The something-and-nothing word “rendition” is only the latest in a long line of euphemisms used by those in power to belittle the nature of actions which are in fact extremely nasty. The Nazis used “final solution” for the wholesale slaughter of European Jewry. In Vietnam the American military loaded their public verbiage with phrases such as “take out” which in fact meant utterly destroy. Inherent in the deployment of euphemism is a desire to reassure a public that might recoil at the reality of the barbarisms that are being perpetrated by their leaders.
As the Council of Europe report made clear yesterday, “rendition” is a euphemism for “kidnap.” Under its kidnap program, CIA agents have been tracking down suspected international terrorists, seizing them off the streets of European cities and flying them to third countries, sometimes with stopovers in secret detention camps in Poland and Romania.
Under US laws — and indeed of the 14 European countries now believed to have known about this process — such activities are illegal and no better than banditry. That European leaders should nevertheless condone such behavior demonstrates the way in which civilized values have been thrown over by President Bush’s miscalculated post-9/11 responses.
It might have been expected that European leaders would have sought to rein in the White House’s extreme measures. It seems, however, that instead Washington’s blundering responses were nodded through at senior levels. Maybe some European leaders are right when they protest that they did not know about the activity of CIA thugs in their countries. But then, they would not have wanted to be told. It must be certain, however, that the top people did know; otherwise it would have been impossible for the CIA to commit such crimes with impunity.
The Council of Europe report makes it clear that there must have been some level of connivance by local authorities, especially in Poland and Romania where the CIA has operated camps. The denial by the Polish premier that he knew anything about it may be true — given his recent arrival in office. Denial, to put it mildly, is not enough. The Poles must now set out to discover who did sign off on the secret CIA detention camps and prosecutions should follow. The Poles, of all people in Europe, ought to be sensitive to such depravities. Following their invasion by the Germans and Russians in 1939, Poland was the site of other secret camps whose names such as Auschwitz and Treblinka have since gone down as bywords for savagery and infamy.
Bush’s war on terror has involved abandoning the very legal standards on which America and its European allies are based. Working on the perverted reasoning that the end justifies the means, Washington has at times behaved with little more morality than Osama Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda. By stooping to its level, the Americans have at times made themselves little better than their terrorist enemies. More disturbingly, Washington’s European allies, by condoning or actively assisting in the illegality of “rendition,” have let down their friends in the Islamic world who might have expected wiser and more thoughtful responses to the complex challenge of global terror.
