Only This Time It’s Okay

Obama will continue the rendition of suspected terrorist both the the US to be interrogated, or to third party states where they fall under the laws of those states, and may be abused.

Google News only shows 34 stories for this philosophical reversal, one of which is Rachel Maddow’s theorizing that Obama’s decision to permit renditions is somehow auto-magically due to Bush hires still being in government. To use your own theme of sabotage, how is it that you sabotage thoughts Rachel? Or is the Enver Hoxha mind influence crap the piece of history they want to bring with them into this century?

Andrew Sullivan’s take in the Atlantic is stupefying in trying to gloss over the differences between rendition and detention of intelligence finds.

If anything proves what a miserable job the press is doing with even basic news coverage, it’s this. By fawning over their favorite, they are barely reporting the news at all. In fact the OPINION item blindly backing the left came out almost as quickly as the wire stories.

As is this was about suspicions of torture, then definition downward of torture, Sullivan wants to make this move about something that won’t muss his readership’s hair. What it is, is a salve wherein after having defined UP the rendition issue, it now has to be defined back down for as many as possible in the world view of Obama’s voters to even be perceivable to them.

There is, of course, a deeper point here. The clear abandonment of the Bush-Cheney torture program makes the detention and rendition of terror suspects much less worrying - both in terms of the damage done to reliable intelligence and the moral cost of betraying core Western values. When the US government has already deployed torture (and retains it as an option under ludicrous euphemisms), it is difficult to believe that they will be squeamish in preventing other governments - such as Egypt and Jordan - from the same or more sadistic and crude forms of torture. One can also be much less worried about short-term, accountable detention of terror suspects if we know that they won't be tortured, abused or mistreated. Abandoning torture as policy makes temporary detention and ordinary rendition less controversial and more defensible as tools in our arsenal.

What some on the far right seem not to grasp is that opposition to torture is not about being soft on terrorism. It is about being effective against terrorism - ensuring that intelligence is not filled with torture-generated garbage, that we retain the moral high-ground in a long war against theocratic violence, and that we can better identify, capture, kill or bring to justice those who threaten our way of life. Rendition and temporary detention are tools in that effort - tools that now need to be as closely monitored and assessed as they were once recklessly abused.

The thrust of the left has NEVER ONCE been about “effective” practice in external affairs. It’s always been a canvas to imagine the shape of their social policies at home in a manner that agrees with them: where they can deal directly with governments that can implement without public consent one social program or another by simply declaring it, such as is the case with WAVA and other social bugaboos that have nothing to do with relations anywhere or international security issues anywhere other than in academia or a think tank. We’re just supposed to believe that to be true because of what they’re calling it, and accept that by declaring it serious, it becomes serious.

So goes it for thing that are real too, and in the same way: never mind the fact that there is no consistent theory matching up the complaint rhetoric against American interests, no consistent theory holding their measures together now, and nothing telling us that they aren’t amateurishly feeling their way through each of their passionate past complaints the left made into its’ own individual ulcer that need be addressed, such as “no torture,” “save the whales,” “no more rendition,” “Cheney ran Abu Ghreib,” opposing abstinence education in poor societies where AIDS is becoming endemic, etal.

We are in for a hell of a ride if international policy is driven by a need to put balm on the left’s self-inflicted verbal wounds – each of which USED to have a “solution” which invariably required the making of a weakened and deferential America.

Much as we found that the more anti-American a non-American is, the more they favored Barack Obama during the election season, we find that strange deference having to face itself and change itself, both in the US and abroad. Good luck, because it was the very essence of cognitive dissonance.