Ordinary rendition

Abduction is a justifiable tactic of the war on terror - just as it was in the case of Adolf Eichmann
  • The Guardian,
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Members of parliament and human rights groups are pressing the government on the issue of rendition (or what this newspaper yesterday tendentiously termed, without the quotation marks, "torture flights"). Rendition does not mean torture. It means moving someone from one country to another without reference to a formal extradition treaty.

The most prominent rendition to date was that of Ricardo Klement. He was abducted, put on trial and hanged, despite strong opposition in his adopted country to what one newspaper called such "censurable methods". I am opposed to capital punishment on principle, just as I am opposed to torture on principle. But I do not consider that any injustice was committed in the seizing and execution of the man known to history as Adolf Eichmann.

Eichmann's abduction would now be euphemised as "extraordinary rendition". Most renditions are not like that. They involve the detention of a suspect in one country and their transfer to another by the CIA. There are good reasons that the first country might wish to take this course. It might not have a legal system capable of disinterestedly dispensing justice, owing to the threat of intimidation. There might be domestic political reasons for the government to be reluctant to cooperate too closely with the United States.

These are facts of international diplomacy. In the meantime the US and its allies have the duty of protecting citizens from international terrorists. The principled objection to rendition is that it stands outside legal process, and the rule of law is the best means we have of constraining arbitrary authority by our own governments. But there is no supranational sovereign authority that can effectively implement the body of international law. After 9/11, peace campaigners urged a judicial approach to bring the perpetrators to justice. What they would have advised if Osama bin Laden had unaccountably declined to turn himself in was never put to the test. Had the CIA abducted Bin Laden from Afghanistan in the late 1990s (a course whose feasibility the agency investigated), some great crimes might have been averted.







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