The Rendition Problem

Ross Douthat has a very interesting, honest post about torture here. (With subsequent posts here and here.) As if by magic, National Review appears with an editorial defending the Bush administration’s approach to interrogation here. I don’t find it especially persuasive, and doubt you will too. Conor Friedersdorf has more too.

Amidst the debate on torture and “torture-lite” (or “enhanced” interrogation), one element of US policy is often overlooked: Extraordinary Rendition. To some extent you can argue about policies applied at Guantanamo and CIA black sites around the world, but there’s no denying, I think, that Extraordinary Rendition amounts to anything less than state-sponsored torture. After all, that’s the entire point of the programme: send these guys to dark places (Egypt, Jordan, Syria) where god knows what kind of brutality may be unleashed upon them. Enough, certainly, to meet even Dick Cheney’s definition of torture. But when you send a guy to be tortured (and let’s not pretend that studied indifference to these men’s fates counts as ignorance) you’re just as responsible, morally speaking, for his suffering as are those who actually inflict.