Wis[s]e Words – Page 528 – Ceci N'est pas Un Blog

Legal advice on Iraq War flawed: No shit Sherlock

Published on November 22, 2008

For some reason –probably all the hoohah over John Sargent– I missed the news last Monday that Lord Bingham, onetime senior law lord of the UK, criticised the War on Iraq as “a serious violation of international law and of the rule of law”:

Summarising Lord Goldsmith’s reasoning, Lord Bingham said: “A reasonable case could be made that resolution 1441 was capable in principle of reviving the authorisation in resolution 678, but the argument could only be sustainable if there were ‘strong factual grounds’ for concluding that Iraq had failed to take the final opportunity. There would need to be ‘hard evidence’.”

Ten days later, in a Parliamentary written answer issued on March 17, 2003, Lord Goldsmith said it was “plain” that Iraq had failed to comply with its disarmament obligations and was therefore in material breach of resolution 687. Accordingly, the authority to use force under resolution 678 had revived.

The former judge then quoted the conclusion to Lord Goldsmith’s Parliamentary statement: “Resolution 1441 would, in terms, have provided that a further decision of the Security Council to sanction force was required if that had been intended. Thus, all that resolution 1441 requires is reporting to and discussion by the Security Council of Iraq’s failures, but not an express further decision to authorise force.”

Lord Bingham was not impressed. “This statement was, I think flawed in two fundamental respects,” he said.

“First, it was not plain that Iraq had failed to comply in a manner justifying resort to force and there were no strong factual grounds or hard evidence to show that it had: Hans Blix and his team of weapons inspectors had found no weapons of mass destruction, were making progress and expected to complete their task in a matter of months.

“Secondly, it passes belief that a determination whether Iraq had failed to avail itself of its final opportunity was intended to be taken otherwise than collectively by the Security Council.”

Which is more or less what every anti-war activist already knew anyway. Like the dirty dossiers and the claims about Iraq being thirty minutes away from attacking Britain, Goldsmith’s legal advice was always meant as a figleaf for a decision already taken. There was never the intent on the part of Blair to really test the legality of an invasion; his former roomie knew what he wanted and so he delivered it. Had Goldsmith’s argument been made in a court of law it wouldn’t have passed the laugh test. As long as it was good enough to convince the doubters in parliament and the press it was good enough.

The runup to the War on Iraq made hollow phrases of democracy and rule of law, as the first was ignored while the second was perverted to make possible this war. It made clear what the population’s role was: to shut up, vote every few years without expecting anything important to change and to let the important decisions be made by our betters. And then Hazel “bloody” Blears has the gall to lecture us about about political disengagment and the negativity of bloggers?

That BNP membership list

Published on November 20, 2008

Via Lancaster Unity: entire membership of the BNP online:

Not only does the data, now available online, include the entire membership list with full names (and former names where there have been changes for any reason), addresses, contact numbers, email addresses and in many cases the member’s age, particularly where those members are under eighteen. Yes, that’s right. This list includes members as young as fourteen, male and female. Where a family membership is bought and paid for, the whole family is listed.

As if this isn’t bad enough, the notes that are attached to many of the entries leave a lot of the members open to difficulties in their jobs, some of them being in the armed forces or the police and the BNP too – an illegal combination, and where not illegal, frequently frowned upon. Other members are noted as construction managers, receptionists, district nurses, lay preachers, police officers, company directors and teachers among many others.

Like this wasn’t enough, the BNP has also listed hobbies or interests where for some reason they are deemed relevant. Thus we have short-wave radio hams, amateur historians, pagans, line-dancers and even a witch (male).

The BNP and/or allied organisations have for years been spying on and outing British leftists on their R*dw*tch site, which in the past has led people to be beaten up because they were featured on it. It must be karma that this is now happening to themselves. Of course, despite the BNP always wanting to play the persecuted victims, the likelyhood of BNP members being beaten up because they appeared on this list is small. A lot of people in sensitive positions will have some explaining to about their membership.

So we shouldn’t shed too many crocodile tears about this leakage by the way. These are people who have not just decided to vote for a racist party, which can –barely– be excused as protest voting, but are so hardened in their racism as to join the BNP. These people are not just a theoretical danger: they act on their odious policies and the BNP has always had ties to fascist terrorist groups like Combat 18. If you’re Black or Asian or gay or in some other way a target of the BNP, this list is a godsend, as it can help you avoid these people. Thanks to whoever leaked this lists these fascists can no longer hide themselves. And they’re very upset about it, as this comment thread on Northwest Nationalists shows.

Can’t get the list yourself (it’s on bittorrent via Mininova and Piratebay)? Then use the very web 2.0 BNP proximity search. Enter your postcode and see if there’s a BNP member living near you…

Night and fog

Published on November 18, 2008

Israel is disappearing Palestinian minors:

On 2 November, a military court of appeals judge in Ofer Military Base denied the appeal of Salwa Salah and Sareh a-Siuri, both seventeen years old, to overturn renewal of the administrative detention orders issued against them.

The two were arrested in the middle of the night in June and have been held in administrative detention in Israel since then. In October, the army renewed the detention order until 3 January 2009. B’Tselem calls on the army to release the two girls immediately or, if it has evidence against them, to prosecute them as provided by law.

Yes, it’s all done nice and legal, but it shows how any justice system is perverted when it has to operate in service of an Apartheid
state.

The H-Bomb Girl — Stephen Baxter

Published on November 17, 2008

Cover of The H-Bomb Girl

The H-Bomb Girl
Stephen Baxter
265 pages
published in 2007

This is a book that’s going to give me nightmares, I can tell. Because I grew up as a kid in the Second Cold War, the last kids to grow up in the shadow of Nuclear Holocaust, when one side was ruled by a succesion of doddering paranoid old men who had gotten their job training under Uncle Stalin and the other was governed by a cowboy actor who half the time seem to believed he had been the war hero his b-movie career had portrayed him, I’ve always been fascinated and horrified by nuclear war. I remember having h-bomb nightmares almost every night when I was eight or ten. Even now, just reading the Wikipedia description of Threads is enough to give me bad dreams, let alone reading a novel the centrepiece of which is an all too realistic description of what could’ve happened to Britain if the Cuban Missile Crisis had not been defused in time. I can only imagine what the intended young adult audience for The H-Bomb Girl will think of it, having grown up with very different nightmares.

So far Stephen Baxter had never impressed me with his writing. I’ve read and enjoyed several of his short stories scattered through various anthologies, but bounced hard of his awful Mammoth novels while the other work of his I’ve come across never appealed to me. The only reason I picked up The H-Bomb Girl in the library was because it got talked about over at Torque Control during the runup to the Clarke Awards. Reading the first few pages intrigued me enough to take it home. Once I started reading it in earnest today I got sucked in and didn’t stop until it was finished. There’s not many books that I do that with these days. Score one for Baxter.

Schadenfreude, or how quickly free marketeers lose their faith

Published on November 17, 2008

The Moustache of Understanding is frantically calling on Obama to save the economy. As is expected of Friedman what he urges Obama to do is inane –apparantely Obama needs to be a true leader and urge the American public to “go shopping” to save the economy, the idea that people without a house, car or job not quite being in a position to restart the global economy by buying more Christmas presents not yet having penetrated his thick skull — but there is an extra franctic tone to his appeal. I wonder why:

That’s because the author’s wife, Ann (née Bucksbaum), is an heir to the General Growth fortune. In the past year, the couple–who live in an 11,400-square-foot mansion in Bethesda, Maryland–have watched helplessly as General Growth stock has fallen 99 percent, from a high of $51 to a recent 35 cents a share. The assorted Bucksbaum family trusts, once worth a combined $3.6 billion, are now worth less than $25 million.

Ah.

No wonder the guru of neo-liberal globalisme, the arselicker of the new world order, is now reduced to stupid pleas for someone, anyone to save him. Funny how soon even the most rabid free marketeer loses their religion when it’s their money on the line.