Condi's European Adventure

Sydney Blumenthal has an interesting piece in Salon on Condoleeza Rice's trip to Europe, largely focused on the outcry over CIA 'black sites' and the policy of rendition. In essence, she has been sent to Europe to shut them up about torture. What the European governments want is an explanation of the U.S. policy on torture and 'cruel, inhuman or degrading' treatment of prisoners. The Bush Administration has sent mixed signals on the issue of the treatment of prisoners, asserting "we do not torture", while sending Dick Cheney to Capitol Hill to get the CIA an exemption from the McCain Amendment. All the while, media reports (most of them from Dana Priest at the Washington Post) suggest that the U.S. has a policy whereby they take terrorism suspects and either send them to CIA 'black sites' for interrogation or render them to countries with less of a problem with torture and similar interrogation techniques. The reports on the 'black sites' mentioned that some of them were in former Warsaw Pact countries in Central and Eastern Europe. In response, many European countries have launched investigations into whether their country hosted CIA 'black sites' or had CIA planes rendering suspects stopping in their territory. The EU has promised to suspend the voting rights of any EU country found to violate human rights laws regarding the treatment of prisoners. Condi today somewhat changed the public U.S. position that we do not torture and adding that we do not render suspects to countries that torture. This is probably either a lie or a legalistic parsing. The Europeans should be investigating the CIA's operations within Europe. As Blumenthal notes:

"In her attempt to impose silence, she spread guilt. Everybody is unclean in the dirty war and nobody has any right to complain. "What I would hope that our allies would acknowledge," she said, "is that we are all in this together.""

There is no situation in which the use of torture (either done in house, in 'black sites' or outsourced through the process of rendition. It erodes the moral authority of countries which practice it and fuel hatred and encourage extremism. But maybe that's the point.