New Fisk

The irresistible romance of a steam train scarred with the bullet holes of battle

How stupid do they think we are?

It's the usual story: a detainee is released from Guantanamo and alleges torture, while the government strenuously denies it. In this case, the detainee is Australian Mamdouh Habib, who claims that he was beaten, electrocuted, drugged, sexually assaulted, and on one occasion, "smeared with the menstrual blood of a prostitute". And the government is Habib's own, who rather than being concerned about the treatment one of their citizens were subjected to, are denying that any torture took place, or that if it did, then it was conducted by heathen Egyptians (which was precisely why Habib was turned over to them). But what's interesting about all of this is that there is solid documentary evidence for at least one of Habib's claims: the draft of an upcoming book by a translator who worked at the camp recounts how US interrogators used sexual tactics to "break" prisoners, including this rather interesting bit:

According to Sergeant Saar, a Muslim linguist then told the woman interrogator that she could break the prisoner’s faith by making him believe that she had smeared menstrual blood on him and cutting the water off to his cell so that he could not wash. The translator’s manuscript gives explicit details of the way in which the suspect was interrogated.

Some devout Muslim men will not touch women other than their wives, particularly if they are menstruating. The theme has come up repeatedly in the US media since September 11. It was widely reported that Mohammed Atta, the lead hijacker, left written instructions no woman should attend his funeral or visit his grave.

According to the draft, the idea was to make the detainee feel unclean and "unable to go before his God in prayer and gain strength".

You really have to wonder how stupid the Australian government thinks people are, denying something when the very people that did it are admitting it in a book...

In the pipeline

I've been rather busy over the past few days, but I've been thinking about some posts. Among them:

• Something on wages, drawing together several articles published in the last few weeks;
• A detailed dissection of the large pile of documents on prisoner compensation that arrived in the mail today;
• A response to Lewis on the Treaty and the constitution;
• More sedition by example - I've pulled together quite a list of cases to hunt up and publicise.

Hopefully some of this stuff will be appearing over the next week or so.

Working

While many have decried the spread of speed cameras and highway patrols as revenue gathering, it seems to be working. The police are issuing fewer tickets - not because they're not looking hard enough for speeding drivers (they clearly are), but because fewer people are speeding. And the effect can be seen in the annual road-toll - down 65 between 2003 and 2004.

That drop alone should give some pause for thought. If 65 more people a year were being murdered, there would be an outcry from the opposition and demands for a greater focus of police resources on solving the problem. Yet that is effectively what has happened with the road toll, and ACT's Ken Shirley calls it "a disgrace".

It isn't a disgrace. Simply in terms of reducing deaths, injuries and property damage, the emphasis on reducing speeding is worthwhile. And given that they're the people doing much of the killing, having speeding motorists pay for it only seems fair.

Sedition by Example III: Bishop Liston

(Being an ongoing series of seditious utterances which have resulted in prosecution under our archaic sedition laws)

Bishop James Liston, to a St Patrick's Day gathering, Auckland Town Hall, 17th March, 1922:

My parents were driven from the land in which they were born and in which they would have been content to live. Why were they driven out? Because their foreign masters did not want Irish men and women peopling their own land, but wanted to use it as a cattle ranch for snobs of the Empire.

So my father and my little Irish mother, and thousands of others, had to go. They came to this country with the memory kept sacred of their privations and wrongs. They have left to us the sacred traditions of their sorrow.

I am a native of New Zealand and I love my country very well. In every land the children of Ireland this day are gathered by some common and holy impulse to rejoice that at long last they have won some measure of freedom and to hope for a complete deliverance from the house of bondage. I do not say for one moment that Ireland has got all she asked for, and all that her sons died for, but she has got the first instalment of her freedom, and is determined to have the whole of it. I say that because the omnipotent hand of God made Ireland a nation, and while grass grows and water flows there will be men in Ireland and women too to fight, and even die, that God's desires may be realised...

The bulk of Liston's speech dealt with the role of the Irish in world history, and contrasted Ireland's current problems over the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty and the establishment of the Irish Free State with those of the wider British Empire. But he thought that those problems were not insurmountable, and would eventually come to a happy ending - thanks in no small part to those like de Valera who were suspicious of British intentions and would "see that the rulers are not duped by England". But the sting was in the tail:

We must not forget the martyrs who died in the fighting in 1916, that glorious Easter. I have here a list of 155 men who during and since 1916 have died for Ireland. 16 were executed by shooting in 1916, 52 were killed while fighting during the Easter week in 1916, 7 died on hunger strike - including Terence MacSwiney the Lord Mayor of Cork - 8 were executed by hanging, 12 by shooting, and 57, including three priests, were murdered by foreign troops.

We cannot forget these men and women but in order that our dream about Ireland can come true, and while we cannot forget, we can forgive.

This caused an uproar in the New Zealand press, and Liston was swiftly charged with sedition for inciting disaffection against His Majesty and promoting hostility between different classes of subjects. He was tried before the Supreme Court in Auckland, but acquitted by an all-Protestant jury, who could not find him guilty for recounting what was, essentially, historical fact.

(Source: Bishop in the Dock: The Sedition Trial of James Liston, Rory Sweetman, Auckland University Press, 1997.)

Well, that worked

North Korea has announced it has "manufactured nukes for self-defence". I think that about shows the effectiveness of the US's tough, all stick, no carrot, demand-total-surrender-before-negotiations-begin approach.

Unfortunately for the world, the US has adopted the same approach towards Iran, refusing to join the EU in negotiations with Iran unless the latter gives up the very thing those negotiations are supposed to be about. And without a major change in policy, I don't really expect the result there to be any different.

National: the party of bigotry

In a piece in his weekly newsletter, Murray McCully exposes National's true colours as the party of bigotry by accusing the government of "officially endors[ing]" homosexuality in its "no rubba, no hubba hubba" ads. How? By showing a gay couple in some ads, getting up to exactly what the straight couple get up to in the rest.

McCully seems to find this offensive - not to mention threatening, judging by the number of times he mentions his heterosexuality in such a short piece. And his preferences are quite clear: gays shouldn't be seen on TV, and should get back in the closet with women and Maori, where they belong. It's the sort of attitude you'd expect to see from the bigots in United Future and NZFirst, not from the chief political strategist of a supposedly mainstream party like National, which aspires to represent all New Zealanders. But then, it's clear from their overwhelming opposition to the Civil Union Bill where the majority of National MP's stand - and it isn't on the side of tolerance and diversity.

As for the ad itself, it's not an endorsement - it's a depiction of reality. Gays exist, and (Shock! Horror!) have sex. And that's something that Murray McCully and his ilk are simply going to have to get used to.

(Thanks to Just Left for pointing this out)

Changes

Blogger has changed its comment posting system, so that you can now actually see what other people have written when composing your reply. Unfortunately, in the process they've fouled up the Recent Comments hack, so I've had to remove it. It'll be back if and when somebody writes an updated version...

Dropped

According to the Manawatu SubStandard, the Police have dropped charges of "dishonouring the flag" against Tame Iti. Given last year's judgement on flag-burning, they were almost guaranteed to lose, and its good to see them acknowledge the fact. Charges of recklessly discharging a firearm have also been dropped, presumably on the basis that an outcry from right-wing politicians is insufficient for a conviction. Instead, the Police are focusing on the charges where they may actually have a case: unlawful possession of a firearm, and possession without a license. Which again, is fair enough. In this country, we demand that people who want to own guns jump through a few hoops first (primarily to do with not being a dick and not wanting to use them on other people); if Iti hasn't bothered, then he deserves to be charged and convicted.

Investment NZ and transparency

I'm appalled that Industry New Zealand is threatening to recommend closing down if they are forced by Parliament to name the international investors they have been wining and dining over the last few years. Who's in charge here? Parliament, or the bureaucrats they appoint?

More importantly, this is a matter of open government and accountability. Parliament and the people have an absolute right to know what public money is being spent on. And the names of those who have visited under the visiting investor scheme are absolutely vital to judging its success. Without them, we have absolutely no idea whether the money is well-spent or not.

The Select Committee should firmly remind Investment NZ who they work for, and that there must be transparency where public money is concerned. And if Investment NZ executives are unwiling to comply, then it is time they started looking for new jobs.

Trying to kill the Treaty

Winston Peter's Treaty Principles Deletion Bill, which would remove all references to the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi from legislation, has been drawn from the ballot and will be put before the House. Predictably, National has announced its enthusiastic support, but they simply don't have the votes to push it through, and I fully expect the Bill to fall at its first reading. Which IMHO is a damn good thing. As I've explained before, "Treaty clauses" referring to the principles are the only thing that gives the bargain underlying the Treaty of Waitangi legal force. If they are removed, then effectively so is the Treaty.

The Dead White Males who support Peters and Brash - the ones who look back nostalgicly to the 50's, when New Zealand society resembled the present National caucus, with Maori and women seated firmly at the back of the room and ignored - probably see that as a wonderful thing. The rest of us - those who realise that Maori are not just going to shut up or go away - ought to be horrified.

Irony

As a non-monarchist, I don't actually give a rat's arse about announced wedding of Charles and Camilla, but there was one part of the BBC story that was simply too good to pass up:

If he became king, Charles would be the supreme governor of the Church of England and some Anglicans remain opposed to the remarriage of divorcees.

Which is rather ironic, given the origins of the Church of England...

Ex post facto criminalisation III

The Terrorism Suppression Amendment Bill (No 2) passed its first reading today, and has been referred to the Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade Committee. This is another bill I'll have to submit on, because while the primary object (tidying up the rules regarding renewing the designation of terrorist groups) is uncontentious, part of it criminalises "the intentional financing of non-designated terrorist organisations". As I've argued here and here, this is extremely vague, to the extent that people will have no possible way of knowing whether they are violating the law or not.

Countries where the laws are secret and decisions as to what is and isn't criminal are made by anonymous security officials are rightly known as despotisms - yet that is what our government is proposing to do in the name of fighting terrorism. It's not something we should tolerate. If we want New Zealand to remain a free and democratic society, then we must take a stand for legal transparency, and oppose this part of the bill.

American Generosity

President Bush is seeking an additional US$600 million in aid for countries hit by the boxing-day tsunami, to bring the total to US$950 million. While a substantial amount, this will still leave the US in the bottom half of both the per-capita and by GDP aid tables. Still, Bush deserves a lot of credit for this. Now we just have to see if Congress will deliver...

Bribery

Bush's US$81 billion supplemental budget appropriation for Iraq is to include a US$400 million "solidarity initiative" to "support nations that have deployed troops in Iraq and Afghanistan". A bribe, in other words.

I'm sure that will go down well in those countries which deployed troops against the overwhelming opposition of their citizens.

Letting Corrections off the hook

The Prisoners' and Victims' Claims Bill has run into trouble in its first days in select committee, attracting criticism from government MP's Russell Fairbrother and Lianne Dalziel. No doubt the whips will be swiftly deployed to restore order and prevent any further embarassments, but in the meantime it's an interesting sign of the tensions within Labour over the bill. Many Labour MPS are no doubt wondering why their party, which is supposedly supportive of human rights, is passing a piece of legislation like this.

Criticisms of the bill have focused on the way it tramples human rights, but another problem, as pointed out by Fairbrother, is that the bill creates a lottery. Only victims who abusers are themselves abused will receive any compensation. Except that that's not quite true, as one of the purposes of the bill is to prevent payments to prisoners and discourage them from seeking compensation in the first place - making it a lottery with no winners.

This tension in the bill comes from it muddling the issue of compensating prisoners for unlawful treatment by the crown with compensating their victims for pain and suffering. But as Just Left points out, these are things which should be kept seperate;

This is not about the victims of the original crime. It is about what happens when someone is abused in custody and the Courts find that they were abused. If people are concerned about victims' rights, then they should focus on compensation at the time of the sentencing, not try and link the two unrelated issues together.

If we want to end compensation payouts to prisoners, then the best way of doing so is to ensure it doesn't need to be paid in the first place. And the best way to do that is for the Department of Corrections to actually hold its staff accountable when they abuse prisoners or develop and implement unlawful and inhumane policies. The present bill does not do that. Instead, by discouraging claims, it effectively lets Corrections off the hook, and allows the abuse of prisoners to continue.

More on outsourcing torture

The New Yorker has an in-depth piece on America's outsourcing of torture. It tells the story of how what was originally a limited scheme for capturing terrorists already convicted in foreign courts and returning them to face a shitty despotism's version of justice turned into a wholesale outsourcing of torture for the sole purpose of evading US law on the matter. It covers a lot of familiar ground - Maher Arar, the Swedish rendition, the torture plane, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and "waterboarding" - but it also adds something new: the opinions of US officials intimitely familiar with the scheme.

One of those people is Michael Scheuer, a "former C.I.A. counter-terrorism expert who helped establish the practice of rendition". He describes the origin of the extraordinary rendition scheme in the mid-90's and the deal originally struck with Egypt to provide terrorists who had been convicted in absentia in their security courts in exchange for their being questioned (using Egyptian methods, of course) before their execution. It was a vile deal, the two countries doing each other's dirty work, but according to Scheur was at least backed by some form of judicial process, however flawed, which generally protected innocent people from rendition. Unfortunately, as the case of Maher Arar shows, that no longer seems to be true.

Another of the new Yorker's sources is Dan Coleman, a former FBI agent responsible for convicting the bombers of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. He is utterly scathing of rendition and of the interrogation procedures used by the US at Guantanamo, pointing out that while it produces confessions, they are of questionable value:

"Have any of these guys ever tried to talk to someone who’s been deprived of his clothes?" he asked. "He’s going to be ashamed, and humiliated, and cold. He’ll tell you anything you want to hear to get his clothes back. There’s no value in it."

Instead, Coleman prefers to treat terrorism suspects like human beings with rights - not just because its the right thing to do, but also because it works:

many of the suspects he had interrogated expected to be tortured, and were stunned to learn that they had rights under the American system. Due process made detainees more compliant, not less, Coleman said. He had also found that a defendant’s right to legal counsel was beneficial not only to suspects but also to law-enforcement officers. Defense lawyers frequently persuaded detainees to coöperate with prosecutors, in exchange for plea agreements. "The lawyers show these guys there’s a way out," Coleman said. "It’s human nature. People don’t cooperate with you unless they have some reason to." He added, "Brutalization doesn’t work. We know that. Besides, you lose your soul."

Something else you lose - and something which both Coleman and Scheur value highly - is any ability to prosecute terrorists in a court of law. No court in a civilised country will accept evidence extracted by torture, and prosecutions have already collapsed because of this (or because of the US's fear of allegations of torture). In Germany, Mounir Motassadeq, the only person to be convicted for involvement in the September 11th attacks, was given a retrial because the evidence against him was too weak. that retrial is now collapsing because of the refusal of US authorities to make high-value terrorist captives available to give evidence. The same is happening in the case of Zacarias Moussaoui in the US; the government wants to convict (and murder) him on the word of these captives, but refuses to allow them to be cross-examined because it might "disrupt the interrogation process" (and lead to questions about how the information was extracted). And other countries, such as the UK, have not been able to charge their citizens released from Guantanamo because of the taint of torture.

Quite apart from the inability to prosecute, there is also the fact that torturing people is grossly counterproductive in the war against terrorism. The British learned this in Northern Ireland, where their use of internment and brutal interrogation methods simply turned the population against them and increased the flow of recruits to the IRA. The US's use of torture is almost certainly doing the same thing. And in a war of ideas whose success ultimately depends on convincing poor Muslims to eschew terrorism, that is not something the US can afford to do.

New Fisk

There will be no Middle East peace without justice

111 calls and public sector funding models

The Dominion-Post this morning had an interesting article (sadly not online) providing context to the current debate about police on traffic duty failing to respond to 111 calls. But rather than being about a focus on revenue gathering, as some would have it, the reason is rather more complicated: it's all to do with how the Police force are funded.

The 1984 Revolution and the passage of the State Sector and Public Finance Acts led to a new model of funding for government agencies in New Zealand. Where previously they'd been funded on "inputs" - how many people etc they needed - they were now funded on "outputs": what they were expected to achieve. This list of outputs is laid out in each agency's annual report and statement of intent, along with an amount allocated for each activity. The lists are very specific, and lay out exactly what services the government is "purchasing" from its agency, along with expected performance standards and how much each "purchase" will cost. So for example the Ministry of Health is funded for so many hip operations at such and such a cost each year, with an expectation that 99% (or whatever) of them will be successful (interestingly, the number funded is consistently below demand, which is why we have waiting lists... but I digress).

In the case of the police, a look at their 2004/2005 Statement of Intent shows that they are funded for a number of output classes, including "policy advice and ministerial servicing" (including answering OIA requests and providing answers to Parliamentary questions), "general crime prevention", "investigations", and the Road Safety Programme. The latter covers

the delivery of key strategic services such as highway patrol, speed and traffic camera operations, restraint device control, drink or drugged driver control operations, commercial vehicle investigation activity, and visible road safety enforcement

and is funded to the tune of $208 million plus GST. Among the services "purchased" are 350 - 400,000 infringement notices (speeding tickets) issued (up 50,000 on last year), 800 - 900,000 roadside breath tests, and attending 350 - 410 fatal accidents (interestingly, despite the oft-touted goal of "getting the road toll down", this is up 20 on last year). One measure of performance is an annual survey about how we the public judge the likelihood of being caught if we speed or drive drunk.

The problem is that departmental chief executives have extremely limited authority to transfer funding from one output class to another, meaning that the money is effectively "ring-fenced" and cannot be used for anything else. Hence the insistence by police managers that police on traffic duty ignore 111 calls unless it is a life-threatening situation: because the money or time cannot legally be used for another purpose.

While it may be tempting to allow police mangers more freedom to juggle competing priorities (and that seems to be the Police Association's position), that creates an accountability problem. How could we hold police managers to account if they decided to (say) ignore traffic enforcement completely in favour of other activities? If we give managers total authority and rely on Ministers to hold them to account, it simply means that managers will try and second-guess the Minister. One of the key ideas of the public sector reforms was to recognise this problem, and things like purchase agreements and output funding are intended to fix it by putting accountability where it belongs: on the Minister.

So, the only way this will change is to pressure the government. They decide the spending priorities, and they are accountable for them. But rather than getting them to reduce the focus on traffic enforcement in favour of other areas, we should be pushing for an across-the-board increase in police funding. The police have suffered starvation just like every other government department, and are expected to do too much with too little. The current debate over 111 calls is just a symptom of that problem.

Good news and pessimism

The announcement of a truce in Palestine and an end to the intifada is good news - it is always good when the killing stops - but at the same time I can't help but ask whether this will lead to real progress towards a genuine Palestinian state, cohabiting with Israel and with real control over its own affairs, or simply allow Israeli domination and oppression to continue.

With Sharon still in charge, it's difficult to see this leading to real change. Still, I can always be pleasantly surprised...