On NRO’s Media Blog, Greg Pollowitz writes that in case you missed it, “There was a great article in the Los Angeles Times on President Obama’s first use of rendition (and torture?).  Not for a terrorist, but for a Lebanese man accused of bribery.  An excerpt:”

A Lebanese citizen being held in a detention center here was hooded, stripped naked for photographs and bundled onto an executive jet by FBI agents in Afghanistan in April, making him the first known target of a rendition during the Obama administration.

Unlike terrorism suspects who were secretly snatched by the CIA and harshly interrogated and imprisoned overseas during the George W. Bush administration, Raymond Azar was flown to this Washington suburb for a case involving inflated invoices.

Azar, 45, pleaded guilty Tuesday to conspiracy to commit bribery, the only charge against him. He faces a maximum of five years in prison, but a sentence of 2 1/2 years or less is likely under federal guidelines.

Defense lawyers and prosecutors declined to comment on the case Friday.

But Joanne Mariner, terrorism and counter-terrorism director at Human Rights Watch, called the case “bizarre.”

“He was treated like a high-security terrorist instead of someone accused of a relatively minor white-collar crime,” she said.

Read the whole thing. As Pollowitz asks:

If this last charge is accurate, then this meets the definition of torture used by the Left.  Will Eric Holder and the likes of Andrew Sullivan call for an investigation of Obama’s administration for this heinous crime?  I’m not sure why the pictures Sullivan has posted of terrorists strapped naked and blindfolded to a board are any different than Obama’s embezzler strapped naked and blindfolded to a board, other than the obvious that the guy in the Bush example is, you know, a killer.

At the risk of quoting one of America’s more puritanical and prudish faith-based conservative God bloggers, I blame “the polity’s moral degeneracy.”