Two courts, one in Italy and one in the United States, ruled recently on the Bush administration’s practice of extraordinary rendition, which is the kidnapping of people and sending them to other countries for interrogation — and torture. The Italian court got it right. The American court got it miserably wrong.

"Just to refresh your memory: Maher Arar, a Syrian-born Canadian citizen, was detained at JFK Airport in September 2002 while changing planes on his way home to Canada. He was held by US authorities incommunicado - no lawyer, no contact with family, no nothing. The Bush administration labeled him a member of al-Qaeda and sent him not to Canada, his home and country of citizenship, but against his will to Syrian intelligence authorities renowned for torture. He was tortured, interrogated and detained in a tiny underground cell for nearly a year before the Syrian government released him, stating they had found no connection to any criminal or terrorist organization or activity."

The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.

An Italian judge sentenced 23 Americans to up to eight years in prison on Wednesday for the abduction of a Muslim cleric, in a symbolic condemnation of the CIA "rendition" flights used by the former U.S. government.The Americans were all tried in absentia because the United States refused to extradite them but the sentence, the first of its kind, was welcomed by campaigners who have long complained that the renditions policy violated basic human rights."This decision sends a clear message to all governments that even in the fight against terrorism you can't forsake the basic rights of our democracies," said prosecutor Armando Spataro.

A federal appeals court in San Francisco agreed today to reconsider a ruling that allowed five men who claim they were tortured in overseas prisons to sue a San Jose aviation company.The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals granted a request by the Obama Administration for a rehearing on the government's claim that the lawsuit against Jeppesen DataPlan Inc. should be dismissed.Jeppesen, a subsidiary of Boeing Co., is an aviation services company.The five men, all foreign citizens, claim the company violated international human rights law by aiding the CIA in plane flights that took them in 2001, 2002 and 2003 to overseas sites where they were allegedly tortured while being interrogated.The alleged CIA program to transport terrorism suspects to other countries for interrogation is known as extraordinary rendition. The lawsuit claims Jeppesen provided flight plans and other aviation support.

At his confirmation hearing to be head of the CIA, Leon Panetta said that "extraordinary rendition"—the practice of sending prisoners to foreign countries—was a tool he meant to retain. Obama's nominee for solicitor general, Elena Kagan, told Congress that she agreed with John Yoo's claim that a terrorist captured anywhere should be subject to "battlefield law." On the first opportunity to abort trial proceedings by invoking "state secrets"—the policy based on the faulty Reynolds case—Obama's attorney gen- eral, Eric Holder, did so. Obama refused to release photographs of "enhanced interrogation." The CIA had earlier (illegally) destroyed ninety-two videotapes of such interrogations—and Obama refused to release documents describing the tapes.

"Calley was charged in the deaths of more than 100 civilians and convicted in the murder of 22 in one village, while al-Megrahi was convicted of the murder of 270 civilians aboard one airplane. Almost everyone, it seems, found it perverse, outrageous, or "gross and callous" that the Scottish government allowed a convicted mass murderer to return to a homeland where he was greeted with open arms. No one seemingly thought it odd that another mass murderer had lived freely in his home country for so long. The families of the Lockerbie victims were widely interviewed. As the Calley story broke, no American reporter apparently thought it worth the bother to look for the families of the My Lai victims, let alone ask them what they thought of the apology of the long-free officer who had presided over, and personally taken part in the killing of, their loved ones."

Among the treasure trove of documents released on Monday related to the CIA's detention and torture program is a 20-page background paper http://www.aclu.org/torturefoia/released/082409/olcremand/2004olc97.pdf that, for the first time, describes in extraordinary detail the process of "rendition" and the torture prisoners are then subjected to when they are flown to "black site" prisons.

The Obama administration will continue the Bush administration’s practice of sending terror suspects to third countries for detention and interrogation, but will monitor their treatment to insure they are not tortured, administration officials said on Monday. [Note: Right! So what is the reason for having them renditioned?]

Raymond Azar, a 45-year-old Lebanese construction manager with a grade school education, is employed by Sima International, a Lebanon-based contractor that does work for the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan. He also has the unlikely distinction of being the first target of a rendition carried out on the Obama watch. According to court papers, on April 7, 2009, Azar and a Lebanese-American colleague, Dinorah Cobos, were seized by "at least eight" heavily armed FBI agents in Kabul, Afghanistan, where they had traveled for a meeting to discuss the status of one of his company's U.S. government contracts. The trip ended with Azar alighting in manacles from a Gulfstream V executive jet in Manassas, Virginia, where he was formally arrested and charged in a federal antitrust probe.

In Alfred Hitchcock’s classic thriller, Shadow of a Doubt, spunky, high school grad Teresa Wright discovers her beloved uncle is a serial killer. Wright’s subsequent efforts to protect herself and others from psychopathic Joseph Cotten are continually frustrated by the extraordinary denial of her family and her community lost in the “thrall” of the worldly, smooth-talking Uncle Charlie. Heartbroken and distraught, she must contend with her uncle’s violent agenda while being obstructed by a naive and vulnerable community of his enablers and/or soon to be victims. Wright’s predicament of horror resonates as I witness my – our – psychopathic (proverbial) uncle – Uncle Sam, the U.S. government – perpetrate violent crime upon crime against humanity enabled by a maddening, morally mute, over-trusting, under-informed citizenry. I can’t wrap my mind or heart around the lack of outrage and empathy among my leaders and the vast majority of my fellow citizens. The Iraq war was launched illegally. The torture program is against the law. The Geneva Convention was ratified by Congress. Habeas corpus has been in place since 1679. The atrocity of 9/11 apparently justified a “gloves off” bloodlust defiance of the legal and moral pillars of our democracy. All these years since, the mandate for constitutional and moral justice "for all" goes unheeded.

Human rights groups are asking United Nations officials to investigate the case of an Italian citizen and victim of the "extraordinary rendition" programme of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency who is currently being held in a Moroccan prison based on a confession coerced from him through torture. The American Civil Liberties Union and the Geneva-based Alkarama for Human Rights have requested that two U.N. Special Rapporteurs investigate the circumstances of Abou Elkassim Britel's forced disappearance, rendition, detention and torture, and raise his case with the governments of the United States, Morocco, Pakistan and Italy.

"Victims of the 'extraordinary rendition' program detained at Guantánamo and other prisons around the world are being ignored by the U.S. government, whose unlawful program landed them there in the first place," said Steven Watt, staff attorney with the ACLU Human Rights Program. "The U.S. has failed to take responsibility for its most egregious actions, leaving Mr. Britel and countless other victims of the 'extraordinary rendition' program with no choice but to turn to the international community for justice."

"The Obama administration has now fully embraced the Bush administration's shameful effort to immunize torturers and their enablers from any legal consequences for their actions," said Ben Wizner, staff attorney with the ACLU National Security Project, who argued the case for the plaintiffs. "The CIA's rendition and torture program is not a 'state secret;' it's an international scandal. If the Obama administration has its way, no torture victim will ever have his day in court, and future administrations will be free to pursue torture policies without any fear of liability."

The landmark trial of American and Italian spies accused of abducting an Egyptian cleric in Milan will continue, a judge has ruled, rejecting a defence bid to end the proceedings. The ruling was a victory for prosecutors in the first trial to examine the "rendition" process, in which the CIA allegedly abducted suspects abroad and sent them to other countries for harsh interrogation. It benefits two former Italian spy chiefs by upholding a Constitutional Court judgment in March excluding evidence on state secrecy grounds. "The most important thing is the fact that the trial goes on, but it's clear that the court ruling has imposed some surgical cuts," the lead prosecutor, Armando Spataro, said. "We will have to see … which part of the interrogations we will be able to use."

"In what may become a landmark decision, a federal appeals court ruled Tuesday that the 'state secrets privilege'--routinely used by the government to block lawsuits against its officials--can only be used to contest specific evidence, but not to dismiss an entire suit. The ruling...came in connection with a lawsuit against...Jeppesen DataPlan for its role in the government’s 'extraordinary rendition' program during the administration of former President George W. Bush. The suit charges that Jeppesen knowingly participated in the rendition program by providing critical flight planning and logistical support services to aircraft and crews used by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to forcibly 'disappear; the five men to U.S.-run prisons or foreign intelligence agencies overseas where they were interrogated under torture. Jeppesen is a subsidiary of aerospace giant Boeing. The lawsuit was brought by the American Civil Liberties Union."

Today's decision is a major defeat for the Obama DOJ's efforts to preserve for itself the radically expanded secrecy powers invented by the Bush DOJ to shield itself from all judicial scrutiny. Given how Obama recently emphasized how committed he is to defending government secrecy powers in court, it it highly likely the Obama DOJ will attempt to appeal this ruling further -- to a full 9th Circuit panel and/or to the Supreme Court -- but in the meantime, the case will return to the District Court for a document-by-document assessment of what is and is not truly "secret" (and the court today held that a mere decision by the President to classify certain documents is insufficient; the court is required to exercise independent judgment as to whether secrecy is truly warranted).

A federal appeals court rebuffed the Obama administration's assertion of secrecy today and reinstated a lawsuit by five men who say a Bay Area subsidiary of Boeing Co. helped the CIA fly them to foreign countries to be tortured. A lawyer from President Obama's Justice Department argued to the court in February that the issues surrounding the "extraordinary rendition," program, including government-sanctioned interrogation methods and the company's alleged connection to the CIA, were so sensitive that the very existence of the suit threatened national security. According to the government's theory, the judiciary should effectively cordon off all secret government actions from judicial scrutiny, immunizing the CIA and its partners from the demands and limits of the law," Judge Michael Hawkins said in the 3-0 ruling. "As the founders of this nation knew well, arbitrary imprisonment and torture under any circumstances is a 'gross and notorious ... act of despotism,' " Hawkins said, citing language from a 2004 Supreme Court decision.

Key Civil Liberties Bill Would Protect National Security While Ensuring Independent Judicial Review. Congressmembers Jerrold Nadler (NY-08), Chair of the Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, Thomas Petri (WI-6), House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers, Jr. (MI-14), Bill Delahunt (MA-10) and Zoe Lofgren (CA-16) today reintroduced legislation that would ensure meaningful judicial determination of the state secrets privilege. The bi-partisan State Secret Protection Act of 2009 would curb abuse of the privilege while providing protection for valid state secrets. “The Administration’s decision this week to adopt its predecessor’s argument that the state secret privilege requires the outright dismissal of a case challenging rendition to torture was a step in the wrong direction and a reminder that legislation is required to ensure meaningful review of the state secret privilege,” said Rep. Nadler. “This important bill recognizes that protecting sensitive information is an important responsibility for any administration and requires that courts protect legitimate state secrets while preventing the premature and sweeping dismissal of entire cases.

A Bush-era legal memo gives new detail on how the administration tiptoed around laws and treaties to justify presidential power to transfer prisoners captured in the war on terror to countries where they might be tortured. The March 13, 2002, memo by Jay S. Bybee, then assistant attorney general in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, said the president has an unfettered right to transfer prisoners captured in the war on terror to governments around the world without regard for whether they would be tortured there.