.S. government planned to return their client to Algeria, and filed an emergency motion asking the court to prevent his transfer. The court ruled it did not have the power to do that, and Belbacha appealed. The court of appeals held off deciding the case though, while waiting for the Supreme Court to rule on whether detainees have the right to challenge their detention in federal courts. (It ruled they did last year in Boumediene v. Bush.) In the meantime, the court temporarily enjoined the U.S. government from sending Belbacha to Algeria.

Then, in April, the D.C. Circuit ruled in Kiyemba v. Obama that the courts have no authority over where the government sends the men. Now, Belbacha is worried again, and his lawyers are scrambling to keep the court from issuing an order that will allow the government to transfer Belbacha to Algeria. His lawyers say he’s now even more likely to be tortured by the Algerian government if he returns there because his struggle to avoid transfer there has drawn international attention and support from human rights groups. As his lawyers put in their brief to the court: “He believes that his strenuous and widely-publicized efforts to avoid transfer to Algeria place him in the government’s crosshairs.”

Belbacha’s lawyers have filed a motion with the court asking that his case be “held in abeyance” until the lawyers handling the Kiyemba case have an opportunity to file a petition to the Supreme Court, and then until the Supreme Court decides whether to hear the case. Holding the case off would leave in effect a June 2008 district court order prohibiting the government from transferring him to Algeria.

The Department of Justice, meanwhile, is vigorously fighting to lift that order, arguing that the D.C. Circuit has already decided that the courts don’t have authority to prevent a detainee’s transfer, and that the government has promised not transfer any detainee to a country where “he is more likely than not to be tortured.”

That’s not sufficient assurance for Belbacha and his lawyers, however. “The U.S. has not assured Belbacha that he won’t be sent back,” said David Remes, Executive Director of Appeal for Justice and a lawyer for Belbacha. As the law stands now, there is no court or independent arbiter to whom Belbacha can appeal.

Human rights advocates say that Algeria’s abusive treatment of two other prisoners recently returned there by the UK raises serious concerns. According to Human Rights Watch, the men were reportedly threatened and beaten in custody. Statements coerced from them were used against them at trial, and both were sentenced to several years’ imprisonment.

Lawyers for Guantanamo detainees from Libya and Tajikistan who similarly fear persecution if returned home have also asked federal judges to at least temporarily prevent their clients’ transfer until the Supreme Court can consider whether courts have any authority over the administration’s decisions about where to send them.

The Obama administration, in another context, has similarly indicated that it is willing to send people to countries known to torture. In making recommendations on the transfer of terror suspects to other countries for interrogation – commonly known as renditions – an Obama administration task force recommended that renditions be permitted to countries known to practice torture, so long as the administration obtains assurances that the suspect will be treated humanely. Although the Obama administration has promised to monitor and enforce those assurances, Human Rights Watch has found that “monitoring is no panacea” because the prisoners cannot be guaranteed confidentiality. Their reports of abuse to foreign monitors would be easily traceable to them, placing them at serious risk of retaliation.

That’s because the current administration announced earlier this week that it will continue the rendition program, albeit under the authority of a broader inter-agency team. But the administration has not ruled out sending terror suspects to countries that are known to torture them in custody.

A Justice Department release on Monday clarified that the U.S. government will obtain “assurances from foreign countries” that they’ll treat the prisoners humanely, and will “insist on a monitoring mechanism” to check up on the prisoner every once in a while, although it may provide some “advance notice to the detaining government.”

Whether or not that “trust me” approach is really worth trusting, given the similar assurances provided by the Bush administration, it does suggest that the Obama team may not welcome an Inter-American Commission inquiry into rendition.

Although the original El-Masri court case that Spencer referred to was brought against the Bush administration, more recent attempts to sue the government on behalf of innocent victims of extraordinary rendition have been similarly rebuffed by the Obama Justice Department, and on the same “state secrets” grounds.

As a result, not one victim of the Bush administration’s rendition program has had his day in court.

El-Masri, a German citizen, was kidnapped in 2003 in Macedonia and flown by U.S. agents to a CIA-run “black site” in Afghanistan. There, he claims he was beaten, drugged, blindfolded, confined in a tiny dirty cell, and prevented from communicating with anyone in the outside world, including his own family or the German government. About four months later, after apparently concluding that they had captured the wrong person, the CIA flew him to Albania and left him on a hillside in the dead of night. El-Masri has never been charged with a crime.

Update:  According to Steven Watt, El-Masri’s lawyer, the Obama administration probably couldn’t make the “state secrets” claim in the Inter-American Commission, which does “not recognize blanket prohibition on accessing courts to assert fundamental rights.”  However, ” Obama can try to argue that the state secrets privilege was legitimately raised before domestic courts and El Masri thus wasn’t denied access to a remedy (one of El Masri’s claims before the IACHR) but in our view, based on our assessment of international law, Obama wouldn’t prevail.”

He adds: “there is no equivalent of the state secrets privilege recognized under international human rights law to bar a human rights victim accessing an international tribunal such as the Commission. ”

Scott Horton reports on the case and provides links to all the court documents on The Huffington Post.

Azar claims he was threatened and coerced into signing a confession in ways that amounted to torture. He says he was hooded, strip-searched, photographed naked, exposed to extreme cold and sleep-deprived. He also alleges that while he was driven to the U.S. prison at the Bagram air base, a federal agent “pulled a photograph of Azar’s wife and four children from his wallet” and said he’d better confess to bribing a contract officer if he ever wanted to see them again.

The government denies that charge and calls Azar’s claims of torture “hyperbolic.”

At least three dozen others who were held in the CIA’s secret prisons overseas appear to be missing as well. Efforts by human rights organizations to track their whereabouts have been unsuccessful, and no foreign governments have acknowledged holding them.

The CIA isn’t commenting on Linzer’s list of the known-suspected ghost detainees, but a spokesman calls such compilations “typically flawed.”

There could be situations — and I emphasize could be, because we haven’t made a determination yet — where, let’s say that we have a well-known al-Qaeda operative, doesn’t surface very often, [and who] appears in a third country with whom we don’t have an extradition relationship or isn’t willing to prosecute. And we think [this operative] is a very dangerous person. I think we still have to think about how we deal with that scenario, in a way that comports with international law, that abides by my very clear edict that we don’t torture and that we ultimately provide anybody that we’re detaining, through habeas corpus, an opportunity to answer to charges. How all that sorts itself out is extremely complicated, because it’s not just domestic law, it’s also international law. Our relationship with various other entities. So, again, it will take this year to be able to get all these procedures in place and on the right footing.

The hypothetical scenario he’s describing isn’t extraordinary rendition, the process by which the United States would transfer a detainee extra-judicially into the custody of another country, typically as a method of claiming not to know that the detainee is tortured. It’s more like a tweaked version of the infamous case of Abu Omar, whom CIA and Italian intelligence agents abducted off the streets of Milan on suspicion of involvement with terrorism and handed to the Egyptian security service. Abu Omar told Peter Bergen last year what happened to him:

Spreading his arms in a crucifixion position, he demonstrates how he was tied to a metal door as shocks were administered to his nipples and genitals. His legs tremble as he describes how he was twice raped. He mentions, almost casually, the hearing loss in his left ear from the beatings, and how he still wakes up at night screaming, takes tranquilizers, finds it hard to concentrate, and has unspecified “problems with my wife at home.”

An Italian judge has indicted 25 CIA operatives and an Air Force colonel for their involvement in Abu Omar’s abduction. Since the U.S. refuses to extradite them, they’re being tried in absentia.

Assume for a moment that the hypothetical scenario Obama outlines is enshrined as U.S. policy tomorrow. That would mean the next Abu Omar would be snatched by the CIA from some country and eventually handed over to the custody of either another U.S. agency — as the CIA is out of the “long-term” detention business — and a process ensues whereby s/he can challenge the basis for his/her detention. The individual would have to be interrogated in accordance with the Geneva Conventions. And this would all have to comport with international law. I am unsure of what basis there is for rendition in international law and would love to be enlightened on that score.

“The press has identified extraordinary renditions, but no one has quite defined it,” he says, offering a definition. First is “where individuals are delivered to black sites and questioned there … that kind of rendition will not take place.” The second: “where individuals are turned over to a country for question … there were efforts by CIA to seek and receive assurances where prisoners wouldn’t be mistreated … There are claims that that was not the case, but I can’t assess the validities of those.” Panetta says he’ll seek the same kinds of assurances, in concert with the State Dept. to “determine that they are in fact” followed upon, and adds that the forthcoming cabinet-level review will expand on how to get more ironclad assurances. The third kind: rendition “for a legal action” which he says should continue.

But Bond gets what he wants. “I’ll retract the statement,” Panetta says, to appease the senator. Amazingly, Bond says the facts about extraordinary rendition are based on “rumors and news sources … hearsay,” fueled by “liberal blogs.” This is a really disgusting display from the senior Republican on the intelligence committee. Are Maher Arar — who was kidnapped by U.S. officials and handed over to the Syrians for torture — and the Canadian government, which launched an official inquiry into his case, a bunch of liars? How about Khalid el-Masri? Is Jane Mayer just a trafficker of rumor? Is the Council of Europe?

Bond just used his position on this committee to try to force the American people to unlearn something that they have very painfully learned. He’s the one who’s sacrificed his credibility on this issue, not Panetta — but he did succeed in getting Panetta to retract the statement.

Renditions yes, “extraordinary renditions,” no, said Panetta. Usually when “moving someone outside the country for prosecution.” Panetta clarifies that his comments that extraordinary rendition and torture occurred during the Bush administration were based on the overwhelming public record, including “[Former CIA Director] Mike Hayden’s acknowledgment” that people were waterboarded, not specific CIA confessions. “It is clear there were black sites, it is clear individuals were brought there … clearly steps were taken that prompted this president to say they will not be taken anymore.” Bond just wants to say the Clinton administration is as dirty as the Bush administration.

Were there renditions that resulted in torture, either during the Clinton or Bush administrations? “I can neither affirm nor deny … my understanding there were renditions to countries that engage in behavior from what I’ve seen in the press. … I have no official information from within that those kinds of rendition took place.” Bond says that this is different from a “blanket statement” on renditions. Happy now? “I suspect that. .. we have rendered individuals to other countries that use techniques to get information … that violate our own standards,” Panetta said, arms folded across his chest.

And — following extra lines of questioning about Saudi programs to rehabilitate incarcerated jihadists, Hamas, and institutional challenges with human intelligence — we’re out for today. Bond didn’t come out and oppose Panetta’s nomination, but he insisted on having the hearing reconvene tomorrow morning for additional questioning, probably along these lines.

Politically, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the chair of the Senate intelligence committee, looks halfway canny for scheduling this hearing so late in the day. Panetta has emerged from it with no real scratches on him — pretty amazing, considering that he stepped into this nomination to the immediate objections of Feinstein. But who knows if Bond and his colleague, Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) — who apparently has questions for Panetta as well — will have more in their arsenal tomorrow.