When asked whether extraordinary renditions will continue, Panetta answers without hestitation: ‘No.’

Last week, the LA Times published a story asserting that President Obama “left intact” the CIA’s authority to carry out extraordinary renditions. (The unfounded claim was thoroughly debunked.) At his confirmation hearing before the Senate Intelligence Committee today, Leon Panetta, Obama’s pick to head the CIA, declared decisively that the CIA would not carry out extraordinary renditions:

SEN. DIANNE FEINSTEIN (D-CA): Will the CIA continue the practice of extraordinary rendition by which the government will transfer a detainee to either a foreign government or a black site for the purpose of long-term detention and interrogation, as opposed to for law enforcement purposes?

PANETTA: No we will not.

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Obama has been disappointing in many areas, foreign policy and economic policy to name a couple. But I guess he deserves some props for this. His nominee actually talking about the rule of law as if it meant something is a nice change. I guess we'll have to see if it is only talk. Tom

The confusion over renditions

By Richard Clarke January 29, 2009

PRESIDENT OBAMA'S order to close the Guantanamo prison provoked comments from the right about the risks of bringing terrorist prisoners to the United States. His order banning torture, but not outlawing "extraordinary renditions," caused some on the left to complain. Both groups of critics, though, either overlook relevant parts of recent history or simply get that history wrong.

Before George W. Bush, there was no real question about what the United States should do with people who broke American anti-terror laws. It did not matter whether they were arrested in the United States or overseas. In the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, for example, one suspect, Muhammad Salameh, was caught in New Jersey. Another, Ramzi Yousef, was caught in Pakistan. Upon arrest, both were given their Miranda rights, arraigned before a US magistrate, given a free lawyer appointed by the court, tried and convicted before a jury, and sentenced to the "Supermax" prison in Florence, Colo.

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This all seems kind of sensible. The kind of sensible that has been absent for 8 years. Tom