Extraordinary Hearing on Extraordinary Rendition
The House Foreign Affairs Committee held a hearing last April on the policy of “extraordinary rendition,” referring to the seizure of suspected terrorists and their transfer to a foreign country for detention and interrogation.
The record of the hearing, which has just been published (pdf), features the volatile Michael Scheuer, a former CIA official involved in the rendition program. It is exceptionally nasty and occasionally funny.
Mr. Scheuer, veering from outrageous to absurd and back again, attacked John McCain, the Washington Post’s Dana Priest and quite a few others in remarkably offensive terms.
See “Extraordinary Rendition in U.S. Counterterrorism Policy: The Impact on Transatlantic Relations,” House Foreign Affairs Committee, April 17, 2007.
“Oftentimes,” Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA) delicately observed, “people aspire to a higher percentage of their thoughts going unspoken than this hearing has demonstrated.”
Soft law was never meant to be a permanent solution. Treating it as one, and letting the sandcastle stand in for the skyscraper indefinitely, is how we end up with a decade of voluntary commitments and no enforceable accountability to show for it.
FAS has partnered with ICLEI USA to launch the CRI Local Advisory Council.
We sat down with Dr. Max Moritz and Chief Rob Hazard to discuss how communities use time, money, and data to reduce the risk that wildfires pose.
The Colorado Future Systems Policy Sprint is FAS’s first state-level policy sprint. Policy sprints are key incubators for “policy entrepreneurship,” FAS’s method for equipping individuals with strong ideas with the technical assistance to develop policy.