What's that smell?

Andrea Merkel may think the air has been cleared by Condoleeza’s doubletalk about torture, but there’s still a smell in the room that won’t go away.  As usual with this administration, what is, depends on what the definition of is is.

According to BBC World News, the US admits that it has “detention facilities” into which the Red Cross is not allowed.  It’s not a great leap to assume that such facilities are the very ones the CIA is accused of running without international oversight.

John Bellinger, the State Department’s top legal advisor made the admission but gave no details about where such prisoners were held.  This casts some doubt over lyin’ little Condoleeza’s statement that we follow the guidelines of the Geneva conventions, although her notorious moral and semantic relativities would make Einsteins’s head swim.  The Geneva Accord deals with prisoners of war and who knows how the prevaricators and equivocators in the Administration define the men, women and children it grabs off the street and flies secretly to secret locations to extract unreliable and illegal and immoral confessions through torture.  

On Wednesday while in Germany, Doktor Rice stressed that all American interrogators were bound by the UN Convention on Torture, whether they worked in the US or abroad. Of course she did not say whether foreign torturers in the employ of the US were so constrained and she did not define torture.

Once again, as we have asked over and over as concerns the activities of the Bush administration, we have to ask: why do we have to redact the constitution, stonewall congress and tell transparent lies if there is nothing to hide?