Gwynne Dyer, Contributor
"METTERNICH COMES close to being a statesman; he lies very well," Napoleon once said of the Austrian aristocrat who dominated European diplomacy for a generation. By that demanding standard, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice does not come close at all.
Her four-country European tour was originally intended to rebuild U.S.-European relations that have been badly damaged by the Iraq war, and especially to welcome a new German government whose leader, Chancellor Angela Merkel, wanted to kiss and make up with the Bush administration. But then came the furore about the alleged torture of terrorism suspects and the revelation that the Central Intelligence Agency used the airports of America's European allies for the 'rendition' of those suspects to places where the torture could be done more conveniently.
Rice's failure to lie convincingly about the torture accusations - the U.S., she said, 'does not tolerate, permit or condone torture under any circumstances' - was not all her fault, for she is continually undermined by other parts of the administration. Vice-President Dick Cheney publicly insists that the CIA be exempt from the ban on 'cruel, inhuman and degrading' treatment of prisoners.
ACCOMPLICES TO TORTURE
Since almost all of this activity takes place beyond the borders of the United States, there is not much that its opponents can do about it through the American justice system. Moreover, the CIA and the U.S. military usually outsource the more extreme forms of torture to other governments (the Abu Ghraib abuses were an aberration) in order to evade direct legal responsibility. But that does involve flying detained suspects around the world in planes owned or chartered by the CIA, and the flight logs of these aircraft show that they have landed hundreds of times in European Union countries, which may legally implicate those countries as accomplices to torture.
As the revelations about secret CIA prisons in Europe and CIA shuttle flights through EU countries grew - at least 210 stops in Britain, 50 in Ireland and 437 in Germany - EU political leaders were forced to demand explanations from the United States. For two weeks Condoleezza Rice denied U.S. wrongdoing but mostly said nothing, which was certainly the best strategy in the circumstances. The European governments could satisfy their own public opinion by loudly demanding answers, and the U.S. saved everybody embarrassment by not giving any. But then Rice lost her patience and told the truth.
Speaking in Washington just before she left for Europe, she defended the renditions as a necessary part of the U.S. 'war on terror'. She made it absolutely clear that the U.S. government had the knowing cooperation of the relevant EU governments, or at least of their intelligence services, in these shuttle flights. It must have felt very satisfying, but she will regret saying it before the end.
There will be public inquiries in other countries, too, and a constant flow of new information about the illegality and cruelty of the American gulag that will undermine the already failing authority of the Bush administration. By telling the truth and insisting that European governments share the blame for the policy, Condoleezza Rice has opened a can of worms that her colleagues at home would have preferred to keep shut.
Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.
