(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 Moe Lane.

Show trial: a trial (as of political opponents) in which the verdict is rigged and a public confession is often extracted — Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary

President Obama was presented with another opportunity to rule out political retribution dressed up as investigations of the looney left-wing’s fanciful allegations of Bush administration war-crimes.

Instead of standing by his previous obfuscation that “we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards,” Obama gave a green light to Attorney General Holder to start the show trials — a political theater relic of Joseph Stalin’s Great Purge of political opponents from the former Soviet Union.

Watch the following CBS video report:

Obama has been planning this for a long time. In a December 2007 KJFK radio interview with Christiane Brown, Obama promised that one of his first acts as president would be to call on his new Attorney General to investigate the Bush administration.

Nothing is left to chance by Obama leaving the decision up to Holder. Obama’s attorney general has already made his mind up about the left’s assertions that the legal authority justifying the CIA interrogation methods was more than wrong. Holder is on record with strong opinions about not only allegations of torture, but also the Guantanamo terrorist detention facility, extraordinary rendition, indefinite detentions of non-U.S. citizen terror suspects and the NSA’s terrorist surveillance program.

Good term, Wizbang: I like it. Anyway, via Dissenting Justice (via Instapundit) we can see in miniature the… ah, evolution of our opposite numbers on the Online Left’s stance on Obama’s reversion to rendition. Our hypocrites for the day are Human Rights Watch*:

April 7, 2008 to at least January 19, 2009:

The US government should:

·Repudiate the use of rendition to torture as a counterterrorism tactic and permanently discontinue the CIA’s rendition program;

Some time after January 20, 2009:

“Under limited circumstances, there is a legitimate place” for renditions, said Tom Malinowski, the Washington advocacy director for Human Rights Watch. “What I heard loud and clear from the president’s order was that they want to design a system that doesn’t result in people being sent to foreign dungeons to be tortured — but that designing that system is going to take some time.”

Translation: all that stuff about the need to end rendition? “Oh, that’s just what we call pillow talk, baby, that’s all.”

Moe Lane

PS: Remember.  Eastasia.  We’ve always been at war with Eastasia.

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I told you.

I damned well told you.

Rendition is back, you pro-torturing, posturing, hypocritical Leftist fools:

Obama preserves renditions as counter-terrorism tool
The role of the CIA’s controversial prisoner-transfer program may expand, intelligence experts say.

Under executive orders issued by Obama recently, the CIA still has authority to carry out what are known as renditions, secret abductions and transfers of prisoners to countries that cooperate with the United States.

Current and former U.S. intelligence officials said that the rendition program might be poised to play an expanded role going forward because it was the main remaining mechanism — aside from Predator missile strikes — for taking suspected terrorists off the street.

The rendition program became a source of embarrassment for the CIA, and a target of international scorn, as details emerged in recent years of botched captures, mistaken identities and allegations that prisoners were turned over to countries where they were tortured.

[snip]

But the Obama administration appears to have determined that the rendition program was one component of the Bush administration’s war on terrorism that it could not afford to discard.

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I’m not nearly as sanguine about this as Ed was:

EXCLUSIVE: Loophole allows terrorist detentions

President Obama’s executive order closing CIA “black sites” contains a little-noticed exception that allows the spy agency to continue to operate temporary detention facilities abroad.
[snip]

Current and former U.S. officials, who spoke on the condition that they aren’t identified because of the sensitivity of the subject, said such temporary facilities around the world will remain open, giving the administration the opportunity to seize and hold assumed terrorists.

The detentions would be temporary. Suspects either would be brought later to the United States for trial or sent to other countries where they are wanted and can face trial.

…I wasn’t sanguine when I noticed this last week, and I’m not sanguine about it now.

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