The Moral Permissibility of Rendition - Essay Example

Renditions are swifter, more secretive, and more uncomplicated than legally permissible extraditions, which can be prolonged, indecisive, and politically laden (Garcia, 2010). President Bush, at a briefing in April 2005, was grilled about renditions and offered the following response (Garcia, 2010, 5): “We operate within the law and we send people to countries where they say they’re not going to torture the people.” Nevertheless, the reality is that the United States has repeatedly transported alleged terrorists to countries, such as Syria, Pakistan, Jordan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia where charges of torture have been widespread.

Many intelligence officers are very much knowledgeable of this and are aware of the decadent aspect of renditions but remain steadfast to the belief that these are a major instrument in the fight against terrorism (Olson, 2007). A contributory issue is whether it is moral to allow and to exploit intelligence recognized or thought of having been extracted by an open state through torture. Or, more importantly, are renditions morally permissible? A legal consultant to the British administration stated that it was “not illegal to obtain and to use intelligence acquired by torture” (Olson, 2007, 70). . In truth, it is questionable that it is the presence of an idealistic unconditional prohibition on torture that has pushed torture “beneath the radar screen of accountability, (Steiner, Alston, & Goodman, 2008, 250),” and that license to perform torture in extremely rare cases would, actually, discourage its use due to the raised degree of accountability.

The unconditional ban on torture is undoubtedly one of the reasons that the United States exercises rendition, which comprises arresting, incarcerating, transferring, and interrogating alleged terrorists in countries where they cannot gain themselves the standard ban that work with regard to inhumane practices of interrogation (Steiner et al., 2008). The procedure of rendition is intolerable because it is completely unfettered, not because it is morally reprehensible. The rationale is moral necessity: critical information has to be obtained from offenders themselves.

But the unconditional legal ban on torture hampers free and well thought-out debate on this issue. Above all, there is no proof that legalizing rendition will result in abuse of other rights where the requirements for the process are precisely defined. Moral arguments against rendition merely acquire some grip where there is proof that a process identical to that being suggested has reached outside its projected range of use after the process was legalized (Rosenbaum, 2005). According to Garcia (2010), the relevant aspects of the moral arguments for rendition are (1) the rationale for the process is benevolence; (2) it requires forfeiting a lesser motive of a particular individual to bestow a higher gain on another; (3) it is practically definite that the suspect holds the critical information; and (4)