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Comment by anomie31 | Hacker News Reader

Why do we call it kidnapping instead of extraordinary rendition?

Possibly because the world in general has settled on certain things being lawful, such as the freedom to criticize governments without repercussion, and if Iran wants to go against that trend they can't expect to get the western media red carpet treatment.

I think OP is saying that it’s “kidnap” when they do it but “extraordinary rendition” when we do it, regardless of what the accusation is. A helpful reminder that we correctly perceive this specific case as intolerable, and therefore we should not also allow our governments to do the same regardless of the euphemism they use

No, the OP suggesting there is a moral equivalence between both when there isn’t.

Why not?

Kidnapping people to face punishment without fair trial seems wrong no matter who does it.

While all (most? many?) extraordinary renditions are kidnappings, not all kidnappings are renditions. The difference is that when doing extraordinary renditions, we are delegating the incarcaration/torture/interrogation of the victim to _some other actor_ specifically so that we can technically not be performing horrible acts. That's what makes it a special kind of kidnapping.

Kidnapping is only one of the ways we ingest people to treat in this manner, if I recall right. Presumably one could be arrested and then renditioned elsewhere -- the rendition is the part where we send someone elsewhere to be harmed in ways that our laws don't permit us to do ourselves.

"Extraordinary" is the part of the phrase that means kidnapping.

Except when the government in question is the US, as with Assange.

Same with terrorism - it’s evil, unless it’s Blackwater.

> Possibly because the world in general has settled on certain things being lawful

Extraordinary rendition is one of those things the world has settled on as being unlawful.

The actual answer is: when geopolitical allies do distasteful things we use euphamisms, when geopolitical enemies do it, we drop the propaganda pretense.

As I recall, extraordinary rendition occurred precisely because the interrogation techniques they wanted to use were illegal in the US but legal in the other country, which was by the way a willing participant. It may have involved kidnapping or it may not depending on the case, but certainly denotes an important distinction as compared to simply violating some foreign country's laws to bring someone to (your idea of) justice. The zinger simply doesn't fit well here.

> extraordinary rendition occurred precisely because...were illegal in the US

> an important distinction as compared to simply violating some foreign country's laws to bring someone to (your idea of) justice

Is the important distinction you want to make that its only wrong if your violated a different country's laws and not your own (personally i'd view that as worse)? Otherwise i struggle to see what the distinction you're trying to point out here is.

Right the West would never hire a company like UC Global to spy on a journalist famous for criticizing governments. And they certainly wouldn't encourage them to kidnap or assassinate that person. They deserve for their kidnappings to be called "extraordinary rendition."

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8041597/US-plotted-...

This is a crime because it happened in the US, targeting an American. Does the article claim any morality high ground? Are you saying this isn't an indictable crime because every country does the same?

I was replying to a specific post that was discussing the morality of the West.

Though, I think it should also be a crime for the US to plot the kidnapping or assassination of foreign dissidents too.

Wikileaks was created by Assange while he was in the US?

They're talking about Alinejad, Assange isn't an American.

> such as the freedom to criticize governments without repercussion

Edward Snowden

Was extraordinary rendition not performed with the consent of the host country?

Just in Europe, a number of countries have protested the US government coming in without consent and kidnapping people, so the answer is no.

Because everybody knows what 'kidnapping' means, and everybody knows that it's a crime. Not everybody knows what extraordinary rendition means, or that it's a crime. The general public not knowing or caring what "extraordinary rendition" means was even used as a joke in the tv show Archer.

Why not call murder an extraordinary death? Provides different, possibly misleading, information.

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