by Nicholas Beaudrot "Extraordinary Rendition" is a very loaded phrase that now has almost two separate meanings. Prior to the Bush Administration, the U.S. Government, primarily through the CIA, would periodically snatch high-value suspect from foreign countries, without any sort of formal extradition process. Richard Clarke talks about this in his book Against All Enemies. On the scale of potentially sketchy things an intelligence agency might do, this is not very high; the prisoners were eventually released or tried. So when the L.A. Times says that rendition "has been an effective tool since the early 1990s and was often used to bring terrorism suspects to courts in the United States", that's what their talking about. But Team Bush appears to have let this concept run wild, and begun snatching suspects with the intention of putting them in various black sites in Eastern Europe murky jurisdiction, or handing them over to countries that are somewhat likely to torture them. That's what Barack Obama put an end to with his executive order. Yes, there are issues of human rights and international law with the first sort of rendition, but no one's ending up in a Franz Kafka short story as a result.
