A FUNNY THING happened to Condoleezza Rice on her way to Europe last week. Even before the secretary of State began her five-day swing through Germany, Romania, Ukraine, and Belgium, American news media started framing her trip not as an important series of bi-lateral meetings on pressing topics–the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, say, or Afghanistan’s stabilization, and Iran’s worrisome nuclear ambitions–but as a kind of high-wire act, far more compelling stuff, in which the secretary’s deliciously daunting task was to convince skeptical European allies that the United States treats its detainees, on average, better than the North Vietnamese treated their guests at the Hanoi Hilton.
That the news media sometimes can–indeed, to satisfy their own commercial needs, must–set the agenda for senior government officials traveling abroad is nothing new. On Rice’s first foreign travel as secretary, a lengthy tour of Europe and the Middle East back in February, her trip was “dominated” by questions about whether the United States was devoted to regime change in Iran, and prepared to use military force to achieve it. By “dominated,” one means, of course, not that the looming American invasion of Tehran arose in all of the important bi-laterals Rice conducted, but, rather, that reporters wouldn’t stop asking about it.
So successful were the media in making Rice’s most recent trip exclusively about the twin issues of torture and “secret CIA prisons” that the secretary, having promised to address the whole matter prior to her departure early Monday morning, was forced to use the faux wood paneling in the Andrews Air Force Base aviators’ lounge as the drab backdrop for a full-bore speech on the issue. Her remarks offered a series of seemingly guileless assurances, such as: “The United States does not authorize or condone torture of detainees.”
By trip’s end, it seemed Rice had successfully traversed the high wire. Though she never confirmed or denied the existence of secret CIA prisons, the Associated Press reported the secretary had nonetheless “eased European ministers’ worries with reassuring denials.” NATO Secretary-General Jaap De Hoop Scheffer said Rice “cleared the air” and added: “You will not see this discussion continuing.” Austrian Chancellor Wolfgang Schuessel told reporters at the White House he was “quite happy” with Rice’s performance. “She took the heat,” Schuessel said. “She stood there.” Even Dutch Foreign Minister Bernard Bot, who had earlier chided the Bush administration to “stop hiding” on the torture issue, found Rice providing “clear answers” during their talks in Brussels, and declared: “All fields were covered.”
“Europe’s foreign ministers rolled over, stuck their paws in the air and allowed Ms. Rice to tickle their stomachs,” sniffed a furious liberal columnist in London’s Independent newspaper.
HERE AT HOME, the verdict, as rendered by those who brought the case to the docket in the first place, was hardly so unambiguous. On the trip’s third day, the New York Times editorialized that Rice “had a hard time sounding credible.” That followed the Washington Post‘s editorial of a day earlier, which derided the secretary’s arguments as a lot of “legalistic jujitsu and morally obtuse double talk.” The Post, at least, eventually came around, headlining correspondent Glenn Kessler’s wrap-up piece: RICE QUIETS CONCERNS OVER DETAINEE TREATMENT. On its website, ABC News linked readers to an Associated Press report entitled ALLIES WELCOME RICE’S COMMENTS ON TORTURE–but deleted that favorable headline from the web page featuring the article.
If it is true that Secretary Rice, notwithstanding the skepticism of some major American news media, succeeded in making her case to the jury she prized most–European political leaders–then students of politics, government, and rhetoric must ask: How exactly did she pull it off? The question is analogous to the one raised by President Bush’s performance in the 2002 midterm elections, when the famously maladroit orator, speaking at fundraisers and rallies across the country, defied historical odds and helped his party win seats in the House and Senate.
“She discussed [the torture issue] three times . . . with the foreign minister of Germany,” marveled Austria’s Schuessel. But the real heavy lifting in Rice’s charm offensive was carried out on the world stage. She addressed the subject of detainees in 7 different public forums and issued a total of 65 separate denials or other verbal statements meant to reassure Europe about America’s commitment to human rights.
Most striking–and apparently unnoticed by Rice’s European counterparts or by any members of the diplomatic press corps–was the secretary’s almost fetishistic attentiveness to verb tense. Forty out of 65 times, or 61 percent of the time, she spoke in the present tense. “The United States does not permit, tolerate, or condone torture under any circumstances,” she intoned at Andrews. A few hours later, on the trans-Atlantic flight to Berlin, she told reporters: “Our people, wherever they are, are operating under U.S. law and U.S. international obligations.” “We respect the sovereignty of our partners,” she said on German television. “We don’t send people to be tortured,” she assured Sky News’ Julie Etchingham.
When not speaking in the present tense, Rice was most apt to speak in some variation of the future tense: 23 of her 65 bites at the apple (36 percent of the time). “We will respect the sovereignty of our partners,” she said on the plane ride over. “People are not going to be transferred in order to be tortured,” she pledged to Etchingham. “The United States intends and will fully live up to its obligations under our international commitments,” she told ARD’s Anne Will. Once, the secretary’s fondness for future tense took a form she herself has often rebuked reporters for indulging: the hypothetical. Appearing with Romanian President Traian Basescu, Rice spoke, in oddly dissociative fashion, about “taking terrorists off the streets, not simply releasing them back into the general population, [but] making certain that you use every lawful means to capture them and to interrogate them and to make certain that you’re getting the information that you need.”
Thus 63 of Rice’s 65 Statements of Reassurance–97 percent of the total–were phrased in present or future tense. Only on two occasions did she speak in the past tense, and thereby address past conduct of U.S. personnel. This unpleasant rhetorical chore she got out of the way early, and never returned to it. In her set piece at Andrews, Rice averred that the United States “has respected the sovereignty of other countries,” and “has not transported anyone, and will not transport anyone”–o, future tense, sweet nectar of obfuscation!–“to a country when we believe he will be tortured.”
Even in those two lonely cases, Rice’s use of past tense was by no means exhaustive: She did not say the U.S. has always respected other countries’ sovereignty; and for her second statement, she set the bar for factual disproval impossibly high, by insisting, effectively, that the U.S. had never knowingly transported a detainee to be tortured. Indeed, all of Rice’s professions of concern for the safety of men subjected to rendition were phrased in present tense: “Where appropriate,” she said at Andrews, “the United States seeks assurances that transferred persons will not be tortured.” When did that start? Only Sky’s Etchingham pursued the matter. “Are those assurances documented?” she asked, a simple but menacing question which, with its unwelcome allusions to paperwork, dated and stamped, threatened to shift the rhetorical theater to terrain Rice evidently considered dangerous: the past. “Well,” the secretary replied, “there are assurances and they go through channels and they are assurances that the United States government relies on.” Ever the practiced recitalist, Rice stayed entirely in present tense; there would be no probing discussion of past U.S. conduct.
Does the Bush administration have something to hide where past treatment of detainees is concerned? Maybe, maybe not; all that could be inferred from Rice’s skillful use of rhetoric was an aversion to discussing the matter. Her extraordinary caution with words led some to wonder whether, as in the Detroit Free Press headline, RICE TORTURE DENIAL LEAVES LOOPHOLES. Washington Post cartoonist Tom Toles depicted the secretary reading her statement at a podium, bathing in a snow-shower of her own asterisks, which cascaded down in abundance from the word-balloon above her head. At her last press availability on the trip, in Brussels, one reporter, soft-spoken Warren Strobel of Knight-Ridder, posed, with a straight face, the logical, though infertile, question: “Are there any loopholes, asterisks, exceptions, carve-outs to what you said?” “Warren,” Rice replied with a smile, “I can only say what I said . . . ”
James Rosen is a White House and State Department correspondent for Fox News, and author of the forthcoming book, The Strong Man: John Mitchell, Nixon, and Watergate.
