Not on her agenda

For the past five years, the United States has been engaged in serious human rights abuses. It has detained hundreds of people without trial in its Caribbean gulag at Guantanamo Bay, it has introduced the practice of extraordinary rendition, kidnapping suspected terrorists and flying them to third world countries so they may be tortured, they have admitted torture in the form of "enhanced interrogation techniques" completely recognisable to the Spanish Inquisition and Gestapo.

Where you stand on this is, as Keith Locke has said,

an acid test of whether you really stand for justice and human dignity.

So where does the Prime Minister stand on it? In Question Time yesterday she was asked, and her answer speaks for itself:

Keith Locke: What will she say to George Bush about the United States’ barbaric treatment of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, and the American Government’s practice of rendering prisoners to torture in third countries?

Rt Hon HELEN CLARK: It is not on my agenda to raise issues of that kind with the President.

That's right: torture just isn't on her agenda. The policy of shameful, sycophantic silence, continues...