Historical instances
20th century
The US has used rendition increasingly as a tool in the US-led "war on terror" to deal with foreign defendants[citation needed], ignoring the normal extradition processes in international law.[23] Modern methods of rendition include a form where suspects are taken into US custody but delivered to a third-party state, often without ever being on US soil, and without involving the rendering countries termed "extraordinary rendition".[citation needed] Hundreds of documents retrieved from Libyan foreign ministry offices in Tripoli following the 2011 Libyan civil war show that the CIA and the United Kingdom's MI6 rendered suspects to Libyan authorities knowing they would be tortured.[24]
The CIA was granted permission to use rendition (to the USA of indicted terrorists) in a presidential directive signed by US President Bill Clinton in 1995, following a procedure[25] established by US President George H. W. Bush in January 1993.[26]
Critics have accused the CIA of rendering suspects to other countries in order to avoid US laws mandating due process and prohibiting torture, even though many of those countries have, like the US, signed or ratified the United Nations Convention Against Torture.[27] Critics have also called this practice "torture flights".[28] Defenders of the practice argue that culturally-informed and native-language interrogations are more successful in gaining information from suspects.[29][30]
In a number of cases, suspects to whom the procedure is believed to have been applied later were found to be innocent.[31] In the cases of Khalid El-Masri and Maher Arar, the practice of extraordinary rendition appears to have been applied to innocent civilians, and the CIA has reportedly launched an investigation into such cases (which it refers to as "erroneous rendition").
The first well-known rendition case involved the Achille Lauro hijackers in 1985: while in international air space they were forced by United States Navy fighter planes to land at the Naval Air Station Sigonella, an Italian military base in Sicily used by the US navy and NATO, in an attempt to place them within judicial reach of United States government representatives for transport to and trial in the United States.[32]
In September 1987, during the Reagan administration, the United States executed an extraordinary rendition, codenamed Goldenrod, in a joint FBI-CIA operation. Fawaz Yunis, who was wanted in the U.S. courts for his role in the hijacking of a Jordanian airliner that had American citizens onboard, was lured onto a boat off the coast of Cyprus and taken to international waters, where he was arrested.
"The Reagan administration did not undertake this kidnapping lightly. Then-FBI Director William Webster had opposed an earlier bid to snatch Yunis, arguing that the United States should not adopt the tactics of Israel, which had abducted Adolf Eichmann on a residential street in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1960... In 1984 and 1986, during a wave of terrorist attacks, Congress passed laws making air piracy and attacks on Americans abroad federal crimes. Ronald Reagan added teeth to these laws by signing a secret covert-action directive in 1986 that authorized the CIA to kidnap, anywhere abroad, foreigners wanted for terrorism. A new word entered the dictionary of U.S. foreign relations: rendition."[33]
The American Civil Liberties Union alleges that extraordinary rendition was developed during the Clinton administration by CIA officials in the mid-1990s who were trying to track down and dismantle militant Islamic organizations in the Middle East, particularly Al Qaeda.[9]
According to Clinton administration official Richard Clarke:
“
'extraordinary renditions', were operations to apprehend terrorists abroad, usually without the knowledge of and almost always without public acknowledgment of the host government.... The first time I proposed a snatch, in 1993, the White House Counsel, Lloyd Cutler, demanded a meeting with the President to explain how it violated international law. Clinton had seemed to be siding with Cutler until Al Gore belatedly joined the meeting, having just flown overnight from South Africa. Clinton recapped the arguments on both sides for Gore: "Lloyd says this. Dick says that. Gore laughed and said, 'That's a no-brainer. Of course it's a violation of international law, that's why it's a covert action. The guy is a terrorist. Go grab his ass.'"[34]
”
Both the Reagan and Clinton cases involved apprehending known terrorists abroad, by covert means if necessary. The policy later expanded.
more info:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_rendition_by_the_United_States
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