Historical Dictionary of Terrorism Third Edition

RENDITION • 585agents to arrest Carlos and return him to France for trial without theformal legal extradition procedure. The Federal Bureau of Investigation(FBI) used the Hostage-Taking Act of 1984 to arrest FawazYounis, a suspected hijacker, in September 1987 but did so withoutrelying on the cooperation of Lebanese authorities. Younis was luredout to a yacht off the Lebanese coast, where he was arrested by FBIagents and then transported to a U.S. naval vessel and brought backto the United States for trial.Cases of rendition in which the country seeking the suspect assertsextraterritorial jurisdiction and bypasses reliance on local authoritiesare controversial because they violate the territorial sovereignty ofthe nation from which the suspect is taken and are probably onlyjustifiable where the local government has given sanctuary to terroristsor else has been incapable of asserting effective authority over itsterritory. Most cases of rendition involve the extradition process orsome other form of cooperation with the local authorities.Since the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks of September11, 2001, the United States has also employed “extremerendition” or “extraordinary rendition” as a means of obtaining informationfrom captured enemy combatants. This means either sending,or threatening to send, a captured combatant to a nation allied withthe United States employing allied nationals to conduct interrogationusing means not ordinarily permitted under U.S. civil and militarycodes of justice.Cases of extreme rendition have been protested by human rightsactivists and civil libertarians, who claim this practice violates bothdue process under the U.S. Constitution as well as provisions of theUnited Nations Convention Against Torture (UNCAT). The renditionin 2002 of a Canadian Muslim suspect, Maher Arar, to Syria forinterrogation created a political crisis in Italy due to the fact that theplane carrying Arar had made a 37-minute stopover in Rome, leadingto the resignation on 21 February 2007 of Prime Minister RomanoProdi. Controversy within Canada over the role of the Royal CanadianMounted Police (RCMP) in handing over files on Arar to U.S.officials led to the resignation of RCMP chief Giuliano Zaccardellion 6 December 2006. On 9 October 2007 the U.S. Supreme Courtrefused to hear the appeal of Khaled al-Masri, a German citizen whohad been kidnapped by the Central Intelligence Agency and sent toan interrogation center in Afghanistan.