The Daily Sandwich

"We have to learn the lesson that intellectual honesty is fundamental for everything we cherish." -Sir Karl Popper

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Location: Boston, Massachusetts, United States

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Monday, June 27, 2005

New, from the makers of Iran-Contra...

It's more of the same! Ahhh, yes. Who would've guessed that the tough-talking geezers who brought you negotiations with terrorists-- then lied about it-- are giving you another great big helping? Well, me, for one. How these guys keep managing to fool Americans into thinking they're the tough guys is beyond me. They're cowardly, thieving pussies.

From the Times of London, via Salon:

We know that the United States never negotiates with terrorists. Just after 9/11, we heard the president say that you're either "with us" or "with the terrorists," and that the United States won't make a distinction between terrorist groups and those who harbor them. Just the other day, we heard Karl Rove deride liberals for wanting to offer "therapy and understanding" to those who had attacked America.

We get it, or at least we thought we did until we read
this report in the Sunday Times: U.S. military officials have been sitting down to tea with members of the insurgency in the hopes of "negotiating an eventual breakthrough that might reduce the violence in Iraq." . . .

What we find so confusing -- and, we'll admit, a little amusing -- is the Bush administration's efforts to explain it all away. On NBC's "Meet the Press" Sunday, Tim Russert asked Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld whether the news of the secret meetings means that the United States is now negotiating with terrorists. "No, no," Rumsfeld said. "Look, look, you've got a situation in Iraq where you've got terrorists over here, you've got Sunni insurgents here, the Ba'athist types, and then you've got people who haven't decided what they're going to do, and then you have people supporting the government. Then you have the government. And the goal is to get people to all move towards the support of the government. And it isn't a matter of negotiating with terrorists. There's no one negotiating with Zarqawi or the people that are out chopping people's heads off."