Rendition

Early in President Obama’s first term he ordered the CIA to follow the army field manual when it came to interrogating prisoners and thus stopped the procedure known as waterboarding. What he did not stop was the process of rendition which is still in force today. 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. Extraordinary rendition, also called irregular rendition, or forced rendition, is the government-sponsored abduction and extrajudicial transfer of a person from one country to another.[1] It is most prominently carried out by the United States government, often with the collusion of other countries: overall, 54 countries are known to have been involved with US extraordinary renditions. In practice this means sending prisoners called ghost to a country like Egypt where they are interrogated using means not allowed in the United States. Ghost prisoners are subject to what the CIA calls “enhanced interrogation tactics”; most others call it torture. The CIA and their operatives’ methods allegedly include waterboarding, sleep deprivation, humiliation, physical beatings, electric shocks, and worse.