Weaselly Rice Tortures Facts
Does The Secretary of State Think Anyone Is Buying Her Spiel?
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.
Maureen Dowd
Copyright Toronto Star Newspapers Limited.
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/1211-25.htm
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.
Maureen Dowd
Copyright Toronto Star Newspapers Limited.
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/1211-25.htm
posted by R7 | 12/12/2005 08:45:00 PM
2 Comments:
Genial dispatch and this fill someone in on helped me alot in my college assignement. Thank you as your information.
Easily I assent to but I dream the collection should have more info then it has.
Post a Comment
<< Home