Points of difference

The government is announcing yet another upward revision of the budget surplus, and National and ACT are taking the opportunity to establish a point of difference by agitating for tax-cuts. I think the government should help them in this, by making it clear that this "windfall" will be reinvested in core social services such as health. This will establish a very clear point of difference going into the next election, with National and ACT standing for tax cuts for the rich, and Labour standing for decent services which benefit all New Zealanders.

The argument for tax cuts is that the government has money at the moment. The chief argument against is that it won't necessarily have it in the future. While the government is flush with cash as a result of the present economic climate, the good times won't last forever, and it must consider its revenue base in bad times as well as in good. If we want to avoid serious cuts to public services in the event of a recession, then we are better off preserving our revenue base and instead investing it in our public services. Otherwise, we are going to (once again) learn that today's tax-cut is tomorrow's run-down hospital.

There's a powerful argument for reinvestment in any case. For most of the 80's and 90's, public services were starved of funds, forced to do more with less as ideologically-driven governments slashed the tax base in an attempt to shrink public spending as a proportion of GDP. Unfortunately, such sustained reductions in funding didn't just trim away the fat - they cut deep into the flesh and bone of our health system, our schools, our universities, our roads. The current state of our hospitals, the length of our waiting lists, the deferred maintenance at our schools and Auckland's transport woes are all directly attributable to this period of deliberate starvation. It's a testament to the extent of the damage that the present government is still cleaning it up five years later.

The right's call for tax cuts allows Labour to present a clear choice between giving the rich more money, and giving everyone better health care. I know which one I'd choose.

Ex-post facto criminalisation

The government is moving to amend the Terrorism Suppression Act 2002. The main change - extending the term before a terrorist organisation's designation must be renewed - is fairly uncontentious, but there is also one which is quite disturbing:

Mr Goff said the Bill also proposed extending two sections of the Act that prohibited the financing of terrorist acts and of designated terrorist entities so that they also covered the intentional financing of non-designated terrorist organisations.

The problem here is that unless this is coupled with a very tight definition of "terrorist organisation" (say, as an organisation which has actually blown something up or killed people, or announced its intention to do so), it risks giving the government the ability to criminalise behaviour after the fact. In other words, to prosecute people for things which were not, or could not possibly be known to be, crimes at the time.

There is also, as with all laws regarding terrorism, a danger of the powers being abused to target organisations whose only "crime" is being disliked by the government. The Terrorism Suppression Act incorporates into its definition of "terrorist act" an exclusion for peaceful protest, strikes and political activity (all of which could be said to be aimed at compelling the government or causing economic damage). A similar exclusion must be incorporated into the definition of "terrorist organisation", to ensure that the government's powers are not abused.

Unfortunately, Phil Goff is in charge of this law. Given his hostility to civil liberties concerns, we should probably expect the worst.

A time for justice

A Chilean court has indicted Augusto Pinochet on charges stemming from the systematic disappearance and murder of opposition figures during his 17-year regime. He has now been placed under house arrest. Most significantly, the judge ruled that Pinochet was competent to stand trial - that his ability to give lucid TV interviews for his supporters showed that his excuse of ill-health (used to escape justice in the UK several years ago) was nothing more than a fraud. This allows several other investigations into murders during his regime to go ahead.

After over thirty years, there may finally be some justice for Pinochet's victims.

Blindsight

The Manawatu Standard this evening had a story (also on news.com.au) about a man who displayed a "sixth sense" because, while completely blind (in the sense that his visual cortices had been destroyed by a stroke), he showed better than chance probability of guessing emotions in pictures of human faces:

When researchers from the University of Wales showed the man images of shapes such as circles and squares, he could only guess what they were, and had a similar lack of success determining the gender of emotionless male and female faces.

But when presented with angry or happy human faces, his accuracy improved to 59 per cent, significantly better than what would be expected by random chance, with similar results for distinguishing between sad and happy or fearful and happy faces.

Newspaper reports are full of breathless talk of a "sixth sense", but this is nothing of the sort. It's a phenomenon called "blindsight", and it has been known to researchers for almost thirty years. It occurs in some people where there has been damage to the visual cortex, but not the eyes or optic nerve, and leads to an uncanny ability to "guess" some things which are going on in the blinded part of the field of vision. Some blindsighted people can "guess" the location of a moving dot of light, even though they cannot consciously see it; others can "guess" shapes. And the reason for this is perfectly obvious: as noted by Dan Dennett in Consciousness Explained

There are at least ten different pathways between the retina and the rest of the brain, so even if the occipital [visual] cortex is destroyed, there are still plenty of communication channels over which the information from the perfectly normal retinas could reach other brain areas.

In this particular case, information is getting through to the part of the brain which distinguishes emotions in others - so despite the fact that Patient X is blind, he can sometimes register people's emotions solely from visual cues.

The authors of the original paper (Discriminating emotional faces without primary visual cortices involves the right amygdala) are of course completely aware of this - but I guess the journalists reporting on this skimmed the preamble to focus on the "mysterious" results. It seems Patient X is not the only blind person in this story...

"Snobbery"

Deborah Coddington, in criticising the fact that only half of university students complete their qualification, says that we have a "snobby attitude" toward university study. But her idea of snobbery is a little strange:

"University is not for everyone. We're screaming out for tradespeople, yet people are being told to go to university."

While I agree with her underlying attitude that some at uni would indeed be better off taking a trade, it's certainly not snobbish to encourage people to pursue the opportunities open to them. Except in the original sense that people sine nobilitate are being allowed to share the same opportunities as their "betters".

I'm also surprised that Coddington, an ACT MP, shows so little faith in the market. According to market dogma, skill surpluses and shortages should simply result in changes in wages and salaries, thus signalling which educational direction people should pursue. Coddington's complaint is either an admission that this mechanism is not working satisfactorily (undermining the whole ACT program), or that she simply wants cheaper plumbers, and the market be damned.

As for the substance of her complaint, it seems that New Zealand attainment rates are in line with international norms. It's not at all unusual for people to fail to complete tertiary study, for a number of reasons, and its no reflection on entry standards that people change their minds about what they want to do with their lives.

Holding our heads up again

According to the Sunday Star-Times, the Supreme Court's decision to free Ahmed Zaoui on bail means that now we can hold our heads up again. Not quite. While I agree that the decision is a landmark victory for huamn rights and the rule of the law, and one that we can all be proud of, we cannot truly hold our heads high until we have a final verdict that the Inspector-General must take Zaoui's human rights into account, and we have made sure that this atrocity can never happen again. The laws that allowed the government to imprison Zaoui without charge or trial for two years on secret evidence are still in place; we cannot rest until they are reformed to ensure that they respect the fundamentals of justice.

Helen Clark has promised to review the law once Zaoui's case is resolved; what worries me is that she will "fix" it by removing the judicial oversight which has so embarassed her government. We must make sure that this does not happen. Justice requires that allegations by the security services must be tested in a proper court, rather than simply in the minds of a bunch of professional paranoids and their mushroomed minister.

The Star-Times does however hit home in its assessment of Zaoui's opponents:

What Mapp and his fellow anti-Zaoui campaigners really stand for is mindless obeisance to the authorities - even when the authorities are egregiously wrong. What they want is capitulation to foreign pressure and injustice. They should be ashamed of themselves.

Indeed they should. Freedom is not built on trusting the government, but on being inherantly suspicious of it. Those who would take the SIS on faith are effectively saying that our intelligence services - or rather, their foreign "partners" - should be allowed to imprison anyone they want, without any oversight whatsoever. But that's tyranny, not freedom, and it has no place in an open and democratic society like New Zealand.

Irony

The Herald responded to Zaoui's release by arguing that Zaoui should not have been released unsupervised into the community and that the Supreme Court had made "a presumption unsupported by the circumstances". But it's clear from the government's admission that Zaoui poses no risk that it is not the court which has made such a presumption...

"Security risk"

Criticism of Ahmed Zaoui's release on bail has centered around the danger he poses to New Zealand, with NZ First warning hysterically that we have welcomed an "international terrorist" and Tony Ryall expressing concern that Zaoui is "free to roam the streets". The problem with both these views is that the government does not regard Zaoui as a threat to national security:

The certificate issued by the Security Intelligence Service alleges that the Algerian refugee is a threat to New Zealand's national security, but in the Supreme Court the Crown said he was not.

The Solicitor-General, Terence Arnold, QC, was quizzed at length by Dame Sian Elias and other judges about what the risks were.

Mr Arnold indicated that the main risks were his communicating and associating with others - including the "issuing of communiques" and "the function of leadership".

[...]

Justice Peter Blanchard put it to him that there was no suggestion violence might occur in New Zealand as a result of any activities Mr Zaoui might be involved in.

Mr Arnold replied after a long pause: "I think that's fair, Your Honour."

The third sentence is the key. It was clear from the summary of allegations released by the SIS that they saw the main risk as damage to New Zealand's reputation - that other people might not like it if we let him stay, either because they would view our insistence on actual evidence rather than mere suspicion as "not pulling our weight" in the war on terror, or because Zaoui resuming his peaceful advocacy for democracy in Algeria would adversely affect relations with some nations. Winston Peters and Tony Ryall clearly think that these issues are worth imprisoning someone over. I do not.

Our entire justice system is based on the idea that the crown must justify imprisonment. That is why we have laws and trials and court proceedings in the first place - to ensure that the crown proves that the curtailment of someone's liberty is necessary. The Supreme Court's decision that Zaoui was eligible for bail was a clear call for the government to put up or shut up - to present some evidence justifying Zaoui's continued detention, or allow his release. The government chose to present no evidence - and in fact admitted in the material quoted above that they had none. While they could have secret evidence which proves beyond a shadow of a doubt Zaoui's involvement in terrorist activity, given the laughable nature of the "evidence" released so far, we simply cannot take it on faith. The government must prove its case against Zaoui in front of a fair and independent court, or allow him to stay.

Home again, home again, jiggity jig

Well, I'm back. Sydney was hot, humid, and it seemed impossible to find a decent flat white. OTOH, it had some pretty good bookshops and architecture (in that there were buildings with a few more years on them than you'd see in New Zealand - but I wouldn't want to live in one).

Bloggage will resume as soon as I've caught up with all the news I've missed, and finished kicking myself for missing MacquarieCon.

A landmark day for freedom and equality

The Civil Union Bill has passed its third reading. While most of the legal legwork will be done by the companion omnibus bill, which has been delayed in select committee, it is still a landmark day for freedom and equality in New Zealand. Freedom because it marks a step away from the social conservative position that laws should reinforce (their) "moral values". And equality because it ends the obvious inequality of recognising different-sex, but not same-sex, partnerships. Instead, we are moving closer to a neutral state, which leaves decisions about family structure and relationships where they belong - with the people concerned - and does not try to influence them by stacking the legal deck.

There is still a long way to go, of course. We must ensure that same-sex couples enjoy full parental and adoption rights, just as different-sex couples do. And we must open up full marriage to people of all orientations, rather than leaving same-sex couples languishing in the half-way house. But that will come; the basic social acceptance gained by gays since the 1986 Homosexual Law Reform pretty much guarantees it.

Looking to the future, there is an obvious next step. In a few year's time, once people have seen that the recognition of same-sex relationships hasn't caused the end of the world, we can move forward. We should amend the marriage act to make it gender blind, allow free transfers between the two equivalent institutions, and let people decide for themselves how they want their relationships recognised.

Zaoui freed

The Supreme Court has ordered Ahmed Zaoui be released on bail into the care of the Dominican Friars. He will have to report to police twice a week and sleep at the friary, but will otherwise enjoy freedom of movement. The government had pushed for release to the Mangere Refugee Center on the grounds that Zaoui was a security risk and that it would be easier to monitor his visitors and communications, but presented no evidence to support their claim; in the absence of such evidence the court really had no option but to order his release.

It's a victory for Zaoui. Tonight he will be able to see the stars and the moon. But while it's an important victory, it's not the war. The key decision is that of the Supreme Court on whether the Inspector-General of Security Intelligence must take the UN refugee convention and Zaoui's human rights into account in making his ruling, and we probably won't see that for several weeks.

Cover-ups

The US Army's response to Abu Ghraib and other allegations of torture is to blame it on "bad apples", rogue soldiers acting contrary to orders who will be prosecuted for their crimes under military law. But how do they treat soldiers with a sense of decency who take that seriously, and who report abuse by their comrades? The story of Sgt Frank Ford is enlightening. Ford was a member of the 223rd Military Intelligence Battalion stationed in Samarra;

[a]ccording to Ford, his teammates, three counterintelligence agents like himself -- one of them a woman -- systematically and repeatedly abused several Iraqi male detainees over a two-to three-week time period. Ford describes incidents of asphyxiation, mock executions, arms being pulled out of sockets, and lit cigarettes forced into detainee's ears while they were blindfolded and bound. These atrocities took place in an Iraqi police station, Ford said. His attempts to stop the abuse were met with either indifference or threats by his team leader, who was himself one of the abusers, according to Ford.

Ford clenched his fists tightly and shook his head slowly from side to side. "I guess one of the things that pisses me off most is the arrogance," he said. "The condescending attitude that my team had. Some of the medics, too. Saying things like 'So what, he's just another haji,' like they were scum or some kind of animal, really just pisses me off."

Ford followed procedures, first approaching his team leader, and then working his way up the chain of command. His superior's response was swift; Ford was forcibly strapped to a gurney and medevaced from Iraq as "delusional". So much for military law.

Just in case anybody thinks this is an isolated incident, there's this story on Yahoo:

U.S. special forces accused of abusing prisoners in Iraq threatened Defense Intelligence Agency personnel who saw the mistreatment, according to U.S. government memos released Tuesday by the American Civil Liberties Union.

The special forces also monitored e-mails sent by defense personnel and ordered them "not to talk to anyone" in the United States about what they saw, said one memo written by the Defense Intelligence Agency chief, who complained to his Pentagon bosses about the harassment.

The story also reports that FBI agents at Abu Ghraib complained to their superiors abotu the abuse there - and yet nothing was done until the story hit the media in May this year. They also complained about torture at Guantanamo - and point the finger squarely at Major General Miller, who was later moved to Abu Ghraib:

One FBI e-mail released by the ACLU said Miller "continued to support interrogation strategies (the FBI) not only advised against, but questioned in terms of effectiveness."

[...]

In the July 14 letter obtained by the AP, Harrington suggested that the Pentagon didn't act on FBI complaints about four incidents at Guantanamo, including a female interrogator grabbing a detainee's genitals and bending back his thumbs, another where most of a prisoner's head was covered with duct tape and a third where a dog was used to intimidate a detainee who later was thrown into isolation and showed signs of "extreme psychological trauma."

The military's response? Nothing. Despite the claim of a Navy officer that "[w]e take all issues of detainee abuse very seriously and where there is the potential that these abuses could have taken place, we investigate them", nothing whatsoever was done about these complaints and eyewitness reports. I think that speaks for itself about the US military's attitude towards torture.

Setting a good example

The Dutch have announced that they will prosecute one of their citizens for assisting Saddam Hussein in genocide. The unnamed Dutchman supplied base materials used to make chemical weapons with full knowledge of their intended use; the weapons manufactured were used in the 1988 Halabja raid in which several thousand Kurdish civilians were murdered by the Iraqi regime.

This sets an excelent example, and I hope that other countries follow it.

"A model city"

Having retaken Fallujah, US forces have announced their intention to turn it into "a model city". Unfortunately, their idea of "a model city" looks a lot like a police state. Citizens will be biometrically identified, forced to wear ID badges at all times, and assigned to work battalions tasked with rebuilding the city. While they will be paid, the labour will be involuntary, making the citizens of Fallujah little better than slaves in their own country.

And they wonder why Iraqis want them to leave...

Something the size of your head

Apparently while I slept Australia got hit by a rock. Well, not hit as such - it broke up about 50km up - but the resulting explosion was between 0.5 and 1 kiloton, the size of a tactical nuclear weapon. It lit up the area like daylight for around four seconds, was detected on seismographs, and was heard as far away as Darwin. And all that from something the size of your head.

No-one was hurt, but its a timely reminder of what orbital mechanics can do, and that we might want to keep an eye out for this sort of thing in the future.

Utterly, utterly dishonest

If anybody needs a further example of Stephen Franks' intellectual dishonesty over the Civil Union Bill, they only need to consider his minority view in the select committee report [PDF]:

Further, as a lawyer, the ACT member is affronted by a bill which establishes a machinery which focuses around the exchange of solemn vows, mimicking the marriage ceremony, without any definded content to the vows. In theory the parties could exchange vows to join in civil union for one day, without exclusivity

Why is this intellectually dishonest? Two reasons. Firstly, because the vows in a civil union are utterly meaningless in a legal sense. The parties could indeed vow to join in Civil Union for one day, without exclusivity - but they would still have to separate for two years before that union could be dissolved (unless they could access one of the specified grounds for immediate annulment - like being under 16). But secondly - and this is what makes it utterly, utterly dishonest - is that there is no legal content to marriage vows either. While people can (and usually do) swear faithfulness and exclusivity in their marriage vows, they don't have to; it is just as possible to swear to a short-term, non-exclusive relationship for marriage as it would be for a civil union, and it would be just as legally meaningless. As laid out in section 31 (3) (a) of the Marriage Act (1955), all that is required to solemnise a marriage is a statement by either party of "I AB, take you CD, to be my legal wife or husband" or words to that effect. The rest of the ceremony is filler.

Stephen Franks continually portrays himself as being the man who actually reads the legislation and understands what it really means. He cannot therefore claim ignorance as a defence for the above - he is simply being grossly intellectually dishonest in order to pander to bigots.

Sydney

It's rather hot. So are the chillis they use as garnish on Vietnamese food.

The fundamentalist mindset

Bloodrage pointed out an interesting quote to me the other day:

It can no longer be denied that the GREAT cause of sickness is disobedience to natural law - wrong habits of living. A very large proportion of diseases from which mankind suffers is IMMEDIATELY PREVENTABLE. There is nothing arbitrary or accidental about the incidence of disease. We are sick simply in proportion to the extent of infringement of natural law. Sickness is the natural consequence of disobedience. We are excused by ignorance or incredulity no more than by neglect. Turn from wrong habits of living, comply with the law, and consequences of deflection disappear.

(Original emphasis)

No, it's not a submission on the Civil Union Bill - it's the opening paragraph of Dr Ulric Williams' Hints on Healthy Living, a cookbook published in Wanganui in 1934. A cookbook. It's quite revealing of the fundamentalist mindset that they regard any deviation from their chosen worldview, no matter how trivial, as disobediance to "natural law" which will be punished by a vengeful god.

More "bad apples"

More abuse, more photos. What is it with American soldiers and abusing and humiliating their prisoners? Are they trying to turn ordinary Iraqis against them?

Worth repeating

Kevin of Lean Left commenting on Crooked Timber about the US believing it is acceptable to use evidence extracted under torture:

You know why we won the cold war? In the end, it wasn’t our military or nuclear weapons or even the Soviet Unions economic problems (the Chinese have proved a hundred times over that totalitarianism can coexist with capitalism quite well). It was the simple fact that we convinced the Europeans and the Japanese that our ideals were better than theirs. This war will be won the same way.

Yes, military action is sometimes required, as will police action. but in the end, the question comes down to this: which side will be able to convince enough of the Arab Muslim world that its ideals are correct, and thus neuter the other side? The monsters tell the Arabs that they can provide a good life, a safe life, a proud life, for them and their families because the monsters are close to God’s heart and know what God wants. So if you turn life over to them, if you do Gods will as they reveal it to you, they will give you the life for your family that you desire. It is a powerful idea, one hard to defeat.

But we have a better idea: we will let you be your own person, find you own way to heaven, build your own independent life with dignity, free from orders and monsters who dare to tell you what God really wants, protected by the law that you yourself helped create. It has won every single time it has been given a chance to be put in practice, our idea. But it it can only work if it is put into practice. Refuse to practice it, forget its power, lie about your adherence to it, flaunt it’s restrictions, ignore its laws, become a monster in defense of it, and it has no power.

And that’s what you advocate, dan — telling the world a lie, giving up on our ideals so that you can feel safer. Trying to fight a monster by becoming a monster. Instead of a choice between freedom and tyranny, you offer them a choice between an honest tyranny and a lie. Why should they believe in our ideal when we so obviously don’t?

(My emphasis)

This captures the debate over the war on terror in a nutshell: it is between those who think it is about nothing more than force, and that all we have to do is keep on killing and killing and killing and killing and eventually there will be no more terrorists left (because people who will willingly blow themselves up to kill others can obviously be intimidated by threatening their lives), and those who understand that it is fundamentally a war of ideas. The split can also be viewed as being between those who think that terrorism poses a serious threat to western civilisation (making the war on terror a war of survival, in which any tactic is justified), and those who take a more realistic view.

From my posts here, it ought to be clear which side I favour. Terrorists are dangerous, and may even at some stage acquire a weapon of mass destruction, but do not ultimately pose a threat to civilisation - the real threat in that area comes from the "war of civilisations" crowd's willingness to sacrifice everything worthwhile about western civilisation in order to "save" it from a few loonies hiding out in caves. Rather, we must win the battle for hearts and minds, and dry up the terrorists' supply of supporters, funding and recruits by presenting them with a genuinely better alternative. And we already have that alternative: freedom.

Unfortunately, as the US Defence Science Board recently noted, American policies seem to be moving in exactly the wrong direction...