The Romanian Intelligence Service does not have any intelligence

In an only-slightly unfair Bloomberg article on how Michael Brown’s emails show him concerned with his reputation and clothing when he might have been focusing on responding to Katrina (the unfair part is to tweak him for looking for a sitter for his dog – was he supposed to let it starve?), there is this sentence: “Brown didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.” No, Brownie doesn’t immediately respond to anything; if you kicked him in the balls (and I encourage this experiment), he’d yell in pain a week later.

Romania and Poland have also denied hosting the CIA’s torture/detention facilities, sorta. From Romania we get such tortuously (sorry) phrased statements as “In the portfolio of projects of the Romanian government, there is no activity as the one that you refer to” and “the Romanian Intelligence Service does not have any intelligence on such detention centers in Romania.” The last one is the world’s lamest Zen koan. Russia has also denied being one of the countries. It hadn’t even occurred to me to suspect Russia, of all places, but now that they’ve denied it I can’t help wondering... The WaPo, by the way, quotes Human Rights Watch’s well-researched Romania/Poland claim, although presumably it knows whether it's true or not. To allow itself to engage in this he said/she said nonsense, today's article was written by Craig Whitlock rather than Dana Priest, the author of the original article.

Fafblog has a suggestion.

To my Russian readers, if any, a happy Day of People’s Unity, and congrats on throwing off the Polish yoke.