Unprecedented democratic conditions

NYT: “The American commanders say their soldiers have largely halted combat missions and now play a training and backup role for the Iraqi forces”. Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.

Let’s see if we can spot a pattern. National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, asked by Chris Wallace about secret overseas prisons today, said, “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.” Bush, last Tuesday, in non-response to a question about secret overseas prisons: “The United States of America does not torture.” McClellan, Friday, when asked about secret overseas prisons: “The President has made it very clear that we do not torture.” And we’ll see what Condi says in Europe this week. (Update: yup.) The pattern is that you ask them about secret prisons and they immediately turn the subject to torture. Which is a term none of them have ever been willing to define.

Hadley said Rice won’t comment on the CIA operations, presumably even to the people who run the countries where they take place, because “the information would help the enemy.” John McCain? The ACLU?

Hey, I just figured something out. The secret prisons are only in a couple of countries, as far as we know, Poland and Romania we think, but the flights that took prisoners there went through a lot of countries – Britain, Ireland, Germany, Italy, etc etc. I think the CIA deliberately spread them around to implicate as many countries as possible to keep them quiet.

AP headline: “US Missile, al-Qaida Death May Be Linked.” Ya think? The first story they tried to put out was that he’d been blown up accidentally by one of his own bombs. If that’s your cover story, you might use missiles without model numbers and the words “guided missile” and “US” on them.

Not surprisingly, Kazakhstan’s dictator Nazarbayev is “re-elected” for another 7-year term with 91% of the vote, in what Nazarbayev calls “unprecedented democratic conditions,” but which were, of course, undemocratic and very precedented.