A few weeks ago I told you that the practice of rendition goes back a long way. In fact it was perfected during the Clinton administration (ask Leon Panetta). There was talk that Obama would end the practice, yet I told you that this would be embarrassing because his own VP – Joe Biden is well familiar with the practice having been privy to it’s use for a long time.

So?

“Reporting from Washington — The CIA’s secret prisons are being shuttered. Harsh interrogation techniques are off-limits. And Guantanamo Bay will eventually go back to being a wind-swept naval base on the southeastern corner of Cuba.

But even while dismantling these programs, President Obama left intact an equally controversial counter-terrorism tool.

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.

Current and former U.S. intelligence officials said that the rendition program might be poised to play an expanded role going forward because it was the main remaining mechanism — aside from Predator missile strikes — for taking suspected terrorists off the street.

The rendition program became a source of embarrassment for the CIA, and a target of international scorn, as details emerged in recent years of botched captures, mistaken identities and allegations that prisoners were turned over to countries where they were tortured.

The European Parliament condemned renditions as “an illegal instrument used by the United States.” Prisoners swept up in the program have sued the CIA as well as a Boeing Co. subsidiary accused of working with the agency on dozens of rendition flights.

But the Obama administration appears to have determined that the rendition program was one component of the Bush administration’s war on terrorism that it could not afford to discard.”

Misreporting on a terminal degree. Again George Bush didn’t begin the practice, it had been in place for more than 25 years as a tool of the agency. Secondly the so-called “outraged” Europeans practice it as well. I know for a fact that the German Federal Intelligence Service used it in 1988 with a member of the Red Brigades, wanted for bombings in Frankfurt.

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