A judge in California recently rejected the Justice Department's claims of blanket state secrecy in a case brought by five rendition victims against Jeppesen Dataplan, a subsidiary of Boeing, which provided the flight plans for the C.I.A.'s renditions.
I understood the information they provided as a specific, credible threat that the Russian criminal enterprise – likely aided by the Russian government and/or secret police – were planning to kidnap and organise a rendition operation against me abroad".
In opposition, the Lib Dems took strong stands against rendition, torture and the spread of secrecy in the courts.
A spokesman for Reprieve, which campaigns against rendition and the death penalty, said government amendments removed a key safeguard that would allow judges to balance questions of security against broader issues of justice.
The prime minister faced questions over the strikes on Monday night when Andrew Tyrie, the Conservative chairman of the treasury select committee who has led a campaign against rendition flights, called for an investigation by parliament's intelligence and security committee.
The eighth is a prominent Kenyan human rights activist, Al-Amin Kimathi, who has campaigned against rendition, and whose arrest led Human Rights Watch to question whether the Ugandan authorities were attempting to silence "a well-known critic of government abuses in the fight against terrorism in east Africa".
She has represented Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, at the supreme court; Abdel Hakim Belhaj, the Libyan dissident subjected to rendition, in claims against MI6; Rupert Murdoch's News International in phone hacking trials; and the Home Office as a security-cleared special advocate in sensitive immigration cases.
But in his career and in his reasoning, when the practice of rendition has come up against the Geneva conventions, or when warrantless wiretapping has come up against the fourth amendment, one side seems consistently to have won out.
(Warner Home Video, $29.98, not rated) Contemporary THE DARK KNIGHT Christian Bale plays a Bush-era Batman not ashamed to use wiretapping, torture and rendition in his battle against a giggling nihilist: Heath Ledger's Joker, who steals the show.
When one Libyan rendition victim, Abdel Hakim Belhaj, brought proceedings against Straw, the then foreign secretary, and against Allen and MI6, lawyers argued the court should throw out the case because it might damage the UK's relationship with the US.
