Who you gonna believe - Condi or your lying eyes?

I have always had a certain grudging respect for the way the Bush administration operates, especially its straightforward use of assertion. When they want to convince us that something is so, they simply say that it's so, knowing that they can count on maybe 1/3 of us to believe them implicitly, and that they stand a decent chance of convincing another 1/4 or 1/3 by repeated assertion. Never mind evidence or documentation: "Saddam was involved in 9/11." "Iraq has a nuclear program." "John Kerry didn't deserve his medals."

Our latest demonstration is the ineffable Condoleeza Rice, telling Europeans that "the United States does not permit, tolerate or condone torture under any circumstances . . . The United States does not transport and has not transported detainees from one country to another for the purpose of interrogation using torture" (see NY Times article at the link above). Never mind the photographs, the film, the eyewitness testimony by victims, perpetrators, and onlookers. Lynndie England and Charles Graner are making big rocks into little rocks, so we've cleared up that little problem. (I'm still trying to figure out how England and Graner managed to be in Afghanistan and Cuba as well as Iraq.) The mainstream media faithfully reproduces Rice's statements and helps to muddy the waters.

Let's parse this: as for the first claim, note that Rice did not say that the US did not torture, merely that we don't "permit, tolerate or condone it." As for the second, I'm willing to bet that Alberto Gonzales et al. already have the legal language ready to assert that we have other "purposes" than torture for transporting "detainees" (a marvelously benign euphemism) to other nations.