If you want to understand how a the unfortunately durable American policy known as extraordinary rendition really works, you probably shouldn’t read Petra Bartosiewicz’s article “The Intelligence Factory” from the November issue of Harper’s.  Not because Bartosiewicz doesn’t track the strange case of Aafia Siddiqui very capably — she does.  It’s just that extraordinary rendition is so chaotic, so ad hoc, and so subject to improvisation that it’s hard to call it a “policy.” Bartosiewicz refers to it simply as “outsourcing” — in this case outsourcing the investigation, capture, and interrogation of terrorist suspects, including U.S. citizens abroad, to foreign intelligence services.   The practice is a violation of long-standing principles of American law and basic standards of human decency.   President Obama should bring this practice to an end.

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