She’s going to meet with European leaders this week, in an effort to sell the Administration’s policy on torture.
Will she get a warm reception?
On Tuesday Rice will touch down in Bucharest to sign a deal opening American facilities in Romania that will provide stopover points for US missions in the Middle East and central Asia. One of them is likely to be the air force base of Mihail Kogalniceaunu, which has come under suspicion as an alleged “black site�.
Parts of Mihail Kogalniceaunu were off limits to Romanian authorities from 2001 to 2004, according to Ioan Mircea Pascu, the former defence minister. Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, visited the base in 2004 but the Romanian government has denied any knowledge of detention sites.
The Washington Post has claimed that America had operated secret prisons in eight countries. Human Rights Watch identified Poland and Romania as the most likely host nations.
Alvaro Gil Robles, the human rights commissioner at the Council of Europe, last week accused the Americans of having run a Guantanamo-style prison camp at Bondsteel in Kosovo. He said that when he visited in 2002 it housed 13 north African detainees who had been stripped of their legal rights and placed in solitary confinement.
Something tells me that while her message will fall on sympathetic ears today, that’s not always going to be the case. How long that will be is anybody’s guess, but how about after the 2006 elections?
Hmm…