Neat

I've been looking at comet Neat tonight. It's about halfway between Sirius and Procyon, and up a bit. Through my binoculars it looks like a little fuzzy blob. I wonder if you can see the tail from somewhere with better seeing?

A sick feeling

The Guardian has a story suggesting that torture techniques are being propagated through coalition forces in Iraq by their horde of ex-special forces mercenaries - who learned them when being trained to resist such methods if captured.

I feel sick.

Labour party blogs

The PM has a blog too. Unfortunately its in the same bletcherous format as John Tamihere's - every entry on its own individual webpage. Ick!

The other problem is that she never says anything interesting. Like Tamihere, her content is just a travellogue - "went here, did this". But I guess this is one of the limits of being a politician - every word will be scrutinised, so they can't ever tell us what they really think, throw out interesting facts, muse about possible policy directions, or just vent their goddamn spleen.

Actually, I take that back. This week, John Tamihere actually says a few things about a Maori party, and is promising more. Actual content for a change...

The politics of conviction

One of the reasons people like Don Brash is because of his perceived conviction. He is seen as a man driven by principle, willing to stand up for what he believes in, and untainted by the compromises of everyday politics.

Hopefully, this perception is being undermined by his duplicity over National's newly released nuclear policy. Last weekend he told the NZPA that he had no position on the nuclear ship ban. Then, when pressed about reports that he had told a group of visiting US Senators that if it were up to him, the nuclear ban would be "gone by lunchtime", he refused to confirm or deny the comments. More recently, he told Linda Clark on Nine Till Noon that he personally opposed nuclear ship visits, and stood on his credentials as a peacenik. When pressed about his other positions, he said he didn't want to talk about it.

(As a peacenik, I wonder how he feels about Simon Power's plans to send New Zealanders to die for America whenenever told to? I'm sure the answer would be fascinating...)

These are not the words of a man of conviction. Like all politicians, Brash is tailoring his message to what he thinks his audiance wants to hear, to what he can sell to the public. The sooner the electorate wakes up to this, the better.

National wants to sell us out

National has signalled a return to foreign policy subservience, saying that they would send New Zealand troops to die for America's interests whenever we are told to:

Without reservation we will support our close allies, Australia, the United States and Britain when and wheresoever our commitment is called upon

The disaster in Iraq shows more than ever the need for an independent foreign policy. Blindly following the United States would have led us straight into a moral quagmire of occupation and torture. Yes, we should help our friends - but only when their cause is just. And when they are in the wrong, we should try and set them right. Friends don't let friends wage illegal wars of aggression.

National wants to sell out our independence in the vain hope of economic benefit for their fat-cat supporters. We shouldn't let them do it. The core of our foreign policy should always be independence - making our own decisions, according to our own values, in Wellington, not in Washington.

Selling the foreshore?

There has been some scaremongering that the government's foreshore policy will allow the government to sell the foreshore. Well, yes - but so did the status quo. The provisions in sections 11 and 12 of the Foreshore and Seabed Bill (the Land Act 1948 does not apply; alienation only by special Act of Parliament or under the provisions of the RMA dealing with reclaimed land) are identical in substance to those in the Foreshore and Seabed Endowment Revesting Act 1991. Those provisions exist because there are reasons why the crown might sometimes want to alienate - setting up a new port, for example - and so it needs the ability to do so.

Furthermore, this is about as strong a protection as we can get in a Westminster system. After all, if Parliament passed a stronger provision forever barring alienation, a later Parliament could always repeal it, or pass a law saying "except for this bit". We don't really do "higher law" in this country - about the only part of our constitutional framework protected in any way is part of the Electoral Act, and even then such protection is not very strong (the provision saying "these bits can only be repealed by a two-thirds majority" is not itself protected...). The Constitution Act, the Human Rights Act, all can be gutted by a simple Parliamentary majority. It is up to us, the voters, to ensure that it does not happen.

The same goes for the foreshore. We must keep an eye on Parliament to ensure that any attempts at alienation are justified. We must meet any unjustified attempt at alienation with lobbying and protests. If we fail to do this, we will have no-one but ourselves to blame.

New Fisk

An illegal and immoral war, betrayed by images that reveal our racism

Torture update

More pictures have emerged, showing prisoners on leashes, more sexual posing, and prisoners chained up with women's underwear on their heads. I've also seen mention of other pictures - more of the beaten-to-death "ghost" prisoner in his bodybag, and a blood-spattered torture chamber. The soldiers were apparently trading them. There's also more reports of mistreatment, such as this one of a 70 year old women being put in a harness and made to crawl on all fours like a donkey. Yeah, the greatest army in the world shows how powerful it is by humiliating grandmothers. What a pack of sadistic bullies...

Meanwhile, the UN is calling on the CPA to respect international human rights law and grant the detainees access to courts.

New Fisk

Pictures of wounded men being shot censored by TV

Moral blindness

NZPundit just doesn't understand people's outrage about the US's torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib:

What am I missing here people? I see the tragic symbolism of what happened in Abu Ghraib but really don't see how it is that important past the hysteria of the current news cycle.

Curiously, he has no such trouble understanding people's outrage about Saddam's torture, which shows us where the trouble lies. And as usual with NZPundit, it's a problem of consistency. What he is clearly missing is any sense that torture is wrong regardless of who does it. His analysis is concerned solely with what people will think, and how it will cause them to act towards the US. He seems completely blind to the moral dimension, to the idea that if it is wrong for Saddam to torture, it is also wrong for the United States, and everyone else as well.

But it's not just the outrage of torture itself, it's the outrage of torture committed by people who know better. The United States is supposed to be the "beacon of freedom", the exemplar of human rights for the world. And yet, it stoops to this. And so we have shattered expectations, disgust at backsliding, abhorrence at the betrayal of the values we hold dear, and a hefty dose of fear - because if the US can backslide, how safe are the rest of us?

Blowback

Many Americans are worried about "blowback" from the publication of torture photos from Abu Ghraib. Too late - it's already happened. This weeks Time has 10 Questions For Jumpei Yasuda (one of the Japanese journalists taken hostage in Iraq last month), and it includes this snippet:

The man who pointed his gun at me told me he was walking on the sidewalk and was arrested by the G.I.s when he wouldn't answer their questions. He said he was imprisoned for almost a month and regularly beaten up. One day, he said, he was taken to a private room and sexually assaulted.

(Emphesis added)

Abu Ghraib's torturers have been turning Iraqis against the occupation long before the photos were published. Contrary to the myopic beliefs of Americans, for whom nothing is real until reported in the US media, people do know when they are being tortured...

Hardcore

My friend Morgue went to Palestine recently. Here's the first part of his story.

Relief

Nanaia Mahuta will not resign from Parliament.

This means the government won't have to go to the Greens after all. Phew.

Focusing the mind

The hope on the left at the moment is that Labour will form a backup agreement with the Greens, allowing them to maintain confidence and supply and thus stay in government. The problem is that while Rod Donald has said that keeping National out of power focused the mind, a ban on commercial release of GMOs is still a bottom line for the party - which probably won't wash with Labour (or the electorate as a whole).

However, I think National has just given the Greens an even sharper focus, by threatening a sacred cow even more important than GE: our nuclear-free policy.

As a Green supporter, I think that this, more than anything else, makes a deal with Labour imperitive. An election now will hand the government benches to National, resulting not only in a repeal of the nuclear-ship ban, but also withdrawl from Kyoto, gutting the RMA, allowing open-cast mining and environmentally destructive development in conservation areas, a rollback of the last six years of progressive social legislation, and, in all likelihood, opening the floodgates to GE. We have to prevent this. If it means swallowing our pride and working with the government, then so be it. Labour, for all its flaws, is far more friendly to our goals than Don Brash.

What should a deal look like? It's probably best not to be seen to be too opportunistic, and with only fourteen months till the next election, it's too late for major policy changes anyway. And if United Future is also to continue supporting the government, then a deal must also be fair to them. Peter Dunne got one big policy item: a families commission. The Greens should push for the same: one decent policy payoff (and greater backroom influence, obviously). A universal student allowance, or a big dollop of cash to fund railways and public transport in Auckland would fit the bill nicely, and both have the advantage of also being popular with the centrist parties (and therefore, one would hope, with "middle New Zealand").

While it seems like selling out cheaply, I think the important thing at the moment is to buy time to ensure that the left-bloc in Parliament (Labour, the Greens and the Progressive Coalition) continues to hold 51% of the vote after the next election - because if it doesn't, then all the progress of the last five years, and our anti-nuclear policy, will be as dust.

New Kiwi blog

Just Left, also an exile from nz.pols.

Size matters

No matter which way you look at it, there were a hell of a lot of people marching yesterday. While some are clearly trying to downplay it - witness the editor of the Independent on Holmes last night making the standard "it's only a tiny fraction of the population" noises - the fact is that this is the biggest protest march in Wellington in a decade, and rivaled the size of anything from the Springbok Tour. We're not in the habit of taking to the streets in New Zealand over politics - it's telling that the only thing bigger on the Herald's list was Peter Jackson's triumphant opening of The Return of the King.

I said a while ago that any real solution to the foreshore and seabed issue had to satisfy the vast majority of New Zealanders, including the vast majority of Maori, otherwise it would simply fester. I think yesterday shows that the government's policy is a failure on the Maori front - you don't get 15,000 people outside Parliament when the vast majority are happy. As a result, it's going to be endlessly relitigated, before the Waitangi Tribunal and various international human rights bodies, in the process damaging our international reputation. Worse, it's going to be re-litigated every time there is a change of government. Maori will keep advocating, in the hope that eventually a friendly government (perhaps dependent on a new Maori party for a Parliamentary majority) will give in.

So, this issue is going to rear its ugly head again and again until Maori are happy with the result. Those hoping they'll admit defeat and give up should look at the Treaty settlements process to see how patient Maori can be.

Thousands

Scoop reports ten thousand marchers on the Hikoi in Wellington; the Herald says it took an hour for the whole march to leave Te Papa. Whichever way you look at it, that's a fairly hefty demonstration of the depth of feeling on this issue.

The full text of the Taguba report into torture at Abu Ghraib prison is here.

Casualties

A footnote in a Herald story indicates that the Civil Unions bill has become a casualty of the current political unrest over the foreshore and seabed:

the Herald understands the controversial Civil Unions Bill, due to be introduced to Parliament next week, has suddenly been put on hold and will not now be seen this parliamentary session.

I'm not sure whether this also applies to the omnibus bill or not, but either way its bad news. The Civil Unions Bill is a long way from perfect (it's really a half-measure, only full-on marraige will bring real equality), but it is a step in the right direction, and it would be a shame to lose it in the panic.

Twenty-five

That's the number of prisoners who have died in US custody in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to the US military:

The BBC's Pentagon correspondent Nick Childs says of the 25 deaths, 12 were found to be either of natural or "undetermined" causes, one was a "justifiable homicide", and two were murders. Ten inquiries are ongoing, he says.

I wonder which of the above categories these two fall into...?

And the Pentagon has shown exactly how seriously it takes its human rights responsibilities;

An Army official, speaking to Reuters on condition of anonymity, said a soldier had been convicted of killing one of the prisoners by hitting him with a rock.

He was thrown out of the army but did not go to jail.

Normally, murderers go to jail. In the US army, they just lose their jobs. Do we need any more proof that the US army regards its captives as untermenchen?