I know no-zink!

Blair is adopting the Sergeant Schultz defence, and claiming that he did not know that the 45-minute claim referred only to battlefield weapons.

And if you believe that, I have some money in the bank in Nigeria I'd like to split with you...

No surprise there

Turns out that Don Brash's story last night about research funding being denied because "there were no benefits for Maori" is a crock of shit.

Update: And so are his claims about special holidays for Maori in employment legislation. So he lies, and encourages employers to racially discriminate on the basis of that lie. That's fairly disgusting, no matter what side of the political aisle you're on.

Here's mud in your eye

I think its fair to say that, contrary to his assertions, Don Brash's policy speech has generated a fair amount of hostility among Maori...

New Fisk

Saudis blame God's will as 300 pilgrims crushed to death at Haj

Fishy business

One News is following up on the "dinnergate" scandal, tonight alleging that former MP Ross Meurant was working as a lobbyist for Simunovich Fisheries while also working as a policy advisor for NZFirst. But while it's very interesting, I don't see how this sticks to Winston - it's Meurant's conflict of interest (and possibly Simunivich's corruption), not his.

Strange

David Farrar on the Police gang-rape inquiry:

there will be no winners - only varying degrees of losers.

I wonder if he says this about every rape investigation?

I would have thought that there would be one clear winner from a thorough, independent investigation, regardless of its outcome: justice.

Just in time for the inquiry

Tony Blair is probably kicking himself for letting Bush force his hand and announcing an inquiry into pre-war intelligence - because the spies are refusing to play scapegoat. Dr Brian Jones, former expert on WMD in the Ministry of Defence's Defence Intelligence Staff, has claimed that intelligence analysts were overruled by their superiors, "resulting in a presentation that was misleading about Iraq's capabilities."

Intelligence chief's bombshell: 'We were overruled on dossier'
Brian Jones: 'There was a lack of substantive evidence... We were told there was intelligence we could not see'

Unfortunately, the Guardian's description of the head of the inquiry as a "safe pair of hands" who is "unlikely to rock the boat" doesn't exactly give much reason for confidence.

(The Guardian also has more on Lord Butler's history and past positions here. Let's make that "no" reason for confidence... the problem with these supposedly "independent" inquiries is that the very people whose decisions are being inquired into get to choose their own judge and decide what can and cannot be investigated. And they wonder why the public has no confidence in the final result...)

China Shop vents her spleen about Don Brash.

EOTWAWKI

Another agreement with NZPundit - this time on the fact that Police Association president Greg O'Connor has a twisted sense of priorities:

it worries me that the head of the Police union appears to think public scrutiny and accountability is a 'distraction' rather than an essential tool for maintaining the rule of law.

I'm worried too. It is essential that we be able to have public confidence in the police. These allegations of a cover-up and police officers protecting their mates grossly undermine that confidence. While they're damaging, turning a blind eye is even more so - and that's not even considering the obvious justice aspects.

Something seriously wrong at the Immigration Service

I'm glad to see that Immigration has temporarily backed down from their plan to deport a 16-year-old girl back to Sri Lanka to be raped or murdered by her relatives. But I'm still troubled by the fact that they could even consider doing something so monstrous. Do you have to have your conscience surgically removed in order to work there or something?

Not so funny when you think about it

Somebody stop me from laughing. Gerry "the bruiser" Brownlee as National's new Maori Affairs spokesperson? Could they have selected anyone worse?

And he's now partly responsible for treaty negotiations as well. What will he do? Throw iwi representatives down the stairs?

Except that it's not funny. The transformation of National from a party dedicated to finally resolving New Zealand's historic injustices into a party dedicated to perpetuating and adding to them is more than a little scary. The sooner the urban liberal faction seizes control of National back from the rednecks and ideological propertarians, the better.

Reflections

I see the annual Waitangi Day angst is starting early this year.

Every year we hear the same chorus: "Waitangi Day is about guilt. We should replace it with a day that we can stand up and be proud of". The problem is of course that national pride of the sort being called for is a deeply un-Kiwi thing. To generalise, the average kiwi does not orgasm at the sight of the flag, has no particular desire to hang it in their front yard or salute it, and can barely remember the words to the national anthem. And IMHO that is a good thing. The last thing we want is a pathalogical flag-cult of the sort they have in the US.

Given who we are, our national day should be laid-back, low-key, and - yes - ambivalent about our progress. A day for relaxing, going to the beach, having a BBQ and enjoying the sun - not for whipping yourself into a patriotic fervor. And if we reflect on the state of our nation, we should remember the bad as well as the good. While we have things to be proud of (women's suffrage; the welfare state; our commitment to human rights; the fact that we didn't commit genocide on our indigenous people) we also have things to be ashamed of (our failure to live up to those ideals; the fact that while we didn't commit genocide, we dispossessed and subjugated and commited grave injustices). And that is as it should be. Nations are not gods - they are not infalliable. They have flaws, and make mistakes. Only by acknowledging this can we hope to do better. And unlike Don Brash and all his self-satisfied pakeha friends who have theirs and don't care too much about how they ultimately got it, I want to do better.

The chilling effect of Hutton

The BBC tried to pull the first episode of Stephen Fry's radio satire "Absolute Power" for fear that it "would upset No 10".

If this is how far they'll now bend over for a comedy, you really have to wonder what effect Hutton is having on the news...

Update 04/02/04: They didn't can it, but they did sanitise it. We can't have radio comedies being disrespectful of the PM, can we?

Our own governments are doing Al-Qaeda's dirty work

Secret trials. Judges and lawyers vetted by the intelligence services to ensure they reach the right conclusions. No juries. Lower standards of proof required for a conviction. A description of the Military Tribunals planned for the Guantanamo detainees and condemned by the British government? No - that same British government's own plans for terrorism trials, which it hopes to enact before the next election.

Al-Qaeda is winning. They haven't mounted a major attack in months, but they're still winning. They don't need to lift a finger to destroy western democracy - because our own governments are doing it for them.

The poor don't need lawyers anyway...

The British government is planning to end legal aid for first-offenders and petty-criminals. First time burglars, petty thieves and drink-drivers will no longer have lawyers provided for them, unless they are facing prison. Instead, they will be advised how to plead by the Magistrate or Clerk of the Court (!) So much for impartiality...

It's all about saving money, of course - but at the cost of justice and social equality. In particular, it raises the spectre of a return to a class-based justice system. Adequete representation is a significant factor in convictions; people with lawyers are far less likely to be found guilty than those without. British conservatives will no doubt claim that the wealthy simply don't commit petty crimes (of course not - they never drive drunk, their kids are never stupid teenagers, and they never stole a policeman's helmet in the wild days of their youth); and besides, they're not facing prison, only a fine, so it's not like it really does any harm, does it?

Obviously they've never been accused of something they didn't do. Neither have I, but unlike conservatives, I don't assume that everyone accused of a crime is automaticly guilty.

This is a significant erosion of the rights of the accused, and likely to lead to more miscarriages of justice, but it gets worse. The British government doesn't only want to stop the poor and vulnerable from consulting lawyers - they want to stop everyone:

Ministers also want to end the automatic right to legal advice after a defendant has been charged and before his or her appearance in court. Another proposal will limit the provision of legal advice in the police station to telephone advice in certain cases where a solicitor cannot "advance" the client's case by attending the police station.

In other words, it's all about upping the conviction rate by exploiting people's ignorance of the law to get them to confess or plead guilty. And this from a supposedly Labour government.

Once more, I'm glad to live in a sane country, where we understand that justice costs money, and that the poor as well as the rich need lawyers...

New Fisk

Why Israel will do business in the hostage bazaar

Inquiries

The Bush administration is to announce an independent inquiry into the intelligence used to justify the war in Iraq. The purpose of course is to pin the blame squarely on the CIA rather than the President and his cabal of NeoCon advisors. "War? We didn't want to go to war, but the CIA presented such damning evidence that we felt that we had to. But remember, the threat was not 'imminent', nosiree".

This flies in the face of the facts. The NeoCons spent the last two years slagging off the CIA for being too cautious in their assessments of Saddam's WMD capability and his links to al-Qaeda. They created a parallel intelligence apparatus dedicated exclusively to telling them what they wanted to hear. And now that things have gone sour, they expect the CIA to carry the can?

It will be interesting to see whether Bush's "independent" inquiry will investigate these matters, or whether it will be another Hutton-style whitewash. My money is on the latter.

(And in other news, the White House is continuing to stonewall an independent inquiry into the September 11th attacks...)

And you thought he was just a singer

Thom Yorke: This theatre of the absurd

Moral Obligations

Sock Thief says:

it is hard not to accept that the international community has a moral obligation to intervene in circumstances of oppression

Sure. But such interventions should be embarked on cautiously, in full awareness of the mess it will involve and the fact that doing it wrong can make things much, much worse. I think the word I'm really looking for here is "humility"... we will fuck up, so we have to be damn sure its worth it. And we have to be damn sure that we're not being taken for a ride by someone using humanitarianism as cover for aggression... otherwise, we end up giving "humanitarian intervention" such a bad reputation that we can't do it when its really necessary.

It doesn't have to be perfect, but we can (and should) do a damn sight better than Bush's gung-ho cowboy act.

The vanishing case for Iraq

As the months have gone by and Saddam's WMDs have failed to be uncovered, supporters of the war have increasingly fallen back on humanitarianism as a justification for the Iraq war. "Saddam was a tyrant who oppressed his people", the usual refrain goes, "he had to be overthrown to save Iraqis".

So what do the real humanitarians think of this? Human Rights Watch - an organisation which was chronicling Saddam's crimes when Bush I was ordering his troops to stand by and let the Shi'ites be massacred - doesn't buy it. It's director, Ken Roth, examines the conditions under which humanitarian military interventions are justifiable, and concludes that the war in Iraq was not justifiable on humanitarian grounds.

The analysis parallels traditional analyses of when it is permissible for an individual to use force in defence of themselves or others. However, because war is such a messy and uncertain business, with far greater potential for death, destruction, and disorder, HRW sets the bar far higher. Without the consent of the local government, humanitarian intervention

...can be justified only in the face of ongoing or imminent genocide, or comparable mass slaughter or loss of life

While Saddam had certainly met this threshold in the past (notably during his 1988 campaign against the Kurds, and in suppressing the uprisings against his regime following his defeat in Kuwait in 1991), there was nothing on this scale going on in early 2003, and no obvious preparations for such. HRW concludes that

Brutal as Saddam Hussein’s reign had been, the scope of the Iraqi government’s killing in March 2003 was not of the exceptional and dire magnitude that would justify humanitarian intervention

But what if it had been? HRW lays out five subsidiary conditions which must also be met. Military action for humanitarian motives must:

• be a last resort;
• be "guided primarily by a humanitarian purpose" (this does not preclude other motives, but they must be subsidiary);
• comply with international human rights standards (the means must be concordant with the ends);
• be reasonably likely to actually make things better; and
• ideally should be endorsed by the UN or other appropriate multilateral institutions, except in extremis.

HRW concludes that even if the brutality of Saddam's regime had justified intervention, it did not meet these conditions. The war was not a last resort (quite the contrary - Bush has been looking for an excuse to attack Saddam since taking office); at the time it was sold as being all about WMDs, terrorism and preventing an "imminent threat" to the United States; it was conducted with significant disregard for civilian lives; post-war planning was inadequate to non-existent, virtually guaranteeing the total collapse of security and living standards we have seen, and inviting a civil war when the US departs; and there was no UN or multilateral support - the international consensus was firmly against the war.

That's a fairly thorough trashing of the "humanitarian justification". I wonder what ad-hoc excuse Bush's supporters will trot out next?

(As for Juan Cole's disagreement, the case of the Marsh Arabs is fairly well covered by those five criteria; the war that was planned and the war we got simply did not meet those conditions. Justifying the war as punishment for Saddam's past crimes is more interesting... self-defence theory rules out using force after the fact if there is no threat; if you see a murderer eating lunch in McDonald's, you can't just shoot him. However, if the US had pursued the course of action suggested - approaching the UN demanding action under the Convention on Genocide, and effectively deposed (in the medieval sense) Saddam for his crimes - then their actions would have been entirely justifiable...)