"Extraordinary" is an ordinary enough adjective, but its sense
is being stretched here to include more sinister meanings that your
dictionary will not provide: secret; ruthless; and
extrajudicial.
As for "rendition", the English language permits four meanings:
a performance; a translation; a surrender - this meaning is now
considered archaic; or an "act of rendering"; which leads us to the
verb "to render" among whose 17 possible meanings you will not find
"to kidnap and covertly deliver an individual or individuals for
interrogation to an undisclosed address in an unspecified country
where torture is permitted".
Language, too, has laws, and those laws tell us this new
American usage is improper - a crime against the word. Every so
often the habitual newspeak of politics throws up a term whose
calculated blandness makes us shiver with fear - yes, and
loathing.
"Final solution" is a further, even more horrible locution of
this Orwellian, double-plus-ungood type. "Mortality response", a
euphemism for death by killing that I first heard during the
Vietnam War, is another. This is not a pedigree of which any
newborn usage should be proud.
People use such phrases to avoid using others whose meaning
would be problematically over-apparent. "Ethnic cleansing" and
"final solution" were ways of avoiding the word "genocide", and to
say "extraordinary rendition" is to reveal one's squeamishness
about saying "the export of torture". However, as Cecily remarks in
Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, "When I see a
spade, I call it a spade", and what we have here is not simply a
spade, it's a shovel - and it's shovelling a good deal of
ordure.
Now that Senator John McCain has forced upon a reluctant White
House his amendment putting the internationally accepted
description of torture - "cruel, inhuman or degrading punishment" -
into American law, in spite of energetic attempts by the
Vice-President, Dick Cheney, to defeat it, the growing belief that
the Bush Administration could be trying to get around the McCain
amendment by the "rendition" of persons adjudged torture-worthy to
less-delicately inclined countries merits closer scrutiny.
We are beginning to hear the names and stories of men seized and
transported in this fashion: Maher Arar, a Canadian-Syrian, was
captured by the CIA on his way to the US and taken via Jordan to
Syria where, says his lawyer, he was "brutally physically
tortured".
Khaled el-Masri, a German citizen of Kuwaiti-Lebanese origin,
was kidnapped in Macedonia and taken for interrogation to
Afghanistan, where he says he was repeatedly beaten. The
Syrian-born Mohammed Haydar Zammar says he was grabbed in Morocco
and then spent four years in a Syrian dungeon.
Lawsuits are under way. Lawyers for the plaintiffs suggest their
clients were only a few of the victims, that in Afghanistan, Egypt,
Syria and perhaps elsewhere the larger pattern of the
extraordinary-rendition project is yet to be uncovered. Inquiries
are under way in Canada, Germany, Italy and Switzerland.
The CIA's internal inquiry admits to "under 10" such cases,
which to many ears sounds like another bit of double-talk. Tools
are created to be used and it seems improbable, to say the least,
that so politically risky and morally dubious a system would be set
up and then barely employed.
The US authorities have been taking a characteristically robust
line on this issue. On her recent European trip, the Secretary of
State, Condoleezza Rice, more or less told European governments to
back off the issue - which they duly, and tamely, did, claiming to
have been satisfied by her assurances.
At the end of December, the German Government ordered the
closing of an Islamic centre near Munich after finding documents
encouraging suicide attacks in Iraq. This is a club which, we are
told, Khaled al-Masri often visited before being extraordinarily
rendered to Afghanistan. "Aha!" we are encouraged to think.
"Obvious bad guy. Render his sorry butt anywhere you like."
What is wrong with this kind of thinking is that, as Isabel
Hilton of The Guardian wrote last July, "The delusion that
officeholders know better than the law is an occupational hazard of
the powerful and one to which those of an imperial cast of mind are
especially prone … When disappearance became state practice
across Latin America in the '70s it aroused revulsion in democratic
countries, where it is a fundamental tenet of legitimate government
that no state actor may detain - or kill - another human being
without having to answer to the law."
In other words, the question isn't whether or not a given
individual is "good" or "bad." The question is whether or not we
are - whether or not our governments have dragged us into
immorality by discarding due process of law, which is generally
accorded to be second only to individual rights as the most
important pillar of a free society.
The White House, however, plainly believes that it has public
opinion behind it in this and other contentious matters such as
secret wiretapping. Cheney recently told reporters, "When the
American people look at this, they will understand and appreciate
what we're doing and why we're doing it."
He may be right for the moment, though the controversy shows no
signs of dying. It remains to be seen how long Americans are
prepared to go on accepting that the end justifies practically any
means Cheney cares to employ.
In the beginning is the word. Where one begins by corrupting
language, worse corruptions swiftly follow. Sitting as the Supreme
Court to rule on torture last month, Britain's law lords spoke to
the world in words that were simple and clear. "The torturer is
abhorred not because the information he produces may be
unreliable," Lord Rodger of Earlsferry said, "but because of the
barbaric means he uses to extract it."
"Torture is an unqualified evil," Lord Brown of
Eaton-under-Heywood added. "It can never be justified. Rather, it
must always be punished."
The dreadful probability is that the US outsourcing of torture
will allow it to escape punishment. It will not allow it to escape
moral obloquy.
