Yesterday, the U.S. Embassy in Ethiopia issued a public alert to warn American citizens about the possible danger of attending Ethiopian millennium celebrations. Except that the whole thing was over before the warning was released.
Par for the course for the Americans around here. We routinely get warnings about things that have already happened. More and more, interactions with the American diplomatic corps here have a whiff of a Soviet-style bureaucracy. I recall fondly the spokeswoman in the U.S. embassy in Ethiopia who said that the Americans supported the "Elders Process" in Ethiopia as a way to win the release of political prisoners. What was the Elder's Process? "I don't know," she said. "But I know we support it."
My first real taste of this bizarre new way of thinking was at a news conference in Baghdad in 2006. The speaker set the ground rules from the start: He would read out an on-the-record statement, and we would then be allowed to follow with questions. Their answers would be off the record.
This happened to be a news conference in which the paving of a 10-mile stretch of road was cited as progress in Iraq. Yikes.
Embassy warning below.
