The coverup continues

So, Bill English has ruled out an inquiry into SAS war crimes. I'm disappointed, but not surprised. At noted in Hit & Run, NZDF is a closed shop, hostile to civilian oversight - and the SAS even more so. They were always going to oppose any investigation into what had really happened.

The question is why the Prime Minister listened solely to them. Shouldn't he also have consulted Crown Law and MFAT, or indeed his own lawyer, before ruling anything out? After all, New Zealand is a party to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, which permits investigation and prosecution of New Zealand troops and officials if our own government fails to do so. And by collaborating in NZDF's coverup, English has effectively just made himself a party to the crime, and opened himself up to prosecution in The Hague...

A conflict of interest

We've known for a while that the Ministry of Primary Industries has been captured by the industries it is supposed to regulate. But how bad is it? They effectively allow the fishing industry to "monitor" itself:

Greenpeace will take a complaint to the Auditor General after discovering the company responsible for monitoring large chunks of the fishing industry is wholly owned by the industry's biggest lobby group.

The company, named FishServe, has been contracted by the Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI) for the past 20 years to monitor overfishing, take catch reports, manage quotas and decide on licences.

A Greenpeace investigation found the company is not only owned by the industry group Seafood New Zealand, but it operates from the same office and shares staff.

[...]

Greenpeace New Zealand executive director Russel Norman said he believed the situation was an example of "regulatory capture", borne from a "web of complex relationships" between MPI and industry.

"What it means in practice is that, in order to prosecute fishing companies for legal breaches, the government regulator, MPI, has to rely on data collected and provided by a company owned by the fishing companies themselves, FishServe," he said.

It gets worse: FishServe also has regulatory powers around licensing and overfishing - which MPI has effectively devolved to the industry's largest lobby group.

This is an obvious conflict-of-interest and it needs to be ended immediately. MPI should do its fucking job of regulating the fishing industry. And if they're unwilling to do that, we should sack them and get people who are.

New Fisk

Revealed: How Isis turns normal towns and villages into theatres and factories of death

A good problem to have

The Green released their preliminary party list over the weekend, pending rearrangement by the members. It looks pretty good, but the commentary around it is whether they've made enough space for new blood in the expected "winnable" spots. They haven't done too badly at that, but they're in a bind because of their underlying problem: as a party they simply have too many talented people.

Seriously. When I look at the Parliamentary caucuses, the Greens have the star lineup. They have active and vocal spokespeople who are able to effectively push their policy arguments and put Labour to shame. There's only one who I think isn't quite up to it, and they're retiring; one more who is merely as hard-working as the average major-party backbencher. The rest are effectively the front-bench of a major party, crammed into one a third the size. Throw in a flood of high-profile, talented candidates wanting to represent the party, and they were always going to have tough decisions. And that's a good problem to have - far better than Labour's one of dealing with back-biting, treacherous, talentless time-servers in safe electorate seats, let alone NZ First's one of pointless non-entities.

(Labour of course has some excellent people. But hell do they have a useless tail dragging on them...)

In the case of the Greens, those hard decisions are ultimately going to be up to the members. It'd be nice if they pushed Chloe Swarbrick or Golriz Ghahraman up a few notches, just to cement that brand as the party of young talent and make sure they get more new blood in if the party polls badly on election day. But that's up to them. And if you really care, I guess you can always just join them and vote...

Good riddance to Serco

Serco has finally been evicted from Mt Eden Prison:

Serco will end its management of Mt Eden Prison today after four years riddled with allegations of fight clubs, poor supervision and understaffing.

The government handed over management of the prison to the UK-based company in 2011 but took it back in 2015 after the allegations were made public.

Since then Serco has only been involved in a labour supply agreement, which finishes today, leaving Corrections back in control.

Good. Our prisons should never have been privatised, and what happened to Mt Eden prisoners under Serco's management proves that conclusively. But while they're no longer sucking money from us for mismanaging mt Eden, they're still mismanaging Wiri. The quicker we can kick them out of there, the better.

New Fisk

Can reconciliation ever heal a country with conflict wounds as deep as Syria?

The obvious question

The US has designated a kiwi as a "global terrorist":

An expat New Zealander who has spent years fighting for Islamic State (Isis) has been declared a "global terrorist" by the US government.

Mark John Taylor, 42, is known as the "bumbling jihadi" after accidentally revealing his locations in the Middle East on social media during at least three years involved with Isis.

Taylor, originally from Hamilton, is believed to now be in Raqqa, Syria. He has previously urged Kiwis to carry out terrorist attacks.

On Friday morning (NZ time), the US State Department declared him a "Specially Designated Global Terrorist" alongside four other men.

Which raise the obvious question: is he on a US kill-list? And if so, is the New Zealand government going to stand by and let one of our "allies" extrajudicially murder a New Zealand citizen?

It also raises questions about what information the New Zealand government has provided to the US about him, and whether by doing so they have violated Taylor's right not to be deprived of life. If he is murdered by a US drone strike, the question of their collusion is going to become a serious issue.

When it comes to spies, refusal to deny is an admission of guilt

According the Newstalk ZB, the SIS is refusing to confirm or deny whether it has spied on journalists:

The Security Intelligence Service can neither confirm nor deny whether it's sought domestic intelligence warrants for the surveillance of New Zealand journalists and authors.

Newstalk ZB sought clarification from the spy agency after its Australian counterpart, ASIO, confirmed in Parliamentary hearings earlier this year that it had sought, and been granted journalist information warrants to access reporters' metadata.

However the SIS won't give any details beyond the basic information disclosed in its annual reports.

Director Rebecca Kitteridge said the agency doesn't release other information about intelligence warrants, as it could potentially jeopardise investigations.

How could it "jeopardise investigations"? Spies like to play up the need for secrecy and the idea that giving any idea of what they do or don't do gives information to their imaginary "enemies". But the real reason is more obvious than that: if they told us they had been spying on journalists, there would be public outrage at their anti-democratic actions and an immediate push to limit their powers and functions to prevent them from ever doing it again. Excessive secrecy is thus a defence against proper democratic oversight.

Yes, this assumes they have been spying on journalists. This is an allegation so damaging to their social licence to operate that the SIS would deny it publicly if they possibly could. Their refusal to do so effectively tells us that they have been - and we can all think of two obvious targets who are in the news right now.

Even Wayne Mapp thinks we need an inquiry

Wayne Mapp, who was Defence Minister at the time, thinks we need an inquiry into their actions:

The man who as Defence Minister approved SAS raids in Afghanistan says further investigation is needed to find out if civilians died and to acknowledge those deaths properly if they are confirmed.

[...]

In a lengthy post on the Pundit website today, Mapp said he had no doubt New Zealand soldiers acted to the highest ethical standards.

However, from briefings provided to him after the 2010 raids he knew the operation, called Operation Burnham, had not achieved its stated aims of arresting or "otherwise dealing with" the insurgents leading Taliban operations against the provincial reconstruction team.

He also claims that he "also knew that other people had been killed", but that he had been told by NZDF that they had been "acting as insurgents" (which is American for "being a civilian in a country the US invades"). But even if you take that at face value, its hard to reconcile with reports that a 3 year old girl was killed, and Mapp is rightly upset about that - hence the call for an inquiry.

When the Minister at the time calls for an inquiry into what went on, that seems like a good reason to hold one. And it makes NZDF's refusal even more untenable. The natural conclusion is that they - or rather, the mafia of ex-SAS officers who currently run it - have something to hide.

New Fisk

In northern Syria, defeated Isis fighters leave behind only scorched earth, trenches – and a crucifixion stand

Climate change: America's climate censorship

How bad is the Trump regime's climate denialism? They've just banned the Energy Department's climate office from even talking about it:

A supervisor at the Energy Department's international climate office told staff this week not to use the phrases "climate change," "emissions reduction" or "Paris Agreement" in written memos, briefings or other written communication, sources have told POLITICO.

Employees of DOE’s Office of International Climate and Clean Energy learned of the ban at a meeting Tuesday, the same day President Donald Trump signed an executive order at EPA headquarters to reverse most of former President Barack Obama's climate regulatory initiatives. Officials at the State Department and in other DOE offices said they had not been given a banned words list, but they had started avoiding climate-related terms in their memos and briefings given the new administration's direction on climate change.

But while censorship may bring peace of mind to Donald Trump and his fellow deniers, who will no longer have to hear about climate change, it won't actually solve the problem. The climate will still change, even if rich Americans refuse to talk about it. But what they are making clear is that they are now effectively waging war on the rest of the world, with a conscious policy of destroying the global climate - and everyone's food supply - for the profit of a tiny American elite. I'm wondering how long the rest of the world will put up with that.

Climate change: The US walks away

The Trump regime has effectively walked away from the Paris Agreement by repealing Obama's emissions reduction policies:

Donald Trump launched an all-out assault on Barack Obama’s climate change legacy on Tuesday with a sweeping executive order that undermines America’s commitment to the Paris agreement.

Watched by coalminers at a ceremony at the Environmental Protection Agency in Washington, the president signed an order to trigger a review of the clean power plan, Obama’s flagship policy to curb carbon emissions, and rescind a moratorium on the sale of coalmining leases on federal lands.

But the move was swiftly condemned by environmentalists as a “dangerous” and “embarrassing” attempt to turn back the clock that would do little to revive the US coal industry while threatening cooperation with major polluters such as China and India.

The latter is important: China and India agreed to cut emissions because the US acted. Now the US has welched and the agreement has been broken. And while China has strong domestic reasons to reduce coal use (its people don't like air pollution - something US politicians may soon have to re-learn), politically its going to have consequences far beyond climate change policy. After all, if the US can't be trusted to keep its word on emissions reduction, it can't be trusted to keep it on trade, disarmament, or anything else.

New Fisk

Syria: Final evacuation of Homs begins under close Russian supervision

The first step on the road to Scoxit

The Scottish Parliament has formally voted to request powers to hold a second independence referendum:

Nicola Sturgeon has won a key Holyrood vote on her plans for a second independence referendum, triggering accusations from UK ministers that her demands are premature.

Sturgeon won by a 10-vote majority after the Scottish Greens backed her proposals to formally request from the UK government the powers to stage a fresh independence vote at around the time Britain leaves the EU, in spring 2019.

She is due to write to Theresa May later this week, asking for Westminster to hand Holyrood the temporary powers to stage the referendum under a section 30 order. She said she would avoid writing until the prime minister had invoked article 50 to trigger the Brexit process, which she is expected to do on Wednesday.

Its basicly unconstitutional for Westminster to refuse such a request, but the Tories will try. But by doing so, they'll make it crystal clear that they think England should be in charge of Scotland, strengthening the case for independence even further.

New Fisk

Tanks, suicide bombs and bayonets: On the front line in the battles around Damascus
'We see them as monsters. At least Israel makes normal, typical war': As Isis caliphate shrinks, Syrian anger grows

Tripling down on war crimes

So, NZDF's response to the allegations in Hit and Run that SAS soldiers committed war crimes in Afghanistan is that none of it happened and that they were blowing up a completely different (but nearby) village at the time, guv. And based on this, Bill English has decided that there will be no inquiry. And if you believe either, then I have a round building in Wellington to sell you. Instead, it seems like NZDF is producing yet more self-serving lies to continue its coverup - and compounding its crimes by lying to its political masters. When that's exposed, there'll be a bureaucratic bloodbath at Defence Force HQ, because it is simply not acceptable for soldiers to lie to Ministers.

Meanwhile, the Herald this morning has a piece about NZDF's suppression of an internal report into their failures in Afghanistan, which shows how such coverups happen:

Inquiries by the Herald have found the commander who shelved the report was in part criticised in its findings.

[...]

The Commander Joint Forces until March 2014 was Air Vice-Marshal Kevin Short, currently Vice Chief of Defence Force, commander of Crib 9 of the PRT in Bamiyan from July 2006 for six months.

His experience there would have given him a keen understanding of the issues raised in the report but also placed him directly in the command structure criticised by it.

He was succeeded by the current Commander Joint Forces, Major-General Tim Gall, who was the Land Component Commander at the time the review was "drafted" and directly responsible for our deployment to Bamiyan.

Yes, its all about personal arse-covering from the people who failed. In the case of the report, it led them to bury a report, then ignore a recommendation from the Ombudsman to release it - something which should result in instant dismissal. In the case of the SAS, it has led to a systematic coverup of war crimes and repeated lies to Ministers. That too should result in instant dismissal.

Finally, Graeme Edgeler points out that its not an inquory we need, but a criminal investigation, potentially leading to prosecutions. The core problem here is that the police are no more capable of conducting such an investigation properly than they are of investigating electoral offences by political parties - they know who they work for and will produce the result which pleases their masters. But on the gripping hand, when the police inevitably fail, the International Criminal Court can step in and maybe then get some real justice - from The Hague, not Wellington.

Places to go, people to be

Nothing from me today - I'm off to Hydra, Wellington's annual larp convention.

Normal bloggage should resume on Monday, unless I am eaten by Shoggoths.

Drawn

A ballot for three member's bills was held today, and the following bills were drawn:

• Ombudsmen (Cost Recovery) Amendment Bill (David Parker)
  
• Equal Pay Amendment Bill (Jan Logie)
  
• Crown Minerals (Protecting World Heritage Sites) Amendment Bill (Ruth Dyson)
  

That's a pretty good lineup, and all three of them deserve to pass. And hopefully we'll see National forced to support at least two of them by public opinion. A full list of the bills is here.

New Fisk

It is President Erdogan's Turkey, not humane Germany, that is guilty of 'Nazi practices'

We need an inquiry

I read Hit & Run last night. And having read it, I'm deeply disturbed. Several of Hager and Stephenson's SAS sources openly admit perpetrating war crimes - specifically, the destruction of civilian property for no military purpose. No-one admits to being responsible for the murder of civilians, but there's serious questions about who ordered the US helicopters to fire on the village and villagers, who fired the shots that killed Islamuddin and Abdul Qayoom, and why the SAS troops refused to provided medical care to obviously injured civilians. And while people can claim that all that happened "in the heat of battle" (as if that justifies anything), there's no such excuse for the subsequent raid ten days later which seemed to have the sole purpose of demolishing the houses of those the SAS believed to be insurgents. This was planned, pre-meditated, and had no military purpose. Again, Hager and Stephenson's SAS sources admit it was done purely for revenge.

And then there's the torture. Not just turning over a man to the Afghan NDS, but beating him first. The SAS need to answer questions about that too.

And the coverup. The SAS and NZDF appear to have lied systematicly about the raids, both to the New Zealand public and seemingly their Minister. They knew within 48 hours that civilians, including a child, had been killed. But Wayne Mapp, who was Defence Minister at the time, is saying that he only found out about it when he saw Stephenson's Collateral Damage documentary in 2014. There are real questions about who bullshat who here - did NZDF bullshit the Minister, or did SAS bullshit their superiors? - which only an inquiry can get to the bottom of.

Finally, there's the matter of the SAS itself. A secret military organisation which effectively runs its own foreign policy, lobbying foreign governments to get involved in other people's wars so they can prove how important and vital they are, is not acceptable in a democracy. Neither, obviously, is one that systematically lies to the public and to its superiors. The SAS needs to be inquired into and tamed, and its disproportionate influence on the wider NZDF tamed.

We can not trust NZDF to do any of this. They've proven repeatedly that they're a closed shop, hostile to civilian oversight. We need a truly independent inquiry to get to the bottom of things. And if the government refuses to provide such an inquiry, we should elect one that will.