Assignment 3 international relations - Essay Example

Rendition program, an effective counter-terrorism program designed by US government, has been a breakthrough taken to enforce human rights and enhance a safer-political and economic life to its people. This piece of research paper highlights the meaning, rationale and significances of rendition program. This paper presents an analysis of goals and specific objectives of the rendition program and detail how this program has become a threat to people as they are unable to identify a list of human rights that are to be protected.

Rendition Program Rendition or extraordinary rendition program refers to the apprehension and extra-judicial transfer of an individual, who has been suspect of terrorism, from one country to another. Hastedt and Guerrier (2010) described the legal perspective and meaning of Rendition Program. It is a practice of handling over an individual or group to another authority. Rendition has been associated with Central Intelligence Agency’s abduction of those who have been suspected of being involved in terrorism and handling them over to foreign intelligence agencies where they will be held interrogative (p. 654). United States have allegedly transferred thousands of suspected terrorists to countries that are very known to use quite harsh interrogation and cross-checking, often with torturing.

This is described as ‘Torture by proxy’. Concept of rendition is not very new, but it has been traced back to early 1980s when rendition was used to arrest the hijackers of the Achille Lauro, in a way that agents of country were abducting a person suspected of crimes in foreign country and by transporting him to another country (Henner, 2009, p. 407). In 1995, US President Bill Clinton authorized, by a presidential decision directive, the arresting of terrorists in foreign countries. The directive clearly stated that if US did not receive adequate cooperation from a state that harbored a terrorist whose extradition we were seeking, the US would be rightful to take appropriate measures to induce cooperation (Henner, 2009, p. 408). According to this directive, Central Intelligence Agency began detaining of individuals in foreign countries to be tortured or held indefinitely without any legal or rightful recourse.

CIA began to detain such individuals in foreign countries for mere torturing and never for trialing them. The above mentioned rendition program, approved by Bill Clinton in 1995, targeted returning suspected Islamic Terrorists to foreign countries where they are demanded for criminal execution and torture as well. CIA has assured that suspects won’t be tortured, in order to be compliant with International Convention Against Torture, and the main purpose behind it, as CIA claimed, was to disrupt terrorist attacks and not to gather information from them (Hastedt and Guerrier, 2010, p. 654). US had mainly two concerns after the incident of 9/11 attack.

What to do with high-ranking Al-Qaeda terrorists and to catch them to interrogate them are these two major concerns.