ICE Is Planning Mass Extraordinary Renditions

Edited by Sam Thielman

AT THE START of this newsletter nearly four years ago, I wrote about how what is widely presumed to be the largest part of the post-9/11 CIA torture program has simply vanished from the historical record. That's the part where the CIA didn't do its own torture, but instead sent people it kidnapped off the streets to countries like Bashar al-Assad's Syria or Moammar Qaddafi's Libya, where their security apparats would do the dirty work. In Italy there was a major court case after the CIA snatched a man known as Abu Omar off the streets of Milan for torture. But in the United States, not even the Senate intelligence committee's torture investigation was able to access agency files on the practice known as extraordinary rendition. 

Many of us who track the War on Terror have spent literal decades warning that without accountability for these atrocities, they will recur and intensify. It's one of the main points of REIGN OF TERROR. And now, extraordinary rendition, albeit without the name, is under contemplation by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), with a crucial assist by the Supreme Court. More than a decade after the CIA got away with it, ICE will perform mass extraordinary renditions at scale. 

ICE is no stranger to extraordinary rendition. The Venezuelans in the Salvadoran prison CECOT were all victims of extraordinary rendition—the term denotes officials of one country sending people who are citizens of a different country to a third country, where they are not citizens, for detention that operates outside a legal process for their disposition. Separately, in violation of a court order, the Trump administration flew eight people from various countries to the giant military base in Djibouti, en route to South Sudan. In what I think can be understood as a capitulation to the threats of habeas corpus suspension from Stephen Miller—though I hardly discount the prospect that Miller was knocking on an open door—the Supreme Court in June blessed the practice. 

CNN, when writing up the court decision, didn't use the term "extraordinary rendition." Instead, its reporters referred to Trump "deporting migrants to countries other than their homeland," as if there was no recent and highly relevant precedent for the practice. The eight men, from Sudan, Laos, Myanmar, Cuba and Vietnam, arrived in South Sudan a week ago Friday. [Also that’s not what the word “deporting” means!—Sam]

On Saturday evening, the Washington Post revealed that ICE is set to act upon the license granted to them by the Court. "Thousands of immigrants" are now considered eligible by ICE for removal to a third country, according to a leaked ICE memo issued Wednesday. It's a sadistically creative weaponization of a long-standing human-rights protection against what's called refoulement, or not sending people back to their country of origin where they would be at risk for persecution or torture. In the hands of ICE Acting Director Todd Lyons, non-refoulement just means you send thousands of people to a completely unfamiliar country, regardless of whether they'd face persecution or torture there. 

The Post's reporting here is a valuable public service. I'm grateful for it. But I think it's important to note that the Post's team also did not connect the upcoming mass removals to extraordinary rendition. Such omissions conceal a crucial patrimony for what is about to happen. 

We'll never know if mass revelations of CIA extraordinary rendition would have stopped this. ICE is a lawless agency and the Supreme Court has transformed the presidency—then again, codified is a better word, since they didn't do this without a ton of post-World War II history guiding them—into an office above the law. But had there been any actual accountability for extraordinary rendition, the lawyers who signed off on Lyons' memo, or who would/will subsequently have to interpret it, would have had to warn ICE that employees acting upon it would put themselves at risk of prosecution or other adverse consequence. 

Instead, because of choices made by people like George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, David Addington, John Yoo, George Tenet, Mike Hayden, Barack "look forward, not back" Obama, Leon Panetta, Liz Cheney and many others—REIGN will sort out for you who did what and proportionately assign blame—we don't inhabit that world. We inhabit a world where ICE will perform extraordinary rendition at scale, and many will act like it's an innovation, rather than a sick recurrence, prompting no one who wielded power to reckon with their role in building this dystopia. 

ON FRIDAY, Israeli settlers attempting to seize Palestinian territory in the West Bank town of Al-Mazra'a ash-Sharqiya brutally beat the 20-year old American citizen Sayfollah Musallet. Then, for what is reported to be three hours, they prevented an ambulance from reaching this young man and potentially saving his life. 

According to Sayfollah's family, he died "protecting his family's land from settlers who were attempting to steal it." You can read more from ZETEO staff reporter Prem Thakkar, but Sayfollah acted like what we would immediately recognize in any other context as a hero. Sayfollah's cousin Fatmah Mohammed told Prem that Sayfollah helped his family run their Florida ice cream shop. He wasn't a soldier. But in the unforgiving minute, Sayfollah stood up to thieves—thieves backed by a powerful ruling military—on behalf of his family. How many of us in this country who talk so loosely and so abstractly about freedom from tyranny would have the courage to do the same? 

It so happens that I've come to know Fatmah a bit over the past year and a half. She is a lovely, generous, devoted, open-hearted soul. It grieves me that her family, like so many Palestinian families, experiences such unimaginable suffering. It shames me that Sayfollah's murderers are Jews, or at least call themselves Jews. And it angers me to know that there will be no justice demanded by Sayfollah's own government, because to that government, Sayfollah was never truly an American; he was a second-class citizen by accident of his heritage, just like Shireen Abu Akleh was. 

Al Jazeera, for whom Shireen reported, notes that Sayfollah is the ninth American killed by Israeli soldiers or settlers since 2022 alone. As with extraordinary rendition, impunity for Sayfollah's killers guarantees the future deaths of more Palestinian-Americans. 

NOT CONTENT with innovating drones that fire guns, the Israel Defense Forces have developed drones that drop grenades (a much easier engineering task, to be sure), reports the intrepid Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham—who revealed the Israeli mass-killing AIs Lavender and Habsora:

In several cases, S. said, Israeli troops deliberately targeted children. "There was a boy who entered the [off-limits] zone. He didn’t do anything. [Other soldiers] claimed to have seen him standing and talking to people. That’s it — they dropped a grenade from a drone." In another incident, he said, soldiers tried to kill a child riding a bicycle a great distance away from them. 

"In most cases, there was nothing you could tell yourself," S. continued. "There was no way to complete the sentence, 'We killed them because…'"

An Israeli drone strike on either Saturday night or Sunday morning—and I don't have any information on whether this drone operated like any of those drones—killed six children at "a potable water distribution point in an area for displaced people," according to Palestinian civil defense spokesperson Mahmoud Basal.

ALL OF THIS HORROR makes it astonishing that DC's new Superman movie can be credibly viewed as a rejection of the atrocities committed by the State of Israel. I saw it on Sunday and I don't think that interpretation is a reach. Moviegoers can enjoy Superman without embracing that critique, but it's available for those who do. 

I'm someone who defends Marvel's Captain Marvel because buried within that movie is a presentation of Skrulls containing overtones of the Palestinian struggle. But those are far more muted than what Superman contains. I left the theater thinking about how Jewish a story Superman has always been, and how those of us who say Never Again For Anyone have a Superman for this season of injustice. (There is also an available anti-Zionist element in Man of Steel, but I don't think Zach Snyder understood it that way; I think that Snyder's uncritical penchant for brutality led him into a plot element whose resonances he didn't really think about.) Such a cinematic portrayal of Superman will change no material reality, for that is up to us, but still. 

I'm not going to say more than that here. In the coming days, you'll hear me and some Jewish friends podcast about Superman, and I'll share that episode in an upcoming FOREVER WARS edition. For now, read what Greg Rucka has to say. And if you leave the theater wanting to read a graphic novel featuring Lois Lane and containing a cameo from The Engineer, WALLER VS. WILDSTORM is right here. 

WHEN ELON MUSK bought Twitter in 2022, this newsletter wrote about his large and growing Pentagon ties with the Pentagon. As we were editing this edition, news broke that part of a new Pentagon AI award worth up to $200 million, the Pentagon will use the Grok chatbot that recently declared itself to be MechaHitler on the platform, now called X. [It also posted elaborate plans to rape a progressive activist and wrote racist erotica about Twitter/X's CEO, who then resigned.—Sam] I look forward to an antisemitic chatbot replacing the Office of the Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs and justifying partnered operations with Israel. 

ALMOST ALL of my journalistic output from the winter of 2006 to the summer of 2007 was soundtracked by Hell Hath No Fury by the Clipse. Every morning, my roommate Kriston and I, both freelance journalists, would brew coffee, open our laptops and gather 'round… stopping the record only to make or take phone calls with sources and editors. During that period I went to Baghdad and Mosul for a month—not my best era for decision-making—and I brought HHNF and the 2nd volume of the unbeatable mixtape series We Got It 4 Cheap with me. 

No one needs yet another middle aged white man who has never sold cocaine writing about the Clipse, the Neptunes, the Re-Up Gang and their output in the mid-2000s. This is culturally inappropriate. But it was simply one of the greatest creative periods for any rap group, ever. And the cerebral, conflicted center of these classic records was the underrated emcee Malice, a man destined to be overlooked in favor of his phenomenally talented younger brother Pusha T. Malice was hardly the first rapper to express guilt over the social consequences of his drug dealing and associated criminality—think Biggie on "Everyday Struggle" or, to a lesser extent, Jay on "D'Evils"—but Malice turned astonishingly harsh self-critique into recognizably genuine spiritual searching. It's on Lord Willing, not HHNF, but Malice's "that's how I know that I ain't shit" verse, fully flipping the boastful energy of a song the Lox is on, has stuck with me forever. When he embraced his Christianity and rebranded as No Malice, I mourned for the end of a band I loved, but mostly, I felt happy for an artist I admired.

But now the Clipse is back after a 16-year hiatus. And somehow, somehow, Let God Sort 'Em Out might be the best album they've ever made. I can't explain it. It could be as simple as two brothers and their friends being legendarily gifted musicians and poets and finding they have a lot to say at middle age. Part of me wants to dive into the rapidly-growing Clipse lore, but a more Malice-like part of me is summoning the restraint to remember that I have a book to finish drafting. Still, Malice's verses on "P.O.V." ("I was the only one to walk away and really be free"—!!!!!) and "M.T.B.T.T.F.," god damn… I mean no disrespect to Little Brother Terrence, who we love dearly so. But everyone who has paid attention to rap music any time in the past 15 years especially already knows how good Pusha T is. If you weren't previously aware of Malice as an all-time great, get familiar. 

And speaking of. Liva is already on LGSEO, but we need outreach to Sandman for a We Got It 4 Cheap volume 5.