US War on Terror Feature: Obama Continues Bush's "Extraordinary Renditions"

[Wehrwolfen]

US War on Terror Feature: Obama Continues Bush's "Extraordinary Renditions" (Whitlock)​

By Scott Lucas
January 3, 2013
Craig Whitlock writes for The Washington Post:

The three European men with Somali roots were arrested on a murky pretext in August as they passed through the small African country of Djibouti. But the reason soon became clear when they were visited in their jail cells by a succession of American interrogators.

U.S. agents accused the men — two of them Swedes, the other a longtime resident of Britain — of supporting al-Shabab, an Islamist militia in Somalia that Washington considers a terrorist group. Two months after their arrest, the prisoners were secretly indicted by a federal grand jury in New York, then clandestinely taken into custody by the FBI and flown to the United States to face trial.

The secret arrests and detentions came to light Dec. 21 when the suspects made a brief appearance in a Brooklyn courtroom.

The men are the latest example of how the Obama administration has embraced rendition — the practice of holding and interrogating terrorism suspects in other countries without due process — despite widespread condemnation of the tactic in the years after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Renditions are taking on renewed significance because the administration and Congress have not reached agreement on a consistent legal pathway for apprehending terrorism suspects overseas and bringing them to justice.
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[Wehrwolfen]

1. Special Forces funded: Since 9/11, funding for U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) has tripled, even as its overseas deployments quadrupled. This Pentagon unit oversees all the military services’ elite Special Forces units, including the Navy SEAL Team Six that was dispatched to Osama bin Laden’s Pakistani hideaway. Under Obama, the command continues to be well-funded even during times of economic problems and budget cutbacks. The Pentagon is seeking a 7% budget increase for SOCOM in fiscal 2012, and the command is fielding the first of its 72 new MH-60M helicopters, while upgrading other aging hardware.

2. Military tribunals: President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder were determined to end military tribunals and try terrorist detainees in criminal courts. Only when Congress rebelled and New Yorkers denounced the since-revoked decision to try 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in Lower Manhattan, did the administration back down and accept the obvious—that deadly terrorists couldn’t be allowed the full set of rights afforded in U.S. federal court. Do we really want a committed jihadist to be set free because a Navy SEAL didn’t read him his Miranda rights when pulling him out of a cave in Tora Bora?

3. Iraq not abandoned: Obama won the presidency with the help of the anti-war Left by promising a quick end to the Iraq War. He has stayed the course long enough for the country to stabilize following the Bush surge, which Obama opposed. Now, with the Middle East pushing out longtime rulers, the new leaders can choose from two models: a democratic Iraq or a demonic Iran .

4. Gitmo still open: Obama’s first act as President was signing an executive order to close the facility holding terrorist detainees at Guantanamo Bay within a year. More than two years later, he has finally concluded that there is nowhere else to house such murderous jihadists.

5. Renditions continued: Obama has continued a version of the Bush practice of renditions. No wonder. It was in a secret prison in Eastern Europe where a waterboarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed gave intelligence to the CIA helping to identify Osama bin Laden’s couriers, one of whom led U.S. Special Forces to his doorstep.

6. Afghanistan surge: Obama foolishly set a date for troop withdrawal in Afghanistan, but he partially accepted his general’s recommendation for more military personnel for the battle. Under Obama, the number of troops in Afghanistan has doubled since Bush left office. Let’s hope the Commander-in-Chief ignores his own deadline and lets the military do its job.

7. Indefinite detention: Even while Obama and Holder wrung their hands over how to bring terrorists to justice, ultimately they came to the same conclusion that Bush reached: There are some detainees who are so dangerous that they can never be released. At one point, Holder even went so far as to say that he would try hard-core Gitmo detainees in criminal courts, but if an acquittal was reached, he would still keep them imprisoned.

8. Surveillance maintained: The Left went crazy over Bush’s so-called assault on civil liberties when the Patriot Act allowed the surveillance of calls from suspected terrorists coming from overseas and permitted the FBI to obtain certain phone records without warrants. Obama’s Justice Department has given legal authority for the continuation of the policy, with the anti-war crowd voicing only muted concern.

9. Record number of drones: Obama has greatly increased the number of unmanned drones used in Afghanistan, an effective weapon against the enemy in rough terrain. One abhors the persistent civilian casualties, but it also greatly reduces U.S. troop deaths.

10. Killing terrorists: Bush said, “Bring ’em on,” when al-Qaeda flocked to Iraq, and he sent intelligence agents and Special Forces around the world to aggressively track down terrorists. American warriors have continued the long battle with continued success during the Obama administration. But because the targeting of an individual for assassination is legally murky, the shot into the head of Osama bin Laden would not have happened if the Obama-supporting American Civil Liberties Union had gotten its way.

Renditions continue under Obama, despite condemnation over lack ...
1 day ago ... But the reason soon became clear when they were visited in their ... Renditions
continue under Obama, despite condemnation over lack of due-process ...
allowed to continue using renditions, but with greater oversight, so ...
interrogation techniques, as some were during the George W. Bush
administration.

 

[waltky]

Granny says, "Dat's right - `cause dey know we onna side o' God...

CIA renditions aided by over 50 countries
February 5th, 2013 - As many as 54 countries participated in the overseas detention and rendition programs overseen by the CIA in the years following the September 11 attacks, according to a new report from a human rights watchdog group.

The report from the Open Society Justice Initiative is an extensive look at a program that has remained largely unreported in its size and scale despite official acknowledgement from former President George W. Bush and other U.S. officials. According to the report, 136 people have been subjected to the process of rendition – the transfer of a terrorism suspect by the United States to a third country for interrogation – or have been held in one of the so-called "black site" prisons in third countries run by the CIA. "The consequence of having so many partners engaged in these operations is that the United States is exposed to continuing embarrassment, liability and censure in multiple jurisdictions outside the United States," Amrit Singh, the report's author told CNN.

The findings were derived from public sources, including documents from U.S. and foreign governments, inquiries from the European Parliament and Council of Europe, findings from human rights investigations and news reports. The CIA secretly held detainees at detention facilities in Lithuania, Morocco, Poland, Romania and Thailand in addition to Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba according to the report. In addition, the report said that countries as varied as Azerbaijan, Canada, Denmark, Malawi, Kenya, Zimbabwe, Malaysia and Sri Lanka also participated through their interrogation, torture or role in capturing terror suspects. Cooperation could also include permitting the use of airspace for overflight rights of planes carrying terror suspects, the report said.

The findings also discussed reports of a secret prison in Somalia run with CIA involvement, along with a two-month secret detention of a terror suspect aboard a U.S. Navy ship. The Italian Supreme Court last year upheld convictions of 23 Americans tried in absentia for the kidnapping of a Muslim cleric from the streets of Milan. They were accused by prosecutors of whisking the cleric to Egypt for interrogation as part of a CIA team working with Italian intelligence officials on a terrorism investigation.

Separately, the European Court of Human Rights recently held that the government of Macedonia violated the rights of Khaled El-Masri, a German national who alleged the CIA abducted him from Macedonia and sent him for interrogation in Afghanistan as part of a terrorism investigation. The U.S. Supreme Court had earlier refused to hear El-Masri's case, after lower federal courts rejected his legal claims.

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[American_Jihad]

Obama preserves renditions as counter-terrorism tool​

The role of the CIA's controversial prisoner-transfer program may expand, intelligence experts say.

February 01, 2009
Greg Miller

WASHINGTON — The CIA's secret prisons are being shuttered. Harsh interrogation techniques are off-limits. And Guantanamo Bay will eventually go back to being a wind-swept naval base on the southeastern corner of Cuba.

But even while dismantling these programs, President Obama left intact an equally controversial counter-terrorism tool.

Under executive orders issued by Obama recently, the CIA still has authority to carry out what are known as renditions, secret abductions and transfers of prisoners to countries that cooperate with the United States.

Current and former U.S. intelligence officials said that the rendition program might be poised to play an expanded role going forward because it was the main remaining mechanism -- aside from Predator missile strikes -- for taking suspected terrorists off the street.

...

Obama preserves renditions as counter-terrorism tool - Los Angeles Times

But, but you don't hear anything from the left-wing ilk or the criminalcrats...