Daniel Pines, an assistant general counsel at the CIA, has asserted in a law journal that the abduction of terrorism suspects abroad is legal under U.S. law, even when the suspect is turned over to countries notorious for torture. “There are virtually no legal restrictions on these types of operations,” Pines asserts in the current edition of the Loyola University Chicago Law Journal.
“Indeed, U.S. law does not even preclude the United States from rendering individuals to a third country in instances where the third country may subject the rendered individual to torture. The only restrictions that do exist under U.S. law preclude U.S. officials from themselves torturing or inflicting cruel and unusual punishment on individuals during rendition operations, or rendering individuals from a place of actual armed conflict or occupation -- all of which prove to be narrow limitations indeed,” Pines writes.
Pines said he was expressing his own views in the article, and that “nothing in the contents should be construed as asserting or implying U.S. Government authentication of information or CIA endorsement of the author’s views.”
But his rank as a senior legal official at the spy agency is bound to attract widespread notice.
Asked for comment, the American Civil Liberties Union was predictably scornful of Pines’s assertions.
“The article does not even address the most extreme form of rendition carried out under the Bush administration: renditions to U.S.-run ‘black-site’ prisons, where Americans, not foreign intelligence services, were the jailers and the torturers,” Ben Wizner, litigation director of the ACLU’s National Security Project, told SpyTalk.
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