[Dialogue] Weaselly Rice Tortures Facts

[Harry Wainwright]

Colleagues, food for thought. Peace, Harry 
  _____  




Published on Sunday, December 11, 2005 by the Toronto
<http://www.thestar.com>  Star 

Weaselly Rice Tortures Facts
Does the secretary of state think anyone is buying her spiel?



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. 

Maureen Dowd, winner of the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for distinguished
commentary, became a columnist on The New York Times Op-Ed page in 1995
after having served as a correspondent in the paper's Washington bureau
since 1986. She has covered four presidential campaigns and served as White
House correspondent. She also wrote a column, "On Washington," for The New
York Times Magazine. Ms. Dowd joined The New York Times as a metropolitan
reporter in 1983. She began her career in 1974 as an editorial assistant for
The Washington Star, where she later became a sports columnist, metropolitan
reporter and feature writer. When the Star closed in 1981, she went to Time
magazine. Born in Washington D.C., Ms. Dowd received a B.A. degree in
English literature from Catholic University (Washington, D.C.) in 1973. 

Copyright Toronto Star Newspapers Limited.

###

 

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