Christopher Hitchens actually had himself waterboarded by the US Military to see whether it felt like torture to him. It did.
via Pharyngula, who has links to video.
Archive for the 'Terrorism' Category
You might remember that the government recently gave Gareth Evans a new job - to lead a commission on nuclear disarmament. In that context, I happened to pick up (for the trans-Pacific plane ride) little Quarterly Essay-style book on nuclear disarmament by Hans Blix, the man who spent 2002-3 being conspicuously and inconveniently correct on the topic of Iraq’s supposed weapons of mass destruction.
In 2005-06, Blix headed a commission, supported by the Swedish Parliament, whose final report provides the most recent comprehensive summary of the issues surrounding nuclear disarmament. Given one of the commissioners was none other than Gareth himself, it would be reasonable to expect that the content reflects the general tenor of his own thinking on the topic (and, incidentally, raises the question of what else this new commission will add). It’s quite accessible and well-written, so if you’re interested in the question I’d recommend you download the report - or at least the executive summary - and have a look.
Last year I wrote that Dr. Mohamed Haneef was an Australian Dreyfus. This year, Turkish trade unionist Meryem Özsögüt is a Turkish Mohamed Haneef.
Ms. Özsögut, a member of the management board of a Turkish public sector union, has been detained for six months allegedly in connection with “being a member of a terrorist organisation” and “for making propaganda in favour of the terrorist organisation”.
More on Ms. Ozsogut’s detention can be read here. A petition to request her release can be signed here.
P.S. The PSI, to which I’ve linked, is an international federation of public sector unions whose Australian affiliates include the Community & Public Sector Union, the Australian Services Union and the Communication, Electrical & Plumbing Union.
I’ve often said that the best source for public opinion research around is the Australian Election Study. Some preliminary data has been released [link to pdf] by researchers Ian McAllister and Juliet Clark, presented in graphical form. The purpose of the paper is to enable assessments of changes in public opinion over time, with some of the questions forming a time series going back to 1969. I’ve only had a cursory look at the data, but one thing I wanted to focus on was the data from the 2007 election, particularly as it relates to issue importance and party advantage on particular issues. Basically, this is much better quality data than anything you’d get from Newspoll.
A detailed analysis isn’t possible in the absence of the raw data which would enable regressions and cross-tabs, but there are some interesting patterns in the data that are presented. The first point to make, one that’s made in the current political context ably by Possum Comitatus, is that leadership is much less important to voting intention than is usually claimed in the media. Since there have been long term declines in partisanship and therefore more votes up for grabs in any particular electoral cycle, the whole concept of party “ownership” of issues becomes much more important - hence all the attention focused last year on “economic management”. I’ve previously pointed out that the question in Newspoll on that measure was actually the wrong one - at least insofar as 2007 goes - because Labor polling found that “economic management for working families” was much more important, and it’s there that their advantage lay (as the opposition now knows well, because that’s where all their attack is focused). In this context, it’s also very significant to observe the finding that a majority of voters don’t believe anything the government does has much impact on the economy - what we might term the “globalisation effect” - something very poorly understood by political commentators, I’d suggest.
Last year, industrial relations jumped from 2% of respondents nominating it as the most important economic issue in 2004 to 16% and top position. Labor enjoyed a big advantage over the Coalition - 52 to 32, intriguingly reversing a Coalition lead (when the issue was much less important) in 2004 of 37 to 27. Continue reading ‘Issues and the 2007 election’
DOCUMENTS have revealed the department of former prime minister John Howard became involved in the Mohamed Haneef affair less than 48 hours after the Indian doctor was arrested in connection with a British terrorist attack last July.
Lawyers for Dr Haneef said the early involvement of the Prime Minister’s Department raised the possibility that Mr Howard may have colluded with then immigration minister Kevin Andrews to politicise the issue.
“One can have a view whether it was to Howard’s political benefit to whip up a storm like he did with Tampa,” solicitor Rod Hodgson said in Brisbane yesterday.
Mr Howard has denied any involvement in the handling of the Haneef investigation.
This highlights the fact that the Clarke enquiry lacks the power to compel witnesses to appear, and in fact that some are being examined without being on oath, and that witnesses will not be cross-examined. Will John Howard be giving evidence? And if he does, will it turn out to have all been Kevin Andrews’ idea? That was never easy to believe, and it’s getting harder.
There’s an intriguing by-election coming up in Great Britain where former Tory leadership contender and shadow Home Secretary David Davis has resigned his portfolio - and his seat of Haltemprice and Howden - “in order to force a by-election over the 42 day detention issue”. Legislation is currently before the House of Lords enabling terror suspects to be held without charge for that time period. Neither the Labour nor the Liberal Democrat parties are running a candidate, and Davis faces one major opponent - former Sun editor Kelvin MacKenzie, whose candidacy was cooked up at a birthday party for Sun editor Rebekah Wade, though some also see the hand of Downing Street in his crusade. Rupert Murdoch was at the party and MacKenzie has already stated that Murdoch would be personally funding his campaign - which would be illegal because Murdoch is not a UK citizen. British politics has been thrown into turmoil as Davis proclaims that his constituents now have a chance to vote to “save Magna Carta”.
Elsewhere: Analysis from Shiraz Socialist.
[Via Crooks & Liars] The US Supreme Court has ruled in a 5-4 decision that detainees in Guantanamo Bay have the right of habeas corpus and can challenge their detention in civil courts.
The decision is here [pdf].
One of the most striking things about the Rudd era is the virtual disappearance of terrorism as a political issue. Aside from a passing reference in his 2020 Summit introductory speech, I have barely heard the words mentioned. While this can be partly attributed to the passing of time, it’s not the only reason. Look at what’s happening in the UK, where Gordon Brown has just bribed and blackmailed a bill authorizing 42 days of detention without charge for terrorism suspects through the Commons, despite widespread rebellion from Labour backbenchers.
The details of this grubby bill, and the tortuous process of getting it through the Commons, can be read at length at the Guardian, for those interested. In short, even the police and intelligence services (who never see an additional power they don’t like) seem remarkably unenthusiastic about the idea; the head of MI5 has even publicly stated that they haven’t requested it. The odds of it actually becoming law are not particularly high, either; the Lords will likely block it, and a court challenge is highly likely (and stands a good chance of succeeding). Regardless of the idea’s merits, however, Gordon Brown thinks he’s going to get a desperately needed win with the wider British public.. The Guardian quotes a poll with 69% of the British public approving the new measures.
It’s a moderately interesting hypothetical whether similar “tough on terrorism” laws would be a political winner in Australia at the moment. I’m very, very glad that Australian Labor don’t seem interested in finding out.
Our security services - ASIO, ASIS, and the AFP - have expanded a great deal recently, and we essentially have to take it on trust that this is a) a good use of money, b) being used to perform the intended goal - no more and no less, and c) being done in such a way that it doesn’t impede everybody else’s rights to be left alone.
In this context, an insight into how the intelligence agencies functioned over 30 years ago is still worth thinking deeply about, and the insights from the just-released reports of the Hope Royal Commission of the mid-70’s remain disturbing today:
During a three-year inquiry, conducted largely in secret from 1974, Justice Robert Hope identified a litany of problems in the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, leading him to conclude that it “may be, or may have been, penetrated by a hostile intelligence service”.
The fresh volumes of classified material released yesterday paint a damning picture of ASIO, from its formation in 1949 by Labor prime minister Ben Chifley, through to the mid-1970s.
According to Justice Hope, record-keeping at ASIO was shambolic, staff morale was low and agents spent more time digging dirt on left-wing sympathisers than looking into the greater threat posed by Soviet bloc spies operating in Australia.
“ASIO could not be taken seriously as an efficient organisation, still less an effective security organisation,” he wrote.
I had a quick read last night of Susan Faludi’s rather stunning new book The Terror Dream: Fear and fantasy in post-9/11 America. Faludi, perhaps best known as the author of Backlash, has written a cultural history of post s11 America, a diagnosis of the temper of the times as refracted through the myths the attack on America both revived and inspired.
It’s a little odd that one of the writers at Daily Kos took aim at the book because “every trend perceived is filtered through a gender disempowerment lens” - a “criticism” which I think really does an injustice to Faludi’s aims. It’s not that she’s taking some sort of circumscribed look at gender politics post-s11 (which in itself would be a worthy project) but rather that her point is that a myth overdetermined by gendered perceptions was cranked up to explain and narrativise what was (wrongly in her view) seen as being an unprecedented series of events on September 11 2001.
Faludi, in some of the most interesting chapters of the book, traces the origins of national myths of violation and aggressive response to the shifting frontier which characterised not just the “Wild West” but also the nation’s colonial beginnings - where “attacks” by Native Americans were perceived as both unpredictable and inexplicable - and interpreted as an existential threat which could only be met by overpowering force.
The arrest and prosecution of our antagonists seemed to be only part of our concern. We were also enlisted in a symbolic war at home, a war to repair and restore our national myth of invincibility. Our retreat to the fifties reached beyond movie tropes and the era’s odd mix of national insecurity and domestic containment. It reaches back beyond the fifties themselves. For this particular reaction to 9/11—our fixation on saving little girls and restoring an invincible manhood—is not so anomalous. It belongs to a long-standing American pattern of response to threat, a response that we’ve been perfecting since our original wilderness experience.
The unfolding mass human tragedy that is the Burmese cyclone (the specifics of which I don’t have anything except that a) I hope that the junta stops putting up barriers to international assistance, and b) that it’s going to make the global food crunch worse) reminds us of the awesome power of nature to inflict death and destruction. While we have great capacity for inflicting misery on our fellow humans, nature has similar capacities and inflicts them far more randomly and far more often. Particularly when compared small groups of discontents sitting in caves in the tribal areas of Pakistan.
But how is Australia prepared for such disasters? Not very well, according to a just-published report by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. For instance, while everybody expects the ABC to handle emergency services broadcasting, ABC Local Radio doesn’t have redundant communications links to all its stations. We may have invested money in tsunami sensors, but there’s no centralized telephone warning system (something that could be done very cheaply, according to the report). Our hospitals aren’t really set up for a surge capacity in the case of even rather modest incidents.
This kind of stuff is often cheap, mostly relatively easy, and could potentially spare a lot of heartache when the unthinkable happens, be it through accident or malevolence. But why don’t we do it? Because it has the unique combination of being both scary and boring, earns governments no credit until the crap hits the fan, and we don’t have a historical precedent of a mass-casualty incident. And, over the past few years, we’ve had the distraction of the horribly overblown War on Terrah - something, incidentally, the ASPI has helped in its own small way to fan here.
Maybe it’s just me, but it seems that the Rudd government has a bit more of a focus on the boring bits of government than its predecessor. This is one boring bit that I hope gets more attention.
Former Howard Government minister Kevin Andrews and AFP Commissioner Mick Keelty seem to be continuing their attempts to blame each other for the Haneef debacle. You’ll recall a couple of days ago that a “source”, most probably Keelty or somebody close to him, claimed that Andrews had cancelled Haneef’s visa without bothering to tell the AFP. Now we have the bite back from Andrews. From the Oz:
FORMER immigration minister Kevin Andrews had no idea of powerful evidence of Mohamed Haneef’s innocence when he controversially revoked the visa of the then terrorism suspect last year. Mr Andrews will tell the Rudd government-ordered inquiry into the bungled case, which opens today, that Australian Federal Police did not inform him of evidence debunking allegations against Dr Haneef’s second-cousin Sabeel Ahmed - allegations that had led to the subsequent terrorism charge against the Gold Coast doctor.
These guys were supposed to be in charge of protecting us from Scary Terryrists - one, of course, still is. Thank your favourite deity that there seems to be so few actual Scary Terryrists in Australia, or we’d really be in trouble…
If there’s any doubt remaining after the Haneef affair that what passes for justice in terrorism and law enforcement matters is nothing of the sort but a blatantly political bag of tricks, the comments from David Hicks’ prosecutor, Colonel Moe Davis, should lay it to rest.
The former chief prosecutor of the US military commissions at Guantanamo Bay said overnight he would not have pursued Hicks because the case against the Australian was not serious enough.
The ex-prosecutor, Air Force Colonel Moe Davis, told a pre-trial hearing for another Guantanamo Bay inmate he had “inherited” the Hicks case and wanted to focus on cases serious enough to merit 20-year jail sentences, with the Australian’s case not meeting that mark.
Davis also said the commissions were tainted by political influence and evidence obtained through prisoner abuse.
The mendacity of the Howard government - pushing for Hicks to be charged after he became a political problem, after letting him stew because doing so was a political advantage - stands exposed. Continue reading ‘The politics of Hicks’
It’s well known that the AFP harboured, and still harbour, strong suspicions about Mohammed Haneef. However, even if you make that assumption, the investigation and subsequent prosecution seems to have been stuffed up on several levels. Aside from the courtroom blunder that saw the criminal case against him collapse, I’ve been told by people who should know about these things that the AFP would have been much better off keeping him under surveillance - including in India, with the cooperation of Indian police - to see if they could turn up actual evidence that he’s anything other than a doctor with the misfortune to have the wrong relatives.
Today, a “source” is telling The Age that Kevin Andrews’ office prevented this from happening by revoking his visa, without even telling the AFP:
Senior public servants in a number of agencies in Canberra, including the police, were caught unawares when Mr Andrews suddenly announced that he was cancelling Dr Haneef’s visa.
“That spoiled it for the police,” the source said.
“It was done without any warning. The police knew that was an option but not that it was to be used so quickly or in such a cavalier fashion,” the source said.
One might be tempted to think this “source” is Keelty, or somebody close to him, making yet another attempt to blame somebody else. But, if accurate, the inescapable conclusion is that Kevin Andrews preferred political grandstanding in the leadup to an election over actually catching and convicting somebody who was genuinely thought to be a for-real terrorist.
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