“Thousands” Illegally Rendered By Bush Administration for Interrogation, Torture

Massachusetts School of Law Report

In violation of international and U.S. law, “thousands” of alleged terrorists have been victims of “extraordinary rendition” by the Bush Administration since 9/11, two legal scholars say. “Instead of working to bring those committing crimes against the United States to justice in U.S. courts, the Bush Administration seems intent on doing exactly the opposite---keeping such individuals away from U.S. courts, hidden in a web of secret prisons, underground interrogation cells, and in the hands of cooperative governments,” write Margaret Satterthwaite and Angela Fisher. Satterthwaite is an assistant professor of clinical law at NYU School of Law and Fisher served as assistant research scholar with the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice.

“Extraordinary renditions, whether originating in territories under U.S. control (actual or effective) or merely carried out by U.S. agents, are unlawful and in violation of international treaties to which the United States is a party,” the authors write. “Despite this clear prohibition, the Bush Administration continues to engage in this practice, using it to transfer detainees out of the reach of U.S. courts and into the realm of secret detentions and brutal interrogations.”

“Having altered the procedure from a transfer sanctioned by U.S. courts to a transfer that is extralegal, this Administration completed the transformation of extraordinary rendition from transfer to justice to transfer out of the justice system,” the authorities contend in an article titled “Tortured Logic: Renditions to Justice, Extraordinary Rendition, and Human Rights Law” published in “The Long Term View,” a journal of informed opinion published by the Massachusetts School of Law at Andover(Volume 6, No. 4).

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Since 9/11, the scholars wrote, renditions have been used not to obtain jurisdiction over the suspects in order to prosecute “but instead to get an individual to talk.” Previous renditions that required approval by an inter-agency group that included the Departments of Justice and State, were now placed in the hands of the CIA, which could render suspects “without consultation.”.........