The NYT has an article on “The Man Behind the Secretary of State’s Rock Star Image.” That aide insists that all of his work in promoting her alleged rock star image is not for domestic consumption – in a story about Condi’s rock star image (no, it doesn’t get less silly with repetition, does it?) printed coincidentally on the same day she’s facing questions in Europe about secret prisons and torture.
Condi the rock star tried today to implicate European countries in America’s torture flights and secret prisons (whose existence she refused to confirm or deny): “Some governments choose to cooperate with the United States. That cooperation is a two-way street. We share intelligence that has helped protect European countries from attack, saving European lives.” So if a country doesn’t “cooperate,” we don’t share any intelligence we have that it might be attacked by terrorists? She won’t say which European countries cooperate, because that would put them at risk of reprisal. Not saying, instead, puts all of them at risk, or at least the ones rumored to be involved. She defended, nay praised, the extra-judicial detention of prisoners, while at the same time refusing to acknowledge the existence of the prisons in which those prisoners are held, because to do so “would be compromising intelligence information, and I’m not going to do that”. That statement is designed to elicit the Pavlovian mouth-shutting that is the response of most of the media to claims that intel is endangered, but in fact makes no sense whatsoever. Compromised how?
Oh, and if you read Condi the rock star’s comment about respecting the sovereignty of European states too quickly, you may have missed what she was actually saying: she totally respects their right to lie about there being secret prisons on their territory.
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