Mrs Rice... You're Kidding, Right ?

Big title in the Observer today : Rice rejects EU protests over secret terror prisons

(...)[Mrs. Rice] is expected to make a public statement today stressing that the US does not violate allies' sovereignty or break international law.

No, of course the US isn't doing anything wrong. There's no secret arrests of people who're never been charged with anything, flown away to prisons where they can be tortured, where they can be "dealt with" without ever respecting the most basic of their rights to a lawyer, a defense, and a trial. Nah, all that is bullshit. We all know there's nothing resembling extraordinary rendition, nothing at all!

The Observer adds: Irish Foreign Minister Dermot Ahern said Rice told him in Washington she expected allies to trust that America does not allow rights abuses.

But of course, we do trust America, we do trust the US government. Our faith in Georges W. Bush is absolute! Never, ever would the US wander astray from all the international conventions on torture. Geneva, anyone? Remember Mr. Rumsfeld and his undying love and respect for the Geneva Conventions?

Oh, and if this wasn't enough, I advise you to go read the following paper in today's edition of the Washington Post: Wrongful Imprisonment: Anatomy of a CIA Mistake. You will learn a few interesting things.

Coats [the U.S. ambassador in Germany] informed the German minister that the CIA had wrongfully imprisoned one of its citizens, Khaled Masri, for five months, and would soon release him, the sources said. There was also a request: that the German government not disclose what it had been told even if Masri went public.

In case anyone doubted it: (...) there is no tribunal or judge to check the evidence against those picked up by the CIA.

Wait, it gets better:
The CIA inspector general is investigating a growing number of what it calls "erroneous renditions," (...)
"They picked up the wrong people, who had no information. In many, many cases there was only some vague association" with terrorism, one CIA officer said. (...)
Masri was held for five months largely because the head of the CIA's Counterterrorist Center's al Qaeda unit "believed he was someone else," one former CIA official said. "She didn't really know. She just had a hunch."

Wow! You kidnap a man, whisk him away god knows where, interrogate him, torture him for five months on a hunch! But of course, in the same time you're upholding all the Geneva conventions, respecting all the aspects of human rights, and you're the most trustworthy US government the wolrd has ever seen.

GIVE ME A BREAK !

Who do you think you're kidding, Mrs Rice?

In front of declarations like this: "It was the Camelot of counterterrorism," a former counterterrorism official said. "We didn't have to mess with others -- and it was fun.", What kind of moral high ground do you think you're standing upon, you and the US?

Sand!

How will you ever dare tell anyone who holds your own citizens prisoners without a trial and who tortures them that they're vilains? They're just the same as you! You hide behind a veneer of dignity that's crackling and crumbling to pieces a bit more each day.

Pathetic.

Stay where you are, Mrs Rice, and keep your mouth shut. Europe has no need for your lessons, your ethics and morals are more than flawed or askew. They no longer have any value.

As for us, I dearly hope the EU will deal with the collaborators of torturers. I hope the EU will show them all the love and mercy they deserve.

Any country which knowingly, at any level of power, participated in helping the CIA in those renditions should be expelled from the EU.

Forever.