Heh. How is a country supposed to bring "democracy" to the world if it can't even uphold its own one?
I don't know if anybody in the US discusses it, but as SOME people might know there are some "allegations" about the CIA having several "secret" prison camps in "New Europe" and abducting European citizens (in addition to Americans, etc) to torture and interrogate them there.
The funniest part about these "allegations" is that the US administration has evaded actually neglecting them and the only thing Condo "Pitbull" Rice has said about it is that she won't publically talk about CIA operations and that "if errors have been made" the US will try to fix them (which has been interpreted by the German chanceloress as an excuse until the US officials hastily pointed out that it isn't -- I guess the US just doesn't make mistakes).
CIA operations. She didn't even call them allegations. She was asked about possible violations of international agreements and the UN human rights that have been implemented throughout the EU. If not being able to talk about CIA operations is the only reason she can't talk about the allegations, she's basically confirming them.
The whole mess is being investigated now.
I'd hope that if such allegations were made about MY country's intelligence agency and the government would refuse to say or do anything about it, let alone support investigations, the people would be on the streets.
This is not about arresting wanted criminals and imprisoning them, this is about abducting citizens out of sheer suspicion in disregard of local, national and international laws, putting them in prison camps ala Guantanamo for an extended period of time and torturing them in order to get information of questionable quality (tortures were banned throughout the past century not only because they violate human rights, but also because it is proven that people will eventually say ANYTHING if you torture them long enough) from them.
True or not, these allegations are outrageous. It should be the foremost priority to disprove them if they aren't true -- and the US administration doesn't seem to give a fuck.
Way to go.
“I don’t give a goddamn,” Bush retorted. “I’m the President and the Commander-in-Chief. Do it my way.”
This guy is his own parody. Amazing.
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Comparatively, China has been a substantial power long before the US existed, and at a time when the British Empire was still pretty much an island and Brittany. So which quantification do you want for "most powerful", the one that owned more continents, or the one that has had regional influence with a state alone much larger than the entirety of old Europe and for more centuries than either the British Empire or the US put together?
