The extraordinary cruelty of "extraordinary rendition".

"For sometime now I have thought it possible to believe that America was going insane. In her own way."

--Martin Amis, London Fields 

RENDITION COMES FROM the verb render which means to deliver, hand over, provide. The word describes a process or action that can be pleasant or unpleasant depending on what is being delivered. A pizza or loan car can be "rendered." So can justice--or injustice.

Rendition, as defined and implemented by the administration of George W. Bush, is a use of language sugarcoating an action that is savagely unjust and terrifying. The adjective extraordinary in the phrase extraordinary rendition contains a certain accuracy, though. For what Bush's secretive and menacing agents are doing to terrorist "suspects" like Maher Arar certainly is extraordinary--extraordinarily illegal, terrifying, and savagely unjust. These "suspects," picked up off streets, at airports, in their homes, don't know what their alleged or possible offense is, exactly who is arresting--or kidnapping--them, and, worst, where they are being taken; nor do their families and friends know. Thus they are being deprived of the basic legal and human rights supported by all advanced nations, including the United States. These are rights affirmed by the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which, among other things, is designed to universally prevent invasive and illegal actions such as improper detention, abuse, and torture.

Who can blame Arar for weeping when, after being forced onto the white Gulf Stream jet used mainly for transporting rendered suspects, he overheard that he was being flown to Syria. He knew--as we all should and as Bush and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld certainly do--that Syria is synonymous with torture: continual beatings with thick electrical cables; blows on the soles of the feet; hours-long suspension from a post by one's wrists with arms pulled behind one's back; near drownings; electrical shocks to the ears and genitals; threats of dog attack; and, perhaps worst of all, weeks, even many months, in solitary confinement in dark, underground cellars or vaults, never knowing how long one would be restrained there, when the next round of torture would begin, what it would include, and whether the torment would thrust one over the edge into insanity or even death. And at the center of all this would be the searing questions: "Why is this happening? What have I done? Will somebody or some authority get me out of here?"

Arar was relatively fortunate, being released in a year's time without charges. That's right, without charges. In other words, he was innocent yet had been treated illegally and with incredible brutality for many months--and not only by the Syrian but by the U.S. government. What he was "guilty" of was knowing a suspected terrorist. When picked up by U.S. officials he was questioned in the United States for thirteen days. Even after that length and intensity of questioning, U.S. authorities weren't satisfied about his innocence. So they decided to send him to Syria, being either ignorant or crass enough to think that torture wrings the truth from the guilty when, in actuality, it usually makes even the innocent confess to anything tormentors want to hear.

U.S. officials claim they send terrorist "suspects" to countries like Syria, Morocco, and Egypt (especially the latter) with the understanding that torture won't be used. But if that's the case, why do they even bother to send them there? The grimy truth comes from an American intelligence agent quoted in the December 26, 2002, Washington Post: "We don't kick the shit out of them [terrorist suspects]. We send them to other countries so they can kick the shit out of them." Another St. Petersburg Times columnist reported that the Washington Post talked with a number of officials who "essentially admitted that, despite assurances, suspects are sent to places [where the officials know] they'll be treated harshly." And one FBI agent states in Jane Mayer's powerful February 14, 2005, New Yorker essay "Outsourcing Torture: The Secret History of America's 'Extraordinary Rendition" Program" (to which this essay is indebted) that the CIA, rather than regretting the extreme abuse administered by Egypt and other nations, "liked rendition from the start. They loved that these guys would just disappear off the books."

It seems fairly clear then that the CIA, the Pentagon, and U.S. Special Forces not only know that these suspects are going to be tortured but fully approve. Indeed, they would likely torture these suspects themselves here in the United States if they could get away with it. From information now emerging in such media as the radio and television program Democracy Now!, it appears that the CIA and Special Forces are abusing and torturing suspects abroad, doing so in secret cells around the world, such as in former Soviet prisons in Eastern Europe and central Asia. Rumsfeld has even allowed suspects "of interest" to be kept off lists of detainees ordinarily accessible to investigative organizations like the International Red Cross. This means these suspects are totally removed from the illumined world of legal propriety, control, and justice. As a result, they are completely at the mercy of institutional jailers: sadists and tormentors dedicated to the Bush administration's flat that it can do anything it wants to other people and nations--an attitude usually associated with dictators, tyrants, and serial killers.

Indeed, one of the crucial evils the Bush administration's attitude leads to is just such activities as rendition--not to mention places of abuse like Abu Ghraib in and beyond Iraq. As a consequence, many innocent people are being seized as terrorist suspects and horribly savaged. Arar's ordeal of ten months, for example, occurred in a cell that was three feet wide and seven feet high, had no light, and was located underground--conditions that surely would have driven most people into serious psychological disturbance.

Often these individuals are released, after months or years of abuse and torture, without a charge. Moreover, they aren't offered even an apology, let alone compensation for extreme damages. Sometimes they are just dumped on a rural road in a country adjacent to their own. None have had legal protection, due process, habeas corpus, or communication with their family and friends during their detention, despite the fact that extraordinary rendition is a clear violation of the United Nations Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Degrading, and Inhuman Treatment--an international pact to which the United States is formally committed.

Prominent Americans like Alan Dershowitz (not to mention Alberto Gonzalez) have attempted to make a case for torture. They claim it can be justified by certain exigent circumstances, particularly a looming terrorist attack that might be averted through intelligence "extracted" in the nick of time from a high-profile terrorist suspect. What, it has been asked, if Mohamed Atta had been caught before he had succeeded in his 9/11 attack? Would it have been all right for him to have been rendered?

The equally appropriate question, however, isn't only whether crisis-averting torture would have been morally acceptable but also whether it would have been effective as intelligence. The crucial case of Ibn al-Shahh al-Libi suggests the opposite. Rendered by the CIA to Egypt (where he experienced beatings with thick metal rods, electrocution of his genitals, and other torture), Libi supplied bad information about the use of chemical weapons in Iraq. This coerced disinformation, conveyed to the United States by the helpful Egyptians, was used by Secretary of State Colin Powell to justify the invasion of Iraq. How likely is it that either the U.S. Special Forces in, say, Jordan, Uzbekistan, Indonesia, or at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan or the Egyptians or Syrians would have squeezed, punched, kicked, or near-drowned the truth out of an Islamic extremist like Atta? It seems probable that Atta would have told his tormentors anything they wanted to hear as long as it didn't reveal the real 9/11 plans.

However willing the United States government is to, as Vice President Cheney eloquently puts it, "work through, sort of, the dark side" one can only go so far toward securing truth through brutalizing and dehumanizing captive individuals, especially fanatics. And, as should be obvious, innocent suspects will likely be deeply embittered by torture, if not pushed into an extreme of revenge, especially toward the United States. Furthermore, according to Mayer and unembedded reporters like British journalist Robert Fisk, a very high percentage of terrorist suspects have turned out to be innocent. Considering, too, that many others who indeed might be engaged Islamic foes of the West really are said to know so little about terrorist threats as to be persons of virtually no "interest" the American intelligence community and its White House commander-in-chief could be doing the United States serious harm throughout the world by their contemptuous violation and dismissal of the basic legal and human rights all people deserve.

One of the major justifications of rendition to which the Bush administration resorts is that terrorists recognize no difference between civilian and military targets. Thus, it argues, new rules of engagement are essential. Every time he wants to implement some new repression of U.S. citizens (such as renewing the Patriot Act and enlarging its provisions) or arbitrarily dismiss international consensus or treaties, Bush talks about protecting the American people. Yet, though it's certainly true that Islamic extremists deliberately make no distinction between civilian and military targets, it's savagely ironic and dishonest for the U.S. government to trumpet that fact to justify rendition, especially in view of its own far more extensive destruction--directly, deliberately, and by proxy--of civilian populations from the Vietnam War on. Though it's hard to be sure how many of the 100,000 Iraqi dead killed by the U.S. military (and the insurgents) were terrorists, insurgents, or freedom fighters (whatever you wish to call them), most probably the large majority were merely citizens--like the Vietnam villagers of a past era--caught in the middle. And when, in Iraq, America's illegal and horrendous fuel-explosive and daisy cutter bombs were dropped from U.S. warplanes and when depleted uranium shells were fired from Apache helicopters, no distinction was made by that ammunition between innocent civilians and combatants, though certainly far more of the former than of the latter group were killed.

A consequence of this cruelly indiscriminant practice of annihilating innocent Iraqis (and, earlier, Afghani citizens), and of the rationale the White House pursues depriving what they deem terrorist suspects of their basic civil rights, could be a dangerous vulnerability for U.S. citizens. For, in consequence, rendition could more and more become the fate of Americans abroad if the United States continues to flout both international principles of justice--to which it has formally agreed--and its own tradition of democratic ideals. Powerful empires in the past have overreached themselves and, as Linda Colley's 2003 book Captives: Britain, Empire and the World, 1600-1850 vividly illustrates, put their own citizens at risk of foreign captivity and often serious jeopardy through imperialist expansion.

In her book Secret Trials and Executions: Military Tribunals and the Threat to Democracy, Barbara Olshansky of the New York Center for Constitutional Rights makes a critical point about Bush's November 13, 2001, military order, "Detention, Treatment, and Trial of Certain Non-Citizens in the War Against Terrorism" which set up military tribunals to try non-citizen terrorist suspects. She argues that it "would be creating a system of secret proceedings in which the charges, the evidence, the verdicts and the punishments would never have to be revealed to the public." She adds that "we will have advertised and exported to the world a model that gives license to the most repressive regimes to implement actions that will violate the human and civil rights of their citizens" An Associated Press release in July 2003 mentioned by Mayer in "Outsourcing Torture" indicates that U.S. authorities at the Guantanamo Naval Base were constructing not only trial facilities but an execution chamber, despite the fact that a very large percentage of the prisoners at the base are now generally regarded as innocent.

The U.S. concentration camp at Guantanamo that Olshansky describes has a certain official aura about it because the public knows that detainees are put there even if no official information has been released regarding reports by investigators of serious abuses at the base. Wretched as the conditions at Guantanamo are for detainees, those for victims of extraordinary rendition are far worse, if only in being even more secretive. Physically overwhelmed and drugged by their hooded captors, sedated by a suppository forced up their rectum, handcuffed, mouth duct-taped, their clothes cut off their bodies with scissors, these rendered "detainees" are hustled with violent and covert dispatch to the extreme punishment of torture in a foreign country without even having been found or proven guilty.

Rendition is based on a particularly pernicious form of secrecy. As the American ethicist Sissela Bok observes in her 2003 book, Secrecy: On the Ethics of Concealment and Revelation:

      While all secrecy can thwart reasoning, invite
   abuse and spread, military secrecy therefore
   carries special risks. The need for the security
   it offers seems so self-evident, and the
   forces that deflect criticism and efforts to limit
   it are so strong, that what it conceals and the
   methods used to ensure it are often taken for
   granted; yet the combination of these methods
   with the power that military secrecy now
   shields can transform individuals and institutions
   in ways that threaten society more than
   all other forms of secrecy.

What is most alarming is that this radical threat emanates ultimately from our civilian heads of state. Thus, in the process of rendering--and rending--mostly innocent individuals, the Bush administration is also tearing apart America's tradition of legal democracy. And the day might not be far off when American citizens are jarred by a loud knock on their door or picked up off the street by masked government agents and whisked away to some unidentified location. A paranoid concern? Fascism and authoritarianism can develop in practically any society over a period of years, even months, given misinformation provided by governments and the pervasive media, the apathy of modern mass society, the enlarging habit by some sectors of government to characterize dissent as disloyalty if not treason, and the intensifying concentration of power in increasingly unregulated American political, business, and military institutions.

It is also alarming that average Americans don't appear to respond much to the profound moral darkness of extraordinary rendition; they aren't involved, too busy these days trying to make ends meet in the country's melting-down economy, or obsessed by sports or sensational celebrity trials. Muslims and people from the Middle East are considered by many Americans to be too foreign, too dissimilar to American standards of acceptable ethnicity, to be identified or empathized with.

Americans need to wake up and understand that saying "this is America!." doesn't necessarily mean that freedom and respect for the individual are of the utmost importance. Indeed, it was in the United States that blacks, Hispanics, Asians, and even whites were lynched, Native Americans swindled and massacred by the government, Japanese-Americans detained in concentration camps, workers in mines and mills treated not sufficiently better than Russian workers under Joseph Stalin or Chinese workers under Mao Zedong. How many dissident American citizens were threatened or jailed during the nation's numerous wars or savagely beaten by patriotic mobs during World War I?

Societies harbor varying degrees of flexibility, resourcefulness, and regenerative freedom as well as subtle and brutal repressiveness and abuse of concentrated institutional power. Extraordinary rendition is a serious symptom of a society that is autocratic and malignant at the top. Those Americans who think this governmental evil concerns only despised foreigners--"suspects"--are at best naive and more vulnerable than they realize. Their own freedom and liberty could be rendered and rended.

Donald Gutierrez is professor emeritus in the English department at Western New Mexico University.