Amnesty International Continue To Morph Into Socialist Workers Party

Does anyone still take Amnesty International* seriously?

Amnesty International called on Canadian authorities Wednesday to arrest and prosecute George W. Bush, saying the former U.S. president authorized “torture” when he directed the U.S.-led war on terror.

The former human rights organisation has also described the system by which the USA detains enemy combatants as "the Gulag of our times". There are flaws with Guantanamo Bay- it seems likely that some of the detainees are innocent and they fall into neither the category of prisoner of war or standard criminals. However to compare a  detention camp with a few hundred individuals suspected of terrorism- which two US administrations have found no adequate alternative to- with the Soviet system of  gulags under which millions of people were sent to their deaths is a lie. Not only a lie but a trivialisation of genocide that David Irving would be proud of.

Perhaps if Bush had instituted a system of public executions, stopped the education of women etc, Amnesty would not only not condemn him but invite him to be an official partner of the organisation.

* To my great shame I actually joined the organisation for a year about a decade ago.

Flogging A Dead Horse- Another Nobel Exclusive

Oslo 2010: Members of the Nobel Prize committee denied yesterday that their latest award was politically motivated. Following on from previous awards to Barack Obama, Al Gore and Jimmy Carter many critics are claiming that the 2010 award is designed to publicly snub former president George W. Bush.

However in Oslo yesterday Norwegian parliamentarians angrily denied this interpretation and said that the joint award to "Everyone on the planet except George W Bush" was made purely on its merits. The official citation referred to "not being a chimpy murdering Hitler" as a reason for the award was one of the least surprising prizes given for many years.

Worldwide recipients were mostly proud to have won an award- "This is something I can tell my grand kids about, it is the most amazing thing that has ever happened to me" cried 31 year old Bolivian traffic warden Manuel Ayala, whilst in Stuttgart 45 year old German accountant Karoline Schwarz was equally pleased saying that this was "a dream come true".

Other winners were more circumspect- "I'm proud to have my achievements acknowledged, but if everyone except Bush wins the prize doesn't it become devalued?" asked veteran Uzbek warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum as he supervised the attachment of electrodes to the genitalia of a troublesome dissident.

There were signs yesterday of a growing number of refuseniks who had turned down their award and their share of the 10 million Krona prize, with both Laura Bush and one of the Bush twins expected to decline.

The prize is expected to be presented on November the 18th, a day the Norwegian Parliament has designated "We Hate George Bush" day.

Senseless & Unjustified.

When it comes to coercive interrogation techniques like water boarding, regardless of whether it is torture or not, there is a legitimate discussion to be had about whether it is justified in a ticking bomb scenario. It is unpleasant but not seriously harmful so whether that outweighs the potential mass slaughter that may be prevented* by water boarding someone like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is a dilemma. I am genuinely ambivalent about what has happened to him, I don't like the idea of subjecting prisoners to water boarding but I don't like the idea of letting hundreds of people be killed by the terrorist cells that he gave up.

That said most of the uses of 'enhanced interrogation techniques' were not for the purpose of preventing imminent attacks and saving lives, but instead used to confirm the Bush administration's preconceived notions of Iraqi - Al Qaeda links, which is both a retarded way to interrogate anyone and renders arguments over whether that the ends can justify the means rather moot, as there were no credible ends in the first place.

As I've said before I don't think prosecuting anyone makes much sense from a legal or pragmatic position, but the treatment of those prisoners really was shockingly incompetent and served no discernible purpose and those that thought it was a good idea should have to explain themselves to the public in full.


* I discount the idea that "torture doesn't work", as merely a slogan to avoid having to decide between two hideous alternatives. Torture can work, just today for example is an news story about a criminal torturing a hostage in order to get her bank details and various examples can be found throughout history.

The Prosecution Rests Indefinitely.

President Obama acknowledged yesterday that lawyers from the Bush Administration who drafted memos authorising the use of harsh interrogation methods on terror suspects could potentially face prosecution.

They won't, for three reasons:

• Obama is smart enough to realise that prosecuting people for causing discomfort to terrorists who have murdered thousands of US citizens would not be a popular move outside of his base. This is doubly true if the interrogation methods actually worked.
  
• The whole point about the memos is that they were trying to clarify what was legal and what was not, there is no fixed definition of 'torture' and it is not obvious that the likes of water boarding come into that category*. No court is going to convict someone for making a judgment call on the issue.
• The precedent it would create would be damaging for any US administration, as future White House advisers would be preoccupied with avoiding any possibility to the exclusion of giving the best advice possible.

* I realise that might be controversial, but water boarding causes no serious physical harm and the subject recovers within a few minutes of the process ending, so the argument for it being torture comes down to the fact it induces panic. If that is sufficient to classify something as torture then a lot of other methods of scaring interview subjects would then be classified as torture. It may well be torture and thus illegal but it is not so clear that someone who came to a different conclusion could be prosecuted in any legal system predicated upon the idea of that people can only be punished for breaking rules that are known in advance.

The Surge.

I didn't write about the Petreaus report on the results of the American 'Surge' strategy last week. The results of the strategy have been successful to some degree as I predicted back in January:

if we know that there were too few troops then why has it become the received wisdom that the troop 'surge' that Bush is currently implementing is doomed to failiure and we should be cutting the number of coalition personel? It seems to me that the surge is the correct policy and that only by wresting control of Baghdad from sectarian militias will Iraq be stabilised.

My opinion was vindicated to some degree, as both the Petreaus report and other sources such as the BBC's 'Monitoring the Surge' have demonstrated. Obviously it is not a panacea and some militias will simply have taken a break for the duration, but those insisting on judging it a failure, such as the infamous "General Betray Us" ad by Move On (it's an interesting quirk of American politics that the Democrats constantly whine about having their patriotism questioned, yet actual examples of patriotism questioning are almost exclusively made by them, plus Ann Coulter) are not doing so based on the evidence.

Colossal mistakes were made in the Iraq war, particularly the failure to impose order as soon as Allied troops took control and the dissolution of the Iraqi army, both of which appear to have been based on a horribly naive misreading of human nature, although Petraeus was cannier than most British and American Generals back in 2003/2004. Yet that does not justify the idea that everything that the US government does from here on is automatically mistaken, in fact since Robert Gates became defense secretary their policies have become far more rational in terms of identifying the problems of Iraq and attempting to deal with them systematically.

Terrorists Might Be Timelords.

Dumbjon marvels at the ability of liberals to blame the Iraq war for a terrorism plot that was hatched at least two years before the invasion began. Maybe it's the revival of Dr Who which has caused this belief because the phenomenon of muslims being influenced by future actions occurs so frequently that it would be hasty to rule it out. For example the favourite Middle East expert amoung the blogosphere's left is the academic Juan Cole, who I might add is no more anti semitic that Alan Hart. In 2005 he revealed:

According to the September 11 Commission report, al-Qaeda conceived 9/11 in some large part as a punishment on the US for supporting Ariel Sharon's iron fist policies toward the Palestinians. Bin Laden had wanted to move the operation up in response to Sharon's threatening visit to the Temple Mount, and again in response to the Israeli attack on the Jenin refugee camp, which left 4,000 persons homeless. Khalid Shaikh Muhammad argued in each case that the operation just was not ready.

The Jenin operation occurred in May 2002. In fact the 9/11 commission was quite clear that the plotting for he 9/11 attacks began in 1999, although it is possible that Cole had a copy of the report which was written at some point in the future.

Similarly when outgoing Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamed made some anti semitic remarks in 2003 Paul 'Enron' Krugman was quick to deduce that it was Bush's foreign policy that had caused Mahathir to attack jews. Mahathirs record of anti-semitism went back at least as far as 1997 as Krugman must have known since he advised the Malaysian government back in 1998 when the currency crisis was blamed on.... well you can guess.

Any more examples?

Iraq Troop Levels.

Almost everyone agrees that one of the biggest failiures of the Iraq war was going in with insufficient troops numbers to maintain a reasonable level of security. In large part this was due to the focus on defeating the Iraqi military rather than terrorists. So if we know that there were too few troops then why has it become the received wisdom that the troop 'surge' that Bush is currently implementing is doomed to failiure and we should be cutting the number of coalition personel? It seems to me that the surge is the correct policy and that only by wresting control of Baghdad from sectarian militias will Iraq be stabilised.