Onnesha Roychoudhuri: Torture and Extraordinary Rendition

In a recent press conference, President Bush struggled to explain the current torture bull which has now passed both House and Senate. It is now simply a formality for Congress to rubber stamp a document that will alter the applicability of the Geneva Conventions in the treatment of those detained in the war on terror. Said Bush, "Common Article III says that there will be no outrages upon human dignity. It's very vague. What does that mean, 'outrages upon human dignity'?"

Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart couldn't have scripted better satire. There is no finer illustration...... of the divide in rationale than between those who see the dark humor in Bush's seeming obliviousness, and those who don't. It's redolent of a continually revisited slippery-slope argument over the "validity" of torture. And despite the media's coverage of the bill's whereabouts in the political machinery, it is clear that grasping just exactly what is at stake is near impossible. Indeed, to understand the scope of the bill is to understand that we are facing the de-democratization of our own country.

Earlier this month, in a well-choreographed move, President Bush transferred 14 "high-value" prisoners out of CIA torture black sites and into Guantanamo. In one fell swoop, President Bush glossed over the acknowledgment of the existence of the massive covert torture program known as extraordinary rendition, and steered the conversation towards trials. Bush claimed that if his legislation redefining torture and stripping "enemy combatants" of any habeas corpus privileges was not passed, these "high-value" prisoners could not be tried.

One of those valued prisoners is the so-called architect of 9/11 – Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. In an outright bully move, Bush stated, "As soon as Congress acts on this bill, the man our intelligence agencies believe helped orchestrate the 9/11 attacks can face justice." But this bill is not just about a handful of people with proven connections to those who planned 9/11.

In a recently released book, Torture Taxi: On the Trail of the CIA's Rendition Sites, the massive scope of a systematic program of torture and detainment without charges was revealed. In a phone interview, authors Trevor Paglen and A.C. Thompson explained that they spent months tracking the CIA flights and the shell companies behind them. What they uncovered was a massive network of planes and secret prisons around the world. Paglen and Thompson pushed to have their book released as soon as Bush, in his mealy-mouthed manner, finally admitted to the massive torture program.

What the book does well is examine both breadth of the program as well as the logical underbelly of that widespread network: the massive complicity involved in sustaining such a program. Paglen and Thompson traced the front companies the CIA uses to operate the civilian planes all the way to small time family lawyers in Nevada and Massachusetts. As Thompson puts it, "People in our communities are doing dirty work for the CIA. This is not just people being snatched up from one faraway country and taken to a country that's even farther away." Indeed, while Paglen and Thompson traveled across the country and throughout Afghanistan, it was Smithfield, North Carolina, a rural town that hosts CIA torture planes and pilots, that most frightened them.

Both are concerned that if Bush's commissions and torture bill passes, those who have been kidnapped and tortured in the extraordinary rendition program would be stripped of any rights and held indefinitely, while their American captors and torturers could continue these activities under the cloak of legality.

But the bill that passed both House and Senate is far more insidious than that.

We're not talking about legalizing the torture and indefinite detainment of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. We're not even talking about the estimated 14,000 detainees held in U.S. war prisons around the world. The bill seeks to identify "unlawful enemy combatants" as anyone "who, before, on, or after the date of the enactment of the Military Commissions Act of 2006, has been determined to be an unlawful enemy combatant by a Combatant Status Review Tribunal or another competent tribunal established under the authority of the President or the Secretary of Defense."