Koyaanisqatsi

Opponents of the practice of extraordinary rendition are growing increasingly vocal about the case of Raymond Azar, a Lebanese construction contractor who was picked up by the FBI on allegations of bribery, shackled, blindfolded and flown to the United States for trial.

It’s a case that the Los Angeles Times referred to Saturday as the “first rendition under [President] Obama.”

In affidavits filed in federal court, Azar says he was denied food, placed in a freezing room and threatened with never seeing his family again unless he confessed to the charges, the Times reports.

[...]

Despite Azar’s guilty plea, the circumstances of his arrest and interrogation will likely lead observers to question the outcome of his trial. The Times reports that Azar signed documents he did not understand because he was “frightened for his immediate safety … and under the belief he would end up in the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay or Abu Ghraib to be tortured,” according to his lawyers.

  Raw Story

All this for bribery? And the bribery, btw, was for kickbacks in reconstruction projects in Afghanistan.

In an audio interview, Horton told Democracy Now! that Obama “never went as far as to say no more renditions,” and the Azar case “shows … how the program is being carried forward. And to a large extent, it’s a trip back to renditions the way they occurred in the Clinton era. This is what we call ‘rendition to justice’.”

Horton points out that “renditions have not been used in a case like this before,” even in the pre-Bush era. “They’ve been reserved for drug kingpins and terrorists.”

Somebody’s going to have to Photoshop me a fourth picture in that series.

P.S. All those right-wing lunatics that are portraying Obama as Hitler over health care (!) won’t even bat an eyelash over this.

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.