By MAUREEN DOWD
December 7, 2005
New York Times OP-ED columnist

Our secretary of state's tortuous defense of supposedly nonexistent C.I.A. 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 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." [...] Read the rest at
http://select.nytimes.com/2005/12/07/opinion/07dowd.html or http://tinyurl.com/ctxue


© Virginia Metze