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Rendition at RiskThe Bush administration's excesses have endangered a valuable tool.

By Daniel Benjamin
Updated Friday, Feb. 2, 2007, at 6:36 PM ET

Oscar Wilde's maxim that "Every man kills the thing he loves," has a corollary in the war on terror: The U.S. government seems bent on destroying the friendships and tools we need to protect ourselves. The most obvious case is the alienation of millions of the world's Muslims through the invasion of Iraq. But there are other examples, such as the way we have put at risk key relationships with allies through misguided intelligence operations and endangered one of our most valuable tools, the practice of rendition.

The point was made again this week when a magistrate in Munich issued arrest warrants for 13 CIA officers in connection with the case of Khaled el-Masri, a German citizen of Lebanese descent, who was abducted in Macedonia in 2004. The German authorities' move follows the lead of an Italian magistrate who is seeking indictments of 25 CIA operatives for the rendition from Milan of an Egyptian radical known as Abu Omar. Then there is Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen who was boosted while changing planes at Kennedy Airport and eventually sent to Syria, who tortured him before deciding he was not a terrorist.

As a recent BBC poll pointed out, most countries polled now view the United States as having a negative influence on world events. The rendition-related blunders are undoubtedly greasing that downward slide. They are also raising the specter of a disruption of the network of intelligence and law enforcement agencies currently cooperating on counterterrorism, as angry publics demand that their governments restrict cooperation with the United States. Especially in Europe, this fills senior officials with dread, because they know that the cooperation is the unsung success of the war on terror.

There has been a great deal of sloppy reporting on renditions, so it is worth setting straight what they are. The defining characteristic of a rendition is that it involves the movement of a suspect from one country to another outside of the formal and often legally complex process of extradition. (Today, these cases overwhelmingly involve terrorists, though in the past there have been other kinds, including some involving drug kingpins and their minions.)

There are two broad categories of rendition: those that are "extraordinary" and those that aren't. What distinguishes one from the other is the role of the government of the country in which the rendition takes place. If the "host government" is not complicit in the rendition—that is, if the individual is essentially being abducted and spirited out of the country without cooperation—the rendition is extraordinary. In the press, renditions are almost always called extraordinary, but, at least before 9/11, extraordinary renditions were extraordinarily rare. (I am aware of only one, and that was in a drug case.) Had we managed to kidnap Osama Bin Laden and smuggle him out of Taliban-ruled Afghanistan in the late 1990s against the wishes of Mullah Omar and his men, it would have been an extraordinary rendition.

There appears to be no public information on the number of extraordinary renditions carried out during the Bush administration, but because the overwhelming majority of the intelligence services in the world are cooperating closely with the United States on counterterrorism, the relative frequency of extraordinary renditions is probably still very low. They are also incredibly hard to do.

Of the not-extraordinary renditions, there are also two types: The first brings a suspect from abroad into U.S. custody without going through a formal extradition. If someone is brought to the United States to stand trial for a crime for which U.S. courts have jurisdiction, that's a good thing—it's how we got Ramzi Yousef back from Pakistan after he bombed the World Trade Center in 1993 and then plotted to blow up a dozen U.S. passenger jets over the Pacific. The Pakistani authorities decided that Yousef was too hot to hold, because there would be a public outcry if he were incarcerated and held for extradition. So, after the joint operation to arrest him in an Islamabad guest house, they were only too happy to have the United States bundle him onto a plane bound for New York. In 2003, the Pakistanis did the same thing with Ramzi's uncle, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the architect of the 9/11 attacks. One can disagree with the administration's decision to shuttle KSM from one secret overseas detention center, or "black site," to another while trying to extract more information from him, rather than bring him to trial. But that is a different question than whether grabbing him abroad is an acceptable practice. U.S. courts have ruled that such renditions are legal, whether they are done with the approval of the "host government" or not.

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Daniel Benjamin is director of the Center on the U.S. and Europe at the Brookings Institution. He served on the National Security Council staff 1994-1999 and is co-author of The Next Attack: The Failure of the War on Terror and a Strategy for Getting it Right.
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