Public Punishment

[BigV]

What about the opposite?!

The news today is filled with stories about the US government's newest dilema, what to do with the prisoners it has that it feels it cannot try or free.

Good grief!! How can someone feel worried and upset enough to capture and imprison a person, hold them without charge, bail, trial, any of the AMERICAN STANDARDS OF JUSTICE, and still be hung up on not just executing them?

Really, why keep them around? Are they some golden goose of "intelligence" that you wish to keep around? How in touch are these people after being continuously locked up for years already anyway? Wouldn't their contributions decline in quality at some point?

The ideas tossed around include building prisons in other countries and paying for the construction maintenance and operation in return for a pledge to have the prisoners held indefinitely.

This shifting around of the people and places has a name:

Extraordinary Rendition.

Great, now I have something else to worry about.

Extraordinary rendition: Try to guess, as a start, what this pretzel phrase, right out of the murky but ever better funded world of "intelligence," could possibly mean.

It's actually an extraordinary rendition of and euphemism for torture -- and not just any kind of torture either. I found the term in Christopher Pyle's Torture by Proxy, a piece in last Sunday's San Francisco Chronicle Insight section, that lays out how immigration officials seized a Syrian-born Canadian, Maher Arar, as he changed planes at New York's Kennedy International Airport, after he turned up on one of our murky watch-lists for possible terrorists. In a bleak odyssey of imprisonment, he then passed through the none-too-gentle hands of the New York City Police, the FBI, and finally ("presumably") the CIA -- or some unidentified Americans anyway -- who flew him from Washington to Jordan where he was turned over to the Syrians for interrogation as a possible terrorist. Pyle writes:

"This covert operation was legal, our Justice Department later claimed, because Arar is also a citizen of Syria by birth. The fact that he was a Canadian traveling on a Canadian passport, with a wife, two children and job in Canada, and had not lived in Syria for 16 years, was ignored. The Justice Department wanted him to be questioned by Syrian military intelligence, whose interrogation methods our government has repeatedly condemned."

He was put in a cell the size of a grave and "interrogated" -- tortured -- for ten months before being released when it became apparent that his ties to terrorism were nonexistent. And so to our term:

"Our intelligence agencies have a name for this torture-by-proxy. They call it 'extraordinary rendition.' As one intelligence official explained: 'We don't kick the s -- out of them. We send them to other countries so they can kick the s -- out of them.' This secret program for torturing suspects has been authorized, if that is the right word for it, by a secret presidential finding. Where the president gets the authority to have anyone tortured has never been explained."

All in all, not just an extraordinary rendition of torture but a verbal reflection of a new reality -- that we have created a global mini-gulag that ranges from Guantanamo to Afghanistan and whose extralegal rules include the turning of "suspects" over to "friendly" -- or even, it seems, in the case of Syria, less than friendly -- regimes ready to apply kinds of the pressure we may prefer not to apply ourselves.

cite: http://www.tomdispatch.com/indexprint.mhtml?pid=1164

[xoxoxoBruce]

Well now, that ought to keep those foreigners from clogging up our airports.