The Independent reports on how the Obama administration has continued Bush II's policy of rendition -- the practice of holding and interrogating terrorism suspects in other countries without due process. (Sadly, I expect Obama apologists will make the same sort of excuses for this as they did for the NDAA and for drone murder.)
The men are the latest example of how the Obama administration has embraced rendition — the practice of holding and interrogating terrorism suspects in other countries without due process — despite widespread condemnation of the tactic in the years after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
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Because of the secrecy involved, it is not known how many renditions have taken place during Obama's first term. But his administration has not disavowed the practice. In 2009, a White House task force on interrogation and detainee transfers recommended that the government be allowed to continue using renditions, but with greater oversight, so that suspects were not subject to harsh interrogation techniques, as some were during the George W. Bush administration.
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Lawyers assigned to represent the defendants in federal court in Brooklyn said the men were interrogated for months in Djibouti even though no charges were pending against them — something that would be prohibited in the United States.
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Harry Batchelder Jr., an attorney for the third suspect, Madhi Hashi, 23, concurred. "Let's just put it this way: They were sojourning in Djibouti, and all of a sudden, after they met their friendly FBI agents and CIA agents — who didn't identify themselves — my client found himself stateless and in a U.S. court," said Batchelder, whose client is a native of Somalia who grew up in Britain.
The sequence described by the lawyers matches a pattern from other rendition cases in which U.S. intelligence agents have secretly interrogated suspects for months without legal oversight before handing over the prisoners to the FBI for prosecution.