Panetta Hearing: No More Extraordinary Rendition
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) asks, what about extraordinary rendition? Will the CIA under Leon Panetta continue to seize terrorism suspects and outsource
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) asks, what about extraordinary rendition? Will the CIA under Leon Panetta continue to seize terrorism suspects and outsource interrogations to foreign governments known to utilize torture?
“No, we will not,” he says, citing President Obama’s recent executive order forbidding the practice. But what about so-called regular rendition, whereby CIA snatches someone and gives them over to a law enforcement agency?
Bond asks about renditions during the Clinton administration and asked about Panetta’s role, if any, when he was Clinton’s chief of staff. “You have to define the kind of renditions we’re talking about,” he replies. “Renditions have been a tool used by this government over the years … to countries with jurisdiction: Carlos the Jackal was taken and returned to France in a rendition … for purposes of trial. I think those kind of renditions are an appropriate tool.” But, he says, if “we capture a high-level prisoner, I believe we have the right to hold that prisoner temporarily… and frankly I think that’s provided for under the executive order.”
That skirts the definitional issue about how long is long-term, when talking about future CIA detentions? Bond asks: where do you hold a high-value target when you capture them if not a secret prison? “It’s fair to say that if we captured Osama bin Laden we would find a place to hold him temporarily … We would debrief him and then we would incarcerate him in a military prison.”
Panetta pledges that the Army Field Manual on interrogations — compliant with the Geneva Conventions — would be in force with such an interrogation, and even detainees in temporary CIA custody would have access to the International Committee on the Red Cross, which is pretty surprising and, frankly, difficult to live up to in practice.
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