President Obama may be trying to shut down Guantanamo and CIA black sites, but he’s decided to make renditions a part of his regime. In case you’ve repressed it along with other Bush-era nightmares, extraordinary rendition is what the U.S. calls kidnapping someone and sending him to a nasty place to be tortured.

An administration official tells the L.A. Times that they intend to keep it “within certain parameters” in order to make it “an acceptable practice.”

It would be nice to know what that means. Call us crazy, but if you’re going to keep alive a practice associated with a moral low point for the U.S., you should probably be totally transparent about what you intend to do.

Los Angeles Times:

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.

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