Condi Rice on the Hot Seat Over CIA Detentions
Condi Rice leaves for a trip today to four European countries. The New York Times reports she is prepared to defend America's use of secret renditions. I don't think she will get off that easy. Other countries are rightfully losing patience with our President's unilateral policy of kidnapping people, whisking them off to secret detention centers outside the U.S., and subjecting them to harsh interrogation techniques that may amount to torture.
The European Union, often more antagonistic to the United States than its individual member states, has vowed to press the issue during Rice’s visit. [German Justice Commissioner Franco]Frattini said the 25-nation alliance has “an institutional and moral duty to promote and defend fundamental rights of people.”
Even America’s closest allies are demanding answers. At least eight European nations have launched inquiries into allegations that the US may be operating a “ghost gulag” with scores of detainees shunted from one detention facility to another, mainly in the Middle East and Central Asia, via transit points in Europe.
This Japanese editorial sums up the flak Condi will face very well.
Awaiting Rice on her stops in Germany, Belgium, Romania and other destinations will be questions about alleged human rights violations supposedly engineered by Washington.
....A probe by an international human rights group has uncovered suspicions that CIA flights possibly transporting such detainees made * stops in Poland, Romania and other countries....If such clandestine jails do exist, they would be blatant violations of EU treaties extolling the value of liberty and human rights.
....The International Covenants on Human Rights ban any arbitrary arrests or detentions. Clearly, holding people in jails kept secret from the general public is an act of inhumanity intolerable anywhere in the world. This rule applies especially to the EU, a region that has repeatedly declared the critical importance of human rights and humanitarian issues in the wake of its citizens' profound soul-searching about the Nazi camps of World War II.
As to what questions Condi should be prepared to answer, the editorial lists these:
Do the detention centers really exist? If so, what types of interrogations and methods are being used? The Polish and Romanian governments deny the reports, posing the question of whether the countries where the jails were allegedly set up have even been informed of their existence.
Secret detention camps are not our first instance of abuse. There's Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo to consider as well. If Condi Rice thinks she can provide vague denials such as "The U.S. does not engage in torture" to get around the issue, or use the line Stephen Hadley used on Fox News yesterday, I hope she's mistaken.
"We comply with U.S. law, we respect the sovereignty of the countries with which we deal, and we do not move people around the world so that they can be tortured," Stephen Hadley told Fox.
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