US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice admitted yesterday that the US may make mistakes in its "war on terrorism" and promised to put them right if they happened.
"We recognize any policy will sometimes result in errors, and when it happens, we will do everything we can to rectify it," Rice said at the start of a European tour overshadowed by allegations of illegal CIA methods against terrorist suspects.
Rice also said the Bush administration will use "every lawful means" to combat international terrorism and does not condone torture.
"We have an obligation to defend our people and we will use every lawful means to do so," Rice said after talks with German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Berlin.
Merkel said Rice's assurances were "important" for her to hear and said the meeting, the highest-ranking official contact between Berlin and Washington since Merkel became chancellor last month, signaled a "good start" for future German-US relations.
Rice, however, declined to comment on the case of a German man, Khaled el-Masri, who was allegedly abducted to Afghanistan and imprisoned there for five months last year until the CIA realized it had the wrong man.
But Merkel said the US government had acknowledged it blundered over Masri, who plans to sue the CIA in a case to be filed in the US later yesterday.
"I'm pleased to say that we spoke about the individual case, which was accepted by the United States as a mistake, and so I'm very pleased the foreign minister [Rice] has reiterated that if mistakes are made, they must immediately be rectified," Merkel told a joint news conference.
Masri's case has caused a furore in Germany, fueled by a US newspaper report that the former interior minister was told of the case in May last year and agreed to a request from the US ambassador to keep it quiet.
Merkel said she would ask Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier to report on the Masri case to the parliamentary committee responsible for supervising security services.
Rice was not challenged directly over reports that the US had run secret prisons in Eastern Europe, which Washington has refused to confirm or deny.
But she reiterated her vigorous defense of US methods in its war on 21st century militants.
"If you don't get to them before they commit their crimes, they will commit mass murder," she said. "We have an obligation to defend our people and we will use every lawful means to do so."
Rice said combating terrorism required close security cooperation, but intelligence methods could not be made public nor specific cases discussed.
"Without good intelligence, you can simply not protect innocent civilians from the kind of attacks we have experienced around the globe," she said.
She stressed that the US operated strictly "within the context of laws and our international obligations," an assurance welcomed by Merkel.
Europe's leading human rights watchdog is probing the press reports on CIA secret prisons, as well as flights by CIA planes across the continent, which it believes may have been used to covertly transport terrorist suspects.
The EU and at least eight of its members have sought clarification from Washington.
A new TV report on Monday cited current and former CIA officials saying al-Qaeda suspects had been held in Europe until last month, but then were then sent to a new CIA facility in the north African desert.
ABC News said two secret prisons operated by the US Secret Service in Poland and Romania were closed just ahead of Rice's visit to Europe.
It said the US scrambled to get all the suspects off European soil before Rice arrived.
Polish Defense Minister Radoslaw Sikorski told ABC News: "My president has said there is no truth in these reports."
PRECISION STRIKES: The most significant reason to deploy HIMARS to outlying islands is to establish a ‘dead zone’ that the PLA would not dare enter, a source said A High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) would be deployed to Penghu County and Dongyin Island (東引) in Lienchiang County (Matsu) to force the Chinese military to retreat at least 100km from the coastline, a military source said yesterday. Taiwan has been procuring HIMARS and Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) from the US in batches. Once all batches have been delivered, Taiwan would possess 111 HIMARS units and 504 ATACMS, which have a range of 300km. Considering that “offense is the best defense,” the military plans to forward-deploy the systems to outlying islands such as Penghu and Dongyin so that
WHAT WAS ALL THAT FOR? Jaw Shaw-kong said that Cheng Li-wen had pushed for more drastic cuts and attacked him, just for the outcome to be nearly identical to his bill The legislature yesterday passed a supplementary budget bill to fund the purchase of separate packages of US military equipment, with the combined amount of spending capped at NT$780 billion (US$24.8 billion). The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) used their legislative majority to pass the bill, which runs until 2033 and has two main funding provisions. One was for NT$300 billion of arms sales already approved by the US for Taiwan on Dec. 17 last year, the other was for NT$480 billion for another arms package expected to be announced by Washington. The bill, which fell short of the NT$1.25
‘CLEAR MESSAGE’: The bill would set up an interagency ‘tiger team’ to review sanctions tools and other economic options to help deter any Chinese aggression toward Taiwan US Representative Young Kim has introduced a bill to deter Chinese aggression against Taiwan, calling for an interagency “tiger team” to preplan coordinated sanctions and economic measures in response to possible Chinese military or political action against Taiwan. “[Chinese President] Xi Jinping [習近平] has directed the People’s Liberation Army to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. China has a plan. America should have one too,” Kim said in a news release on Thursday last week. She introduced the “Deter PRC [People’s Republic of China] aggression against Taiwan act” to “ensure the US has a coordinated sanctions strategy ready should
A former television news host and six military personnel — active and retired — have been indicted on espionage charges, Kaohsiung prosecutors said yesterday. Lin Chen-you (林宸佑), a former CTi News host and YouTuber, last year allegedly made videos at the direction of a Chinese agent criticizing the Democratic Progressive Party’s recall campaign, the Ciaotou District Prosecutors’ Office told a news conference in Kaohsiung. He allegedly received 4,325 tether coins for the videos from an unidentified person surnamed Huang (黃), believed to be an agent of a hostile foreign power, they said. Lin, also known as Ma Te (馬德), has a show named
RSS