More on Extraordinary Rendition

David Ignatius of THE WASHINGTON POST wrote, in 2005:

Before you make an easy judgment about rendition, you have to answer the disturbing question put to me by a former CIA official: Suppose the FBI had captured Mohamed Atta before Sept. 11, 2001. Under U.S. legal rules at the time, the man who plotted the airplane suicide attacks probably could not have been held or interrogated in the United States. Would it have made sense to "render" Atta to a place where he could have been interrogated in a way that might have prevented Sept. 11? That's not a simple question for me to answer, even as I share the conviction that torture is always and everywhere wrong.

NOTE: According to other sources, this is not true. Atta could have been rendered to "a place where he could have been interrogated in a way that might have prevented Sept. 11"

However, Mr. Ignatius also points out that most, if not all, interrogators recognize that torture does not work. Their reasoning for use of rendition is "emotional leverage," using the person's homeland, family to influence...