RhinoceRoss: Hey, let's blame the CIA  

A few years ago I attended a group exhibition at the Contemporary Art Centre in Vilnius in which one young "artist" assembled some scraps of paper and photos and displayed them on a wall.

His "art exhibit" consisted a bunch of news clippings and agency photos – it wasn't even a vain attempt at a collage – that laid bare the gaping discrepancies in different wire reports describing Saddam Hussein's capture and his tiny little hiding hole in Iraq.

An arty friend confided to me that the guy got a gobsmacking $30,000 grant to put together that shambolic exhibit.

Spot news is a tricky endeavour at the best of times. It's a cutthroat business involving many outlets that compete to get the story out as fast as they can. I believe it was Nick Davies who wrote in his book 'Flat Earth News' that about 30 percent of breaking-news stories contain significant errors.

It's made even trickier when officials retreat into the language of obfuscation, because this forces journalists to try their hand at mind-reading and at translating the convolutions of politicians into plain language.

And officials often use gobbledygook deliberately in order to throw the hounds off the scent.

This was the case with the Lithuanian parliamentary panel's inconclusive CIA prisons report, which I would translate as: "Maybe yes, maybe no, maybe rain, maybe snow."

It caused one of the bigger international news agencies to run a headline that read, "Lithuania Let CIA Use Secret Prison for Interrogation," which was followed by, "The panel said it had no 'firm evidence' that the prison was used for its original purpose to interrogate terrorist suspects."

"The use of overseas detention centres was designed to circumnavigate US law," another big agency reported, which probably meant the desk editor had just finished subbing a story about 14-year-old Laura Dekker, the teen who's desperate to circumnavigate the globe in a sailboat.

Lithuanian journalists were left scratching their heads over the BBC's report that "at least eight terror suspects were held at one centre on the outskirts of the capital Vilnius, the investigation found." The investigation found no such thing.

AFP's headline was bang on – "Lithuania may have hosted two US 'war on terror' jails." Like I said, maybe yes, maybe no, maybe rain . . .

The day before releasing his report the panel's chair, Arvydas Anusauskas, hinted that he planned to sit on the fence – he told journalists he'd never grabbed a terrorist suspect by the sleeve during the investigation.

Of course he didn't. How could he have?

But Anusauskas navigated the treacherous waters of this investigation deftly. Why?

The sowing of confusion among media was, I'm sure, a calculated move.

The report gets the world off Lithuania's back because on the one hand it basically says, yes, we let the CIA mess about in our country. We don't know exactly what it was up to when it was here – we didn't ask it too many questions, you know, that can be annoying – but we have a vague idea that it was up to no good, and we sort of knew this but certainly not all the details, and, hey, sorry for that, we won't do it again.

And the report holds out the scalps of three Lithuanian security officials as a peace offering and ostensible proof of the country's semi-culpability.

At the same time, no current or former elected state officials were implicated.

The three former Lithuanian intelligence officials who've been named will be left with tarnished reputations, but they will never actually be prosecuted based on the scanty evidence provided, and those guys know it. And Anusauskas knows it too, even though his report suggests they face a criminal investigation, but that's just official window dressing.

Lithuanians are an amazing breed. They fight the bloodiest internal struggles imaginable. The political knife fighting here is beyond vicious, as any reading of this country's daily press reveals.

But as soon as there's an outside threat, sworn political enemies will almost always close ranks and tell foreign interlopers to shove off. As well they should, particularly in this case.

We small country. We need Amerika to stand with us because we have big bully neighbour to the East that we won't name but you know who we mean and she won't leave us in the peace. CIA asks us for the help, so we help it, no problems. They our allies. The small ally always help the big ally. CIA screws up and hides, now sits in the backyard scratching big bellies, drinking Pabst birzgalas and watching the American football. Problem is theirs, jomajo. Don't blame us. Amerika still the big ally and we love Amerikans, but CIA is cabbage-heads.

Reading between the lines, I think this is what Anusauskas's report really says. And, for the most part, I agree with it.