Storywatch

Thursday's story about the deaths of Afghan prisoners in custody has been widely reported, even making the New York Times (which has a 3-page article on the subject). As more detail has emerged, it's looking even more likely that at least one of the prisoners died as a result of US interrogation techniques. The Pentagon's response has been to quibble over the meaning of homicide, and stress that it doesn't neccessarily mean an unlawful or criminal killing, though they've been strangely unwilling to present any alternative scenarios as to how the prisoners died (e.g. it was self-defence). Given their "nothing we do is illegal" response to the Washington Post's original allegations of torture last year, it suggests that they're going to rely on the same legal game playing that allows them to keep people in legal limbo in Cuba, rather than engage with the moral issue here.

Why do Americans always conflate legality with morality anyway? Even if it's not technically illegal for the US government to torture and kill noncitizens outside the United States, it's contrary to the universal values which the US is supposed to stand for. If it isn't illegal, it damn well should be.

New Fisk!

Doha summit shows Arab disunity.

"Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.."

Recently Captured al Qaeda Leader Was Killed Last Year. I guess we'd all forgotten that.

More to froth about

More stuff to froth about: the deaths of two Afghan detainees in U.S. custody in Afghanistan have been ruled to be homicides

A criminal investigation into the December deaths of the two men is in its final stages, but a U.S. military source said it is not clear whether anyone will be charged.

One senior military official said, "This investigation may not go well for us."

The men died shortly after arriving at Bagram air base north of the Afghan capital, Kabul. The first man died December 3 of a pulmonary embolism and the second one December 10 of a heart attack.

Autopsies found that "blunt force trauma" was a contributing factor in both cases, military sources said.

It's unclear whether that blunt force trauma was inflicted during interrogation, or by "overenthusiastic" US soldiers inflicting their own "justice" or "having a little fun", but either way it's pretty damning: the US military either tortured two men to death (though that may not have been their intention), or failed to enforce discipline and allowed their soldiers to do the same. And they're supposed to be the good guys.

Torture is a crime, and those responsible should be found, charged and tried. However neither the spokesman's comments above or the US Army's handling of similar cases is exactly encouraging.

According to this article advisors have warned Bush that he faces a humiliating defeat on his proposed UN resolution authorising war on Iraq. They have allegedly advised him to seek a way out of war with Iraq (see story)...then again who the hell are capitolhillblue.com and why should we believe them?

Going more mainstream...I'm not sure if this was picked up by the New Zealand media but It is pleasing to see a Democrat front up to the public and have the balls to criticise George W Bush. Former Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright (the woman who famously said that the deaths of Iraqi civilians caused by UN sanctions was a price worth paying) has urged the President to wait longer before attacking Iraq, saying current pressure was forcing Baghdad to disarm.

She has suggested "more intrusive inspections and even the threat to destroy suspected weapons facilities that the government refuses to open to U.N. personnel, the way U.S. and British pilots attack missile sites in the Iraqi no-fly zones." This sounds very sensible. (story here)

Peace March

There is a peace march in Christchurch on Saturday March 15th at 2pm.It will start at the museum and finish in Cathedral Square...It won't acheve anything but I might try and get out of bed for this one because its always good to be pissed off in the company of other people who are pissed off about the same things that you are. Besides, the war could be in full swing by then.

Actually, having a look at the Peace Action Network's website does highlight one of the problems with being a self respecting leftie...the nutters you have to share the political left with. Some of them take their paranoia and anti Americanism a bit too far.

US may not put UN resolution to a vote

From America's point of view, this makes good sense - why bother to vote if the resolution is going to be rejected? - but it's definately shafting their main ally. Tony Blair has staked his political future on his ability to get a second resolution authorising force through the UN security council; if it doesn't even go to a vote, where does that leave him?

OTOH, Bush has already shown that he'll screw even his friends if he thinks he can get some political mileage out of it.

Those who forget history...

Further to Mike's comments the other day about American and European attitudes to war being attributable to European memory of what war is actually like, I found this comment in an interview on Salon to be interesting:

[America's] forgetfulness makes it possible at any moment in history for us to believe in our essential innocence. We don't remember that we've ever done anything other than what we do now. It's a great triumph to a civilization that it can go from being a white supremacist country in the late '50s, when a substantial portion of the country didn't believe in racial intermarriage, to racial egalitarianism. We can believe that this is just the triumph of what our essential values have always been.

Americans see their lack of memory as a virtue, because it allows them to forget the bad past and focus on the (assumed) better future - and there's some truth in this. However, in forgetting the bad past, they also forget why it was bad, which robs them of the very guidance they need to ensure that the future stays better rather than regressing back to the bad old past again. We can see this in American economic and social policies over the last twenty years, where their rush to deregulate everything seems to give no thought to why such regulations were implemented in the first place. It's just assumed that they're there because regulation is the sort of thing Government just does (because its Evil and Spiteful and wants to Impede Business) - rather than a response to the very real problems of an unregulated market (see the nineteenth century for an example of this). And of course, we see it in the American desire to ignore existing international agreements on warfare, and return to the barbarities of the past.

Straw warns against isolating US

[Straw] argued that America was the only superpower and the world had to decide whether to force it to act unilaterally or through international institutions.

Call me stupid, but I don't see how acting through international institutions only if they agree with you is any different from acting unilaterally.

Storywatch

The Independent's story on American plans to use banned chemical weapons in Iraq is slowly percolating through the media. It's been picked up by the NZ Herald, Common Dreams, and by various newspapers in Pakistan. But thanks to the Associated Press, the American media is putting a decidedly different spin on things.

Unlike the Americans, I'm actually quite keen on "straitjackets" such as the Chemical Weapons Convention. Sure, war is an inherantly messy business, but mutual restraint from the worst barbarities can save us from horrors such as this or this.

The Green Party is asking the Government to withdraw the invitation for Australian Prime Minister John Howard to visit New Zealand next week. According to their press release, Howard is a warmonger whose actions have stripped him of any right to the courtesy normally owed to a visiting dignitary.

I don't entirely agree with them - given that Australia is our closest ally and number one trading partner we can't afford to have our Government piss them off quite to that extent. That said, I hope that the protest movement gives him a good bollocking when he is here and that it gets across exactly what people think of the toadying little weasel.

My theory is that America has a totally different point of view on war compared to the Europeans. Much of Europe was destroyed in WW2...America suffered only two attacks on its home soil(I'm not counting the bomb laden balloons that the Japanese launched into the jet stream in the forlorn hope of hitting something in America). There was Pearl Harbour of course and also the Japanese occupation of a couple of the Aluetian Islands (I suspect most Americans would struggle to find the Aluetians on a map).

For Europeans war is something that should be avoided at all costs, there are still enough people around who lived through the war and/or the years afterwards for the memories to still be strong. America just doesn't have that experience.

Likewise, while the horrrible effects of poison gas attacks haunted people in Europe for years after the Great War...and the institutional memory has remained, few American soldiers where ever targetted by it and the proportion of the population that was involved in the war was much smaller in the US.

They lack the frame of reference to understand that war and chemical weapons are bad. When you combine this with an elite that is avaricious and drunk on power and a President who makes foreign policy at about the level of an 8 year old its bad news for Iraq...and whichever country or countries they decide to invade next.

New Fisk

American billions keep Arab regimes sweet (02 March 2003)

Still frothing with outrage

Yes, I'm still frothing with outrage over the article below. There are people on nz.politics trying to draw a distinction between "bad" gases that that Evil Monster Saddam uses, and the "nonlethal" ones the US plans to use - you know, the ones that killed 128 people in Moscow last year. The logical conclusion of this is that Saddam is a monster because he killed a higher percentage of his victims than the US Army intends to. Either that, or its American Exceptionalism again.

Issues of morality and hypocrisy aside, this isn't exactly going to encourage Saddam to continue disarming. And I can think of no better way to ensure that he uses any WMDs he may have stashed away than to use them on him first.

America plans to use banned chemical weapons in Iraq

The US is preparing to use the toxic riot-control agents CS gas and pepper spray in Iraq in contravention of the Chemical Weapons Convention, provoking the first split in the Anglo-US alliance. "Calmative" gases, similar to the one that killed 120 hostages in the Moscow theatre siege last year, could also be employed.

The convention bans the use of these toxic agents in battle, not least because they risk causing an escalation to full chemical warfare. [...]

The British aren't keen on this, firstly because they're one of the chief authors of the Chemical Weapons Convention and unlike the Americans still take their international agreements seriously, and secondly because of fears of escalation and retaliation:

Professor Julian Perry Robinson, one of the world's foremost authorities on the convention, said: "Legally speaking, Iraq would be totally justified in releasing chemical weapons over the UK if the alliance uses them in Baghdad."

Meanwhile, I'm just boggled at the sheer blatant hypocrisy involved here. Saddam is (rightly) demonised in the US press because he used chemical weapons against Iran and gassed his own people. There's a strong underlying theme that chemical weapons are a Bad Thing, period. And so the US is going to prove it by using them. Do they expect us not to notice?

Actually, given Fisk's recent article on planned media censorship, and the reports on how the media was controlled last time, they can probably guarantee it.

Plan B - U.S. Looks at Alternative War Plans Without Turkey

I call "Godwin"

Blair calls anti-war protesters "appeasers". Obviously he's never heard of Godwin's Law.

Seriously, if the best argument in favour of the war is that everyone opposed is a commie, peacenik or appeaser who would have supported Hitler, then it doesn't really have much going for it, does it?

[Addendum] BTW, my memory of WWII history may be flawed, but wasn't Hitler the guy who wanted to invade other countries?

That darn democracy thing again...

Turkey's parliament has failed to approve the deployment of US troops in the country. While the vote was 264-250 in favour, it failed to achieve a majority of MPs present in the chamber (19 of whom abstained), and was declared invalid.

The US is apparantly "seeking clarification" on the vote, which was initially reported as having been passed. Really, it sems pretty clear to me - Turkish MPs are still heavily divided on the issue, and US$15 billion isn't enough to persuade them.

There's new Fisk!
How the news will be censored in this war - Robert Fisk: 25th February, 2003
America uses Israel's words to justify occupation - Robert Fisk: 28 February 2003

Fisk is good but this article - Richard Dawkins: Why should we in Britain help Bush to get re-elected?- has my favourite quote for today - "I am vigorously pro-American, which is one reason why I am anti-Bush. They deserve better"

The seemingly unstoppable march towards war continues. In Britan, Tony Blair gained the backing of the house of commans for his position on Iraq. Unfortunately for him he had to rely on the support of the Tory opposition to overcome a major rebellion in his own party . How the lack of trust and the ill-feeling between the various factions within Labour, affects Blairs ability to govern in the future could proove to be very interesting...one to watch I think.

Meanwhile in America it looks like the Whitehouse is trying to scare the people who have choosen to be human shields in Iraq into packing up and going home (story here). No names of course, just an anonymous official saying that they may be considered "combatants" rather than "civilians." I don't know what that means in practice but somehow I don't think it is good news.

It also looks like a deal between Turkey and the US to open up a Northern Front in Iraq and coincidently sell out the Iraqi Kurds is all but done. (see story - U.S. Would Limit Action By Kurds in Postwar Iraq - The article also has a map showing the areas where the Kurds live, which gives a plenty clear indication of what is at stake here). I mentioned in my post a few days ago that America's allies in the region want to keep a lid on the idea of democracy and don't want a change in the status quo. This article gives a reasonable summary of what the status quo actually is in the Arab world.