‘Of course not: that’s what France is for.’

(Via Instapundit) My first reaction to this piece of news:

Administration officials have stated that they do not plan to suspend the policy of extraordinary rendition but that they will instead introduce stricter measures to prevent torture and will no longer send prisoners to countries with histories of abuse.

Bolding mine, and let me translate: the Obama administration has decided to institute a policy of extraordinary rendition, and it will be more than happy to take advantage of the current fever swamp of speculation, innuendo, and conspiracy theorizing on the topic (ironically, and epically, demonstrated here) to set up via (probably) the Clinton-era rules once more and call it an ‘improvement.’ We – and by ‘we’ I mean ‘career bureaucrats’ – will thus hand off suspects to countries that will be happy to deniably hand them off to countries without our sensibilities, human ‘rights’ groups will pretend that they don’t know this is happening, and the system will quietly reset to the 1990s.  Which is not good.

And, of course, the usual suspects on the pro-torture Left will blame everybody for this state of affairs except themselves.  They do that.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.