ABSTRACT
On February 17, 2003, forty-two-year-old Moustafa Hassan Nasr, commonly known as Abu Omar, an imam from Egypt, was allegedly kidnapped by American and Italian officials and flown from Italy through Germany to Egypt, where he was subjected to a brutal regime of torture. When we first discussed the Omar case in 2006, we viewed it as an unusual action by agents of the US government (DiMento and Geis 2006). However, what happened to Abu Omar was the commonplace fate of many people whom US agents or accomplices transported to overseas sites so that their interrogations would not be associated with American policy. Legal judgments of this practice, known as “extraordinary rendition” and sometimes labeled as “torture by proxy,” have reached varying conclusions. For our part, we regard extraordinary rendition as immoral and as a violation of both American and international law. In this chapter, we address legal, policy, and moral issues bearing on extraordinary rendition and emphasize that there is no evidence that the practice produces useful intelligence and that even if it were to do so, the means being used to that end are intolerable. We also believe that while some might seek to justify the policy in jurisprudential terms, it is a legally highly suspect and morally reprehensible procedure that brings discredit and shame upon the United States.
