EUROPEAN REACTIONS TO YESTERDAY'S (MODEST) DOCUMENT DUMP

Most of the European papers weren't satisfied with the documents that the White House released yesterday.

The headline in Berlin's Der Tagesspiegel is "Rumsfeld approved brutal methods," and an opinion piece with the title "Betrayal of its own values" begins thus: "The bad conscience in Washington is palpable." In his commentary in the Sueddeutsche Zeitung ("Bush and Torture"), Stefan Kornelius writes that the documents show that the administration -- including the President -- engaged in "detailed" discussion of interrogation methods, and that Rumsfeld "ordered methods that were similar to torture" (folterähnliche Methoden). The papers "show that a grey zone could be created while the administration watched, a zone within which torture was possible." The Frankfurter Rundschau carries the headline, "Bush relativizes human rights."

Few European papers seem willing to accept at face value the administration's attempts to highlight the "humane" nature of U.S. treatment of detainees. This is probably due to European emphasis on the binding nature of international commitments, something that the Bush administration has done its best to reject, openly and forcefully, over the past three and a third years. Just looking at the headlines, it is striking to me that the U.S. media seems willing to give the Bush administration the benefit of the doubt, or at least to play up the self-limiting aspects of the administration's positions as revealed in the documents. The headline in the SF Chronicle is "President rejected torture of prisoners," and Fox News also repeats Bush's denials on the torture front. Some news outlets in the U.S. are more critical, to be sure, but in Europe the spectrum of opinion, as reflected in major newspaper coverage, seems to go from critical to very critical.

For more foreign coverage, check out Libération (here), Le Monde (here), Spain's El Mundo (here), and Austria's Der Standard (here) . The last piece, titled "Bush's counteroffensive," is especially biting.

For links to the docs themselves, see WaPo, here.