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If forced to choose who you would believe, innocent German citizen Khaled Masri who says he was tortured by the US after he was snatched and taken to Afghanistan, or Condoleezza Rice, Don Rumsfeld, or any other representative of this administration, who would it be? Who in the world is going to believe anyone but Masri? Update: It would be a beautiful thing for there to be a debate between Dr. Condoleezza "We do not condone torture" Rice and Mr. al-Masri about how much the US condones torture. Someone could tell her to stuff it in her Ferragamo shoes. There's no two ways about it. She lies. Is Rice denying Masri was tortured? Not that I've heard. She's just admitting snatching and torturing him was a mistake because he had the same name as the guy the US meant to snatch and torture.
Update II: And it turns out European audiences don't believe her. Imagine that. More from Dowd:
More from Reed Hundt: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. ...
It all depends on what you mean by "authorize," "condone," "torture" and "detainees."...
When Ms. Rice was a Stanford professor of international relations, she would have flunked any student who dared to present her with the sort of willfully disingenuous piffle she spouted on the eve of her European trip.
Maybe she figures that if she was able to fool people once with doubletalk about W.M.D., she can fool them again with doubletalk about rendition. ...
Colin Powell and his aides have made no bones about the fact that his inaccurate presentation to the United Nations was the lowlight of his career. Does his successor not grasp the perils of misrepresentation? Does anyone around her not realize that the price paid by the State Department for lack of candor is quite different than the stakes for someone running for office? I mentioned the other day that she really must not be playing word games on the torture issue, but all the reports from Europe suggest that she is being less than direct with every word on the subject of torture including, to paraphrase Mary McCarthy about (I think) Lillian Hellman, "the" and "and" and "but."