Daily Archives: December 5, 2005


Defending the Indefensible

rice seems to be defending rendtion and secret prisons as she:

…chastised Europe leaders today, saying that before they complain about secret jails for terror suspects in European nations, they should realize that interrogations of these suspects have produced information that helped “save European lives.”

Really, some specifics would be helpful here.

…Ms. Rice repeatedly emphasized that the United States does not countenance the torture of terrorism suspects, at the hands of either American or foreign captors.

What exactly does she mean by torture? We know the bushites think about it a bit differently than many of the rest of us.
Reaching for justification and admitting that it is happening she goes on to say:

“We must bring terrorists to justice wherever possible,” she said. “But there have been many cases where the local government cannot detain or prosecute a suspect, and traditional extradition is not a good option.”

Why not? Please condi some details are in order here.

“In those cases,” she added, “the local government can make the sovereign choice to cooperate in the transfer of a suspect to a third country, which is known as a rendition.
“Sometimes, these efforts are misunderstood,” she said.

Echidne responds:

I want to hear a lot more about “the efforts being misunderstood”, a lot more. Like in what way are we misunderstanding them, exactly? Is it that the European interrogation centers were just chosen because they had excellent food and beer?

So much for the transparency the bushies seem to demand from everyone else. For instance, on November 10th stephen hadley said the following:

In terms of intelligence, you know, one of the problems, in dealing with a closed society such as North Korea, is you don’t know what you don’t know, and what you do know tends to be fairly limited. And as you know, we don’t know as much about their enrichment program as we would like. And that’s one of the reasons why, as part of the six-party talks, it will be very interesting to have — and very important to have a declaration, to have dismantlement procedures and verification measures so we can be sure that in a otherwise fairly non — extremely non-transparent society, these commitments to give up nuclear weapons and nuclear programs are carried out.

This is all well and good and we can agree with hadley. However, let’s revise his statement just a bit (italics):

In terms of intelligence, you know, one of the problems, in dealing with a closed administration such as bush’s, is you don’t know what you don’t know, and what you do know tends to be fairly limited. And as you know, we don’t know as much about their rendition program as we would like. And that’s one of the reasons why, as part of the six-party talks, it will be very interesting to have — and very important to have a declaration, to have disclosure procedures and verification measures so we can be sure that in a otherwise fairly non — extremely non-transparent administraton, these commitments to give up torture, rendition and secret prisons are carried out.

Yep, they need to look into the mirror a little more often and we should remember that whenever the bushies decide to accuse an opponent of some foul behavior it is often, if not always, a behavior that one or more of the bushies is trying to hide.
Update: Also see the heretik.


Lists! Year-end Lists!

Rex expects over 600 lists to populate Lists: 2005:

2001 had 350 list, and it has grown steadily to last year’s high of 550. So I’d expect 600+ this year. Some of it depends on which lists I allow in — if I included every single music blogger’s list, that would be a couple thousand alone. (Music is always the biggest category. I apologize every year that I can’t possibly add every single music blogger’s list.)

If you crave lists head on over and satisfy your hunger and if you know of a list that is not included let him know.
Via Marginal Revolution.


Korean Restaurants to Experience Increased Business

I’m certainly going to add one or two to my list of stops and will be ordering extra sides of kimchi:

Korea’s traditional side dish has begun attracting worldwide attention again as a potential remedy for avian influenza. It is a golden opportunity to restore pride in kimchi as a healthy food relished by people the world over.

Does anyone track and report sales at Korean restaurants or kimchi sales in particular? Either might be a pretty good index for how concerned people are about avian flu.
Via 7610.