Obama's rendition shame | Clara Gutteridge »
Posted By berkeley 2 weeks, 1 day ago in Political OpinionIf the prisoners are being held by captors who routinely engage in torture, the US agents themselves will have no need to engage in coercive techniques themselves – ipso facto, the torture is simply outsourced. This new move represents the dark side of an increasingly concretised two-tier legal system: one in which those designated as "terror suspects" are not entitled to the full set of rights enshrined in the US constitution. By endorsing the use of extraordinary rendition – otherwise known as kidnap – Obama is moving back from the worst excesses of the Bush era, but in doing so he risks instituting a global legal apartheid involving an abusive detention regime for people regarded as "not quite citizens". While US prisoners have legal rights, others may be sent by the US to any rights-abusing country in the world for interrogation and detention.
If our collective experience of the past eight years is to count for anything, it should be that the rule of law must apply to everyone alike and equally, everywhere. Only then can we hope to prevent the recurrence of medieval abuse and disappearances that have disgraced the US and threaten to drag the world back into the dark ages.
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berkeley
If tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. Of all the enemies to public ...
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gamahuche2 weeks ago
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FTA
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Obama's people have also indicated that rendition – the forcible transfer of individuals to the custody of third-party states – will continue to be used by the US on terror suspects. Therefore, this new FBI unit could send people to regimes such as Morocco, Egypt and Syria and conduct interrogations on people being detained indefinitely by these old partners in the secret detention game.
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This MUST be stopped! It brings the greatest possible shame on the US.
I hope they've at least stopped using Uzbekistan where the favoured techniques included raping people with bottles and boiling them alive.
A puzzling aspect to me is why these countries are playing for the US. What "incentives" are being given to the leaders of some of the most corrupt nations on the planet? -
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almos_vagyok2 weeks ago
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And how do you know that they are terrorists until you have given them a fair trial?
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I am old enough to remember when Americans proudly declared their moral superiority
to the Soviets by claiming that they do not trample on the rights of individuals as the
Soviets do. That was a good thing, it is a petty that it is no longer the case.
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