THE CIA’s secret prisons are being shuttered. Harsh interrogation techniques are off-limits. And Guantanamo Bay will eventually go back to being a windswept naval base on the southeastern corner of Cuba. But even while dismantling these programs, US President Barack Obama left intact an equally controversial counterterrorism tool. Under executive orders issued by Obama recently, the CIA still has authority to carry out what are known as renditions, secret abductions and transfers of prisoners to countries that cooperate with the United States.
Current and former US intelligence officials said that the rendition program might be poised to play an expanded role going forward because it was the main remaining mechanism — aside from Predator missile strikes — for taking suspected terrorists off the street.
The rendition program became a source of embarrassment for the CIA, and a target of international scorn, as details emerged in recent years of botched captures, mistaken identities and allegations that prisoners were turned over to countries where they were tortured. The European Parliament condemned renditions as “an illegal instrument used by the United States.” Prisoners swept up in the program have sued the CIA as well as a Boeing Co. subsidiary accused of working with the agency on dozens of rendition flights.
But the Obama administration appears to have determined that the rendition program was one component of the Bush administration’s war on terrorism that it could not afford to discard. The decision underscores the fact that the battle with Al-Qaeda and other groups is far from over and that even if the United States is shutting down the prisons, it is not done taking prisoners. One provision in one of Obama’s orders appears to preserve the CIA’s ability to detain and interrogate terrorism suspects as long as they are not held long-term. The little-noticed provision states that the instructions to close the CIA’s secret prison sites “do not refer to facilities used only to hold people on a short-term, transitory basis.” Despite concern about rendition, Obama’s prohibition of many other counterterrorism tools could prompt intelligence officers to resort more frequently to the “transitory” technique.
The decision to preserve the program did not draw major protests, even among human rights groups. Leaders of such organizations attribute that to a sense that nations need certain tools to combat terrorism. “Under limited circumstances, there is a legitimate place” for renditions, said Tom Malinowski, the Washington advocacy director for Human Rights Watch. “What I heard loud and clear from the US president’s order was that they want to design a system that doesn’t result in people being sent to foreign dungeons to be tortured — but that designing that system is going to take some time.”
CIA veterans involved in renditions characterized the program as important but of limited intelligence-gathering use. It is used mainly for terrorism suspects not considered valuable enough for the CIA to keep, they said. “The reason we did interrogations (ourselves) is because renditions for the most part weren’t very productive,” said a former senior CIA official who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the subject.
The most valuable intelligence on Al-Qaeda came from prisoners who were in CIA custody and questioned by agency experts, the official said. Once prisoners were turned over to other countries, the agency had limited influence over how much intelligence was shared, how prisoners were treated and whether they were later released. “In some ways, rendition is the worst option,” the former official said. “If they are in US hands, you have a lot of checks and balances, medics and lawyers. Once you turn them over to another service, you lose control.”
Because details on the rendition program are classified, the scale of the program has been a subject of wide-ranging speculation.
