AT exactly 5 p.m. on March 13, 2007, just as I was preparing to leave my cubicle in Washington for the day, I got a phone call from the journalist Jonathan Landay of McClatchy Newspapers. To this day, I remember his exact words.
“One of your congressman’s constituents is being held in an Ethiopian intelligence service prison, and I think your former employer is neck-deep in this.”
The congressman was Rush Holt, then a Democratic representative from New Jersey, for whom I worked for 10 years starting in 2004. The constituent was Amir Mohamed Meshal of Tinton Falls, N.J., who alleges that he was illegally taken to Ethiopia, where he was threatened with torture by American officials. My “former employer” was the Central Intelligence Agency, but it soon became apparent that the agency “neck-deep in this” was the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Eight years after Mr. Meshal’s rendition, his case ended up before a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. The questions hanging over the proceeding were: can the United States government allow, or even facilitate, the rendition of an American citizen to another country for interrogation? And can United States officials themselves conduct rendition and interrogations of American citizens, including threats of torture, on foreign soil?
According to a decision handed down last week, the answers appear to be yes. If this decision stands, it will mean that an American citizen overseas who is unlawfully targeted by the United States government for rendition, interrogation and detention with the help of a local government will have no form of redress in the courts.
Mr. Landay’s 2007 phone call triggered Representative Holt’s involvement — and thus mine — in Mr. Meshal’s case. For months, I was on the phone daily or conversing via email with representatives of the F.B.I. and the State Department, trying to piece together how he ended up being held in a jail cell in Ethiopia.
Mr. Meshal had originally traveled to Egypt in 2005 to visit family members, but subsequently went to Somalia, ostensibly to provide humanitarian aid to what was then known as the Islamic Courts Union, the Islamist rebels opposed to the existing pro-United States Somali government. After the Ethiopian government helped drive the I.C.U. into retreat, Mr. Meshal was caught up in a wave of refugees who fled to neighboring Kenya, and was detained by Kenyan authorities in early January 2007.
After being interrogated by F.B.I. agents in Kenya, Mr. Meshal was rendered by Kenyan authorities back to Somalia, and then handed to soldiers who took him to Ethiopia, a country he had never visited. At the time, State Department officials in Kenya formally protested the Kenyan government’s rendition action.
However, F.B.I. agents were able to almost immediately gain access to Mr. Meshal in Ethiopia. In my mind, that raised the very real prospect that either the F.B.I. or another element of the United States intelligence community asked its Kenyan counterparts to ship Mr. Meshal to Ethiopia for further questioning.
Read more: How the F.B.I. Can Detain, Render and Threaten Without Risk
Source: nytimes.com