Gwynne Dyer: Rice lies and CIA 'waterboards'

express: Condoleezza Rice and Count Metternich

"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, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice does not come close at all.

Her four-country European tour was originally intended to rebuild US-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 US, 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, and the CIA goes on using such techniques as "waterboarding" (strapping a prisoner to a board and immersing his head until he believes he is drowning) even while the State Department condemns other governments that use the same technique. Read more