The Film "Rendition"

Here is the trailer for the film Rendition.

This is about the insane US policy of rendition started by Bush that grabbed some terrorist, maybe, but certainly grabbed a lot of innocent men and shipped them off to secret CIA prisons around the world for torture and passed them on to favoured Middle East regimes for more intensive torture.

From a 2007 article by the Voice of America:

Daniel Benjamin, of The Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. says rendition harms U.S. credibility.

"The issues of rendition and torture have become intertwined in the public imagination in our nation and in the minds of our friends abroad," he said. "Abuses that have been committed in the name of the Global War on Terror trouble the conscience of those who care about America's reputation and those who have been proud of our nation's role as a champion of the rule of law."

Frederick Hitz of the Center for National Security Law at the University of Virginia, says rendition should be illegal.

"I view it much as I do the executive order prohibition on political assassination," he said. "We should not be in the business of coercive torturous interrogations, directly or indirectly."

Another witness, David Cole of Georgetown University's Law Center suggested that Congress should call for an independent investigation of the Bush administration's rendition policy.

This article mentions a real human being, the Canadian Maher Arar, who was snatched off a plane transiting through the US between Tunisia and Canada. After many years Maher Arar got public hearings in Canada to expose the RCMP and CSIS involvement in his mistreatment, he got an official apology from the government, and he got an cash settlement from the government. What he didn't get back was the lost years, the pain, and memories of the cruelties he underwent "by mistake".

Of course, the US refuses to this very day, to take responsibility for the wrongs it did. It refuses to acknowledge the facts. It refuses to pay any restitution. It refuses to give back the good name of these people it has so irreparably harmed. It refuses to give justice to its victims... just another cruel torture added to those already meted out by the government of the people of the United States.

The cruel joke of the heinous US policy is that an innocent person like Maher Arar continues to be harrassed and mistreated by the us as the Voice of America article makes clear:

Testifying by video link from Canada, because he remains barred from the United States, Arar condemned what he calls the immoral practice of rendition.

"Let me be clear, I am not a terrorist, I am not a member of al-Qaida or any other terrorist group," he said. "I am a father, a husband, and an engineer. I am also a victim of the immoral practice of rendition."

U.S. lawmakers offered Arar apologies and regrets, and voiced disappointment that the U.S. government has not done the same.

But "regrets" given informally are not justice. There has been no justice for Maher Arar or any of the other innocent victims of this cruel, inhumane, unjust, vicious, an illegal US policy started under Bush (and supposedly ended under Obama, but who knows, it may still continue but be more "efficiently" executed in the sense that any innocents are never seen or heard from again so any "mistakes" are never known).

The film Rendition gives the "Hollywood view" of this crime. It ends with the "good American official" who realizes that this one case was wrong and who rights end so that the poor guy can get home to his loving wife and kids. In the real world, some of these injustices end in judicial murder. Nobody gets to go home. The wife and kids are left in limbo never even knowing that a judicial crime was committed against them. In other cases, the unfortunate innocent does finally get home, but as a broken man who may not be a gibbering fool, but is psychologically devastated and will never get his previous life back. In the real world, the bureaucrats under Clinton, Bush, and Obama (sure Obama put an executive order out to stop the "torture" but I don't believe it has ended, I think they have simply gone into blacker "black ops" to make it hard for the world to find out). Americans don't realize that something like 2% of the federal budget goes into "secret" operations which are effectively beyond the control of the legislators and even the President. The US is a rogue state. I have no explicit "proof" of this other than that history has shown that the US has gone down this path of illegality for many, many decades.

Somebody who has a very dark view of this black ops & black budget side of the US is Catherine Austin Fitts who said the following in an interview:

What we do know is that under the laws of the Constitution, which say money cannot be spent unless it is appropriated. It is essentially a violation of the Constitution to do that, with one exception. And this is where the black budget comes up. There are provisions under the National Security Act of 1947 and the CIA Act of 1949 for military and military intelligence to crawl money from outside of different agencies’ budgets, and spend it on non-transparent purposes. That’s sometimes why it’s called the “black budget”.

And what I found out both as Assistant Secretary of Housing, and then what I found with my company … and with the group of honest guys kicked out of HUD, was you had an agency whose legal purpose and political purpose was to help finance the mortgage markets, whose mortgage insurance programs were increasingly caught up in financing black budget operations. And this is very much tied to what’s going on in the mortgage markets.

She's gone a little wacky from my viewpoint, but her concern about how much the US has gone rogue is a legitimate concern and is something that voters have no way of knowing because all of this is "secret" and can't and won't be told so voters have no way of knowing what "their government" is doing on their behalf.