Mamdouh Habib's extraordinary rendition

Just in case the more red of neck amongst my readers aren't aware, rendition in this case refers to the surrendering of suspected would be terrorist Mamdouh Habib to Egyptian authorities for torturous interrogation. Habib and his lawyer do, however, in the more conventional sense of "rendition", give an inspired performance on SBS's Dateline. The promo blurb for the show is as follows (my bold):

Startling new claims from Mamdouh Habib. As espionage stories go, it sounds like something only the CIA itself could dream up – a fleet of jets delivers bound and gagged terrorist suspects to countries known to have no qualms at all about using torture to extract information. This notoriously secret US policy is known as extraordinary rendition. And it was reporter Bronwyn Adcock who first told us about it here on Dateline in July last year. Bronwyn’s story revealed Mamdouh Habib’s rendition how he was transferred from Pakistan, where he had been arrested, to Egypt and then to Guantanamo Bay, and tonight you’ll hear more on this ongoing saga from Habib himself.

The former south-west Sydney café proprietor and devout Muslim maintains he was brutally tortured while he was held in Egypt and for its part, the Australian Government is sticking to its line that it didn’t know he was even in Egypt. But tonight Habib makes a number of dramatic new claims including that he was interrogated in Cairo by people using information that could only have come from this country, raising the politically and legally loaded question of whether Australia was, in fact, complicit in what happened to him.

New claims from Habib startling? Hardly. He and his mouthpiece are doing their best to keep this before the public for as long as possible.

Caught up in a scheme only the CIA could dream up? When it comes to dreaming stuff up Habib can hold his own.

There were so many bound and gagged terrorist suspects a fleet of jets was required? Some numbers would be helpful.

In execution of a notoriously secret US policy? Just thinking about that makes my head hurt.

He was brutally tortured? Plain old torture isn't brutal enough.

Dramatic new claims? They're new and dramatic in the same sense that Home and Away is dramatic and ever does anything new.

Was Australia complicit? If ASIO was doing its job, you bet Australia was complicit and, rightly so.

The program then focuses on just about every aspect of this case except Habib's role it it. That's because:

Habib's lawyer, Stephen Hopper, who brokered the lucrative deal with '60 Minutes' and advised Mamdouh Habib not to talk about his overseas activities. For Dateline's interview we didn't pay a cent, but Stephen Hopper is extending his media strategy even further. A condition of granting the interview was that we weren't allowed to even ask Mamdouh Habib what he was doing before he was arrested. Stephen Hopper keeps his client on a tight rein.

So, Habib tells his story but misses out on the sort of grilling Philip Ruddock receives.

Habib does make some startling revelations. For example, he reveals that his Egyptian interrogators and assorted intelliegence types can be fooled by the same ploy a child might use when playing pin the tail on the donkey:

MAMDOUH HABIB: They blindfold me. They tied it up like this. Before they tied it up I closed my eyes very tight and when they release it, I release my eye, I can see a gap from the bottom if I lift up my head like, I can see people. And that's what I was do. On this day, they take me in a room and I see this Australian guy.

What a bunch of dummies.

Seriously, there isn't much new or news worthy in this program although Habib does claim that his Egyptian interrogators had access to information from his many cellphones; information that only ASIO could have provided. It seems entirely reasonable that ASIO would have shared its Habib intelligence with the CIA; after all, ASIO hadn't been watching this guy for ten years for no reason. ASIO didn't need to know where Habib was at the time, or care.

I can hardly wait for Habib's next rendition.