The official cooperation of European governments in the CIA's "extraordinary rendition" of persons it kidnapped and air-transported to foreign police agencies for torture is a major embarrassment for those governments.
The revelation of policies of official criminality by the Bush administration is greeted with indifference: in the US media, by a US public long inured to such disclosures and their facile rationalization, and by the European elites who have long reconciled themselves to Washington's world leadership albeit with minor differences over the distribution of the spoils of hegemony.
The least firmly bound into this hegemonial system, by virtue of its tail-ending of the food chain, is the European public. It was to strengthen the backbone of its satellite European governments in resisting the opinion pull of their publics that US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was sent on a fence-mending mission. The two cartoonists of the leading German newspaper, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Greser and Lenz, reacted to this cynical strategy with the following cartoon.
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