Bush Extends Extraordinary Rendition to Somalia

Many of these prisoners have been identified, including 17 Kenyans and 20 Ethiopians. There are three Americans, including one who has been taken back to this country to face charges. There are people from 21 countries. So, that means that the Ethiopian government has gone one up from the Bush administration -- they have rendered their own citizens for torture. Does this mean that we are in increasing danger of rendition if Bush continues to jump the shark?

Given past experiences, I suggest that a lot of these prisoners were turned in by bounty hunters anxious for the huge rewards that were promised by the Ethiopians. This would not be surprising given that the Bush administration promised multimillion dollar rewards for terrorist arrests and bounty hunters grabbed anyone that they could find so that they could reap the profits.

And given the complete lack of evidence that is accompanying these phony arrests, it would not be surprising that most of them had nothing to do with terrorism or that they merely had an incidental role. Given Guantanamo, the fact of the matter is that the fact that the government cannot bring most of these people to trial after so many years means that they never had the case against these people in the first place. Given that, I suggest that the Ethiopian government does not have any case against these people, either.

The Bush administration has described Kenya and Ethiopia as "partners in terrorism," which suggests that they could be the ones holding a lot of the prisoners that the CIA kidnapped as part of their own rendition program.

"I don't know if there has been a country in the world that has exported its people like this," said Maina Kiai, the chairman of the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights. "If the Kenyan government cannot use its laws and processes . . .how do we say we are a strong state?"

Diplomats from Great Britain, Sweden and other countries intervened in Ethiopia to have prisoners from their countries released. Activists said they'd tracked the whereabouts of the remaining prisoners through interviews with those who'd been discharged, as well as with security officials in Kenya and Ethiopia.

So, the fact that diplomats intervened to have these people released suggests that there is no evidence against a lot of these people. And this suggests another dynamic at work here -- the fact that British citizens were caught up in the sweep suggests that beneath the surface, even though Gordon Brown is saying all the "right things" as far as the Bush administration is concerned, that relations between the two countries are souring. Brown said at his first PMQ that the UK has already reduced their troops from 40,000 to 5,000, with more withdrawals planned "as the security situation improves." And Tony Blair politely told Bush to fuck off when Iran captured their sailors and has ruled out attacks on Iran.

There are two dynamics at work here. The first is blowback -- the fact of the matter is that our alliance with Ethiopia, far from stopping the terrorists, is spawning them. It is spawning retribution in the UK, although thanks to the professionalism of their police force and the vigilance of their people, attacks there were thankfully foiled. The second is the loss of respect from our allies. At one point, we were really close to the UK as allies. Even before Bush took office, it was at the point where Conservative Opposition Leader William Hague derisively called Blair "America's Poodle." So, while we are still close allies with the UK on the surface, the cracks between the two allies are starting to show.

And we see typical Bush administration fingerprints in this operation, including the phony arrest of Abdul Malik, who was supposedly involved in a 2002 bombing in Kenya. But the fact of the matter is that given the fact that he was taken to Guantanamo, where he will presumably be tortured, the likelyhood that the US will obtain any reliable evidence from him is slim to none.