CMoore.com

Remember duhbya’s Gunsmoke pledge? No, the other one. No, the other one. The one about not negotiating with terrorists.

Turns out, we’ve been holding secret talks with insurgents in Iraq.

U.S. officials recently met secretly with Iraqi insurgent commanders at a summer villa north of Baghdad to try to negotiate an end to the bloodshed, a British newspaper reported today.

Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, asked about the report, suggested that meetings between Iraqi officials and insurgents “go on all the time” and said “we facilitate those from time to time.”

The insurgent commanders “apparently came face to face” with four American officials during meetings on June 3 and June 13 at a summer villa near Balad, about 25 miles north of Baghdad, the Iraqi capital, The Sunday Times newspaper in London said.

Now, of course, the fun is going to be watching the rhetorical contortions into which the administration will twist in order to avoid being in negotiations with those bloodthirsty deadenders who gassed their own people and tortured them… when they weren’t relaxing in their rape rooms. From “Baathist deadenders” to “assassins” to “Sunni Freedom Fighters” in six seconds, baby.