*IF* it turns out to be true that we were operating a secret jail in Benghazi…

…and that is a legitimate ‘if:’ anyway, if it turns out that Broadwell’s revelation last month is correct and that Benghazi was hosting a secret jail* for the purpose of extraordinary rendition then I hope that people will find the following posts to be useful.

• 01/21/2009. There’s a phrase missing from this Washington Times report on detainee policy.
• 01/28/2009. Obama’s Rendition Exception.
• 02/01/2009. Obama embraces torture.
• 02/02/2009. The nuance of the pro-torture Left (HRW edition).
• 02/08/2009. Greenwald, Sullivan’s faux-outrage over rendition.

In other words: I told people about this, back in the beginning of Obama’s first term.  I even maybe managed to guess from which country the revelation that we may have screwed up, although I assumed at the time that it’d be in conjunction with the Qaddafi regime. And here’s the thing: whether secret jails existed in, and rendition occurred at, Benghazi or not, there are secret jails and rendition is going on right now somewhere.  What we’re just trying to figure out whether this particular practice and policy was the specific reason why four Americans were murdered in Libya.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

PS: If it did happen that way, it is of course the progressive’s movement fault.  You. Were. Warned.

*The CIA has seemingly flatly denied it: “An agency spokesperson told The Daily Beast that “[t]he CIA has not had detention authority since January 2009, when Executive Order 13491 was issued. Any suggestion that the Agency is still in the detention business is uninformed and baseless.” (Daily Beast link here) However, as has been noted from the start:

According to the executive order, “The terms ‘detention facilities’ and ‘detention facility’ in section 4(a) of this order do not refer to facilities used only to hold people on a short-term, transitory basis.”

…which is pretty much what Broadwell described in her speech: a temporary facility designed to hand off CIA prisoners caught under irregular circumstances, to allies of varying levels of dubiousness.  And as the two quotes above demonstrate, the CIA’s ‘denial’ thus does not actually rebut Broadwell’s statement: fine, they’re not in the detention business.  They’re merely in the business of temporarily holding people captured under conditions not conducive to prosecution under American criminal law until said captives can be handed over to allies of various levels of dubiousness.  You know.  Extraordinary rendition.

And again: we told you so.