Tag: rendition

Washington Post deigns to report on renditions again.

The Washington Post is almost believably shocked to discover that the practice of rendition has returned to Clinton-era levels:

…it is not known how many renditions have taken place during Obama’s first term. But his administration has not disavowed the practice.

Hot Air called this a ‘surprise.’ I know that they’re being sarcastic, because those folks were as aware of the situation with regard to rendition as I have been, for about as long as I have been.  Although I have to admit, I am slightly surprised by just how willing the antiwar movement was to roll over and show its belly on the subject of drone strikes; I assumed at the time that the Left actually meant it when they said that they had a problem with summarily executing jihadis.  Turns out that it’s apparently sexy to progressives when it’s a Democratic President writing out the kill list.

Go figure. Continue reading Washington Post deigns to report on renditions again.

*IF* it turns out to be true that we were operating a secret jail in Benghazi…

…and that is a legitimate ‘if:’ anyway, if it turns out that Broadwell’s revelation last month is correct and that Benghazi was hosting a secret jail* for the purpose of extraordinary rendition then I hope that people will find the following posts to be useful.

Continue reading *IF* it turns out to be true that we were operating a secret jail in Benghazi…

#rsrh VDH: Obama now Bush III?

Well, yes and no.

So here we are back at the beginning — the Nobel Laureate is a continuance of George Bush on the war against terror; he has sized up both his domestic and foreign supporters and understood that their former outrage was not principled but largely emotional, driven by short-term political considerations, and thus centered on the caricature of a white, male, Christian, Texan cowboy, conjuring up all the easy tropes of anti-Americanism. Obama, to his credit, figured out that the Western world wanted to be kept safe, and that Bush had figured out how to do that, and that his own messianic presence could square that circle by being the un-Bush Bush.

The donkey in the room that Victor Davis Hanson is not addressing is rendition: which the Bush administration abandoned, in favor of Gitmo; which we have started up doing again; and which will cause a major foreign policy firestorm when the first pictures get smuggled out of Pakistan (or wherever we’ve ended up sending suspected terrorists).  That’s the other major reason* why I don’t make the welkin ring on Obama’s plagiarizing of Bush’s GWOT strategy; in at least one major way, he hasn’t.

And, naturally, it’s the one place where he should have made sure to.  One wonders why the Secretary of State didn’t warn him off…

Moe Lane

*The first being that if you’re going to steal the ideas in private of a man who you habitually (and insecurely) deride in public, the absolute best that you’ll get out of me is silence.

[UPDATE] Glenn Reynolds raises an excellent point about hats.

The progressive movement’s abandonment of human rights, Part 45.

Number made up, but trust me: I could find forty-four more examples, ya, you betcha.

Here’s the thing: I’ve met Michael Barone. I know that he’s smart. Frighteningly so, in fact. And I know that he pays attention to details, in ways that usually startle the living life out of people who aren’t used to it. In other words, this is an aware guy that we’re talking about.

So why the surprise, here?

All of which brings to mind the report of a conservative blogger who watched George W. Bush’s 2005 inaugural speech with a group of liberals. Every time Bush called for spreading freedom and democracy around the world, the crowd guffawed and groaned and jeered. For them, evidently, Bush was a figure of fun, and his calls for democracy and human rights laughable. The same people who decried his supposed authoritarian rule at home had nothing but contempt for his call for freedom and democracy abroad.

Beneath this stated contempt is, I think, something in the nature of secret guilt. Or rather, anger at the notion that Bush had stolen the issues of human rights and democracy from the liberals.

The desire to oppose the Iraq war root and branch, to denounce every aspect of it, imposed a duty to dismiss as laughable Bush’s stated objective — set out eloquently before the decision to take military action as well as after it — of advancing democracy in the Middle East. A duty to side with those, like the National Intelligence Council nominee, who have long held that governance in the style of Saudi Arabia or Syria is the best that can be hoped for in that region, and the best for all concerned. A duty to dismiss with contempt, or simply to ignore, the rather remarkable strides of the Iraqis themselves made after enduring decades of brutal tyranny.

Continue reading The progressive movement’s abandonment of human rights, Part 45.

Greenwald, Sullivan’s faux-outrage over rendition.

“‘To cowardice,’ he said, and flung the empty glass against the back wall of the fireplace with a savageness I had never seen in him before.”

The quote is from Spider Robinson’s short story “Unnatural Causes” (found in his first Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon story collection, known as, well, Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon), and we’ll be revisiting it in a moment.  But first: pro-torture pro-Obama bloggers Glenn Greenwald and Andrew Sullivan have decided that they are very unhappy about Obama’s decision to maintain the Bush administration’s policy of “asserting a broad “state secrets” privilege to shield from disclosure information related to the CIA’s rendition program.” You may find a link to Greenwald’s table-pounding via Glenn Reynolds, and one to Sullivan’s via Ace of Spades: no offense to either Glenn or Ace, but I’d rather not track the filth that they linked to directly into my nice, clean website.

And it is filth, because if you look at either pro-torture pro-Obama blogger, you’ll see that neither has done anything except pound on the table. And they won’t, either. Their outrage is rather finely tuned. Continue reading Greenwald, Sullivan’s faux-outrage over rendition.