Rice says US will work to rectify mistakes
US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said today that Washington would work to rectify any mistakes it has made in its war on terror, and insisted that the Bush administration does not condone torture.
“When and if mistakes are made, we work very hard to try to correct them,” Rice told a news conference with German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
Merkel said she and Rice talked about the 2004 case of Khaled al-Masri, a Lebanese-born German national, who maintains he was seized in Macedonia and taken to a US prison in Afghanistan where he was tortured and interrogated about suspected ties to al Qaida.
Merkel said “the government of the US has, of course, accepted as a mistake” the al-Masri case and added that it had been referred to a secretive German parliamentary commission for investigation.
Rice declined to comment directly on the case, but when asked if she could “guarantee” that a German citizen had not, and will not be subject to the practice of rendition, she indicated a mistake had been made.
“We also recognise that any policy will sometimes result in errors and when it happens we will do everything we can to rectify it,” she said.
Yet Rice defended the rendition programme, which has faced bitter criticism in Europe, saying the US has “saved American lives and we’ve saved European lives” with international intelligence efforts and pledged to continue with the work, with the assistance of its allies.
“We will do everything we can to co-operate with like-minded intelligence services,” Rice said.
The meeting with Germany’s new chancellor came as Rice opened a four-nation European trip amid swirling questions of whether the US keeps terrorist suspects in secret prisons that violate European legal and human rights guarantees.
Merkel said Rice’s assurances were “important” for her and for ordinary Germans to hear and said the meeting, the highest-ranking official contact between Berlin and Washington since Merkel became chancellor last month, signalled a “good start” for future German-US relations.
She also welcomed Rice’s pledge that US officials in Iraq are providing all the help they can – including intelligence – to help secure the release of a German aid worker kidnapped there 11 days ago.
Dutch Foreign Minister Ben Bot dismissed Rice’s response to questions about the CIA’s reported secret prisons as inadequate.
“We’ve read her statement now and I know that it doesn’t give a satisfactory answer in regard to these detention centres,” Bot said in the Dutch parliament.
Merkel made no direct criticism of the US and neither of them shed any light on whether the CIA had operated secret prisons in Europe or whether prisoners had been transported through Germany, as has recently been reported in US and international media.
“We haven’t discussed other cases (besides al-Masri), so I cannot recognise any pattern” of US renditions against German citizens, Merkel said.
Speaking later to Germany’s ARD television, Rice reiterated that the US believed that terrorism “has to be fought lawfully.”
While terrorists knew no laws, “we don’t want to mimic them or become like them,” Rice said. “There are military necessities, but we are going to be a country of laws ... that is something of which our partners can be assured.”
Rice’s trip to Germany, Romania, Ukraine and Belgium is meant to build on generally improved relations between Europe and the US after strains over Iraq. The war remains widely unpopular in Europe, as does US President George Bush.
Later today, Rice flew to Romania, a country identified as a possible site of a secret detention facility run by the CIA. Romania denies it. She will sign a defence co-operation pact there related to an air base the advocacy group Human Rights Watch has identified as a site for a clandestine prison.
European governments have expressed outrage over reports of a network of secret Soviet-era prisons in Eastern Europe where detainees may have been harshly treated and reports of CIA flights carrying al Qaida prisoners through European airports.
Several countries have denied they hosted such sites. If the US did operate such prisons, or is still doing so, the information would be classified. The Bush administration has refused to answer questions about it in public.
“Were I to confirm or deny, say yes or say no, then I would be compromising intelligence information, and I’m not going to do that,” Rice told reporters on her plane to Germany.
