Even Saddam deserves a lawyer

PNN slags off former US Attorney General Ramsey Clark for offering to defend Saddam at his trial. According to PNN, this makes Clark "genuinely evil".

PNN obviously does not care about justice or due process. Saddam may be an evil mass-murdering bastard, but even he deserves an adequate defence at trial. Ditto for Clark's previous clients. Skimping on this - or allowing the baying mob to intimidate lawyers into not representing unpopular clients - reduces us to the level of Soviet-style show trials. But somehow, I suspect that a "warmongering flag-waving God-fearing conservative" like PNN wouldn't mind that one little bit.

Update: (02/01/04) Right from the horse's mouth: "There's absolutely no need for a trial. Saddam's guilt is beyond doubt." This is the mentality that gave us "justice" by lynchmob.

Some "non-scandal"

Remember the Valerie Palme affair? The White Houe exposing an active CIA agent in order to intimidate her husband and other critics of the administration? The one NZPundit called a "Non-scandal"? Well, Ashcroft has recused himself and appointed a special prosecutor - just like Watergate, Iran-Contra, or Whitewater.

Some "non-scandal". That flapping noise is the sound of the Bush administration's chickens coming home to roost.

Freeloaders claim theft

A group of forest owners is whining and stamping their feet over the government's refusal to give them Kyoto credits. They're calling it "the largest private property theft in New Zealand's history" - which is frankly a load of crap. As the Environmental Defence Society points out, the carbon credits were never theirs in the first place. They exist solely as a creation of an agreement between the New Zealand government and other states. If we take the absolutist propertarian position seriously, the government created them, therefore they belong to the government. EOFS.

If the KFOA wants carbon credits, then there's nothing stopping them from negotiating a deal with other countries or companies to create a tradeable emissions right of so many kg of carbon per hecatre or whatever - but then they'd have to do all the work themselves, rather than freeloading.

Anti-Fisking

"Warmongering flag-waving God-fearing conservative" newcomer Propaganda News Network opens his blog by "fisking" my post on Libya. Those who want the details can go and read them there, but the core contention is that this is a victory and vindication of bullying NeoCon policies, as "Gaddafi initiated diplomatic proceedings exactly as the war started".

Perhaps PNN would like to consult this story from the Washington post, which says among other things:

"What forced Gaddafi to act was a combination of things -- U.N. sanctions after the Lockerbie bombing, his international isolation after the Soviet Union's collapse . . . and internal economic problems that led to domestic unrest by Islamists and forces within the military," said Ray Takeyh, a Libya expert at the National Defense University.

But the money quote is this:

Within months after September 11th, we had the Libyans, the Syrians and the Iranians all coming to us saying, 'What can we do [to better relations]?' We didn't really engage any of them, because we decided to do Iraq. We really squandered two years of capital that will make it harder to apply this model to the hard cases like Iran and Syria," said Flynt Leverett, a former Bush administration National Security Council staff member now at the Brookings Institution.

Just to highlight that: Gaddafi (and others) made significant diplomatic advances after September 11th, but Bush ignored them and sat on his hands for over a year. Meanwhile, the British have pursued a policy of quiet diplomacy, and have managed to achieve exactly what Bush has in Iraq - eliminate WMDs which weren't there - without having to kill ten thousand innocent civillians and an unknown number of conscripts in the process. I am not happy with the corresponding relaxation of pressure on Libya on the human rights front, but the result itself is a good thing.

As for North Korea, I think that it really does display the flaws in the warmonger's logic: threats from America seem to have caused a rush to acquire a nuclear deterrant, rather than a rush to eschew one. It's a massive failure of imagination to think that threats and force will always be met by backing down, rather than with reciprocation - but bullies always seem to have this problem, and when one of their victims meets force with force, they stand around whining and wondering what the hell caused it.

I do have to compliment PNN on one thing though: he has a catchy name, and at least he's honest about what he's spreading.

Circling Apollo is chucking it in.

Silly season

If the blog is looking a bit dull, it's because it's silly season. No substantive news equals no fits of apoplexy at the keyboard equals no frothing at the mouth posts.

In the meantime, I'm wasting too much time playing with my NationState. I've just spent a few days lobbying over six hundred virtual UN delegates to get a proposal on the ballot, only to have it fail to make quorum. < sigh >... maybe next time.

Positive news from Iraq for a change

Against the background of suicide bombings, death squards and growing sectarian violence comes this piece of good news: the Iraqi Governing Council is incresingly standing up to the Americans. Unfortunately, some of the ways they're standing up are not so good - approving contracts which may have been assigned corruptly, appointing their own stooges in the place of the pentagon's, without any pretence of elections - but in general its a good trend. Iraq needs to be run by and for Iraqis, not for the benefit of Haliburton and Bechtel.

Though judging from this article, both the IGC and CPA have a long, long way to go yet.

And more

Checkpoints Prove Useless Against Suicide Bombers in Iraq

New Fisk

At least 13 die in Iraq suicide bombings

Spinning to war

More dirt surrounding the war on Iraq is emerging, with this report that MI6 ran a long-term campaign, Operation Mass Appeal, to plant stories in the media about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction.

Think about that: the intelligence services attempted to manipulate public opinion to build support for the government. Scarily antidemocratic is how I'd describe it.

Fortunately they failed - 80 - 90 percent of Britons opposed the war - but the fact that they even tried tells us that something is seriously wrong with British democracy. The British people should be clamouring for a full inquiry, and for the people who authorised this campaign of spin to be exposed and drummed out of office.

In the Devil's Garden

This is billed as "a sinful history of forbidden food", and it doesn't disappoint. Stewart Lee Allen - who people may remember from The Devil's Cup, his history of coffee - has an easy writing style, and an excellent eye for the amusing or informative anecdote. In fact, that's all this book consists of - amusing or informative anecdotes about food which is or has been forbidden or frowned upon. So there's stuff about how chocolate "transforms women into sex-hungry whores", the exact number of virgins muslims are guaranteed in paradise (approximately 23 million, not 70 as widely reported), the arousing power of chick-peas (so strong that merely drinking the water they were cooked in grants the imbiber the stamina to "deflower 72 virgin goats"), the politics of bread and the morality of the potato. There's no confessions of art-smuggling in this one, though.

Well worth reading, if only so you can be disgusted at the ability of the French to eat absolutely anything in a cruel fashion, and the way the English can take all the fun out of it.

New Fisk

Hooded Men Executing Saddam Officials

Please continue your petty bickering

Whoops! In his christmas message, Tony Blair claimed that the Iraq Survey Group "had unearthed 'massive evidence' of clandestine [WMD] labs". Today, Viceroy Bremer called him a liar:

The head of the Coalition Provisional Authority said it was not true.

Paul Bremer, said it sounded like a "red herring" made up by someone to upset the rebuilding effort.

Please continue your petty bickering, we find it most amusing...

New Fisk

From joy to despair: Iraqis pay for Saddam's capture

Denial

US officials are now blaming Canada for their BSE problem. At the same time, they're still claiming that US beef is safe to eat as "the cow's brain and spinal cord - which is the only part normally infected by the disease - was removed before the meat was processed".

Nobody mention mechanical recovery...

Cuba isn't happy about Guantanamo

Cuba has criticised the US's treatment of prisoners in Guantanamo, calling the facility a "concentration camp". This is a bit rich coming from a regime which incarcerates dissidents and has little regard for due process, but on the other hand if even they think something is bad then it must be pretty terrible.

If Cuba really wants to support the human rights of those in Guantanamo, though, it has a very clear course of action open to it: allow lawyers for those imprisoned to petition Cuban courts for a writ of Habeus Corpus. The US government's chief argument for denying detainees access to American courts is that Guantanamo is not under US jurisdiction. The Cubans should call their bluff, and watch them squirm.

New Fisk

Iraq through the American looking glass
Deaths mount on both sides on Christmas Day in Iraq

Nasty Hobbitses, we hates them we does

I foolishly showed this abomination to some friends, and now I have been driven away by the bad singing. Evil, nasty Hobbitses, we hates them. Gollum! Gollum!

Stupid fucking bastards

Yet more evidence that Americans are stupid fucking bastards: they process obviously sick animals for food before the test results are received:

The 4-year-old diseased dairy cow in Washington state [the one that tested positive for BSE] was slaughtered into ground beef for hamburger and also possibly sausage and pizza toppings, according to the Center for Science in the Public Interest.

But all is not lost:

Some 10,000 pounds of raw meat linked to the animal and processed by Verns Moses Lake Meats in Washington was recalled.

That would be a voluntary recall, of course - because the US government cannot force a company to recall contaminated food. How do I know this? Because a while ago I read a book called Fast Food Nation, which has some truely scary stories about what goes on in US meat packing houses, and the complete lack of serious regulations surrounding them. Mechanical recovery, for example, which guarantees that material from the central nervous system (where BSE is found, and which according to US Department of Agriculture regulations must be totally removed from the animal and never fed to people) goes into your hamburger. The USDA hasn't banned it because it would cost meat companies US$200 million a year. Consumer safety? Let 'em sue!

This is a pefect example of what happens when you let an industry write its own regulations - safety goes out the window and consumers get screwed. What's worse is that there is a cult of patriotism surrounding US beef; the beef industry is already pulling out all the stops to get people to keep eating, and if their PR campaign fails, they can always fall back on legal threats. Twelve states have "food libel" laws outlawing questioning the safety of perishable goods (most notably Texas, where Oprah Winfrey was prosecuted for talking about BSE and saying that she had eaten her last hamburger); these will be a powerful disincentive to anyone pushing for a serious investigation or regulatory reform.

Oh, and the really scary bit: initial reports said that the cow in question was destined to be processed into animal feed. They still do this after what happened in Britain? Stupid fucking bastards indeed...

Waiting

No news yet from Beagle-2. I was hoping to cap off my christmas day with some Mars-porn, but once again I am dissapointed.