War on Iraq

Blair’s Alberto Gonzales, But Worse

Bloody Lawyers, Civil liberties, Corruption, New Labour, Torture, UK politics, War on Iraq, War on Terror
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The Rt Hon Attorney General, Lord Scum of Scumshire and !st Baron Scum

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.

Dulce Et Decorum Ain’t

Manufacturing consent, UK politics, War on Iraq
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Seems to me a certain senior RAF officer is a lot more than half in love with easeful death… provided it’s someone else’s.

Meet General Sir Anthony Cecil Hogmanay Melchett VC KCB DSO, Air Vice-Marshal David Allan Walker OBE MVO FRAeS:

RAF pilots asked to consider suicide flight
Lee Glendinning
Tuesday April 3, 2007
The Guardian

A senior RAF officer asked fighter pilots whether they would consider suicide missions as a last resort to stop terrorists if their weapons had failed or they had run out of ammunition.

During a training exercise, Air Vice-Marshal David Walker put it to newly qualified pilots that they should think of flying suicide missions in a “worst case scenario” when a terrorist attack was imminent.

The head of the RAF’s elite One Group who is in operational control of Typhoon, Tornado, Jaguar and Harrier fighters and bombers, is reported to have asked the pilots: “Would you think it unreasonable if I ordered you to fly your aircraft into the ground in order to destroy a vehicle carrying a Taliban or al-Qaida commander?”

According to reports in today’s Sun, he told them they knew when they signed up that they would have to risk their lives.

The Ministry of Defence last night confirmed that the training exercise had taken place but stressed it was a hypothetical question to provoke thoughts as to what pilots would do if they were confronted with a situation in which they might die.

[…]

“The idea of officers ordering personnel to commit suicide is disgusting,” an unnamed officer told the Sun.

Another said: “His idea of leadership is to suggest that it is within his power to authorise the first example of an ordered kamikaze attack in the RAF’s 89-year history. He is subtly suggesting that if he wished he could order anyone in his command to die.”

It’s one thing to put your life at risk but it’s quite another to have a senior officer say he’d kill you on a whim. It’s a situation Walker’ll never face though: he’s too busy yukking it up at guest nights with royalty, celebrity and the Red Arrows. All that ceremonial Master of the Royal Household stuff to see to, doncherknow.

It’s hard work, just like the field of military expertise that led Air Vice Marshal Walker to reach the eminent heights from which he now pontificates to fighting women and men – administration:

Air Vice-Marshal David Allan Walker OBE MVO FRAeS has been Master of the Household of the Royal Household of the Sovereign of the United Kingdom since 2005.

He was born 14 July 1956, and educated at the City of London School, and the University of Birmingham (BSc, 1977). He joined the Royal Air Force in 1974, and served in the Administration Branch. He is a MIPD and staff qualified (qs).

[…]

Walker became an Air Commodore in 1998 and was appointed Director Corporate Communications (RAF), 1998–2001, and later was Director Personnel Policy (RAF) then Personnel Training Policy 2001–2003..

So. He’s a professional suckup to royalty, policy wonk and spin merchant. The most serious danger he’s been in in his life was probably at a No 10 dinner party. If this is the calibre of officer in charge the UK forces truly are fucked.

Are You Tonkin To Me? : Part II, Turn About Is Fair Play

Torture, War on Iran, War on Iraq
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I haven’t written about the British hostages been held in Iran at all as yet: the main reason for that is that while I have enormous sympathy on a personal level for the hostages, some of whom are from my home town, (and especially for the one woman hostage Fay Turney, having been a female member of the UK armed forces myself) nevertheless, on the strategic level I can only agree with Ronan Bennett in this morning’s Guardian:

Turney may have been “forced to wear the hijab”, as the Daily Mail noted with fury, but so far as we know she has not been forced into an orange jumpsuit. Her comrades have not been shackled, blindfolded, forced into excruciating physical contortions for long periods, or denied liquids and food. As far as we know they have not had the Bible spat on, torn up or urinated on in front of their faces. They have not had electrodes attached to their genitals or been set on by attack dogs.

They have not been hung from a forklift truck and photographed for the amusement of their captors. They have not been pictured naked and smeared in their own excrement. They have not been bundled into a CIA-chartered plane and secretly “rendered” to a basement prison in a country where torturers are experienced and free to do their worst.

As far as we know, Turney and her comrades are not being “worked hard”, the euphemism coined by one senior British army officer for the abuse of prisoners at Camp Bread Basket. And as far as we know all 15 are alive and well, which is more than can be said for Baha Mousa, the hotel receptionist who, in 2003, was unfortunate enough to have been taken into custody by British troops in Basra. There has of course been a court martial and it exonerated the soldiers of Mousa’s murder. So we can only assume that his death – by beating – was self-inflicted; yet another instance of “asymmetrical warfare”, the description given by US authorities to the deaths of the Guantánamo detainees who hanged themselves last year.

And while the families of the captured marines and sailors must be in agonies of uncertainty, they have the comfort of knowing that the very highest in the land are doing everything they can to end their “unjustified detention”. They can count themselves especially lucky, for the very same highest of the land have rather different views on what justifies detention where foreign-born Muslims in Britain are concerned.

Quite.

As a nation we can hardly go around the world demanding that other countries observe the ‘rules of war’ when we have not done so ourselves.

Because of our actions, because of Iraq, Guantanamo and our continued support of the murderous regime of George Bush our diplomatic and political capital as a nation is virtually nil. We are hoist by our own petard. Pick a cliche – we are a busted flush, clapped out, disgraced, shamed, having our own faces rubbed in our mess…

It hasn’r helped either that our continuing bosom buddies and allies, the USA, recently kidnapped a number of Iranian public servants:

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“Sovereignty left”

Sensible Liberals, US politics, War on Iraq
Published on 4 Comments on “Sovereignty left”

Michael Bérubé has gone back to blogging at Crooked Timber and as one of his first posts there has written a hit piece on his usual enemies, at the heart of which is his invention of the socalled “Sovereignty left”

In the US, the Z/Counterpunch crew have a symbiotic relation to Berman, Hitchens, et al., just as in the UK the Galloway/Respect crowd have a symbiotic relation to the Eustonites. To this day, each needs the other. And it is in both camps’ interest to pretend that Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq were all part of the same enterprise: all three wars were wars of liberation for the Hawks, and all three were exercises in imperialism for the Sovereignty Left. The Hawks wound up agreeing, in whole or in part, with Bush’s premise that Iraq was the next logical front in the War on Terror. And the Sovereignty Left has never quite explained what American empire was established in the Balkans, and they’ve never quite explained why they opposed the Taliban from 1996 to 2001 but opposed the Taliban’s removal after al-Qaeda’s strikes against the US. But both groups share the common goal of aligning supporters of war in Kosovo and Afghanistan with supporters of war in Iraq.

Now this all came about because Bérubé was a bit miffed that he was lumped in with the cruise missile left and the Decentists, that is the people on the left who think the US should be justified to intervene military in other countries in the name of human rights. After all he opposed the War on Iraq, so he couldn’t be part of this group. Oh but wait, the main reason for opposing the war he gives was because “Iraq was a terrible diversion from Afghanistan”; what’s more, he supported the Kosovo war. In other words, he is somebody who thinks the US is justified in using military force to enforce its idea of human rights, at least under some circumstances, yet he doesn’t
want to be identified with people who are slightly more enthusiastic about which cases qualify.

Which he seems to want to invent an “equally bad” counterpart to the Decentists on the left of the debate, which he has christened the “sovereignty left”: the problem is this group does not exist. According to him, this group is terribly concerned about respecting the sovereignty of the countries the US has attacked. But the examples he gives do not actually bear this out. The people he talks about are much more concerned with the effects of such attacks, not with an abstract concept like sovereignty.

There is of course a kernel of truth in his idea: there are people on the left who have consistently opposed any US military intervention, just as there are people on the right who never do. But he seems to think that opposing Kosovo or Afghanistan is self evidently wrong, when there were good reasons to oppose both. Even taking both operations at face value, there is the simple question of whether the goals stated at the time could be reached by military action and whether or not these goals were worth the cost in lives lost and countries damaged. It is possible to differ on these points.

But there are also more fundamental reasons to oppose any socalled humanitarian intervention by the US and/or NATO. The question is whether or not you believe that the US and NATO are forces for good in the world. Despite the impression given by Bérubé, this is not self evident. Here you have the main divide between him and Chomsky, Berman, Cockburn et al: on the whole he believes it is, with some exceptions, while they don’t. None of this has to do with sovereignty, so why pretend it has?

Because the latter is easier to ridicule?