Sunday, July 29, 2007

An Extraordinary Rendition That Doesn't Seem To Be Getting Much Negative Press

Intelligence agents grabbed this guy in another country, fly him to the Middle East--and then executed him! I mean, if "extraordinary rendition" is so bad when the CIA grabs suspected terrorists off the street and flies them off to be interrogated, why was it okay for the Mossad to kidnap Eichmann from Argentina in 1960?

Although perhaps I shouldn't mention it--I'm sure that the same crowd will just add this to Israel's list of crimes.

UPDATE: I realized that this sounded a little flippant. I really am not keen on the regular circumvention of legal processes. But we are at war (although the Democrats sometimes don't seem to be aware of that), and we are fighting an enemy that makes the Brezhnev-era Soviet Union seem like they were playing by Marquis of Queensbury rules. You have to go back to Stalin, Hitler, and Imperial Japan to find thugs with the level of barbarism of al-Qaeda.

Playing by a very narrow set of rules puts us at serious risk of losing heart. Lowering ourselves to their level risks the civilized values that are the reason that we are fighting these monsters. There is a saying that you must be careful who you pick as enemies--you are in danger of becoming like them.

I have some misgivings about turning over captured terrorists to some of the Middle Eastern governments that assist us. Torture is reputed to be common in many of these systems--and I don't mean playing Christina Aguilera music, or having a female interrogator make the suspect think that she has smeared menstrual blood on him. I don't even mean waterboarding (which I consider arguably on either side of the line that qualifies as torture). I mean the sort of torture that makes you sick to even think about, no matter how evil the subject of that torture is.

On the other hand, one of the mantras of leftist thought is that there are no universal truths, and we shouldn't impose our cultural values on others. Except in this one case! Then they suddenly decide that there are universal truths, and we do need to impose our values on our Middle Eastern allies.

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