New Twist In Terror Justice

[struggle4progress]

"Extraordinary rendition" .. is a controversial legal concept that is moving quickly to the front-burner of the legal and political world... (The) intensifying debate over the constitutional propriety of extraordinary rendition already looms as the most important battle of the year in the legal war on terrorism.

Thanks .. to the .. work of .. Jane Mayer in .. The New Yorker magazine, .. people .. are paying closer attention to the .. policy wherein .. suspects are transferred .. into the control of foreign governments, so that interrogation methods that are not permitted under U.S. law may be applied ... In other words, when our government decides that a particular suspect may have information that is of particular use, .. it farms the suspect out to governments that permit .. torture. And .. it does this despite a 1998 law that seems to prohibit the practice ...

Earlier this month, the New York Times reported that the Senate intelligence committee now is considering a bipartisan investigation to determine "whether there was a sufficient legal foundation for the coercive interrogation methods, secret detention and extrajudicial handing over of detainees to other countries that the CIA has practiced." The effort, the Times reported, stems in part from the fallout of the now infamous government memorandum in August 2002 – a/k/a the "Gonzales Memo," named after the new attorney general – that narrowly "defined torture as acts that induced pain tantamount to organ failure." Now that the Bush administration has backed off that ill-advised memo and the odious practice it endorsed, the legislative branch of government wants to make sure that operatives in the field truly are backing off its directives.

Then, just a few days ago, the Times reported more movement on this story. Now, apparently, the CIA itself is "seeking to scale back its role as interrogator and custodian of terrorist leaders who are being held without charges in secret sites around the world." In part, the Times' article reports, the CIA's change of tack is motivated by increasingly shaky legal support for the detentions, especially in the wake of the two terror-case rulings last June by the United States Supreme Court which recognized certain due process rights for detainees. Those landmark rulings – in which the justices famously told the president that "a state of war is not a blank check" – have spawned several lower court rulings that slowly but surely are stemming executive branch control over terror suspects ...

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/02/18/opinion/courtwatch/main674973.shtml