That Woman? – Moon of Alabama

December 5, 2005

That Woman?

So Rice is coming to Europe. But instead of answering questions about CIA flights and torture camps, she will tell the European politicians to screw themselves.

Just in time Dana Priest reports that the German Minister of Interior was informed when the U.S. tried to silently free an erroneous renditioned German. He even helped a bit to cover things up.

Rice of course has a point. European governments did know about the CIA flights and the existence of torture camp. Having said nothing so far, the official requests to the U.S. about CIA flights now are hypocritical.

But to publicly pledge allegiance to the Cheney government torture policy, as Rice demands, is not something any European politician can do without a very heavy toll at the ballot box.

In Germany the new Chancellor Merkel and her cabinet will get squeezed over this. Merkel intended to make again friends with the Amerikaner. Now, no matter what she is going to say, her polls will drop with any picture showing Condi and Angie smiling at each other.

Does Rice really believe she is making friends this way? Does she really believe the European governments will follow the legalized torture arguments of the Cheney government? With all European media discussing nothing else?

The picture above is from Tagesschau.de. Tagesschau is the, non-partisan, prime evening TV news in Germany. As a politician, would you like to be associated with the public view of that woman?

I guess U.S.-European relations just dropped another few degrees.

Posted by b on December 5, 2005 at 17:40 UTC | Permalink

Comments

The EU Gvmts knew. Of course they knew.
Here in CH it was the Plane Spotters (those guys who hang around ariports with binoculars and enjoy writing down serial numbers) who sounded an alarm. Gleefully!
And why the fuss about the flights? EU airspace is open, to fly across it and/ or land in it all one has to do is conform to Technical specs and International Aviation agreements (proper flight plan, etc.) and pay, natch. (Airport tax.)
It is unclear to me how a ‘crime’ committed on a plane, flying over the UE, is to be treated. A stewardess kills her pilot lover by stabbing him with a box-cutter while flying over Munich? A foootball club lights up joints in a no-smoke plane after drinking too many G and T’s? An illegal alien flies over 7 EU countries?
The planes serve to distract from the real issue – secret prisons. Secret prisons are a big deal, people moving here or there, under guard or not, by plane or train or car are not very important.
A bit as if the French and the Brits complained about Jews in WW2 being put on trains without the proper permits for changing residence and without the proper, fully paid up, train tickets and not enough fresh nappies and milk for the babies!
Chilling…

Posted by: Noisette | Dec 5 2005 18:28 utc | 1

madame von condiribbentropp going aabout her business as that old champagne salesman one did – informing the czechs & the poles – hat they had to make free but firm decisions in favour of the greater power
it really is becoming like a comic version of the third reich fuhrer bush, field marshall keitelrumsfield, goebells rove & all the other little gauleiters. anoy of the shifting supremes or attorney generals are a good copy of himmler, kaltenbrunner heydrich or eichmann
this administration comports itself through what is clearly the most tragic moments of this time like some cabaret from roumania –
even, herr heidegger could not surpass their use of language of beingnotbeing being being
in the affairs if stae the rats have come up from the sewers & from underneath the floorboards & all going rapidly up the drainpipe for their greater greed like the finanzminister abramoff
what a fucking farce
what a cruel fucking farce
they make fools of themselves but they ridiculise & infantalise this world until all we’re good for is to be spoonfed rupert mourdoch’s emotional absences

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Dec 5 2005 18:44 utc | 2

surely, i meant rupert murderoch

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Dec 5 2005 18:46 utc | 3

& now is not the time to appease fuhrer bush & all the minions of his junta
if there existed a moment for europe to have its backbone tested – it is with madame ribbentrop
renditions, ghost prisoners, pahtom jails are a shame on the european nation
when ô when will a jurist of substance place these fuckers before the hague where they belong

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Dec 5 2005 19:25 utc | 4

they won’t R Giap. And you know it.

Posted by: Noisette | Dec 5 2005 19:40 utc | 5

noisette -yes unfortunately – i do know that
international jurisprudence met its end when the world court could not enforce its decision on the american blocking of nicaraguan ports & that was some time ago
but there are some good lawyers & ramsey clark is amongst those

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Dec 5 2005 19:57 utc | 6

Noisette (yum !) said:
> It is unclear to me how a ‘crime’
> committed on a plane, flying over the
> UE, is to be treated.
in theory the airplane is national territory of the country under whose flag it flies, just like ships.
i also think that the “scandal” about overflights is to hide that there are probably many kidnapping and torture centers across europe, not only poland, hungary or romania, but in more “decent” places like germany, netherlands, belgium, ireland, switzerland, UK.
it should be pretty straightforward to list up the places where the known planes landed, then draw a circle of about 50Km around that airport on the map and then start listing locations like military bases, (legit) jails, mental institutions, hospitals, secluded and country-side residences of people from certain countries under diplomatic protection or of managers of certain (front) corporations and other govt locations within that circle, especially if they have visible security measures beyond what is justifiable by their supposed purpose.
checking out these suspect sites should IMHO help find a high percentage of the locations within europe where people are being tortured.

Posted by: name | Dec 5 2005 20:41 utc | 7

Not too much surprising about Condi. Do what’s nec. to maximize one’s personal power. While much is made of Condi being black, less well known at least to me, is this information from a Prominent Black Selma Civil Rights Attorney. Her parents were black upper class & it seems they opposed the Civil Rights Movement…God knows what they said about MLKjr. around the dinner table…
The white preacher who visited with me accused me of having made up out of “thin air” that Condi Rice’s family opposed the 1960s civil rights demonstrations in Birmingham. He had no facts to refute my charge but the man just couldnâot believe that blacks as prominent as the Rice family would have opposed a black civil rights movement. I explained that upper class, educated blacks had the most to lose from opposing the white establishment and most of them regularly denounced the black marchers and protesters. I also suggested that the preacher read the book, Race, Class and Power in the Alabama Coalfields, 1908-1921, by Professor Brian Kelly of Belfast, Ireland.
Wish he were more specific here. link It’s not too clear to me if this is merely his inference.

Posted by: jj | Dec 5 2005 20:46 utc | 8

in the dana priest piece, i might be reading too much into this (it was the holidays, after all), but how likely is it that both the cia station chief and the european division chief were on vacation at the time, or at least unreachable? how convenient. so how long were these vacations? the article states that it wasn’t until the 23rd day of masri’s captivity in the hotel room before he was flown to afghanistan. c’mon dana. get the real story.

Posted by: b real | Dec 6 2005 3:24 utc | 9

“When it comes to human rights, there is no greater leader than the United States of America, and we show that by holding people accountable when they break the law or violate human rights.”
– Scott McClellan, White House spokesman

The United States’ “Disappeared”
The CIA’s Long-Term “Ghost Detainees”.
– A Human Rights Watch Briefing Paper

The decree allowed Hitler’s government to legally raid Communist Party offices and to imprison and torture party members; this imprisonment was sometimes euphemistically described as “protective custody”. When the newly-elected Reichstag convened after the March 5, 1933 election, all 81 Communist deputies elected to that body were absent [disappeared], allowing the Reichstag to approve the Enabling Act on March 23, 1933. The Reichstag Fire Decree was thus one of the significant steps in Hitler’s seizure of power (see Gleichschaltung) and has been fittingly labelled the “Magna Carta of the Third Reich”.
– Decree of the Reich President for the protection of people and state

“The US does not tolerate, permit, or condone torture under any circumstances … We cannot discuss information that would compromise the success of intelligence, law enforcement and military operations, We expect that other nations share this view. It is up to those governments and their citizens to decide if they wish to work with us … They have a sovereign right to make that choice.”
– Condoleeza Rice, U.S. Secretary of State

“The reason she is able to say that the United States does not engage in torture is that the administration has redefined torture to exclude any technique that they use. What makes this awkward for Secretary Rice is that the state department has continued to condemn as torture techniques such as waterboarding when they are used by other countries – in other words the very techniques the CIA has used against these high level detainees.”
– Tom Malinowski, Washington director of Human Rights Watch.

“The words chosen by Secretary of State Rice appear to be extremely carefully framed. What now constitutes torture in the US? That’s a big problem, especially when the acts are carried out outside the US.”
– Mary Robinson, former President of Ireland

“We do not torture”.
– President George W. Bush

“I am not a crook”.
– Former President Richard Nixon

… Since clear standards only limit interrogation techniques, it is reasonable for me to assume that supporters of this argument desire to use coercion to acquire information from detainees. This is morally inconsistent with the Constitution and justice in war. It is unacceptable … If we abandon our ideals in the face of adversity and aggression, then those ideals were never really in our possession. I would rather die fighting than give up even the smallest part of the idea that is “America.”
– A Matter of Honor, a letter sent to Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) on Sept. 16 by Capt. Ian Fishback, Iraq Veteran

Posted by: Outraged | Dec 6 2005 4:21 utc | 10

The ‘New Disappeared’, from July 2005 …

Island paradise or torture chamber?
… But rendering means giving up control to the other country, says Pike, which in turn means only low-value suspects are transferred.
“The CIA keeps the high-level ones to themselves,” he says. “And they work them over.”
…the U.S. is also bound by the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which it ratified a decade ago. The covenant prohibits incommunicado detention, requires that detention centres be officially recognized, that identities be registered, that families be told of the detention and that the times and places of all interrogations and names of those present be documented.
None of these provisions is being met with the ghost prisoners, says David Danzig, spokesman for Human Rights First, a legal advocacy group that has produced two reports on U.S. treatment of suspects, both those in the military system and the unacknowledged phantom system. Danzig says the International Red Cross has a list of 36 individuals, almost exclusively high-value detainees, that the U.S. admits it is holding but will not say where.
“But our conversations with government officials, former detainees and others suggest it’s safe to say hundreds, probably thousands, is more accurate for the number of people being held in secret.”
“It would be hard to systematically torture in known detention centres, but you can’t track a secret world. The secret locales are one part of the whole picture, the dark underbelly, and they’re absolutely outside of the law.”…

Posted by: Outraged | Dec 6 2005 4:51 utc | 11

U.S. “renditions” on shaky legal ground – lawyers
…”Such renditions are permissible under international law and are consistent with the responsibilities of those governments to protect their citizens.”
Rice was speaking before leaving for Europe on a trip overshadowed by allegations that the Central Intelligence Agency has run secret prisons on the continent and covertly transferred suspects via European airports.
Human rights lawyers said some of the cases which have come to light amounted to “disappearing people”, a practice recognised as illegal for decades since its widespread use by Latin American governments in the 1970s.
“If we’re actually taking people, abducting them and then placing them in incommunicado detention, which appears to be the case, we would be actually guilty then of a disappearance under international law, in addition to a rendition,” said Meg Satterthwaite of the Centre for Human Rights and Global Justice at New York University School of Law.
She pointed to Article 9 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which outlaws arbitrary arrest or detention and says an arrested person has the right to be told why he or she is being held and brought before a judge.
Gabor Rona, international legal director of advocacy group Human Rights First, said: “If people are simply being spirited off the streets … and secretly being transferred into detention from one state to another, and have no opportunity to contest the legality of that in a court, then that is very obviously in violation of international law and most domestic law regimes.”…

Posted by: Outraged | Dec 6 2005 5:42 utc | 12

ABC Nightline has another “Just In Time” piece for Rice’s visit to Europe:
Sources Tell ABC News Top Al Qaeda Figures Held in Secret CIA Prisons

Two CIA secret prisons were operating in Eastern Europe until last month when they were shut down following Human Rights Watch reports of their existence in Poland and Romania.
Current and former CIA officers speaking to ABC News on the condition of confidentiality say the United States scrambled to get all the suspects off European soil before Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice arrived there today. The officers say 11 top al Qaeda suspects have now been moved to a new CIA facility in the North African desert.
…
The CIA declines to comment, but current and former intelligence officials tell ABC News that 11 top al Qaeda figures were all held at one point on a former Soviet air base in one Eastern European country. Several of them were later moved to a second Eastern European country.
All but one of these 11 high-value al Qaeda prisoners were subjected to the harshest interrogation techniques in the CIA’s secret arsenal, the so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques” authorized for use by about 14 CIA officers and first reported by ABC News on Nov. 18.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice today avoided directly answering the question of secret prisons in remarks made on her departure for Europe, where the issue of secret prisons and secret flights has caused a furor.
…
The CIA has used a small fleet of private jets to move top al Qaeda suspects from Afghanistan and the Middle East to Eastern Europe, where Human Rights Watch has identified Poland and Romania as the countries that housed secret sites.
But Polish Defense Minister Radoslaw Sikorski told ABC Chief Investigative Correspondent Brian Ross today: “My president has said there is no truth in these reports.”
Ross asked: “Do you know otherwise, sir, are you aware of these sites being shut down in the last few weeks, operating on a base under your direct control?”
Sikorski answered, “I think this is as much as I can tell you about this.”
In Romania, where the secret prison was possibly at a military base visited last year by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the new Romanian prime minister said today there is no evidence of a CIA site but that he will investigate.
…
Sources tell ABC News that the CIA has a related system of secretly returning other prisoners to their home country when they have outlived their usefulness to the United States.
These same sources also tell ABC News that U.S. intelligence also ships some “unlawful combatants” to countries that use interrogation techniques harsher than any authorized for use by U.S. intelligence officers. They say that Jordan, Syria, Morocco and Egypt were among the nations used in order to extract confessions quickly using techniques harsher than those authorized for use by U.S. intelligence officers. These prisoners were not necessarily citizens of those nations.
According to sources directly involved in setting up the CIA secret prison system, it began with the capture of Abu Zabayda in Pakistan. After treatment there for gunshot wounds, he was whisked by the CIA to Thailand where he was housed in a small disused warehouse on an active airbase. There, his cell was kept under 24-hour closed circuit TV surveillance and his life-threatening wounds were tended to by a CIA doctor especially sent from Langley headquarters to assure Abu Zubaydah was given proper care, sources said. Once healthy, he was slapped, grabbed, made to stand long hours in a cold cell and finally handcuffed and strapped feet up to a water board until after .31 seconds he begged for mercy and began to cooperate.

Posted by: b | Dec 6 2005 8:41 utc | 13

The WaPo editorial agrees:

Yet the Bush administration surely cannot expect that the uproar in European countries, including staunch allies such as Britain, will be contained through such hairsplitting spin. The political backlash is still growing, and the damage could be considerable. For example, the plans of the new German chancellor, Angela Merkel, to rebuild close relations with the United States have been seriously threatened by emerging reports of German participation in CIA renditions.
The only way to remedy the damage is to change the underlying policies.

Posted by: b | Dec 6 2005 9:58 utc | 14

“Of the 12 high-value targets housed by the CIA, only one did not require water boarding before he talked. Ramzi bin al-Shibh broke down in tears after he was walked past the cell of Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the operational planner for Sept. 11. Visibly shaken, he started to cry and became as cooperative as if he had been tied down to a water board, sources said.”
The CIA has selectively released information to try and deflate the image that people may have of these guys as heroes but they have demonstrated their appalling lack of insight into the human condition.
In their effort to make Ramzi bin al-Shibh weak they have cast Khalid Sheik Mohammed as a strong man able to withstand a huge amount of torture. What did they do to him that the mere sight would cause another hardened terrorist to break down.
One could argue that this may be an attempt to create a great legend for Khalid Sheik Mohammed before releasing him by way of escape.
If that is true they are wasting their time because if he is in fact the weakling and traitor A.Q. will discover that during their standard debrief.

Posted by: Anonymous | Dec 6 2005 19:06 utc | 15

The Bush administration has embraced torture as a key part of the “war on terror.” Finally, members of Congress, the military and the CIA are speaking out against the abuse
“A number of soldiers we’ve talked to have told us they were ordered by military intelligence to torture,” Sifton told Salon. “And not just at Abu Ghraib but at forward operating bases across Iraq.” According to Sifton, several soldiers who tried to report misconduct say their superiors told them to take a hike.
A growing number of military and CIA personnel, according to officers from both realms, admit that the Bush policies, hatched in the fearful weeks and months after 9/11, have deeply corrupted military and intelligence operations over four years of war.
…”Torture not only degrades the victim, it also ultimately degrades the torturer,” said Kimball, who served in Iraq and now teaches history at West Point.
…”You tell a soldier to go out there and ‘waterboard’ someone” — strap a prisoner to a board, bind his face in cloth, and pour water over his face until he fears death by drowning — “or mock-execute someone, but nobody is thinking about what that’s going to do to that soldier months or years later, when it comes to dealing with the rationalizations and internal consequences. We’re talking about serious psychic trauma.”
More soldiers are starting to come forward with the support of groups like Human Rights Watch, which conducts leading research on torture in the war on terror.
Although unwilling to talk on the record for fear of retribution by the military, a number of active-duty soldiers who’ve spoken with Human Rights Watch are increasingly angry about the torture scandals, according to researcher John Sifton.
…”A number of soldiers we’ve talked to have told us they were ordered by military intelligence to torture,” Sifton told Salon. “And not just at Abu Ghraib but at forward operating bases across Iraq.” According to Sifton, several soldiers who tried to report misconduct say their superiors told them to take a hike.
According to the senior Army JAG, who wasn’t authorized to speak to the media and was granted anonymity by Salon, many fellow JAGs and military officers feel that the administration has long since veered into dubious territory…

Posted by: Outraged | Dec 7 2005 3:49 utc | 16

Merkel did see the danger and took a bit of a stance. This wasn´t what Rice had expected.
Rice Is Challenged in Europe Over Secret Prisons

Mrs. Merkel spoke openly of “the issue of the C.I.A.’s overflights” that apparently hold secret detainees going to or from secret jails elsewhere, while Ms. Rice refused to answer most questions and continued insisting that the prison issue and related issues were classified matters.
Skip to next paragraph
Related
Skepticism Seems to Erode Europeans’ Faith in Rice (December 7, 2005)
Mrs. Merkel then said Ms. Rice had admitted that the United States had mistakenly abducted Mr. Masri.
“The American administration has admitted that this man had been erroneously taken and that, as such, the American administration is not denying that it has taken place,” Mrs. Merkel said.
Ms. Rice said she could not talk about the case specifically, but added, “Any policy will sometimes result in error, and when it happens we do everything we can to correct it.”
Later, an aide to Ms. Rice, who spoke on the condition that he not be identified, said that “we are not sure what was in her head” when Mrs. Merkel spoke of the American admission of error in the Masri case. Ms. Rice did not discuss the case with her in any direct way, he and other aides insisted, even though the senior aide said, “The American government has talked about this issue with the German government.”
Mrs. Merkel said simply, “We’ve talked about Mr. Masri.”
Speaking of Mr. Masri and the issue of the detainees in general, Mrs. Merkel added, “We can’t go public about all the details, but at the same time we need to introduce a certain degree of transparency.”

Posted by: b | Dec 7 2005 8:24 utc | 17

william blum logically puts the following two quotes side by side in his latest anti-empire report:

“When it comes to supporting the rights of Jews, there is no greater leader than the Third Reich, and we show that by holding people accountable when they violate the rights of our Jewish citizens. We show that by supporting the advance of religious and ethnic tolerance and supporting those Jewish people in countries where their human rights are denied or violated, like Austria.” — Joseph Goebbels, German Minister of Propaganda, March 6, 1941

“When it comes to human rights, there is no greater leader than the United States of America, and we show that by holding people accountable when they break the law or violate human rights. We show that by supporting the advance of freedom and democracy and supporting those in countries that are having their human rights denied or violated, like North Korea.” — Scott McClellan, White House spokesman, December 2, 2005

and he also sends out this holiday greeting 😉

To my dear readers in America and around the world, in the spirit of the season, I wish each of you your choice of the following:
Merry Christmas
Happy Chanukah
Joyous Eid
Festive Kwanza
Erotic Pagan Rite
Happy New Year
Internet Virtual Holiday
Heartwarming Satanic Sacrifice
Devout Atheist Season’s Greetings
Possessed Laying-on-of-Hands Ceremony
Really Neat Reincarnation with Auras and Crystals
And may your name never appear on a Homeland Security “No-fly list”.
May your abuses at the hands of authority be only cruel, degrading and inhuman, nothing that Mr. Cheney would call torture.
May your country never be “liberated” by the United States.
May your labor movement not be supported by the National Endowment for Democracy, nor your elections.
May the depleted uranium, cluster bombs, white phosphorous, and napalm which fall upon your land be as harmless or non-existent as the Pentagon says they are.
May you not fall sick in the United States without health insurance, nor desire to go to an American university while being not wealthy.
May you re-discover what the poor in 18th century France discovered, that rich people’s heads could be mechanically separated from their shoulders if they wouldn’t listen to reason.

Posted by: b real | Dec 7 2005 16:21 utc | 18

blum link

Posted by: b real | Dec 7 2005 16:23 utc | 19

doh! one of those two quotes was made up by trickster blum to make a point. back to lurk mode…

Posted by: b real | Dec 7 2005 16:27 utc | 20

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