Rendition, not Extradition

The healthy man does not torture others --
generally it is the tortured who turn into torturers
--Carl Jung

And we're doing all the things that we should
Doesn't everybody here believe in the things we do?
--Perfect World, Talking Heads
___________

A rhetorical error and a seeming point of minutiae, but an error of the sort which makes all the difference in terms of current misunderstanding of actions undertaken in the Phony War on Terror.

In its review this week of the movie "Rendition," The Week magazine, a fine little gloss on the news from various arenas, states: "Anwar El-Ibrahimi (Omar Metwally), suspected of terrorism, is extradited to an anonymous country. There he’s tortured for information. . ."

However, the character of El-Ibrahimi is not extradited. He was kidnapped, and never arrested. "Snatched" and rendered, as the New York Times movie reviews describes it. But not extradited. Extradition necessitates a prior arrest, and no such legal niceties were involved in the snatch-and-rendition. It was not a foreign government that kidnaps him; it is the CIA.

Is it that the rendition program is so onerous that we cannot bring ourselves to use the right words to describe its degenerate nature, or are writers that uninformed that they do not know the difference between extradition and rendition? Is it their intention to give the administration a free pass, or has the administration simply successfully overlapped the two concepts?

The practice of rendition fits the legal definition of kidnapping, with the exception that the ransom is ostensibly transmuted into the attempted extortion of information. It is possible to view rendition as hostage-taking, an action which is outlawed by the Geneva Convention.

The sad part about the program is that we do not have the moral integrity to carry out the renditions ourselves. Like everything else these days, we outsource it, to those more familiar with the terrain of "enhanced interrogation" methods.