Trust Me?

We discussed Condi Rice's attempts to defend the indefensible below. Paul Craig Roberts explains that her message is not an attempt to defend the US policy of torture, rendition and secret prisons, she is just telling them to 'Trust Me'. Mr Roberts points out that no member of the Bush administration deserves anyone's trust and that certainly includes Ms Rice.

Secretary of State Condi Rice is off to Europe to neither confirm nor to deny that the US government in an operation known as rendition kidnaps people, often the wrong ones, and flies them to foreign countries to be tortured.

"Trust me" is her line. According to Reuters, "Irish Foreign Minister Dermot Ahern said Rice told him in Washington she expected allies to trust that America does not allow rights abuses."

Who will trust this woman who, as President Bush’s National Security Advisor, said that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction capable of producing a "mushroom cloud" over an American city?

Who will trust this woman who, as National Security Advisor, said Saddam Hussein sheltered al Qaeda terrorists in Baghdad and helped train some in chemical weapons development (CNN report, Sept. 26, 2002, 1:28 PM EDT)?

Who will trust this woman who won’t answer a question but says "trust me"?

With all the details now in the news Condi Rice's stonewalling statements make her look like an idiot who can't be trusted.

Details of specific rendition cases are so much in the news as to make Condi Rice’s stonewalling absurd. On December 4 the Washington Post reported that in May of last year the US ambassador to Germany was dispatched by the White House to inform the German Interior Minister that the CIA had kidnapped a German citizen, Khaled Masri, and flown him to a CIA prison in Afghanistan where he was held for five months.

The Americans told the Germans that Masri was innocent and would be released. The Germans were instructed to say nothing about the incident even if Masri went public, because the US did not want to acknowledge the rendition program. In other words, the Bush administration expects any other government that finds out about its wrongful actions to keep quiet about them even when its own citizens are victimized.

Gentle reader, who could possibly believe Rice’s reassurances that the US respects the sovereignty of other countries when it is established fact that the US kidnaps other countries’ citizens abroad and flies them off to torture prisons?

Do you think the policy won't impact you? We;; who have you pissed off lately?

To comprehend the importance of due process, a process that the Bush administration has destroyed for "suspects" be they American citizens or foreigners, entertain that on the way to work one morning you are forcefully intercepted and spirited away to Afghanistan or to Egypt or any of the other locations of US torture prisons. Why are you there, you wonder. Did a personal enemy or envious colleague report you on a false charge? Did a tortured suspect somewhere utter a name that resembled yours?

Nonsense, it can’t happen, you say? Alas, it happened to Masri and perhaps 3,000 others who are estimated to have been "renditioned." According to the Washington Post, a CIA official said that Masri was kidnapped and held secretly for five months because the woman in charge of the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center’s al Qaeda unit "believed he was someone else. She didn’t really know. She just had a hunch."

Isn’t it reassuring that the US government toys with people’s lives on the basis of female intuition?

This is justice in America, a country that is teaching Iraq about democracy through force of arms.

This is what our country has become. As I said the other day:

It is becoming obvious that 911 did change everything, for the worse. The United States was once the beacon for freedom and justice but no more.