Mark Steyn: A Bad Person

Full-throated support for torture, always refreshing:

I agree with Michael re rendition, and the President's newfound enthusiasm for it. He won't abolish torture, but he's happy to outsource it, and make it one of those jobs Americans won't do. And everyone else seems content to be governed by moral poseurs: Re that Human Rights Watch flip-flop—"Under limited circumstances, there is a legitimate place" for rendition—the circumstances seem to be limited to when there's a Democrat in the White House.

On balance, I prefer an Administration with the cojones to waterboard you themselves rather than stick a bag on your head and ship you to some Third World genital-clampers.

Was there ever any doubt about Mark Steyn's sentiments towards Bush's balls? He conflates rendition and extraordinary rendition to states practicing torture, and insists that one article about what Obama might do is on a par with a whole bunch of actually dead and tortured people. Hackish! Read Hilzoy for a thorough refutation (and here). I hope Canada never goes after him again for any reason no matter what he says; it was a painful time rooting for Steyn against his would-be censors.

UPDATE: did we ever hear any of these sentiments from Ledeen back when it might have mattered?

...despite all the pious talk about putting an end to torture, he seems to be retaining what is arguably the worst component of our "interrogate the terrorist" programs: rendition.

I well remember the first time I heard about this noxious practice. An intelligence-community official told me, with evident satisfaction, "We're sending these guys to places where they don't have Miranda rights.  Or lawyers." I didn't like it then, and I don't like it now. It's a total moral copout: We enable torture while claiming to have abolished it.

Maybe it was a lot like his Iraq war opposition: on the QT.

Comments

[norman spalding]

OJ iuj ol;k;< l,;'l.

[norman spalding]

The fact is the pot is not a demon and the use of it is advised.

[Doctor Slack]

The American attitude to hate speech laws is backward, and I hope Canada continues to "go after" assholes like Steyn. (Inasmuch as "Canada" ever did; what Canada has is a very straitjacketed government-led program for resolving grievances between community members over inflammatory speech, much as Steyn and his ilk no doubt would have tried to portray it as some gray-suited apparatchik saying "Nyet!" to his moronic column by pure fiat.)

[David Moles]

This is Mark "Syphilis" Steyn we're talking about, right?

[rapier]

I am bit late to this party. By chance finding 11/7/03's Dead Right.

http://examinedlife.typepad.com/johnbelle/2003/11/dead_right.html

Timely in the extreme for we have come to the denouement of the conservative free market project to achieve desired social ends. In all probability an economic collapse on a scale unimagined by all. Where Donner Party stories will not be analogy and they won't be the worst if it, by a long shot.

[strasmangelo jones]

I am really, really, really unconvinced that torture outsourcing will not take place under Obama, given that it took place under Clinton. And Hilzoy's response seems pretty clueless, given that (1) her co-blogger Katherine - someone far more qualified to call herself "Dr. Rendition" - blogged about this exhaustively, and (2) pointed out at the time that our torture-outsourcing regime, under both Bush and Clinton, claimed not to violate the Convention Against Torture, since the CIA would, as a matter of routine, ask our third-world torture partners, "You're not going to torture this guy, right? Ha ha", to which they would reply, "Of course not, wink wink." The amount of gullibility on display here is breathtaking.