Glenn Reynolds, law professor, and frothing RedState blogger Moe Lane lack basic knowledge about a policy of torture they've been defending, and are unable to distinguish between torture and rendition. Fortunately, Hilzoy has written a helpful post enumerating the finer points for them, so that they can complain about "the Left" in the future without embarrassing themselves. The larger point here is that many torture apologists don't have the foggiest idea of what they're defending, they're just indulging a political philosophy that says the law doesn't matter when it comes to "bad guys," whether they've been convicted or not.
In their defense, the LA Times article was written in such a way that if you knew almost nothing about rendition and didn't bother to read all the way until the third paragraph, you might think that it automatically meant "sending someone to a country to be tortured," and therefore the headline might read "Obama's gonna torture people anyway," which was probably the point. But that doesn't explain why it snagged several people who give the pretense of knowing what they're talking about.
-- A. Serwer
