Anyone who’s studied any law knows that a functioning legal system is not just about the laws themselves – they’re just words on paper – but also about the people who make and administer them, and their motives for doing so.
If you want to know just how badly political self-interest has perverted Brirish law and just how deep the depths that New Labour has dragged our formerly much-admired legal system to are, you’ve only read this morning’s Independent and its revelations that Attorney General Lord Goldsmith did an Alberto Gonzalez and enabled the torture and murder of detainees by British personnel, ignoring his own army’s senior legal advice in the process, caring little whether British troops committed or would be prosecuted for war crimes.
Lying us into a war with his flip-flopping legal opinions – and probably blackmailed into it by a desperately-sucking-up-to-Bush Tony Blair threatening to reveal his adultery – wasn’t enough; he also allowed himself to be bullied by the known drunk and abuser, then Secretary of Defence (and now Home Secretary, at least for a while, heaven help us), that loathsome, meddling Scot John Reid, into setting aside the Human Rights Act when dealing with Iraqi prisoners.
Good enough for us Brits but not for the ragheads, apprently, being as they are by New Labour’s lights lesser humans.
Cue the beatings, hoodings, torture and murders from the licensed pyschopaths we’ve been training in our foot regiments. They should’ve been kept under tight control by their senior officers, that’s what senior officers are for – but the officers were ordered not to by Goldsmith.
From the White House to No. 10 to Goldsmith to Iraq and Afghanistan – nothing negates the indivual responsibilty for those horrendous acts of violence but those who gave the orders, and those who gave the spurious legal figleaf for them to so so, are the truly guilty.
Goldsmith, like so many of the lawyers British and US government is afflicted with is careerist, weak, self-interested scum. He sold his country’s honour, such as it was, for the sake of position; the price was the maimed and the damaged and the tortured and the dead of Iraq and Afghanistan, and the prospect of violence cascading down the generations; but it seemed a price worth paying to him to be Attorney General, and cheap at that.
How big a hypocrirte is he?
Believe it or not, from 1998 until his appointment as Attorney General, Goldsmith was co-Chairman of the International Bar Association’s Human Rights Institute and he was the Prime Minister’s Personal Representative to the Convention for the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union. Alberto Gonzales at least has the excuse of being an unqualified hick real estate lawyer way out of his depth.
Goldsmith has no excuse whatsoever.
Yes, he’s scum, though that really doesn’t do the depth of my contempt justice.
