A Spork in the Drawer

International Fugitive

Retired Field Marshal von Rumsfeld:

Former U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld fled France today fearing arrest over charges of "ordering and authorizing" torture of detainees at both the American-run Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and the U.S. military's detainment facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, unconfirmed reports coming from Paris suggest.

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"Rumsfeld must be feeling how Saddam Hussein felt when U.S. forces were hunting him down," activist Tanguy Richard said. "He may never end up being hanged like his old friend, but he must learn that in the civilized world, war crime doesn't pay."

International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) along with the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR), and the French League for Human Rights (LDH) filed the complaint on Thursday after learning that Rumsfeld was scheduled to visit Paris.

Is this a known known, an known unknown, or a unknown unknown?

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You Don't Know Jack

Kelly:

The response of French governments to these repeated rescues was stunning ingratitude. Charles DeGaulle pulled France out of NATO and delighted in sticking his finger in our eye. No Western nation has done more than the France of the retiring President Jacques Chirac to undermine our foreign policy.

Never mind that Chirac was right about Iraq.

The solid Sarkozy win put an exclamation point on a trend little remarked upon by our news media. Before the war on terror began, many of our traditional allies had governments that were opposed to American foreign policy, or at least to President Bush's policies.

The first opposition domino fell in Germany in September 2005, when Angela Merkel nudged out Socialist Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder.

Then, in January 2006, Conservative Stephen Harper evicted a Liberal government that had held power in Canada since 1993.

This is a common bit of triumphalism from our rightwing. Of course, they never seem to mention that Canadian and European Conservative parties are roughly equivalent to our Democratic Party in ideology. Our Republican Party corresponds to their fringe far-right nationalist parties.

Can Sarko turn things around? Those, like columnist Mark Steyn, who fear France and Europe are lost causes, think not. In the 2005 German election, "the electorate was irritated with the incumbents but recoiled against any meaningful change," he wrote. Mr. Steyn thinks the same is true about the French.

Jack cites Mark Steyn. Mark Steyn believes in reducing much of the planet to rubble. That says a lot about Jack's judgment.

We'll find out how serious the French are about reform in the parliamentary elections in June. In the meantime, we have a friend in the Elysee Palace for the first time in a very long time. That's something to toast with French Champagne.

So now Jack, and our rightwing, love France. Perfidious neocons!

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The Leisure Class

First it was George, then it was the Iraqi parliament, and now it's the newly-elected president of France:

Nicolas Sarkozy won the French presidency Sunday, told his countrymen to start working harder, then promptly took his family for a cruise on a billionaire buddy's 200-foot yacht off the coast of Malta in the Mediterranean Sea.

Thus the first scandal of the Sarkozy presidency was born. Political opponents called the timing and the opulence of the vacation "indecent." Wednesday's newspapers carried grainy front-page photographs of President-elect Sarkozy in saffron shorts with his 10-year-old son, Louis, standing on the deck of what one headline dubbed "the floating palace."

"I have no intention of apologizing," a defiant Sarkozy, 52, told a pool of French journalists Wednesday morning after jogging on a small island off the Malta coast. "I'll be president of the republic in eight days. In theory I could have rested for eight days, but I'll only take two and one-half. No one can argue with that."

Why don't they all just pool their money and buy a tropical island and rule from there? It seems like elected - or selected - officials everywhere are taking long vacations.

It's good to be the king, I suppose.

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This Is Interesting

Passed along without comment:

PARIS (AP) — A French intelligence service learned as early as January 2001 that al-Qaeda was working on a plot to hijack U.S. airliners, and it passed the information on to the CIA, Le Monde reported Monday.

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Le Monde reported that the documents included a note dated Jan. 5, 2001, which said al-Qaeda had been working on a hijacking plot for months. The intelligence note reported that bin Laden had attended a meeting in Afghanistan in October 2000, where a final decision to carry out the plot was made, the newspaper said.

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