In one of Obama's first acts as president, he outlawed the use of "extraordinary rendition", or the process of transferring suspected terrorists to countries where we knew they would be tortured. During Counterterrorism Official John Brennan's speech a few weeks ago, he implied that the prospective candidates for "preventive detention" were dwindling, and that the U.S. would instead rely on other countries to detain terrorism suspects who the government believes pose a threat.
Today, the Task Force on Interrogation has issued new guidelines for rendering suspects to other countries, but we're not actually going to stop sending terror suspects to countries that are known to torture people in their custody. Instead, we're going to rely on a system of "assurances" from foreign countries that the individuals in question won't be tortured, as well as an undescribed "monitoring mechanism" to ensure the receiving nations are keeping their promises. Daphne Eviatar was on a conference call with the Washington Times' Eli Lake, who attempted to get the administration to clarify the new policy, but the administration official wouldn't offer much more than what's been set out in the press release.
So: Possibly, in order to avoid housing terror suspects indefinitely, we're going to rely on other countries to detain them -- countries that torture people -- even though we're technically not supposed to do that anymore. They promise not to torture them, and we maybe have a way of making sure they keep their promise, but it's not clear how we would do that, and -- forgive me if I'm a bit skeptical here -- it seems like there's still the possibility that all this is a kind of theater that's just meant to prevent the U.S. government from being at fault should these people be tortured.
The bottom line is, the way to avoid other nations torturing terror suspects is to avoid sending suspects in our custody to countries that torture people. But we're not going to be doing that.
-- A. Serwer
