Condoleezza Rice has reversed what the media tried hard to blow up into a crisis between the US and its European partners by challenging their commitment to security and their unfounded suspicions of illegal activity by American interrogators of captured terrorists. European leaders have given Rice a resounding vote of confidence. The Washington Post dutifully reports this -- on page A16:

European foreign ministers attempted to make peace with the United States on Thursday over the controversy concerning treatment of terrorism suspects, with many saying they were satisfied with visiting Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's explanations of U.S. policy. ...

Some ministers, such as Bernard Bot of the Netherlands, had indicated they still had deep concerns over U.S. policy, despite a week-long effort by Rice to defuse the tensions. But afterward, ministers reported that they were satisfied with the U.S. position.

"Secretary Rice has covered basically all of our concerns," Bot said, adding that if the secret prisons existed -- which he called "pure speculation" -- Rice "has made it quite clear" that the United States did not violate international law in such facilities.

German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier added that Rice "has reiterated that in the United States international obligations are not interpreted differently than in Europe."

NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer declared at a news conference that Rice had "cleared the air" and that he considered the issue closed. "You will not see this discussion continuing" at NATO, he said.

The report by Glenn Kessler provides an amusing, if desperate, attempt to keep the kerfuffle alive by reminding us every other paragraph that the Dutch might not be completely satisfied with Rice's representations. However, after making a point of the Dutch effort to open its own detention facility in Afghanistan -- which would not concern American interests in the least, as the information gathered there would still get shared with us -- Kessler quotes the Dutch foreign minister in complete contradiction to his assertion, three paragraphs later. The Post then buries the entire story in the back of their news section after covering the story on CIA detentions at or near the front page for the last few weeks.

What supposedly started as a blockbuster story turns out to amount to nothing more than common sense. The CIA detains terrorists -- what a shock! They interrogate their prisoners! They don't want people to know where these terrorists are held so that we can get intel from them to uncover attack operations against us and our allies! Stone The Crows! The American media, starting with the Post, somehow still have not put these operations in the context of the war being fought by America, the UK, Australia, and a number of other nations against Islamofascist terrorist organizations and their state sponsors. If they had thought for a moment about that, then the revelation that the CIA interrogates enemy operatives captured in battle areas hiding among civilian populations should cause no more surprise than a historian discovering that the OSS interrogated infiltrators during World War II, usually in secret locations and without worrying about Miranda rights.

Dr. Rice deserves our congratulations for reminding Europe that the fact that we detain terrorists for interrogation does not equate to a policy of torture, and the foreign ministers should be congratulated for recovering from an overdose of American media hysteria. The Post and the other outlets who followed their folly should take a couple of chill pills and come up for air before blowing the next story way out of proportion. And if they want to be taken seriously, then they should put the denouement of their sky-is-falling narratives in the same place they put them when the story broke: A-1.

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