Extraordinary Rendition

Bob Herbert [NyTimes] writes about this US policy today. "Rendition" occurs when someone is esentially abducted in a foreign country and brought to the US to stand trial. US Courts overlook the circumstances of the suspect being "rendered" to the US, but due process kicks in when they fall into US custody.

Extraordinary Rendition is a new US policy, where we kidnap people in the US, and send them to, say, Syria, (yes, the country whose ambassador we just recalled because we think they assassinated a Lebannese politician), where they are tortured. This happened 2 years ago to a Canadian citizen, Mahar Arar. Landing at JFK, the US sent him off to Syria (where he was originally from), where the Syrian government tortured him. But, apparently, he's not a terrorist. Oh. They released him a year later.

So, Exrtraordinary Rendition is Bush's policy of kidnapping people off of US streets, holding them without charge and without rights, shipping them to foreign soil with governments whose torture practices are unconstrained by those principles of liberty and democracy Bush is fond of dressing up in.