Obama Outsourcing Torture?

"An invaluable tool, (the CIA) said, is the practice in which U.S. agencies transfer individuals arrested in one country to another allied country that is able to extract information from them and relay it to the United States.”

Washington Post, 1 Nov. 2002

In their haste to fall over themselves in praising the Obama administration’s decision to close Guantanamo and CIA secret prisons, much of the media forgot to ask if that also applied to rendition. Rendition, a practice that began not with the now departed Bush administration but with its Democratic predecessor, involved the transferring of terrorism suspects from American control to the custody of American allies like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan. And how do these countries “extract information” from suspects. Here’s an account from the Washington Post of some of the methods employed by Jordan’s General Intelligence Department:

Former prisoners have reported that their captors were expert in two practices in particular: falaqa, or beating suspects on the soles of their feet with a truncheon and then, often, forcing them to walk barefoot and bloodied across a salt-covered floor; and farruj, or the "grilled chicken," in which prisoners are handcuffed behind their legs, hung upside down by a rod placed behind their knees, and beaten

We now have the apparent answer about rendition. The LA Times reported yesterday that it will continue as will the CIA’s power to kidnap people off the streets in foreign countries as it has done in widely publicized cases in Europe. The difference, according to one anonymous Obama official, is that “if done within certain parameters, it is an acceptable practice."  The Obama administration should be asked as soon as possible whether torture is within these “parameters.” If it is it is further evidence that the main difference between the Obama version of the war on terror and that of his predecessor is in the way that it is sold to the public.