Under executive orders signed on January 22, the CIA appears to have preserved its authority to carry out renditions – by which hundreds of terrorist suspects have been abducted and transferred to prisons in countries with questionable human rights records such as Egypt, Morocco or Jordan.

The measure, disclosed by the Los Angeles Times yesterday, gives some indication of how Mr Obama’s promise of change may be slower to be realised than once hoped, with the new Administration coming under concerted attack across a range of issues.

But, there may be a problem with the LA Times article.

Glenn Greenwald says the LA Times story about this order is way overblown. Hilzoy agrees. And Scott Horton says the LA Times got punked.

This controversy is worth mentioning again because it's very important that the order doesn't leave open the option of reviving these black holes. As CCR said, "If the order leaves the option of reviving those sites, it is more symbolic than a true reversal."

The New York Times says here's how the rendition game is played:

The country that receives the prisoners gives phony assurances to Washington that they will be well-treated, which allows the Central Intelligence Agency to claim, as they did in this case, that it “does not transport individuals anywhere for the purpose of torture.” Right, and waterboarding is not torture either.

Here is the 2007 European Union report on secret renditions. The CIA operated more than 1,200 flights through European airspace. Not all were secret renditions of prisoners or suspects, but at least 21 cases of such are mentioned in the report. The report criticized European countries for turning a blind eye to the CIA's actions.

Here is what the Center for Constitutional Rights said the day President Obama issued his orders:

The order to close the CIA black sites where people were held in secret for the purpose of torture is to be applauded. There is no place for such black holes in a democracy. Their intended purpose is to circumvent the Geneva conventions and our own laws. If the order leaves the option of reviving those sites, it is more symbolic than a true reversal.

The order to make all agencies abide by the Army Field Manual’s acceptable interrogation tactics is perhaps the most important gesture toward restoring our moral authority as a nation. The Center for Constitutional Rights represents so many men who were brutally tortured by our government that this hits home for us in a way that it may not for those with no faces and lives to attach to the story.

Again, we caution that the order may leave an escape hatch if the CIA should want more tactics, i.e. torture, available in its arsenal. The Geneva conventions should be the only arbiter of what is possible for governments to do to human beings.

Secret rendition is a big deal. Ask Khaled el-Masri. The CIA should not be grabbing people off the street and flying them on chartered planes to secret prisons outside the legal jurisdiction of the U.S. and Red Cross, and especially not to countries that may not comply with the Geneva conventions against torture. The U.S. must have one policy: We do not torture. And that means we cannot be complicit in torture by others. If we flew them there, it's in our name.

So the question is, does Obama's order give the CIA the option to re-institute secret rendition? I don't know, but I'm glad the CCR and ACLU, which have represented many tortured detainees and sued over the Ghost Air flights are staying on the case.

I'll give the last word to Human Rights Watch:

The order does not address the legality of what is known as rendition to torture - the practice of illegally transferring a person to a country where he or she faces torture or persecution - and instead leaves review of that practice to the task force as well. The best known case is that of Maher Arar, a dual Canadian-Syrian citizen arrested at New York's John F. Kennedy airport in September 2002, flown to Jordan, and then driven across the border to Syria, where he was detained in a tiny cell for almost a year and tortured repeatedly.

Human Rights Watch said that Obama repeatedly condemned the practice of rendition to torture on the campaign trail, and urged him to put an end to this illegal practice as well.