by Jeremy Leaming
Federal courts have avoided legal challenges against President George W. Bush’s construction of counterterrorism policies that included extraordinary rendition where terrorism suspects were secretly shipped to countries well-known for employing torture. The Bush and Obama administrations urged the federal courts to dismiss legal challenges to extraordinary rendition and secret detention sites arguing that they would expose “state secrets.”
But an exhaustive report from the Open Society Foundations’ Justice Initiative reveals the policies marketed as a way to protect Americans from terrorism, trampled human rights and produced fatally flawed information. Rendition, in particular, “stripped people of their most basic rights, facilitated gruesome forms of torture, at time captured the wrong people, and debased the United States’ human rights reputation world-wide,” write OSF’s Jonathan Horowitz and Stacy Cammarano about the report.
The federal government has refused to acknowledge participation in rendition and according to Horowitz and Cammarano more than 50 other governments were also involved though have refused to admit it. The initiative’s report details the brutality and senselessness of secret prisons and rendition.
In "Globalizing Torture: CIA Secret Detention and Extraordinary Rendition," Amrit Singh, a senior legal officer of OSF’s Justice Initiative, states that “more than a decade after September 11, there is no doubt that high-ranking administration officials bear responsibility for authorizing human rights violations associated with secret detention and extraordinary rendition, and the impunity that they have enjoyed to date remains a matter of significant concern.”
But because the government has used the so-called state-secrets privilege to scuttle lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of its counterterrorism work, it has until now been difficult to discern the scope of rendition, its number of victims and other government involvement.
In the report’s executive summary, it is noted that “based on credible public sources and information provided by reputable human rights organizations, this report is the most comprehensive catalogue of the treatment of 136 individuals reportedly subjected to these operations. There may be many more such individuals, but the total number will remain unknown until the United States and its partners make the information publicly available.”
r the Ninth Circuit dismissed a lawsuit lodged in 2007 on behalf of five men kidnapped by the CIA and sent to other countries for imprisonment and interrogation. The ACLU represented the men and argued that they had been tortured during their imprisonment. The Bush and Obama administrations argued that the lawsuit should be dismissed because it could uncover so-called "state secrets," undermining national security. The Ninth Circuit sided with the government, maintaining that it represented a "rare case" in which the government's claims to protect national security were stronger than considering whether human rights were violated.
Maher Arar is 
The plaintiffs allege that they were kidnapped and transported to CIA black sites -- a practice known as "extraordinary rendition." At the black sites, the plaintiffs assert that they were tortured in the Bush administration's pursuit of the "War on Terror." They filed suit against a Bay Area subsidiary of Boeing for helping arrange the flights on which they were transported. The Justice Department promptly intervened on behalf of the company.
You are introduced and assigned to military defense counsels who wear the same uniform as the prosecutors. Men, some of whom may be totally innocent, awake every day to this indefinite detention. This is the reality of the Military Commissions system for detainees at Guantanamo Bay.