And it’s ambiguous whether what Clinton’s policy allowed violated the UN Convention of Torture

http://www.unhchr.ch/html/menu3/b/h_cat39.htm

http://www.law.harvard.edu/stu…..rodt.shtml

Under the Clinton administration, most extraordinary renditions appeared to be subject to strict procedures. First, the receiving country had to have an outstanding arrest warrant for the person.[11] Second, each extraordinary rendition was subject to extensive administrative scrutiny before it was approved by senior government officials.[12] Third, the local government was notified.[13]
Further, the CIA was required to obtain an assurance from the receiving government that the individual would not be ill-treated.[14]

I think that these limitations were, in fact, done with an eye on the Human Rights Convention against Torture and an eye on US Law In 1998, Congress passed legislation declaring that it is “the policy of the United States not to expel, extradite, or otherwise effect the involuntary return of any person to a country in which there are substantial grounds for believing the person would be in danger of being subjected to torture, regardless of whether the person is physically present in the United States.”

It is that last point that likely would make any prosecution under the Human Rights Charter difficult, at best. If there were assurances that the individuals were not to be tortured and only received legal punishments, then the issue may be irresolvable. The receiving country violated its agreement. BUT, especially if the Clinton administration subsequently learned that these individuals were being tortured, and did not stop the renditions to Egypt, then it was certainly immoral…and perhaps would cross over to illegal under international law. But if reports of the torture of these individuals occurred after Clinton left office, or if the CIA suspended renditions to Egypt after they became known, then it would probably be in compliance. And the UN Charter on this issue really has no enforcement power over individuals. It can issue a condemnation of the States involved…and insist that renditions cease to a state its “Committee on Torture” declares as violating the policies upon renditioned prisoners.

Even Mayer’s article states

The Administration appears to be relying on a very fine reading of an imprecise clause in the United Nations Convention Against Torture (which the U.S. ratified in 1994), requiring “substantial grounds for believing” that a detainee will be tortured abroad. Martin Lederman, a lawyer who left the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel in 2002, after eight years, says, “The Convention only applies when you know a suspect is more likely than not to be tortured, but what if you kind of know? That’s not enough.

Furthermore, I don’t think that it would constitute a “war crime”, since there wasn’t a war going on. Individuals were not captured on the battlefield, or simply picked up by warlords, then renditioned because of rumor or nationality. The renditions in Afghanistan and Iraq would pose very different issues (following the Geneva Conventions), than captures made by host countries at peace (as the Albanian or Croatian cases).

The 9/11 Commission did state that there were about 80 authorizations for rendition (some unsuccessful, such as the effort to send bin Laden from Sudan to Saudi Arabia) that occurred before September 11, 2001. Unfortunately it didn’t specify how many of these were during the Clinton era vs. the terms of Bush Sr. or Dubya. But that would mean that there were perhaps about 6-7 cases a year back through 1988.

It also didn’t specify how many were to foreign nations (such as the Achille Lauro rendition) vs. to the United States ( a la Noriega, the killer of DEA agent Kiki Camanera, several of those involved in the East African Embassy bombings, etc.).

And Scheure’s comments about the following probably doesn’t strictly apply to the Clinton era, although it might

The U.S. began rendering terror suspects to other countries, but the most common destination remained Egypt. The partnership between the American and the Egyptian intelligence services was extraordinarily close: the Americans could give the Egyptian interrogators questions they wanted put to the detainees in the morning, Scheuer said, and get answers by the evening. The Americans asked to question suspects directly themselves, but, Scheuer said, the Egyptians refused. “We were never in the same room at the same time.”
Scheuer claimed that “there was a legal process” undergirding these early renditions. Every suspect who was apprehended, he said, had been convicted in absentia. Before a suspect was captured, a dossier was prepared containing the equivalent of a rap sheet. The C.I.A.’s legal counsel signed off on every proposed operation. Scheuer said that this system prevented innocent people from being subjected to rendition. “Langley would never let us proceed unless there was substance,” he said. Moreover, Scheuer emphasized, renditions were pursued out of expedience—“not out of thinking it was the best policy.”

Indeed, the whole point of the Mayer article, as I read it, was that the post-9/11 rendition program, though originating in years earlier (and we must go back to Reagan, at least, on this), has expanded vastly in the Bush-Cheney era to a program where the United States tortures, has huge camps of renditioned individuals that lie outside of any sovereign legal system [Gitmo, CIA camps in Eastern Europe], where individuals are sent to places where they have committed no crime and are not nationals within, including those intended to NEVER be dealt with in the legal systems of either the US or the country of imprisonment. And rather than a few individuals the numbers appear to be in the thousands of cases.

Not that the state didn’t need to spend a lot more on education; but I still find it humorous that the issue that hurts the Huckster most with the check-writing Repubs is one that was of his own making.