Smackdown…
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. </i>
Good point. Just who is our government talking to, anyway? People such as myself won’t believe a word they say, and the knuckledraggers won’t doubt a bit, and the rest of the world? Ha. So just who is Rice speaking to?
