Reality Check

BUSH REALITY
Bush Defends CIA's Clandestine Prisons
PANAMA CITY, Nov. 7 -- President Bush, defending a clandestine U.S. prison system abroad for terrorism suspects, said Monday that his administration would continue to aggressively battle terrorism in sometimes unconventional but always lawful ways.

Brushing aside international criticism of the CIA-run prisons set up in eight countries, Bush said that the nation is at war with an enemy "that lurks and plots and plans and wants to hurt America again. And so, you bet, we'll aggressively pursue them, but we'll do so under the law." Bush, who spoke to reporters during a brief visit to the capital of Panama, also asserted, "We do not torture."

"I'm confident that when people see the facts, that they'll recognize that we've got more work to do," Bush said, "and that we must protect ourselves in a way that is lawful."

ACTUAL REALITY
Victim of Europe anti-terror kidnap says he was tortured then dumped
MADRID - A German who says he was kidnapped in Europe and imprisoned for five months in a Kabul jail broke down as he told a Spanish court he was tortured, force-fed and dumped in a forest hundreds of miles from home.

The case of Kuwaiti-born Khaled el Masri has fuelled debate in Europe about secret CIA terrorism suspect flights, and led Spain to probe whether US secret services used an airport on the Spanish island of Mallorca as part of its operations.

In his first testimony before a court, the German of Lebanese origin said he was arrested by Macedonian secret police on New Year’s Eve, 2003 while on a holiday.

For more than three weeks the 43-year-old father of five says he was held in a hotel room in the Macedonian capital, Skopje, as interrogators tried to force him to confess he had attended an al Qaeda training camp in Pakistan and was wanted by German and Egyptian police.

Masri said his abductors drugged, handcuffed, blindfolded and beat him up, before he was forced to wear a nappy, earphones, leg chains, and bundled on a plane before being flown to Kabul.

In the Afghan capital he was thrown into a dirty cell and tortured over a five month period, Masri told Madrid’s high court, according to a transcript of court proceedings.

Ummm – someone remind me how this helps with Bush’s quote “I'm confident that when people see the facts, that they'll recognize that we've got more work to do," Bush said, "and that we must protect ourselves in a way that is lawful." - hell I’d settle to even understand what the fuck he is saying in this quote – that he is confident the people will be horrified by what he has been doing in secret CIA prisons but want him to do more? Does he even know what he means?