Mark.
Q Mr. President, under the law, how would you justify the practice of renditioning, where U.S. agents who brought terror suspects abroad, taking them to a third country for interrogation? And would you stand for it if foreign agents did that to an American here?
THE PRESIDENT: That's a hypothetical, Mark. We operate within the law and we send people to countries where they say they're not going to torture the people.
But let me say something: the United States government has an obligation to protect the American people. It's in our country's interests to find those who would do harm to us and get them out of harm's way. And we will do so within the law, and we will do so in honouring our commitment not to torture people. And we expect the countries where we send somebody to, not to torture, as well. But you bet, when we find somebody who might do harm to the American people, we will detain them and ask others from their country of origin to detain them. It makes sense. The American people expect us to do that. We -- we still at war.
One of my -- I've said this before to you, I'm going to say it again, one of my concerns after September the 11th is the farther away we got from September the 11th, the more relaxed we would all become and assume that there wasn't an enemy out there ready to hit us. And I just can't let the American people -- I'm not going to let them down by assuming that the enemy is not going to hit us again. We're going to do everything we can to protect us. And we've got guidelines. We've got law. But you bet, Mark, we're going to find people before they harm us.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/relea...0050428-9.html

The report was explicitly critical of Mr Ahern, who it says "failed to answer all the questions in relation to the concerns that Irish airports may have been used by CIA aircraft travelling to or from extraordinary rendition missions".
Labour MEP Prionsias De Rossa, who sat on the parliament's temporary committee investigating the rendition programme, accused the Government of attempting a "cynical whitewash".
http://www.ireland.com/newspaper/bre...breaking40.htm

Reportedly, in a number of cases (such as Khalid El-Masri and Maher Arar) the practice of "extraordinary rendition" has been applied to innocent civilians, and the CIA has reportedly launched an investigation into such cases (which it refers to as "erroneous rendition"). In El-Masri's case, he may have been mistaken for another man with a similar name, Khalid al-Masri. The introduction of the term "erroneous rendition" should not be interpreted to mean that extraordinary rendition of any intended subject is legal.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_rendition

4. Does Amnesty International accept US claims that "rendition" is legal?
Amnesty International believes that these practices are illegal because they bypass any judicial or administrative process such as extradition. Under international law, it is illegal to transfer people from one country to another without any kind of judicial or administrative process.

http://web.amnesty.org/library/index/engpol300032006

Extraordinary rendition is a method that the CIA under Bush has expanded so that people with a dissenting voice may be locked away without any recourse to a Judicial system. Some have been found to be not guilty of any actions against US interests and the rest, how are we to know what they are alleged to have done or have done? We may only judge when the facts are presented, to date those facts have not been shown. If they have done something put them on trail. If all they have been doing is bad mouthing the US then the criminal resides in the Whitehouse.

What’s the next step arrest a few Democrats who vote against Bush’s policies in Iraq and park them in Gantanemo until they realise the error of their ways?