Karen’s Opinion

Hmmm. I am thinking. We just watched the movie, Rendition. I have always said that I feel nervous when I travel in a foreign country. I have joked that I was afraid I would be arrested for stepping on a crack in the sidewalk. I would be thrown in jail and no one would ever find me. I thought I was kidding.

Rendition is explained by Wikipedia as:

Extraordinary rendition and irregular rendition are terms used to describe the apprehension and extrajudicial transfer of a person from one state to another, and the term torture by proxy is used by some critics to describe situations in which the U.S. has purportedly transferred suspected terrorists to countries known to employ harsh interrogation techniques that may rise to the level of torture. It has been alleged that torture has been employed with the knowledge or acquiescence of the United States, although United States Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice stated in an April 2006 radio interview that the United States does not transfer people to places where it is known they will be tortured.

The US program has raised a series of moral, judicial, and political allegations, prompting several official European Union investigations. A June 2006 report from the Council of Europe estimated 100 people had been kidnapped by the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) on EU territory and rendered to other countries, often after having transited through secret detention centers (”black sites”) used by the CIA in cooperation with other governments. According to the European Parliament report of February 2007, the CIA has conducted 1,245 flights, many of them to destinations where suspects could face torture, in violation of article 3 of the United Nations Convention Against Torture. A large majority of the European Union Parliament endorsed the report’s conclusion that many member states tolerated illegal actions of the CIA and criticized several European governments and intelligence agencies for their unwillingness to cooperate with the investigation

The movie we just watched was about a man who was taken away like that. He was tortured because of what the authorities thought he “might” have done. Very scary stuff. His wife didn’t know what happened to him and could find no one to help her. What a frustrating situation. Frightful.

The movie was hard to follow and I still do not know how some things were tied together. It could have been better. They could have dwelled on the wife’s attempt to find her husband. They could have dealt with why, of all the people in South Africa, this businessman was chosen as a suspect. Oh yeah, we fast forwarded through the torture scenes.