Eli Lake has an excellent piece in the Washington Times today sifting through Leon Panetta's record on rendition as Clinton's chief of staff. Panetta, Obama's nominee to head the CIA, will face confirmation hearings next week. As Lake points out, Panetta does not represent the clean break from Bush administration intelligence policies that the press joyously decreed when Obama first announced the pick. Panetta was, at the very least, aware of the rendition program by which terrorism suspects captured abroad by U.S. forces are transferred to the custody of allies with more flexible guidelines for interrogation. At most, Panetta may have played some role in deciding how and where that program was applied.
So the question that must be put to Panetta, who last year wrote with regard to torture that there "are certain lines Americans will not cross," is whether he still believes that rendition is on the right side of that line.
In practice, it should be extremely difficult for Panetta to disavow this particular element of the Bush administration's war on terror strategy. After all, if rendition was a necessary evil before the attacks of September 11 -- before the United States was engaged in open warfare with al Qaeda and its affiliates -- how can Panetta now justify objecting to such methods?
Rendition was always an effort to disguise the ugly methods of intelligence gathering by creating a process with the veneer of legitimacy. Warrants were issued, trials were held in absentia, and promises of proper treatment were made. It was theater, and the players knew full well that they were creating the appearance of legality, not the real thing. Their primary concern, as it should have been, was the result. As Jane Mayer quoted one FBI agent in her opus on the program, "[The CIA] loved that these guys would just disappear off the books, and never be heard of again....They were proud of it."
Rendition meant the Clinton administration didn't have to get its hands dirty while still achieving a mostly satisfactory outcome -- terrorists interrogated and permanently removed from the battlefield. Of course, as Obama said during the campaign, we shouldn't be outsourcing torture. That's a job that can be done here and done better by Americans. More than that, is there any doubt that whatever methods employed by U.S. forces will be far more humane than what was done to the terrorists shipped off to Egypt with Panetta's knowledge and consent during the Clinton years? As left-wing icon Michael Scheuer points out at the end of Lake's piece:
"If you were offered a choice between Guantanamo and a prison in Egypt, what place would you choose?"
