More investigations

It looks like Spain isn't the only country suddenly investigating the CIA's torture plane. According to a roundup on Daily Kos, investigations have now begun in Germany, the Canary Islands, Norway and Sweden, and are likely to be launched in Iceland and Portugal. It seems that Europe doesn't like being turned into accomplices to American torture...

Whackamole

Via Hard News: The Herald Premium Content Blog has been hit with a DMCA complaint and so has moved to LiveJournal. Which at least will make it easy for people to read the Herald through their friends lists.

The Herald will probably complain about this too - but I suspect the people behind it can move it quicker and easier than the Herald's lawyers can file complaints...

The first test

The government's new, looser arrangements for Cabinet Collective Responsibility may face their first real test in Question Time today, with the following question:

GORDON COPELAND to the Minister of Revenue: Does he agree with Inland Revenue Department advice that, particularly in relation to the 33 percent and 39 percent personal tax rates, there is growing evidence of income splitting within families who are self-employed and that this leads to perceptions of unfairness in the tax system?

The Minister of Revenue is of course Peter Dunne - an advocate of income splitting. But as Minister, he is bound to support the government's policy programme in this area, which does not yet include income splitting. It will be interesting to see how he answers it...

Treasury's ideological burp

During the 80's and 90's. Treasury managed to earn itself a reputation as a bunch of rabid idealogues who were the driving force behind the radical free market "reforms". While having to work with a Labour-led government hostile to that programme has forced them to restrain themselves over the last few years, this year's Briefing to the Incoming Government shows that they haven't changed a bit. In it, they recommend gutting the RMA, selling SOEs, introducing work testing for those on the sickness and invalids benefits, and shifting the burden of taxation onto the poor by giving large tax cuts to the rich (while warning that "additional fiscal stimulus in the short term may exaggerate the economic cycle" - meaning send inflation through the roof) - restarting the Revolution, in other words. National is of course crowing, but this is hardly neutral policy advice. According to One News last night, Treasury thought National was going to win the election, and tailored their advice to suit.

What is worrying is that there is clearly still a large faction of senior people within Treasury ideologically committed to the Revolutionary agenda, and just biding their time to try and impose it on the New Zealand public. These people are crossing the line from public servants into political agitators, and they should consider carefully how their ideological commitment affects both their policy advice and their political neutrality. The proper thing for these people to do is to resign and stand for election, rather than continue attempting to impose their ideological agenda by stealth from within the government. But I guess Graham Scott showed them how little appetite the public has for their policies...

Open for voting

The 2006 NetGuide People's Choice Web Awards are now open for voting. And yes, there is a "best blog" category...

You can vote here.

Fuck Iraq, part VI

And so we return to where we began. Over a year ago, soldiers from the Oregon Army National Guard raided a compound in Baghdad run by the new Iraqi Interior Ministry and discovered dozens of detainees who had been beaten, tortured, and starved. That time, they were ordered to return the detainees to their abusers and just walk away. On Sunday, US soldiers searching for a missing 15-year old raided another Interior Ministry site, and made a similar discovery: 170 detainees locked in a basement, malnourished and showing signs of torture. According to one witness, the injuries included

...signs of physical abuse by brutal beating, one or two detainees were paralysed and some had their skin peeled off various parts of their bodies.

Unlike last time, the soldiers were actually allowed to do something about it, and the Iraqi government has now begun an investigation (though whether it will be anything more than a whitewash remains to be seen). The US has also said it is "troubled" by the incident - which while an improvement on their normal non-response to evidence of torture by their Iraqi proteges, is still a long way from what they should be saying. When Saddam Hussein was doing things like this, they called him a monster. Surely Iraq's new torturers deserve the same label - and the same treatment?

Again, it has to be asked: was this, the replacement of one group of brutal torturers with another, really worth the deaths of 30,000 civilians? And when are the "liberal hawks" who pushed for war to end Saddam's torture going to admit that their good intentions have led us straight to hell?

A warning for America's torturers

Philippe Sands, international law expert and author of Lawless World, has a simple warning for members of the Bush Administration involved in crafting or implementing America's policies of rendition, torture, and black prisons: don't travel. Because if they do, they may find themselves in the same situation as former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet - arrested in a foreign country, awaiting extradition to Spain or some other country with universal jurisdiction for war crimes, on charges of complicity in crimes of torture. Henry Kissinger is already in this situation, and both Donald Rumsfeld and Lt General Ricardo Sanchez are under investigation in Germany. But as the truth about these policies comes out, the net will widen - to include policymakers in the White House, the Pentagon, the CIA and State Department, as well as the field commanders and soldiers who carried out the orders, the CIA operatives who abducted the victims, and the pilots who flew the planes. If their name is in any document, or if they can be identified in any other way, they will face the risk of arrest, extradition, trial and punishment, for the rest of their lives. America may refuse to clean up its own act; the next administration (or the one after that) may refuse to investigate and try these criminals. But the world will not forget, and if America refuses to do its duty in prosecuting those responsible for torture, we will do it for them.

Reducing transport emissions

As has been pointed out before, policy towards reducing our greenhouse gas emissions has to aim at basically two areas: cars and cows. Of these, the latter are considered to be a long-term problem, to be solved by research. Greenhouse policy therefore has to focus heavily on the former. And it's certainly an area worth focusing on. Transport is responsible for around 18% of our total greenhouse gas emissions, and is continuing to grow at (IIRC) 4% a year. It has contributed around a third of our total emissions growth since 1990, and looks to contribute even more in future. Reducing these emissions is key to meeting our obligations under the Kyoto Protocol.

So far, the government has only tinkered in this area. They have introduced a biofuels initiative, which is expected to reduce total emissions by 0.9%, and a carbon tax, which will help push the market towards changing transport patterns and more fuel efficient vehicles. But they need to do more. And one obvious area where they can make easy savings is by improving the average efficiency of our vehicle fleet. Due to the cheapness of second-hand Japanese imports, New Zealanders tend to drive older cars, with lower fuel efficiency and dirtier engines. Changing this (or at least reducing the proportion of older cars in the fleet) would allow us to make significant savings in carbon dioxide emissions, and perhaps other areas as well.

Various suggestions have been made in this area. Peter Dunne suggested paying people to take older vehicles off the road, and the Greens have suggested barring imports of older vehicles combined with fuel efficiency dependent "feebates" on registration. And now the Business Council for Sustainable Development has weighed in, with a report on incentivising green vehicles [PDF]. This takes a detailed look at the "feebate" idea, and proposes cash incentives of up to $3000 (and penalties of up to $2000) for new vehicles, with lower incentives for used imports. This is estimated to cost the government approximately $100 million a year. Unfortunately, there's far less data on the possible savings; the report gives data only for individual vehicles, with no modelling of how the number of replacements would affect carbon emissions. OTOH, I don't expect the policy to pay for itself purely through carbon reduction (and it won't, based on the expected size and cost of our Kyoto overrun compared with the total size of transport emissions); instead, the social savings will come from reduced fuel and (more importantly) health costs. According to the Ministry of Transport, vehicle-sourced air pollution kills 400 people a year - almost as many as are killed in accidents. The overall health effects are estimated to cost the government $442 million a year. Encouraging the uptake of newer, cleaner vehicles will take a significant slice out of this. Given that we spend over $200 million a year to reduce road deaths, the move would seem justified on health grounds alone.

One area I disagree with the BCSD is that of retrospective incentives. They suggest backdating incentives (but not penalties) for two years to reward those that have made the right choice and to compensate for any loss of resale value. But the point of an incentive scheme is to influence behaviour, and by definition you can't influence behaviour that has already occured. Any payments for purchases before a policy is even announced are therefore simply a waste of money.

An admission

Anyone wanting to deny that the US used white phosphorus in Fallujah should check out this BBC report, where a Pentagon spokesperson flat out says:

"It was used as an incendiary weapon against enemy combatants"

But I guess the Pentagon is on the side of the terrorists, right?

Spain to investigate torture flights

Spain has become the second country to investigate stopovers by the infamous "torture plane" in its territory. The investigation was sparked by a report several months ago that the two aircraft used by the CIA for rendition had repeatedly stopped over in Majorca between 2004 and 2005. According to the Guardian, on one such trip the plane was used to kidnap a German citizen, Khaled al-Masri, from Macedonia, and fly him to Afghanistan, where he was

shackled, beaten, injected with drugs and questioned persistently about his alleged links with al-Qaida. He was returned to Albania six months later, apparently after his kidnappers realised they had the wrong man.

Spain claims universal jurisdiction for war crimes and torture, and they have at least the cover identities (and presumably photographs) of 42 suspected CIA operatives who crewed the aircraft (some of whom match the descriptions of agents sought by Italy for the kidnapping of a terrorism suspect from Milan in 2003). I guess none of them will be going anywhere near Europe anytime soon.

Scotland has also begun an investigation into torture flights through Glasgow and Prestwick airports.

White Phosphorus in Fallujah

Over the past few days I've been watching the growing story of the US's use of white phosphorus in Fallujah last year. According to allegations initially made by Italian broadcaster RAI, and subsequently confirmed by both US soldiers and contemporary media reports, the US used white phosphorus against "insurgents". Whether deliberately or by gross negligence, these "insurgents" included a large number of civilians, who suffered terrible injuries. The Bush Administration initially denied the allegations, then admitted them in the face of the evidence, but denied that this equated to the use of a chemical weapon. The latter point is arguable; as George Monbiot points out in the Guardian:

White phosphorus is not listed in the schedules of the Chemical Weapons Convention. It can be legally used as a flare to illuminate the battlefield, or to produce smoke to hide troop movements from the enemy. Like other unlisted substances, it may be deployed for "Military purposes... not dependent on the use of the toxic properties of chemicals as a method of warfare". But it becomes a chemical weapon as soon as it is used directly against people. A chemical weapon can be "any chemical which through its chemical action on life processes can cause death, temporary incapacitation or permanent harm".

And yet at the same time, such quibbling is spectacularly beside the point. The reason we ban chemical weapons such as mustard gas is because they are indiscriminate and cause terrible injuries [GRAPHIC]. That's the same reason we object to white phosphorus: it makes absolutely no distinction between combatants and civilians, affects a wide area, and causes terrible injuries [GRAPHIC]. It is not something that should even be considered for direct military use, let alone in a civilian area such as a city. But then, "indiscriminate" pretty much sums up the whole attitude of US forces in Iraq since the beginning, and if its more convenient for them to melt the skin off the people they're supposed to be saving, that's exactly what they'll do.

(BTW, if you're looking at the pictures linked above, do not click "successiva" too often unless you have a very strong stomach. Melted dead people crawling with maggots may cause you to lose your lunch)

The scientific brain drain

Twenty to thirty percent of our science graduates are leaving the country, according to a Waikato University marketing professor. But before the Opposition gets on their high horse about how "high" taxes are driving our best and brightest overseas, something needs to be pointed out: these people aren't leaving because of taxes; they're leaving because there are no jobs for them. Which in many ways makes it a non-problem: if there are no jobs, then their departure is (by definition) not contributing to the skills shortage. Rather we're producing a massive surplus of science graduates with nowhere to go.

Except it's not quite that simple. While there are no jobs for our science graduates today, there will be in a few years' time, as our universities and CRIs face mass cohort retirement. Unfortunately, our graduates can't wait that long: they have to keep current, or else their entire education (seven to ten years) is wasted. And so they go overseas, where there are jobs, and where their hard-earned skills can be put to use, rather than wasted in a call-centre or mindless retail proledom.

Why do we have this problem? As with so many of the problems besetting us at the moment (hospital waiting lists, an understaffed defence force, not enough police), it all goes back to a decade of systematic underfunding during the 90's. Since the break-up of the DSIR, staff numbers at our CRIs have gone one way: down. Restructurings, relocations, and natural attrition thinned the ranks of older scientists, while a virtual hiring freeze meant they were not replaced. Given the funding cuts and vagaries of five-year grants, this was a viable strategy - but it means that in five or ten years when the current staff retire, there will be problems finding enough people to take their place. Universities aren't nearly so badly off, but they have cohort problems of their own.

How can we solve this? If we don't want to face a mass shortage of scientists in a few years time, we need to start hiring them now. And this, more than anything else, will convince talented students that there is a future in science and that it is worth pursuing as a career. Unfortunately, that won't happen in the current science funding environment, and so unless the government decides to invest in the future of science in this country, it simply won't have one.

Saying "no" to John Howard

John Howard's industrial relations reforms have been greeted by the largest protests in Australian history. 175,000 marched in Melbourne, according to The Age, with 100 schools and many factories forced to close as workers simply downed tools and walked off the job, despite being threatened with fines or the sack.

Howard was dismissive, claiming that all this will be forgotten when the law is passed, but his plans have exposed a vein of real anger in Australia. Australians know what these changes mean, because they have seen the consequences in New Zealand: the 1990 Employment Contracts Act led to the widespread abolition of overtime, penal rates and job security; a decade's stagnation in wages (leading to a decline in the overall wage-share of the economy in favour of corporate profits); and pay cuts of up to 25% for the most vulnerable workers. It was a very real cause of the wage gap between Australia and New Zealand today, and Australian workers have no desire to see that gap closed by a decline in their own living standards. Fortunately, they seem to want to fight. If John Howard does not listen, this protest will be repeated - and repeated, and repeated - until he does.

No sense of humour

Kazhakstan is threatening to sue Borat for defamation. And accusing him of "serving someone's political order designed to present Kazakhstan and its people in a derogatory way". Seriously.

Somehow, I don't think this will get him to stop - even under Britain's draconian libel laws.

It's a Dunne deal

The Electoral (Integrity) Amendment Bill now looks set to pass its first reading - thanks to United Future. We can only hope they change their mind during the select committee phase.

Ratings

Nielsen//NetRatings have posted the traffic estimates for the top 10 media sites according to their market intelligence service. There's a clear difference between sites like the Herald and Stuff, with around 200,000 unique visitors a week, and the smaller magazine sites, which range between 3,300 and 6,600 (Scoop itself seems not to be included). By comparison, this site got 3,300 unique visitors last week according to sitemeter. According to DPF's sitemeter, he's had 14,000. Now, I don't really expect Sitemeter rankings to be entirely comparable with those from Nielsen (they will have different definitions of "unique" based on differing abilities to distinguish repeat users), but I don't expect them to be wildly out. And what this tells us is that the very biggest political blogs - places like Public Address and Kiwiblog - get at least as many eyeballs as major magazines like The Listener and minor newspapers like the NBR and Hawke's Bay Times.

Scary, isn't it?

Progress report

So far, my experiment with using pledgebank to mobilise lobbying on the Marriage (Gender Clarification) Amendment Bill is going well: three people have signed up, and we only need two more.

Again, if you're interested, you can sign up here.

Update: The pledge is successful! Guess I should get writing then.

So, did I set the target too low? And do people want to see more of this sort of thing?

Nothing but a bauble

In his oft-quoted Rotorua speech on September 7th, Winston Peters disclaimed any interest in the perks and baubles of office. He then turned around and accepted the position of Foreign Minister outside Cabinet in the Labour-led government. This has raised lots of issues - issues of deceit, and of the role of Cabinet Collective Responsibility, and his suitability for the job - but ignoring all those, one thing is becoming increasingly clear: despite his declaration in Rotorua, this job is nothing but a bauble. Just look at the evidence:

• Peters won't be going on international visits, at least where they are at all sensitive. He didn't attend the Pacific Islands Forum (despite a previously expressed interest in a greater focus on our Pacific neighbours), and while he will be attending APEC, he will be babysat by Helen Clark and Phil Goff;
• He doesn't issue press releases on foreign affairs. The official government response to the recent bombings in India was late, and issued only afte rhe had been kicked. The response to the weekend's bombings in Jordan was issued by the Prime Minister, rather than the Foreign Minister.
• He will not even be sitting on Cabinet's external relations and defence committee - the chief body which decides foreign policy in New Zealand, and which the Foreign Minister traditionally chairs. Instead, the committee will continue to be chaired by Phil Goff.

Winston's role will be limited to greeting ambassadors, attending cocktail parties, and going on junkets and those overseas visits deemed unimportant enough that they can be entrusted to him. Meanwhile, the actual work of his portfolio will be done by other people. And we're paying him $195,000 a year for this?

This has nothing to do with Cabinet Collective Responsibility or any of the other issues mentioned above. The question isn't whether Winston is suitable for the job - but whether he's even going to do it. And if he's not - if we're going to continue this absurd situation where he has the title, but the actual work is done by others - then he simply shouldn't be a Minister.

Why am I not surprised?

While researching Parihaka, one of the things that caught my eye (in addition to the acts of attainder and effective suspension of the rule of law) was the process followed. It is clear from the Waitangi Tribunal report [PDF] that the settler government had decided from the beginning that they were going to seize the land at Parihaka by force and crush any suggestion of Maori autonomy or property rights. They then conspired to provoke a crisis which would justify such action, circumventing every check and balance in their way.

Chief among these checks and balances was the possibility of intervention from London. According to the Waitangi Tribunal,

The British Parliament had inquired about the suspension of the ordinary course of law in New Zealand and rumours that Maori prisoners had been mistreated. The Native Minister had replied evasively, attributing all fault to the fanatical support for Te Whiti and the unwholesome effect of the latter's 'evil eye', but the British Government was unconvinced and had sent a new Governor to review matters and report. Governor Gordon was more sympathetic to the indigenes.

The government's response was to wait until the Governor was out of the country. In mid-September, he departed for Fiji, and in his absence his powers were exercised by the Chief Justice as Administrator of the Government. The Chief Justice was far more cooperative, authorising a military buildup in Taranaki, and then, when the it was learned that the Governor was returning from Fiji early, taking extraordinary steps to act before he could intervene:

At 8 pm on 19 October, the chief justice, as administrator, issued a proclamation calling upon Te Whiti to submit to such reserves as had been proposed and for the others to disperse or suffer unspecified consequences. At the same time, Bryce, the former Native Minister, was sworn back into office. At 10.30 pm, about an hour after the Executive Council meeting ended, the Emerald, conveying the Governor from Fiji, dropped anchor in Wellington Harbour. Next morning, the Governor assembled the Ministers, but one was missing. The Native Minister had left at 4 am to assemble an armed march on Parihaka, as had long been his dream. He had decided to deliver the proclamation at the point of a bayonet and to take punitive action without waiting for a response. The Governor could not recall the decision; by a special arrangement, the proclamation had been published on the same evening it was made in a Gazette Extraordinary...

I dug through back-issues of the Gazette to find this proclamation (which is indeed quite extraordinary), and guess whose name was on the top of it? Who was the Chief Justice who conspired with the government to subvert the rule of law and authorise an armed attack on peaceful citizens going about their business? None other than James "simple nullity" Prendergast. Why am I not surprised...?

Plus ca change...

So, the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (established under the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, which New Zealand has been a party to since 1972) is sending someone to investigate whether the Foreshore and Seabed Act violates the rights of Maori. Good. And something they may wish to consider is that this is not the first time the New Zealand government has denied Maori access to the courts in order to subvert justice and prevent well-grounded land claims. In 1894, Rangitane chief Nireaha Tamaki claimed land in the Mangatainoka block on the grounds that it had neither been surveyed or passed through the Native Land Court, and therefore remained under customary title. The Court of Appeal applied the Wi Parata doctrine - that Maori were savages and therefore there was no such thing as Maori customary title, and that even if there was, any dealings with them were Acts of State and therefore not subject to judicial review.

Tamaki did what Maori have been doing since the beginning: he appealed. The case was heard by the Privy Council in May 1900, and the decision handed down a year later. Here's the result according to his short bio on the Treaty of Waitangi page:

The New Zealand Court of Appeal decision was reversed. The Law Lords rejected the argument that there was no M?ori customary law, and commented that it was "rather late in the day" for New Zealand courts to adopt such a view, given that several existing New Zealand statutes, including the nineteenth-century Native Lands Acts, referred to M?ori custom. The New Zealand Court of Appeal was also adjudged to have jurisdiction over the question of whether the land in dispute had been ceded to the Crown. It would be an understatement to say that the New Zealand judiciary was unhappy with this decision.

The government's response was to limit Maori rights to investigate the government’s land purchases through the courts...

And this was to a decision which simply said that the facts around customary title "were either known to lawyers, or discoverable by them by evidence". Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose...