Condi's World Tour Hits a Snag

Posted on December 6, 2005

The Financial Times reports on Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's world tour, which has been anything but pleasant for her. The world press continues to fire questions at her about the revelation that the United States has secret prisons all over the world and that suspects are being sent to other countries secretly for questioning and/or torture. The polite word the U.S. uses is "rendering." Everyone else calls it "kidnapping." Condi doesn't seem to be able to quell the growing discontent over the revelations.

In her response to allegations about the Central Intelligence Agency�s activities in Europe, the US secretary of state failed to get to grips with European perceptions that President George W. Bush's America is a wild, brutal place that contrasts with the peaceful, law-abiding EU.
Ms Rice's statement this week included three big legal arguments, all of which fell far short of bringing the debate to a close. She spent most of her time justifying the US use of "rendition" - transporting suspects from third countries without the say-so of a judge - in what US officials say is the first official acknowledgement of the practice since September 11.
"There have long been many� cases where for some reason the local government cannot detain or prosecute a suspect and traditional extradition is not a good option," she said. "In those cases the local government can make the sovereign choice to cooperate in a rendition. Such renditions are permissible under international law and are consistent with the responsibilities of those governments to protect their citizens." She added that the US and other countries had used renditions for decades, and that the French government's abduction of the terrorist Carlos the Jackal in the 1990s was judged as legal by the European Commission of Human Rights.
But the problem is that to say that some renditions have been held to be legal is not the same as proving that all such abductions are legal. As extra-judicial measures, renditions are legally controversial by definition. In addition, one principal feature of Carlos the Jackal's case was that he was put on trial - unlike many of the US's detainees.

One former CIA official noted on CNN today that "rendering" a suspect to some other country for questioning is a useless tactic. Once a prisoner is out of the U.S., he said we have lost control over the interrogation and that it is unlikely that some former Eastern bloc country is going to turn over reliable intelligence to us, assuming they learn anything at all.

There is the PR aspect of all of this: with the gross mismanagement of the war in Iraq, the last thing we need is more bad PR abroad. It is no secret that the intelligence agencies of most countries use some unorthodox methods to fight terrorism -- and always have. But this latest fiasco exposes even more of the Bush administration's flawed plans for fighting terrorism. If we're learning so much from prisoners at these secret prisons, then why is Iraq such a disaster? Why is Afghanistan slowly being infiltrated again by the Taliban, while heroin production finances interests inimical to the United States?

There is also that little issue of human rights. That concept seems to have been jettisoned, right along with the so-called "Patriot Act."