Comment of The Day

I see that anarchist rag The Sunday Times (prop. R. Murdoch) is featuring more video of police brutality at the G20.

Rupert Murdoch’s the champion of the oppressed masses now? Who knew? Fight the power, Rupe!

As if.

Commenter GnosticMind responded to Henry Porters’ column on public order policing in today’s Observer and he hits the bullseye when he says:

19 Apr 09, 5:36am (about 2 hours ago)

What is also interesting here is the media treatment of those attacked by the police : The second victim to come forward, the woman from Brighton, has now hired Max bloody Clifford of all people, to represent her : Anyone well versed in Situationist dialectic and critique will see exactly what is happening here — the state media machinery absorbs the threat to the status quo, by repackaging the threat — and selling it back to its own people — as spectacle and entertainment.

The society as spectacle wins yet again — if , that is, most people are fooled and pacified by it yet again.

All that Situationist theory is old hat by now, and very overdone, years ago — but by God they got it right.

They certainly did.

I bet TimesOnline’s hitcount is well up. The management (R. Murdoch) and the advertisers must be loving it. Do I smell an advertising revenue spike?

Dissent and violent repression;not only poliitical theatre but the saviour of the economy.
.

Hindsight Is Overrated

pixies

Belatedly, a former UK Director of Public Prosecutions asks the essential questions about the police’s behaviour at the G20 protests:

…here are some questions for the IPCC to consider as it investigates the events leading to Ian Tomlinson’s death: why were British police officers attending a demonstration in the heart of London with their identifying numbers hidden? In the absence of a fire risk, who authorised them to pull balaclavas up over their heads? And why didn’t they want anyone to see their faces?

Yes why? Were they “Only following orders….”? Presumably the police at Mark Saunders shooting were following orders to cover their faces; otherwise that’s a lot of bad apples in the police.

The DPP is responsible for determining any charges and prosecuting criminal cases investigated by the police in England and Wales; he or she makes decisions about the most complex and sensitive cases and advises the police on criminal matters. He reports to the Attorney General, the Government minister who answers for the Crown Prosecution Service in Parliament.

How come it was that the politically-appointed former DPP from 2003 to 2008, MCDonald, a QC and former (and again post-retirement) member of human rights chambers Matrix (colleague Cherie Blair), couldn’t bring himself to ask those questions when he could have had some effect?

It’s much easier to write a condemnatory Guardian editorial after the fact – and presumably pocket a fee – than to act against the police when you have the power to.

Former Harvard Law Review Editor Forgets Law

same_shit

“Only Following Orders” is not a defence to accusations of war crimes. You’d think Obama, former constitutional scholar and Harvard Law Review editor, would know that, wouldn’t you? It seems not. CBS:

President Obama announced that CIA interrogators who used harsh tactics on terrorism suspects during the Bush administration will not be prosecuted… Even as they exposed new details of the interrogation program, Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder, offered the first definitive assurance that those CIA officials are in the clear, as long as their actions were in line with the legal advice at the time.

Even though it was wrong? Sounds like the Nuremburg defence to me.

The Nuremberg Defence states that the defendant was “only following orders” (“Befehl ist Befehl”, literally “order is order”) and is therefore not responsible for his crimes; it was most famously employed by Nazis during the Nuremberg Trials, for which it is named.

The victorious Allies suspected such a defense might be advanced, and issued the London Charter of the International Military Tribunal (IMT), which specifically stated that ‘only following orders’ was not a valid defense against charges of war crimes.

Let’s just remind ourselves of what exactly it is Obama is condoning, shall we?

With his accession to ultimate power Obama seems to have forgotten all he ever knew about human rights and the US constitution:

….now the world knows that the Obama Administration doesn’t want to fully look back to understand how it could come to pass as a matter of law that our nation would torture. The federal courts cannot initiate there own investigations or cases. So the nation turns its lonely eyes to Congress. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Sen. Patrick J. Leahy, D-Vt., has said for months that he favors a blue-ribbon “torture commission” that would truly (i.e., with subpoena power) investigate this matter. Will he now push forward with such a review? Or will he fold like a cheap umbrella the way Spain did today?

For the pro-prosecution gang, about the only bit of encouraging news came from Sen. Russ Feingold, also a Democratic member of the Judiciary Committee. He issued a release late in the day suggesting that the government’s acknowledgment of immunity and indemnity only extended to the lower-level military officials who engaged in water-boarding and not to the men who drafted those memos, men like Steven Bradbury, the Office of Legal Counsel lawyer who just two months ago so publicly trashed his fellow traveler, John Yoo, over the matter. If Sen. Feingold is correct, if he’s on to something, then this story may yet live another day. But I wouldn’t bet on that.

Those of us still hoping that the EU will uphold international law and prosecute US and other war crimes (a position so easily and quickly vacated by Obama that one might be led to suspect he never intended prosecution to begin with, but just implied he might to get votes. Oh, surely not.) are shit out of luck too, just as much as those who thought that one day they might see justice in the US are:

Spain wants torture charges against Bush Six dropped
…on Thursday, Spanish Attorney General Candido Conde-Pumpido said he would advise Judge Garzon to drop the case.

Ironically, Spain’s Socialist government was highly critical of the Bush administration’s policies in the war on terror. But it enjoys warm relations with the new U.S. administration led by President Barack Obama, and some critics have suggested that Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero does not want to risk embarrassing his friend.

“It’s a shame the prosecutor is taking this position, but not a surprise,” Boye told CNN. “They always obey political orders. They don’t want to be in a bad position in front of the Obama administration.”

The author hopes that prosecutor Garzon, who also arrested Pinochet, has the balls to resist the political pressure coming from DC and Madrid. I hope so too – but I wouldn’t bet on that.

‘A Liberal’s A Wingnut Who…’ *

Wingut

Remember the police violence at the Countryside Alliance demo and all those formerly rabid Tories who said they’d never trust authority again? Glenn Greenwald has a great post up about the US version of the phenomenon, at Salon:

The ultimate reaping of what one sows: right-wing edition

(updated below – Update II)

Right-wing polemicists today are shrieking in self-pitying protest over a new report from the Department of Homeland Security sent to local police forces which warns of growing “right-wing extremist activity.” The report (.pdf) identifies attributes of these right-wing extremists, warning that a growing domestic threat of violence and terrorism “may include groups and individuals that are dedicated to a single-issue, such as opposition to abortion or immigration” and “groups that reject federal authority in favor of state or local authority.”

Conservatives have responded to this disclosure as though they’re on the train to FEMA camps.

The Right’s leading political philosopher and intellectual historian, Jonah Goldberg, invokes fellow right-wing giant Ronald Reagan and says: “Here we go Again,” protesting that “this seems so nakedly ideological.” Michelle Malkin, who spent the last eight years cheering on every domestic surveillance and police state program she could find, announces that it’s “Confirmed: The Obama DHS hit job on conservatives is real!” Lead-War-on-Terror-cheerleader Glenn Reynolds warns that DHS — as a result of this report (but not, apparently, anything that happened over the last eight years) — now considers the Constitution to be a “subversive manifesto.” Super Tough Guy Civilization-Warrior Mark Steyn has already concocted an elaborate, detailed martyr fantasy in which his house is surrounded by Obama-dispatched, bomb-wielding federal agents. Malkin’s Hot Air stomps its feet about all “the smears listed in the new DHS warning about ‘right-wing extremism.'”

[…]

I don’t recall Glenn Reynolds or Mark Steyn complaining that the FBI, for virtually the entire Bush administration, was systematically abusing its new National Security Letters authorities under the Patriot Act to collect extremely invasive information, in secret, about Americans who had done nothing wrong.

Read the whole thing

I see the whiny ass titty baby contingent of the flying buttmonkey brigade are still around, and still whining.

[* “…been arrested“]

Comment Of The Day

Didn’t I say a couple of years back that a depression’s only official when the middle classes start complaining about benefit rates? Job Seekers Allowance is currently just over a measly sixty quid a week and even Guardian journos are struggling.

A commenter wryly commiserated:

dementedlands

23 Mar 09, 11:45am (about 19 hours ago)

I am unemployed. It is impossible to live on £60 a week. Luckily I discovered that I was able to claim £14,000 a year for the house my parents live in. I use it for job seeking and have made over £60,000 .

Neighbours call me a benefits cheat and point out that a couple were recently given a 6 month jail sentence for a £40,000 fraud. I call them a bunch of jealous peasants.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/mar/23/tony-mcnulty-allowances.

Heh.

The brass-necked, greedy dishonesty and sheer hard-faced gall of Employment Minister Tony McNulty, who’s been highly visible in the Guardian’s pages and elsewhere demonising non-existent cheats and scroungers with his hateful ‘no ifs or buts’ anti benefit fraud campaign, beggars belief. Talk about rubbing the faces of the 2 million unemployed in it.

Understandably it’s been front-page news all over the UK and a hot topic on blogs of all political flavours; corruption’s corruption after all, however inured we’ve become to it since the advent of New Labour.

But not at the Guardian, though being a supposedly leftwing paper you’d think they’d find the irony delicious. But while the tabloids and broadsheets scream condemnation the Guardian’s appeared oddly muted on McNulty and strangely quiet on the corruption and greed of the Labour establishment in general. I’m amazed that comment got through CiF’s notoriously harsh moderation.

Another irony the Guardian seems to have missed in light of the up to 150 journalists and others the Guardian Media Group (Editor Alan Rusbridger, salary £355,000 pa including 17,000 benefits) is itself about to make redundant on sixty pounds a week (£3,120 pa)is that it should then publish a comment decrying the low benefit rates that it is itself condemning its own employees to. Talk about rubbing the faces of the unemployed in it.

Comment is Free‘s a very popular Guardian section that appears to rely mostly on insecure freelancers, cheap recent graduates and user generated comments for content and must already be – compared to a fully staffed print newspaper – cheap to run.

It would be interesting to know, therefore, exactly how many Guardian journalists and CiF columnists already rely on the benefits system to feed their families and underpin their struggling and insecure writing careers – and conversely (how like so many other British companies) how many and which newspapers offering low-paid parttime or freelance employment rely on state benefits to underpin their business models. Without Tax Credit support for freelancers how many newspapers would fail entirely, I wonder?

I see now why the Guardian, wants unemployment benefit rates to rise. It’s potentially vital to it’s new shiny 24/7 online business model.

Tell me again, who’re the welfare scroungers exactly? No wonder the Guardian has such a discreet empathy with McNulty.