Obama’s First Rendition Looks Very Questionable
If his first publicly known rendition case is any indication, there may well be a legitimate question as to whether Obama’s rendition program is even more repulsive than that of George Bush. More evidence will be required for an informed answer, but Obama is off to a very inauspicious beginning. From Scott Horton in an exclusive for Huffington Post:
[I]n a federal court in suburban Washington, a case is unfolding that gives us a practical sense of what an Obama-era rendition looks like.
Raymond Azar, a 45-year-old Lebanese construction manager with a grade school education, is employed by Sima International, a Lebanon-based contractor that does work for the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan. He also has the unlikely distinction of being the first target of a rendition carried out on the Obama watch.
According to court papers, on April 7, 2009, Azar and a Lebanese-American colleague, Dinorah Cobos, were seized by "at least eight" heavily armed FBI agents in Kabul, Afghanistan, where they had traveled for a meeting to discuss the status of one of his company’s U.S. government contracts. The trip ended with Azar alighting in manacles from a Gulfstream V executive jet in Manassas, Virginia, where he was formally arrested and charged in a federal antitrust probe.
This rendition involved no black sites and was clearly driven by a desire to get the target quickly before a court. Also unlike renditions of the Bush-era, the target wasn’t even a terror suspect; rather, he was suspected of fraud. But in a troubling intimation of the last administration, accusations of torture hover menacingly over the case. According to papers filed by his lawyers, Azar was threatened, subjected to coercive interrogation techniques and induced to sign a confession. Azar claims he was hooded, stripped naked (while being photographed) and subjected to a "body cavity search."
I would say that the evidence of torture is an allegation at this point; but the optics of forced rendition for simple contracting fraud are disturbing. No terrorism, no deaths, and it does not even appear that Azar is a principal in the company, Sima International.
But in all three previous administrations, renditions have been considered a rare technique reserved for dangerous terrorists and violent drug kingpins. Azar is at worst a secondary figure in a small-time contract fraud case and is not accused in any way of terrorism. Why such aggressive and dramatic techniques were used in connection with the apprehension of a man suspected of a small-scale white collar crime remains entirely unclear.
Afghanistan is a sovereign country that, by all accounts, Azar was in legally and properly. The Afghan government further appears to have no knowledge of nor participation in, at least that it will admit, the forced removal of Azar at gunpoint by US agents. There are international extradition norms and, although there will certainly be a lot of facts being added to the picture as the case goes forward, the US actions do not seem to comport with them. While the government under Barack Obama seems to remain up to its old (and some new) egregious tricks, the one check and balance left in this country, the Federal Judiciary, seems to be on the ball already:
Azar’s allegations will now go before United States District Court Judge Gerald Bruce Lee, who must test Azar’s claims to have been tortured and act on his motion to dismiss the charges and suppress his confession. Motions of this sort are generally reckoned a long shot, as most judges prefer to have everything fully developed at trial. But at a 90-minute hearing held on July 17, Judge Lee indicated his discomfort with the prosecutors’ conduct, and specifically with their failure to supply the defendants with background information about the capture and interrogation of Azar and Cobos in Afghanistan. He asked three government prosecutors who were present if they were familiar with the Stevens case before Federal Judge Emmet G. Sullivan, in which a special prosecutor has been appointed to investigate potential criminal misconduct by the prosecutors. He insisted that the prosecutors immediately turn over to the defendants their records, including interview notes and any exculpatory materials.
Judge G. Bruce Lee. Sounds like a guy not to be messed with. Good.
Amazing isn’t it that the US government can snatch Azar at gunpoint, bag him, tag him and fly him to Virginia for minor contracting fraud by his employer, yet they cannot seem to do so much as stop giving bonuses to KBR who kills American soldiers through their reckless disregard. Nor have they bagged and sensory deprived anybody from DynCorp, who has engaged in major fraud on defense contracts in Afghanistan and Iraq. Go figure.
This is incomprehensible. Who ordered this? And why did they resort to rendition instead of plain old arrest and trial?
Bob in HI
KBR sub contractor maybe they should be treated like the Mob?
makes ya wonder ?? will we ever climb back up the rabbit hole ..alice ??
And what is Mueller thinking? I thought that Mueller had become very canny about these abuses early on, and was protecting the FBI from this sort of nonsense.
A Window Into C.I.A’s Embrace of Secret Jails (Kyle “Dusty” Foggo’s role emerges)
Source: New York Times
WASHINGTON — In March 2003, two C.I.A. officials surprised Kyle D. Foggo, then the chief of the agency’s main European supply base, with an unusual request. They wanted his help building secret prisons to hold some of the world’s most threatening terrorists.
Mr. Foggo, nicknamed Dusty, was known inside the agency as a cigar-waving, bourbon-drinking operator, someone who could get a cargo plane flying anywhere in the world or quickly obtain weapons, food, money — whatever the C.I.A. needed. His unit in Frankfurt, Germany, was strained by the spy agency’s operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, but Mr. Foggo agreed to the assignment.
“It was too sensitive to be handled by headquarters,” he said in an interview. “I was proud to help my nation.”
With that, Mr. Foggo went on to oversee construction of three detention centers, each built to house about a half-dozen detainees, according to former intelligence officials and others briefed on the matter. One jail was a renovated building on a busy street in Bucharest, Romania, the officials disclosed. Another was a steel-beam structure at a remote site in Morocco that was apparently never used. The third, another remodeling project, was outside another former Eastern bloc city. They were designed to appear identical, so prisoners would be disoriented and not know where they were if they were shuttled back and forth. They were kept in isolated cells.
The existence of the network of prisons to detain and interrogate senior operatives of Al Qaeda has long been known, but details about them have been a closely guarded secret. In recent interviews, though, several former intelligence officials have provided a fuller account of how they were built, where they were located and life inside them.
Mr. Foggo acknowledged a role, which has never been previously reported. He pleaded guilty last year to a fraud charge involving a contractor that equipped the C.I.A. jails and provided other supplies to the agency, and he is now serving a three-year sentence in a Kentucky prison.
Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08…..?_r…
To those inclined to Grand Unified Conspiracy Theories, note that Carole Lam was one of the fired USA’s. Her office was the one that was investigating Foggo. I’ve always thought her firing was more egregious than Iglesias’.
Wasn’t Carol Lam the USA who was investigating (among other things) that dirtbag, Jerry Lewis? (CA 41st congressional district.)
Debra Yang.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05…..ref=slogin
Who got the nifty job offer to walk away from the investigation & get a 7 figure signing bonus – coincidentally all from the same firm that was representing Lewis. Not to worry about shenanigans, though, after all, Ted Olsen was involved in her hire. Oh, and of course there was no effort by the USAs office there to ditch the Lewis investigation -nope nope nope, far from it, they did, after all, eventually get around to bringing in someone else to head it up. Michael Emmick.
http://www.harpers.org/archive…..c-90001133
Of course, after delaying before getting Emmick on board, once he was on and digging into things – they refused to renew his contract and ditched him.
I’ve always thought the Lam and Yang cases were more interesting and egregious than any of the others and IMO, Lam must be a helluva lawyer to have pulled off what she did with Cunningham and getting things to where she got them on Foggo. Amazing what she pulled off when you think about it.
good god. this is a completely unamerican thing to do.
or is “unamerican” an old-fashioned term in the transformative era of president obama.
what could possibly have motivated the doj-fbi to undertake such a move?
fraud?
how about fraud in iraq?
the fbi could have saved the gov’t air fare to afghanistan;
they could simply have traveled to chicago to chat with former iraqi electricity minister Aiham al-Sammarae, residing once again in his adopted city?
No, this has become the American thing to do. This case tests whether the government can get away with forcing rendition on pretty much anyone they good-goddamn want to. Maybe this judge won’t let them get away with it. But let me note a side piece of irony:
The special prosecutor in the Stevens case is Henry F. Schuelke, III. And guess who Scott Shane reported in today’s New York Times is the newly hired criminal attorney representing James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, of recent torture fame? Why it’s the same Henry F. Schuelke, III! (If memory serves me right, he was also defense attorney for one of the Enron defendants.)
Hey, great catch Jeff. I will say this, I don’t know much about Schuelke, but my cursory look, back when Emmet Sullivan first appointed him, looked good I thought (and I am usually cranky on these things you know). His background seems solid. Note that in the Stevens case, he was appointed by the court, on its own volition, not by the DOJ; so there is no apparent conflict.
I’m not suggesting any conflict, just noting the coincidence. Also, I assume he was chosen because he’s a damn good criminal attorney, which is what Mitchell and Jessen need (whatever our wishes for them may be). And they may need it more as a potential prosecutorial was in a sense leaked by Scott Shane’s article on them in today’s NYT.
There you have it, character take-down wise. They are described as leading a needy CIA too far. You wouldn’t know from Shane’s article that there were any other torture issues. That JPRA was pushing their influence, telling military clients that their Personnel Recovery Academy had the people to staff the interrogation booths. That there was ever a rendition program. The article takes governing partner, “legendary military survival trainer” Roger Aldrich, and reduces him to a mere employee, along with others swept up by Mitchell’s entrepreneurial genius.
Mitchell-Jessen likely made no more, even if it made millions (a figure left hanging with no further elaboration), than a number of other contracting agencies that supplied interrogation services. Yet, Shane mentions no other agency, including Aldrich’s own Tate, Inc., whose fortunes also rose after 9/11, and which I documented here at FDL.
I’m no friend of Mitchell and Jessen… hardly so. But I know a set-up when I see it. While Mitchell and Jessen should pay for their role, if they are the scapegoats for the whole large torture mess, then a terrible disservice will be done to this country, as the torturers will continue to hold office, staff major Pentagon commands, and run the CIA — and there will plenty of millionaires who made dough through torture, not to mention tons of military graft, laughing all the way to the bank. Hell, I’d even suppose that like some of the Watergate defendants, Mitchell and Jessen will take it as a badge of honor to do their time, to cover for their superiors. More likely they figure that they’ll never see a day in jail.
Shane should have dug deeper. I can understand the contempt and anger towards these men and what they did drives the wish to see them behind bars. But we have a larger commitment… to getting out the full truth.
Heh, well normally you know you would immunize or plea them down for cooperation in going up the food chain. That is the way cases are done in a normal prosecution world. When the fix is in ahead of time that there will be no climbing the ladder though, that kind of puts a crimp in that plan. This is why I keep whining about this aspect of Holder/Obama. Many people are convinced there is a secret plan to do this once they start with the guys “exceeding guidelines” – that Holder is going to ease on into the big gig. I don’t know about that. I have learned to take Obama at his word on a lot of things; if you do that, and don’t imprint your own hopes and dreams for change on him, he is fairly consistent. And when he deviates it is always in the wrong direction. So I don’t hold out a ton of hope that they are really going to go bigger in scope when they swear they are not. That would appear to leave Mitchell and Jessen and even lower scrubs, both governmental and contractor, assuming there are prosecutions at all.
If you were on the SJC, say you’re Feingold or Whitehouse, what would you tell Holder to move this forward … other
than, “Do your bloody job !”
Isn’t that basically what Nadler told him?
Bob in HI
A “trial” balloon.
auspicious: “I do not think it means what you think it means”
(I’m sure it’s just a typo for inauspicious but opportunities to quote Inigo Montoya must be seized!)
Um, yeah, that was indeed a mistake. Thanks.
Perhaps my Milbank Unit count is getting too high (like a pitch count)…..
And when we hear that we should not look backwards this is why it is critical to do exactly that. If you do not cauterize the wound if festers. Left untreated it infects the rest of the body.
If this is Obama’s policy he is a criminal no better than Bush. And there was no better criminal than Bush.
Fuck health care it is cases like this where Obama as Joker posters make sense.
pro foland @6
you keel my typo, prepare to die.
But doG forbid that KBR, Blackwater or the rest of the US contractors be held accountable for ANYTHING.
Fraud? Antitrust? This gets you kidnapped and flown to the US and thrown in some military hellhole?
Holy Crap.
FunnyWheelieDiva
11-teen dimensional chess, my ASS!
And silly me thinking it was just the senatorial successor that was associated with whited, or at least overly decorated, sepulchers.
an Obama-style rendition: new meaning to “an antitrust probe”
hooded, stripped naked (while being photographed) and subjected to a “body cavity search”
perhaps the Obama administration is just prepping for the rendition of US corporate fraudsters
This is a war zone , with credible reports that some contractors are heavily armed , and therefore seven FBI agents does make sense in apprehending this individual. There are also credible reports that the fraud committed by the type of contractor involved may very well be funding Taliban/alQaida activities,in theater -I agree with gitcheegummee-that this my very well lead back to MZM/Wilkes / Foggo and Lamm’s firing.
I also agree with bmaz -as described this arrest has terrible optics, It will be interesting to see where the trial of this contractor takes us – we’ve known for a very long time that well placed high rankinf gov’t officials have been war profiteering from the GWOT & the illegal Irak occupation ,
God Speed to the prosecutors in this case
Sima International looks like a Lebanese KBR, except without the easily verifiable history of fraud and malevolence. Apppears to be a legitimate Lebanese contractor lawfully doing business in Afghanistan. I thought that was a reasonable thought to explore, but I can find no indication of violence or other problem with Azar or Sima International through a healthy Google search. I can find no reaso for the extraordinary action here.
heard scott horton discussing this today on dn! and immediately thought this sounded way fishy, as in: overt (as in ‘overthetop’) use of gubmint officials to participate in corporate turf wars. the piddling company azar was working for somehow got inside contract territory it had no, erm, ‘legit bidniss’ in, so they had to be roughed up.
the old and original definition of fascism, as in what mussolini wanted to call ‘corporatism’. (that definition has, in the past few years, thinned to ignore that corporate piece completely. how convenient for all those screeching thugs and their puppeteers out there demonizing any and all attempts to weaken corporate power of any stripe.)
The only ray of sunshine is that the rendered get access to the courts. A small, but significant difference from the former regime. It will take a long time to unravel the evil that Cheney raised up from the darker recesses of our military/paramilitary. Thank you, Jeff, bmaz and everyone else here who are fighting the good fight.
bmaz,@22,
Is it possible that Sima could be tied to other activities -not necessarily ‘googleable ‘ -much has been said about the “hallawah” (?) paperless money laundering practice by many in the Middle East –
Is it possible that the Obama DOJ feels like it has enough of a criminal case to take Azar back for trial -that this is actually a better outcome then rendering someone …then disappearing them to ‘elsewhere’
Especially if it turns out that the suspect was not tortured , and that the hardassed judge in this prosecution makes sure the DOJ is sqeakey clean at the trial ?
I went and read the pleadings in the case and can no evidence of that whatsoever. It, by the government’s own words and allegations, does NOT involve that. And the governments will over-hype and fabricate to allege terrorism any chance they get. For there to be no indication of such in the government’s own complaint, affidavits and warrants (which are standard US warrants only I might add, not international) is as dispositive as you can get. There is no basis whatsoever for you to conjure that allegation up out of thin air.
OT:
Cheney comes out of his bunker. Guess ___ is ready to hit the fan.
I see this as their planned end game … if the truth is revealed, walk everything back to Dubya & Executive Privilege.
Sorry for the off-topic, but I had an unsettling experience on my drive in to work today. As I turned out of my neighborhood on to the main street of my upper class, conservative white Houston suburb, I saw that someone had plastered the Obama as Joker/socialism poster on a caution sign. I had an immediate, visceral reaction, a sickening sinking feeling in my gut. Whatever it means in other contexts, putting them up in my neighborhood is an unmistakeable, if implicit, threat of violence.
I don’t know what YOU did, but I would have gotten out of my vehicle and taken it down.
Unfortunately, I was in traffic and late for work. However, I have daughter home for the summer from college who can deal with this when she gets up. I’m tempted to print out stickers that just say “Matthew 25:31-46″ and slap them on top. Around here, that would make an interesting spectacle.
That’s not a bad idea. As rock red as it is where I am, I haven’t seen any of those posters around here. I can imagine that horrible, sick feeling.
@21
Mornin’ Al!
I ran across an interesting tidbit about Wilkes and MZM ,in relation to FEC matters.
CREW FEC COMPLAINT AGAINST MZM AND MITCHELL WADE RESULTS IN $1,000,000 PENALTY – SECOND LARGEST IN FEC HISTORY
Contact:
Naomi Seligman Steiner 202.408.5565 [email protected]
CREW FILES FEC COMPLAINT AGAINST MZM, INC. // 21 Jun 2005
Related News Coverage
Ex-Contractor Gets 21/2 Years in Prison In Cunningham Case // 16 Dec 2008
Washington Post
FEC issues historic fine against big bucks contributor // 1 Nov 2007
31 Oct 2007 // Washington, DC – Today, as the result of a complaint filed by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, the Federal Election Commission (FEC) announced the second largest fine in FEC history — $1,000,000 — has been imposed against MZM and Mitchell Wade.
In June 2005, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) filed a complaint with the FEC alleging that MZM, Inc. and its president, Mitchell Wade, violated the Federal Election Campaign Act. CREW’s complaint was based on an article appearing in the San Diego Union-Tribune and alleged that Wade had used corporate funds to reimburse employees for contributions made to members of Congress who Wade believed could be helpful to MZM.
MZM and Wade have entered into an agreement with the FEC admitting that MZM made corporate conduit contributions to the campaigns of Rep. Virgil Goode (R-VA) and former Rep. Katherine Harris (R-FL) and agreeing to pay $1,000,000 to settle the matter. Melanie Sloan, executive director of CREW, said today, “We are gratified to learn of the FEC’s disposition of this matter. As the presidential campaign season progresses, a fine of this magnitude should serve as a warning to all political donors that violating federal campaign finance laws has serious consequences.”
The FEC release can be found here: http://www.fec.gov/press/press…..1mzm.shtml
I wonder why this fellow was selected. We have decent relations with Lebanon and we’re occupying Afganistan.
For anything that doesn’t involve anti-Israeli actions, we should have no problem arranging an extradition from Lebanon. And a rendition like this is expensive. 8 FBI agents to Afganistan, even if it’s an in and out, would be minimum 5-10K each in expense reports. Gulfstream V’s cost about $5K/hour in fuel costs alone.
The offical charges are just an excuse. Yeah, he’s probably guilty of them (Obama strikes me as more careful than Bush), but they really wanted to talk to him about something else.
If he was AQ, ObamaCo would likely be trumpeting it to the heavens…so I’m gonna guess an Iran nuke program connection and suggest we got a tip from Israel.
Boxturtle (What do I win?)
@21 (Continued)
The Federal Election Commission has since issued a request for info about the Rep. John Doolittle(R Ca) fundraising commissions.
As a member of the House Appropriations Committee, Doolittle helped steer $37 million to a company called PerfectWave.
PerfectWave was owned by Brent Wilkes, one of two defense contractors from whom Duke Cunningham admitted taking bribes. From 2002 to 2005, Wilkes and his associates helped raise $85,000 for Doolittle.
Doolittle claimed that his support for PerfectWave was based “on the project’s merits and the written support of the military.”
However, Doolittle’s only evidence of this was “a letter of praise from Robert Lusardi, a program manager for light armored vehicles at the Marine Corps dated Feb. 25 – two and a half years after PerfectWave got its first earmark. By the time Lusardi wrote his letter, the company had received at least $37 million in earmarks.”
Research by Josh Hudelson, Will Thomas, and Peter Sheehy –TPM Muckraker
What the Judge and FBI are going to need to address are the trappings of torture that are a pretty irrevocable part of the DOJ now. I’m sure there will be sabre rattling, but the end result will very likely be more carte blanche for DOJ. Obama and Holder need to dream every night, now and for hereafter, over what they are ushering in.
In any event, on the coercion front, here’s what you have. A couple of people who are being investigated for offering a bribe to the US Army Corps of Engineers guy in order to get/extend a gov contract and/or for knowing about the bribe. They would have just as easily travelled to Washington to meet with their contact on the bribe, but instead things were set up for them to travel to Afghanistan. Where it was going to take a Gulfstream jet at FBI’s beck and call to get them back. And this was over a 100,000 bribe (as Horton notes, the jet and agents trip cost more than that – an odd way to go when you could have set the meet on US soil).
Horton also notes that there is no tie with other terrorism, although there is the kind of scarey (in light of el-masri) fact that the guy they picked up has the same name as a Lebanese General tied to the Harriri murder. Not the same guy – but with the same name.
So you have these two people who are faced with 8 heavily armed FBI agents who take them into custody, not here in the states but in a setting where the US government has been involved with planning and executing torture. And to date, planning and executing torture with no real consequence. And there is no one with the Afghan gov around, no law enforcement, no state dept. The US says it obtained consent from the Afghan gov for the snatch, but won’t say who with the Afghan gov gave the ok or even what dept. That doesn’t go to the validity of the snatch under the US rendition cases, but it sure does go to the issue of coercion – that the FBI was deliberately creating a situation of armed capture in a foreign country and without any involvement of local law enforcement. All done in a country where the US government has been involved in torture as policy.
Then the snatched are put in kevlar because they are getting ready to be transported as targets with US gov representatives who are marked as same, in a country where US gov representatives are routinely targeted. And they are getting ready to be transferred to Bagram, a known and used torture site destination for the US government AND also a site under constant threat of assault.
So they are putting these two in kevlar and shipping them to a site that has been known for its torture use and it’s also a site that greatly increases the risk to their personal safety bc of the constant attacks.
Then, whether you buy the allegations of what happened at Bagram or not, they are treated just like they would have been treated if they were being taken to a black site for torture or GITMO for torture, with sensory deprivation (acknowledged by the FBI and probably witnessed by enough on take off and touchdown that denying it would have been ill advised)
When you have the US policy of torture, especially coupled with both Holder’s and Obama’s reassurances to torturers, and ongoing coverups of torture, and a “military commission” option being asserted by Obama that would make any detainee fear they would end up at GITMO in such a proceeding and also a “military justice” history to date that hands out 60 day suspensions for extended periods of torturing an Iraqi General culminating in his torture killing.
Against this backdrop, FBI and DOJ are saying – what? who would feel coerced by us?
@24 It would be worth your while to read both the Horton piece and the pleadings he links. It will fill in a lot of your questions.
Two things, and I am going to come back to this in a subsequent post I think, but the amount of bribe money actually transferred overtly was $16,500 although there was discussion about continuing payments. Secondly, it appears quite clear from the initial affidavits that the government had a cooperating witness (read plant) in a contracting office in Afghanistan that actually affirmatively solicited the bribe to start with. Oh, and one other thing, Azar was not a direct party to the initial discussion of the bribe, nor any subsequent discussion nor payment I have found so far; he was simply referenced as “knowing and approving” by the other individual, Cobos. No direct participation I have seen so far.
I don’t think this is the same thing as the rendition and torture of politically-tinged terra suspects. It’s nasty, bad behavior, but its been going on for decades. Mexicans know this very well. I think Clinton was president when we grabbed a leading drug lord in Sinaloa, roughed him up, stuffed him into a box, and took him back to the US. I’d venture a guess that he was stripped, hooded and manacled as well. I seem to recall we repeated this type of thing more than once. I don’t agree with it, but it isn’t John Yoo-style torture either.
It is legal under US law and DOJ guidelines for violent criminals and offenses only. There is NO indication of the presence of that here and, again, I have gone in and read the pleadings and allegations in place at the time he was snatched. No support for a finding of violence and or terrorism.
Agreed. Then why the heck snatch this fellow? Based on public information, he’s barely worth the expense of an international arrest warrant.
Boxturtle (Looks like the judge is NOT the kind of judge ObamaCo likely wanted)
He is a KBR subcontractor as I understand I wonder if his name is on funny multimillion dollar KBR projects?
He can testify to work actually done on not done, substandard materials, not following the blue prints, whether KBR had an inspector on site overseeing things or not.
I think big money fraud should be treated and punished like a mob case.
I am against torture. Rendition for terrorists and above the law crooks like KBR who following normal channels we will never get in a court room?
I am conflicted could go either way.
And to be fair I don’t know just what the government wants with this guy really.
Now that I think about it the Government should announce why they have rendered somebody after they render him.
I have yet to see one thin iota of evidence that Azar is in any way related to KBR whatsoever. None. Not even a baseless allegation in any of the court record or any other reputable source I have seen.
Nor have they bagged and sensory deprived anybody from DynCorp, who has engaged in major fraud on defense contracts in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The treatment of the execs at Chiquita who WERE actively and knowingly funding terrorism comes to mind as well.
Being hooded thats new, normally they ask you to strip before a body cavity search is that torture or is there more?
Do you think the Feds want the real books on what KBR did and did not do?
Is KBR perhaps being looked at like they were a terror group? War profiteering should I feel be looked at this way. But I do not agree with torture just what was supposedly done?
Why be surprised that an relatively innocuous person has been grabbed this brutal way. Night and fog.
My impression has been that what you may or may not have reasonably been thought to have done, can often have absolutely nothing to do with being trapped in the nightmare.
These perpetrators have been blundering around for a long time.
Maher Arrar, for instance. the four foot by six foot box in Syria.
Using extraordinary rendition in a puny case like this is picking an acorn off the ground to show mom, while missing the truckload of nuts in the parking lot. There are billions in contractor fraud to be investigated, and Obama pulls out all the stops to investigate two small time foreigners – not Blackwater/Xe, not Halliburton, not the Big Brits – who are unlikely to have a dozen Congresscritters in their pocketbooks.
For shame, Mr. Community Organizer President. You have the “courage” to stop the street urchins in Chicago from selling illegal beer, but ignore Al Capone’s warehouses full of liquor. Your vaunted speechifying will soon come to naught if your actions continue to be this empty.
My guess is these two small timers stepped on a big guy’s toes, failed to grease the right wheels, or were sacrificed to show that Obama’s actions are as forceful as his rhetoric [sic].
It’s a white man’s world?
Gerald McEntee has a fresh post up: “Countering the Lies about Health Care Reform”
Emmick is a particularly nasty piece of work that wasn’t even Yang’s replacement, he was brought in by the temp USA there, Goerge Cardona, so Cardona didn’t have to soil his hands with the Lewis stuff. Then Cardona and Emmick left and the whole thing disappeared when the new guy, Tom O’Brien took over. Funny that.
The real story in the US Attorney scandal may be as much about the ones who saved their jobs or left on their own. Christie, Rove’s underlings in Alabama, etc.
“the optics of forced rendition for simple contracting fraud are disturbing. No terrorism, no deaths”
I find our willingness to make such a distinction the most disturbing thing of all. If rendition, torture, and the rest are appropriate for terrorism cases, then they are appropriate for high-dollar, white-collar, Republican-style crime as well. This is what “equal protection” means.
We have to get out of the mindset that says that anything is OK when it is a matter of protecting helpless Us from scarey old Them. This kind of victim mindset is what has got us to the point where our liberties are all but gone. It has made the supposed friends of liberty acquiescent to almost any outrage while giving the Dark-Side crowd the coward’s courage that comes with promises of impunity.
Now we are starting to see that what can be done to little brown people with unpopular views who commit criminal acts can also be done to respectable businessmen. Bankster take notice: a post-Obama adminstration may be whisking you from your Bahamian tax refuge to some dank, central-European dungeon for your next meeting with the IRS auditors and bank examiners. Alberto Gonzales, Karl Rove, et al: maybe a coming, true-blue, Democratic backlash government will “take the gloves off” and get you to say what IT wants to hear. Patriot Act doesn’t seem like such a good idea now, does it?
I draw the distinction because US law provides for the extradition of violent offenders from non-treaty sovereigns; as opposed to non-violent ones, which it does not. It is not a “willingness to make such a distinction”, it is a valid distinction in the law that has long been there. Please note that this still contemplates formal extradition process as opposed to extraordinary rendition.
You and I are agreed on the need to respect extradition agreements, and I understand the distinction you make. I also meant “our” (as in the the collective majority view), not “your”–I didn’t mean to attribute any anti-civil-libertarian double standards to you.
But my point still stands in the broader sense, I think. I am simply saying that our national readiness to break inexpedient laws (in this case the laws governing extradition) in terrorist cases has had its inevitable corroding effect. Once expediency wins out in one arena, the logic is irresistable in all of them. And at that point, our prejudices are more important than our jurisprdence.
If I, for one, were to allow that a terrorist act justifies extralegal countermeasures like extraordinary rendition and torture, then I would have very little trouble justifying the rendering and torture of Dick Cheyney. Or Ben Bernanke. I actually think that they are that evil. And my list alone goes on and on.
This is why I have trouble with the whole concept of terrorism as a crime. Isn’t one man’s terrorist another man’s Vice President? Isn’t the distinction mainly political? Why is bombing an airliner in furtherance of worldwide jihad any different from bombing an airliner for insurance money? Why is burning a ski lodge for your radical ecological ideology more heinous than doing it for a lark or, again, for the insurance? The difference is one of belief and of ideas in each case, which are supposed to be free in our society. I say, punish the crime, ignore the cause.
From an enforcement point of view, refusing to distinguish grubby, mundane crime from political crime has the advantage of denying the perpetrator some of the spotlight he seeks. From a civil liberties perspective, it has the much greater advantage of forcing us to prosecute acts rather than beliefs, without any panicky shortcuts through the law.
Agreed
Would you PLEASE stop using the word “rendition”? It’s “kidnapping.” Fats are rendered and people are kidnapped.
Or at least say “so-called rendition.” Or put quotes around “rendition.” Or something. But don’t buy into right-wing framing words. Let’s defend the integrity of the English language.
That is not true. You are confusing “extraordinary rendition”, a term coined by Clinton and abused by Bush, with standard rendition which has long been, in appropriate cases, a legal form of extradition.
Did Obama render the person under discussion or did he extraordinarily render him?
His “fat is in the fire”,either way.
I vote for “extraordinary rendezvous”. *G*
if i understood horton correctly in his interview on dn! this am, this rendition was extraordinarily extraordinary for the reason that it was NOT for any alleged terrorism activities. in fact, the case against this man was petty, involving mere (in the scheme of things) hundreds of thousands of dollars in fraud, and in that part of the world, typically considered part of doing business.
hence my suspicions posted at 65.
horton also noted that he had suspected that the obama admin had not stopped the renditions completely, instead walking them back from the bush to the clinton and bush 41 years when renditions were done for high target individuals, but they were rendered for the purpose of standing trial, not disappeared. and, presumably, not tortured.
how much of this kind of stuff could be just a matter of all those bad guys unleashed under cheney and still not reined in? same question applies to a lot that’s going on at doj.
makes me imagine a man being lowered into a giant pressure cooker half-filled with oil
but that’s just me ymmv
heh
“Looks” can be deceiving.
The British, our very ‘principled’ allies, kept another minor Muslim player in isolation in one of their prisons, they later admitted, not for what he did but for what he knew.
After 10 years of appeals, the victims’ home country finally had him transferred to a Muslim jail near his family, where he suddenly committed suicide the next day.
Ironically, these endless, out of control and unchanged opium/drug and Muslim ‘wars’ are too routinely coming to be more about the control of the wealth underlying the opium/drugs and Muslim ‘problems’.
Ignoring the prosecution of torturers isn’t being done for nothing- someone, somewhere, is getting’ paid.
And I’m ashamed the Democrats too have their hands open wide.
i agree that the stakes are scary high in these games. however, for this very reason i find myself more sympathetic toward dems than accusatory. tho some may well be on the take, sure, i suspect that most of the others find themselves stuck between a rock and a hard place in terms of knowing how precious little wiggle room they have, and what’s in store for them (and the rest of us) if they so much as sneeze in the ‘wrong’ (read: unflattering to corporate power) direction. think paul wellstone.
i’ve made this argument here before in terms of trying to consider how i would handle myself in their position. i honestly cannot say. it seems so easy to assert that i’d be pristine in my integrity and aggressively vocal in my actions. but if someone threatened my family, and pointed out that i couldn’t really report this threat to the fbi because, gosh, you know they’re in on it, i don’t know what i would do. if they threatened to expose ancient pot smoking or an illegal nanny, i’d have to weigh the consequences of that against the fallout, lose my seat to someone of their choosing, decreasing further chances of reversing this hellish trend.
in practice, i’m one of those who will not compromise even small bits of integrity, hence i find myself now (still) jobless and homeless. hard to effect any real changes from this impractical position, yet i would have it no other way. still, i can’t help but consider all the various possibilities for those in elected office these days, and none of them even approach comfortable.
our democratic republic, heading to hell in a handbasket, really. a comfy cozy corporate handbasket.
I have not had time today to research the matter at hand, but could this “rendee” actually be a mole working for us,and it’s a way to get him out of there and not blow his cover?
Jus’ sayin…I know, I know…..I watched The International last night, and…..
No, not according to the statements made to and by the court.
Whether this was a rendition or an extraordinary rendition seems intentionally vague, but it appears to have the hallmarks of an extraordinary rendition.
Obama claims that the Afghan state’s government, such as it is, consented to and cooperated in this process. But it seems to have taken place without due process under local law and without the involvement of the host government’s police or judiciary, if they exist. Certainly, it took place without notice, without the victims knowing the claims made against them, and without the opportunity to contest them.
Before Bush, extraordinary rendition, a euphemism for state-sanctioned violent kidnapping, was reserved for dangerous violent criminals who had co-opted local law enforcement and judges and who could not be detained or extradited under normal treaty procedures. Those facts don’t seem present here, except for the Bush-administration like violent force used to kidnap. I would call that an extraordinary rendition.
To use such extreme force for petty fraud – especially when compared to the significantly larger alleged frauds perpetrated by substantially larger, but more well-connected players – is grandstanding and abuse of process.
As bmaz and related articles suggest, it also expresses an absurd mismatch of cost vs. potential harm avoided or prosecuted. The amount claimed lost to fraud in this case is about US$100,000. As with the Spitzer case, the government spent much more than that mounting this arrest and transporting the alleged perpetrators to the US. Costs to hold them in prison and prosecute them will add heavily to the taxpayers’ bill.
I don’t think this focus or allocation of resources will scare Blackwater/Xe or Halliburton. This is not a shot across the bow at them or an advance warning that they should obstruct justice by destroying their records. It’s virtually a statement that Obama, like Bush, intends to go after only the little guys. As with the banksters, it’s business as usual for the good ole boys.
I’d like to see some Wall St fraudsters detained as enemy combatants and rendered for tortured confessions. This can be done on the cheap as the torture can be flying coach on commercial.
Rendition after torture is novel and rendition for fraud is novel. The thing strikes me as stupid and expensive but not all that significant in context of all other irregular and outrageous stuff that have sort of not gone completely away.
robspierre @61
[ This is why I have trouble with the whole concept of terrorism as a crime. Isn’t one man’s terrorist another man’s Vice President? Isn’t the distinction mainly political? Why is bombing an airliner in furtherance of worldwide jihad any different from bombing an airliner for insurance money? Why is burning a ski lodge for your radical ecological ideology more heinous than doing it for a lark or, again, for the insurance? The difference is one of belief and of ideas in each case, which are supposed to be free in our society. I say, punish the crime, ignore the cause ]
this is my belief – terrorism is the war of the less powerful against the powerful.
if you don’t have an army and can’t fund one, you fight as you can to influence the outcome you desire. is this really that hard to understand?
what constitutes a “terrorist” is entirely relative.
it would be nice if we americans could have an understanding of that.
boston tea party participants?
WWII resistance fighters in france, belgium, norway, germany?
jews from europe who migrated to palestine and began using WWII “resistance, aka terrorism” measure against arabs?
palestinians cooped up in gaza conducting suicide bombings in israel?
american indians who attacked civilians invading their territory?
western supremicists of various stripes who threaten local, state, and federal officials?
anti-abortion activists who intimidate, threaten, and kill doctors who support abortion rights?
environmentalists who sabotage or destroy property?
one question?
have we ever seen in the u.s. of a. the same outrage directed to an amrican military attack of a town or village – say, my lai or fallujah, that our media and we ourselves direct at “despicable actions of terrorists?