"Black Masked Ninjas" and Extraordinary Rendition

Amnesty International has just released a report on U.S. rendition practices after 9/11 and the story of three Yemeni men who "disappeared" in CIA custody for over 18 months. In particular, the report details the systematic use of an international and secret prison system, in which American operatives kidnap supposed "terrorists" and fly them to "black sites" across the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and elsewhere. These sites are hidden detention centers where released prisoners claim to have been tortured while in custody. According to Amnesty, the three Yemeni men were seized in 2003 and transported to a variety of locations, where they were interrogated by "black-masked ninja" U.S. operatives, who took great caution to avoid disclosing their identities or where they were (such as by removing labels from food and clothing).

The American creation of a global prison system, with an unknown numbers of individuals "disappeared," is a truly shocking feature of the war on terror. Yet, what's perhaps most disturbing about it is the way in which U.S. practices are premised on a completely inappropriate paradigm. In essence, American officials seem to imagine that the U.S. is facing a coherent guerrilla movement, not unlike those in Latin America and Southeast Asia during the Cold War. On their view, rather than nationally oriented actors, Islamic extremists are guerrillas oriented toward an global battlefield. The U.S. justifies mass detentions across the globe and the use of coercive interrogation at secret sites as necessary means of fighting this global guerrilla movement. The problem of course is obvious. We are simply not confronted by anything that resembles a guerrilla movement -- either in ideological, political, or structural coherence. Islamic extremism, in its many local permutations, is not an internationalized version of the Viet Cong. The tools of counterinsurgency are especially inappropriate -- for starters because there is no real political machinery to smash (not that we should be in the business of smashing guerilla movements anyhow).

As a result, the Administration finds itself detaining mostly innocent individuals, with little material or even ideological tie to the supposed "enemy." And of course, for Bush and company, the harder it is to find the "terrorists" the more devious and cunning they must be. Yet, the clear reason why secret detentions and illegal kidnappings have done little to destroy the fundamentalist threat is because the threat itself is marginal. Even before raising the legality of international prisons or the moral incoherence of promoting democracy through state violence, we can ask a more basic question. Is there an actual crisis that could vaguely justify the massive security apparatus in operation today? Since the answer is no, the U.S. in essence has let loose a wave of violence to fight an enemy that barely exists.