Saturday

 

Say no to outrage fatigue

Maybe I missed this in previous news, but part of our extraordinary rendition policy is to send prisoners to Uzbekistan? I'm not trying to imply that other countries we've rendered prisoners to, like Syria and Egypt, are pleasant places to go. But Uzbekistan? They've boiled people to death, and the U.S. State Department has repeatedly pointed out their human rights abuses. But apparently brutally interrogating suspected terrorists is so important that no other principle can possibly constrain our actions. At this point, I would only be a little surprised to find out that we were rendering prisoners to North Korea for interrogation. Sure, they're a despotic regime run by a lunatic who hates us. But if we some suspicion that someone is a terrorist, but not enough to go after them under U.S. law, why should we let that stop us?

I haven't seen her post much recently, but Katherine at Obsidian Wings was the place to go for extraordinary rendition related information, since she's actively engaged in research on the topic. I don't see any mention of her on the Obsidian front page, so I don't know if she's gone inactive or changed sites or neither of the above but she's clearly still commenting there. I thought she had more of a formal role in the past, but maybe I'm wrong.

Update: I'm glad I couldn't get Crooked Timber to load earlier today, because if I could I would have seen a post remarkably similar to this one and not been motivated to write mine. And the aforementioned Katherine is in comments there, providing suggestions about contacting one's Representative or Senator. Also, at least one commenter there endorses torture as smart policy, and I don't know what the proper combination of fury and fear is towards such a person.

# posted by washerdreyer @ 4/30/2005 10:37:00 PM
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