The extraordinary renditions are "probably indispensable", said the State Department Legal Advisor John Bellinger when he met a delegation of members of the European Parliament in Washington, DC.
Claudio Flava, the rapporteur, announced that "senior sources from the US intelligence community confirmed that between 30 to 50 extraordinary rendition operations have been undertaken since 2001".
The delegation also obtained confirmation of "the existence of seven black sites operated in countries of Asia, Europe and Africa". One is said to be operational still, in a North African country.
That is more detailed confirmation than the US Senate ever published. And yet another interesting topic for the upcoming hearings for the confirmation of Michael Hayden as CIA director.

George Bush seized a rare opportunity to be at his best, by discussing the immigration issue, a topic he knows well and for which he would actually deserve the "compassionate conservative" label under which he ran in 2000.
The ideas may have been recycled, the means to implement them somewhat dubious, but at least it was an honest attempt at opening a reasonable and comprehensive debate, beyond the collective fixation on the border issue.
The irony is that this president, caught at his own game of invoking national security to justify any controversial policy, is now using this issue as a temporary foil for his many disasters in the "war on terror".
Ostensibly demanding that the Senate vote on a project under a two week deadline, he has pushed several embarrassing topics out of the national conversation: the NSA domestic spying operations, the vice-president's involvement in the exposure of CIA agent Valerie Plame, the republican lobbying scandals. And if anyone is going to mention Iraq, it is to speculate that the deployment of American reservists will most likely diminish, since the president wants to mobilize the National Gard to support the Border Patrol.
The whole plan might be obsolete before the next elections - as soon as someone remembers , for instance, that the current backlog means that legal immigrants wait for months for their documents after being approved for a green card, so far the only tamper-proof ID for legal aliens. But by then there will be a lot of blame to spread for the failure of the reform. Karl Rove, who even allowed himself the luxury to acknowledge that the war is dragging his boss' numbers down, is alive and well.

While mother's day demonstrators in Albany were already worrying about the next war, fearing the bombing of Iranian civilians, the Bush administration was preparing to hail Libya as the example of a reformed state.
Monday, State Secretary Condoleezza Rice announced the final steps towards full diplomatic relations with the Gadhafi regime. After being branded a terrorist State for more than a quarter of a century, the evolution began when Colonel Gadhafi immediately denounced the 9/11 attacks. Condoleezza Rice stressed that the turning point was December 2003, when Libya decided to cooperate fully with the international community and revealed its secret nuclear installations, its programs for developing weapons of mass destruction, and some information about the A.Q. Khan proliferation network.
North Korea and Iran are called to meditate on this example that aims to proove that no sinner is beyond redemption for this administration. It just might help a bit that oil will part of that future rich relationship between the former foes.

Michael Hayden is a master of Bushspeak, as illustrated by his comments as he's making the rounds on Capitol Hill, prior to his confirmation hearings.
The NSA surveillance programs are designed "to preserve the security and the liberty of the American people", he says. The American people seem to agree, at least on part one of the proposition, according to the instant polls. Part two seems to have become less relevant to a majority of them.
After the adequate amount of pre-election posturing, aka "tough questions" by senators of both parties that profess to be "great admirers" of the general, George Bush can thus probably safely bet that his nominee will be confirmed. He will have scored political points with his base, and democrats will in all likelyhood fail to capitalize on this episode.
This might explain why the White House suddenly decided to seize the moment on another burning issue, with an address to the nation on immigration Monday night.

The next CIA boss is "a leader that listens well", says his current boss, Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte. Michael Hayden is the public face of the warrantless eavesdropping operations, and was leading the National Security Agency when the program was launched.
Typically, the democratic leaders who object to his appointment did not make much of that, choosing instead to concentrate on the fact that he would be a military man at the helm of a civilian agency. They probably forgot that their two most recent presidents, Carter and Clinton, also appointed military men to run the Agency. They possibly overlooked as well the fact that one of the few times the general decided to not publicly salute and go with the hierarchy involved a dispute with Don Rumsfeld.
True to form, the Defense Secretary disqualified the question when asked. He lamented the "pedestrian" nature of the debate, and the lack of facts underlying "thumbsucker articles" about the internal tensions within the administration on the intelligence front. He wants all to know everything is fine between him and "Mickey", as he repeatedly called the nominee.
It will be left to Arlen Specter, chairman of the Senate Justice Committee, to concentrate on the eavesdropping issue, and on the general's understanding of constitutional rights.
(photo: sculpture by Cai Gou Qiang, realized with objects confiscated at national airports after 9/11) 

The illegals came out of the shadows, under the glare of the 24 hours news channels' cameras. The first massive social movement in years had shown its strength in several cities, but on May Day it became national. Its message is still sketchy on the details of precisely what immigration reform would be appropriate, and what the best methods to ensure its success are, but one point is unmistakable: the call for human respect and dignity. 

One sentence on the evening news, the same AP dispatch or a short article deep inside the newspaper: the peace march, Saturday April 29 in Manhattan, was all but ignored by the American media. Three years after President Bush declared "the end of major combat", April had been the deadliest month in Iraq, and Congress had just voted more funds for the war. The polls had been widely reported, that previous week, showing the administration at its lowest level of popularity ever, but a massive demonstration of that same sustained opposition to the war was not deemed worthy of interest.