David Ignatius in today's Washington Post penned an article entitled
`Rendition' Realities where he partially explains why rendition is more successful than torture.
He starts by explaining what rendition is:
Rendition is the CIA's antiseptic term for its practice of sending captured terrorist suspects to other countries for interrogation. Because some of those countries torture prisoners -- and because some of the suspected terrorists "rendered" by the CIA say they were in fact tortured -- the debate has tended to lump rendition and torture together. The implication is that the CIA is sending people to Egypt, Jordan or other Middle Eastern countries because they can be tortured there and coerced into providing information they wouldn't give up otherwise.
He then goes on to explain how torture doesn't really work.
The problem with this argument is that it assumes that the CIA believes that torture works. But in 30 years of writing about intelligence, I've never encountered a spook who didn't realize that torture is usually counterproductive. Professional intelligence officers know that prisoners will confess to anything under intense pain. Information obtained through torture thus tends to be unreliable, in addition to being immoral.
He then partially explains why rendition is successful
What's gained by transferring a prisoner to his home country for interrogation is emotional leverage, according to Arab and American intelligence chiefs. A hardened al Qaeda member often can't be physically coerced into giving up information, no matter how nasty the interrogator. But he may do so if confronted by, say, his mother, father, brother or sister. That family contact is possible if he's near home; it's impossible if he's in an orange jump suit and warehoused at Guantanamo Bay.
But he seems to have omitted the real reason that it is so effective. The torturers are not working on the prisoner, they are almost certainly torturing his mother, father, brother, sister or child in front of him.
I have searched the diaries fairly thoroughly and have found no mention of the 60 Minutes piece on rendition. It has further details of the use of aircraft to render people and accounts of people who were mistakenly rendered