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Does secretary of state think anyone is buying her spiel, asks Maureen Dowd
by Maureen Dowd
Our secretary of state’s tortuous defence of supposedly non-existent CIA torture chambers in Eastern Europe was an acid flashback to Clintonian parsing.
Just as Bill Clinton pranced around questions about marijuana use at Oxford during the ’92 campaign by saying he had never broken the laws of his country, so Condoleezza Rice pranced around questions about outsourcing torture by suggesting that President George W. Bush had never broken the laws of his country.
But in Bill’s case, he was only talking about smoking a little joint, while Condi is talking about snatching people off the street and throwing them into lethal joints.
"The United States government does not authorize or condone torture of detainees," she said.
It all depends on what you mean by "authorize,’’ "condone,’’ ``torture" and "detainees.’’
Rice also claimed that the United States did not transport terrorism suspects "for the purpose of interrogation using torture." But, hey, as Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld likes to say, stuff happens.
The president said he was opposed to torture and then effectively issued regulations to allow what any normal person - and certainly a victim - would consider torture. Alberto Gonzales et al. have defined torture deviancy downward to the point where it’s hard to imagine what would count as torture.
Under this U.S. administration, prisoners have been hung by their wrists and had electrodes attached to their genitals; they’ve been waterboarded, exposed to extreme heat and cold and threatened with death - even accidentally killed.
Does Rice think anyone is buying her loophole-riddled defence? Not with the Italians thinking of rounding up CIA officers to ask them whether they abducted a cleric in Milan.
And with Vice-President Dick Cheney slouching around Capitol Hill trying to circumvent John McCain, legalizing torture at the CIA’s secret prisons, by preventing Congress from requiring decent treatment for U.S. prisoners.
As The New York Times’s Scott Shane reported Wednesday, a German man, Khaled al-Masri, says he was kidnapped, beaten and spirited away to Afghanistan by CIA officers in an apparent case of mistaken identity in 2003. He is suing former CIA chief George Tenet and three companies allegedly involved in the clandestine flights.
Masri, a 42-year-old former car salesman, was refused entry to the U.S. last Saturday. He had intended to hold a news conference in Washington last Tuesday, but ended up talking to reporters over a video satellite link, telling how he was beaten, photographed nude and injected with drugs during five months in detention.
Masri said through an interpreter: "I don’t think I’m the human being I used to be.’’
When Rice was a Stanford professor of international relations, she would have flunked any student who dared to present her with the sort of wilfully disingenuous piffle she spouted on the eve of her European trip.
Maybe she figures that if she was able to fool people once with doubletalk about weapons of mass destruction, she can fool them again with doubletalk about rendition.
As chatter spreads about Rice as a possible presidential contender, we are left wondering, once more, who this woman really is. Is she doing this willingly, or is she hemmed in by the powerful men around her?
As a former national security adviser who has had the president’s ear for five years, did she try to fight the appalling attempt to shred the Geneva Conventions, or did she go along with it? Is she doing Cheney’s nefarious bidding on torture, just as she did on ginning up the case for invading Iraq?
As Rice used weasel words on torture, Hillary Clinton took a weaselly position on flag-burning. Trying to convince the conservatives that she’s still got a bit of that Goldwater Girl in her, the woman who would be the first woman president is co-sponsoring a Republican bill making it illegal to desecrate the American flag. The red staters backing this measure are generally the ones who already can’t stand Hillary, so they won’t be fooled.
The senator doing Clintonian triangulating is just as transparent as the secretary doing Clintonian parsing.
All in all, a bad week for women - sheer torture to watch.
Forum posts
13 December 2005, 23:18
Maureen: The tragic part of all this is that few people are doing anything about it. Most of the public no longer believe the lies of Bush, Cheney, Rove, Rice, et al, but no authority is doing a damned thing about investigation. The fact that European leaders were recently said to be "satisfied" with Rice’s tap dance, waffling and bureaucratise is disheartening. Have they all become victims of the Bush hypnotic swagger? They must all remember the Hitler and Mussolini and Stalin days so why would they be content that little Tar Baby Rice looked at the cameras and swore "There is no torture." Who in the world really believes her? Why would anybody believe her or Bush??? That is a deep mystery to be solved only by World courts investigating war crimes, or by some honest people doing honest investigaton without getting fired. But I know of no such body. I have had no confidence in the integrity of the Supreme Court ever since they accepted the findings of Jeb Bush and gave the Presidency to GW by strictly partisan vote. Now, with the Bush litmus test, which he vehemently denies, I fear this country has been taken over by liars, cheats, and scoundrels.
Peter Fredson
14 December 2005, 13:34
They are not satisfied. The Council of Europe, covering the 46 countries in Europe, is still investigating, although it appears that all the CIA prisoners in Europe have been spirited away to Africa in the last month. That way, the CIA can claim that there are no illegal prisoners in Europe, without having to admit that there used to be.
15 December 2005, 07:01
When will the ones who love this war get enough blood? Why not just drink it fresh from their still warm victims...
"We do not torture" -Condi always fighty for whitey-but only when he’s a winged-nut rightie..
Can we do it to their cabal and ask about where they really got their "pre-war intelligence" ? I hear the CIA knows all the latest and greatest techniques-it’s still "legal". Plus the CIA isn’t too happy about the Plame thing-so in light of their "experience" I’m sure they can get the information they need to have a Gitmo style conviction-that is no charges, no lawyer, no parole and no end in sight.
Sickos, I hope the fools that did this to other human beings rot in jail, then hell after that...how dare they call themselves AMERICANS. Only by their own f-ed-up standards.
15 December 2005, 11:28
Yes, but this has been going on for decades... Throughout the cold war era... Only now a few make some noise and think that this started with 9-11...
Remember the School of the Americas (now renamed).
They were calling themselves "Americans" then, why not now. Did not the prior CIA folks and politicians from the ’40s, ’50s, ’60s and so on consider it an activity of valor and fighting for the "good"? So too are the current personnel.
Your concern will soon enough fade away as the story drops off the coverage it is receving. For reference, remember Abu Graib? Remeber the promise that Bush made of closing it down when the abuses came out? What happenned to your concern as the news faded but the prison remained open?
Condi Rice has some real personal problems. I mean, I can see a White man making those statements but, like Powell (who shares her moral and identity weaknesses,) she has a very stong need to become one of them. In this regard, to appease and be accomodated, I suspect she will be "Whiter than White".