Did you read the article?

Their case is different from the widely criticized "extraordinary renditions" carried out after the Sept. 11 attacks. In those cases, CIA teams snatched suspected Al Qaeda members and other alleged terrorists overseas and flew them, shackled and hooded, to prisons outside the United States without any arrest warrants or other judicial proceedings.

The FBI arrested Azar and Cobos with warrants signed by a federal magistrate. And the State Department, Talamona said, asked the government of Afghanistan "for its consent in advance to take these two individuals into custody and return them to the United States to stand trial. They consented to our request."

As a candidate last year, President Obama vowed to end "the practice of shipping away prisoners in the dead of night to be tortured in far-off countries."

After taking office, he ordered the CIA to close its network of "black site" prisons and promised to shutter the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The Justice Department has seized and transported foreign drug lords, terrorists and other high-profile fugitives to U.S. courtrooms when normal extradition was not considered possible. The Supreme Court ruled in 1992 that such renditions, as the transfers are known, are permissible.

In 1997, for example, FBI agents in Pakistan captured Mir Aimal Kasi, who was on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list, and returned him to Washington to stand trial. Kasi was convicted of murder in the killing of two CIA employees and was executed in Virginia in 2002.