Shhh.....Can You Keep a Secret?

First off -- Nick, kudos to you on your response to George Packer. I started reading the article on that in the FT this morning but my eyes glazed over by the second paragraph. I was still grumbling over the article on the front page - "Evidence CIA has secret jails in Europe".

Oooh, "secret" jails. But not so secret that Human Rights Watch, a US lobby group, has found out about it. Well, thank goodness they have blown the lid off this big cover-up because I thought all al Qaida suspects and other assorted terrorists get to go to Club Gitmo to be tortured and demeaned in their cells with big arrows pointing to Mecca, eating their orange chicken and rice pilaf, reading library books and watching movies.

The supposed "strong evidence" to support this is "flight records of CIA aircraft transporting prisoners out of Afghanistan," reportedly to Poland and Romania. So? Where's the human rights violation here? Being taken to jail on a plane?? I don't know, because the article doesn't discuss that. It only speculates that if this is all being done in secret, then there's room for torture. You want torture? Tell me how many American servicemen some of these 'suspects' have killed or injured and tell me what the families of those Americans are going through. I don't think you need to speculate on that. But if you really want to speculate, why not think of how many American families we've spared from that torture because of all the captures we've made.

And if these jails have been kept secret, then maybe that's why it's been such a secret that one of bin Laden's top lieutenants escaped from the detention facility in Bagram. And why ABC reported on it yesterday (11/2), when the escape took place in July and has been public since July.

Somehow, that missed the front pages....sshhhh....