The Quiet Road

I noticed the “women bishops” thing hit the headlines this week. Thing is, I knew the anglican church were in for another round of this nonsense the very moment the women priests thing had been settled. It was inevitable. Frankly, though, I can’t think about this issue without the words of Bill Hicks echoing in my ears:

It’s all very silly. Y’know? Of course I acknowledge the right of women to confer upon themselves whatever strange archaic titles they want, whether that be ‘priest’ or ‘bishop’ or ‘grand high vizier’. Men should have no monopoly on superstitious weirdness. But given the general contempt with which I hold such titles, as well as the low opinion I have of the modern churches, it’s hardly a great leap forward for feminism in my view.

Like the “gays in the military” thing, an issue which Bill Hicks also neatly dissected with a single observation (“Anyone dumb enough to want to be in the military… … …”)

I actually find myself in the uncomfortable position of — ostensibly — opposing equality when it comes to the question of homosexual men or women being admitted to the army. Once again, like the women priests thing, I of course acknowledge that a person should never be discriminated against because of their sexuality. But at the same time I find nationalism an inherently problematic concept, and I am utterly — right to the core of my being — opposed to militarism.

So you see, I’d argue that almost anything that reduces the size of our armies is a good thing. So I say “let the army have their prejudices”. In fact, let’s encourage some more! Next up, ban redheads from the military. Then anyone with brown eyes should be dishonourably discharged. Right-handed people and anyone whose name contains the letter ‘S’.

Seriously.

Gays in the military? No!

(but no straights either)

Prince Harry interviewed on Channel 4 News tonight:

“I would never want to put somebody else’s life in danger”.

From the man who’s been calling in air strikes on buildings for the last ten weeks.

Merrick

Usually when those in power do something contemptible, my reaction is to feel contempt. I suspect I’m like most people in that regard. I’m the first to admit that it’s not a particularly nice emotion to be feeling. All the same, so long as the Irish government turns a blind eye to extraordinary rendition or Dubya Bush announces that his plan for Iraq is to (via PDF) ‘make it more like Israel’ (that’s like “bring it on” times a thousand, right? It can only be a deliberate attempt to piss off the insurgents) then it’s not like we’ve got much of a choice about how to feel.

That said, occasionally you’ll hear or read something so incredibly contemptible, so off-the-scale ludicrous, that you’re forced to just step back and admire the blatant arrogance and cheek of it. And like Bill Hicks discussing the police officers who — under oath — insisted they used the minimum force required to restrain Rodney King, today I am forced to wonder at the sheer size of Lord Goldsmith’s balls.

Seriously. They must be bloody massive.

Lord Goldsmith, for those who don’t know (or have already repressed the memory) was Tony Blair’s Attorney General. He was the chief legal advisor to the UK government for the best part of six years; appointed in 2001 and serving for the entire duration of the Iraq War to date. He’s just been replaced in Gordon Brown’s cabinet reshuffle by Baroness Scotland about whom I know sod-all except that — as with Goldsmith — her willingness to use an aristocratic title makes her an anachronism more suited to a museum than a government office.

Now, there’s no doubt in my mind that Lord Goldsmith’s role during the past few years has essentially been to try and convince anyone who’ll listen that New Labour’s participation in the outright destruction of a sovereign nation — I’m talking about Iraq here, not the UK — and murder of between 2 and 3 percent of the population, is completely legal and above-board. Whenever Tony Blair did something that should rightly land him in a cell in The Hague, Lord Goldsmith popped up and said it was completely legal and above-board. There’s a P.R. agent in the novel I’m writing. His name is Henry Stone and it’s his job to spin the actions of a rich psychopath so that they appear completely legal and above-board. He’s a bit part, not a significant character, but the consequences of his actions have serious ramifications and permit said psychopath to continue his nastiness. In the language of psychology we would describe Henry Stone as “an enabler”.

Anyways, Lord Goldsmith is no longer in a position to enable New Labour to run amok (though I suspect Baroness Scotland has been chosen for her ability to do the same). So, on the day he left office, he clearly decided it was time to let us all know what a massive pair of balls he’s got on him. He called…

for an investigation into how illegal torture techniques came to be used by British soldiers in Iraq. He said it was a matter of grave concern that techniques such as sleep deprivation, hooding and stress positions were deployed against suspects held by UK forces.

Clare Dyer | Goldsmith calls for inquiry into Iraq torture (via Bloggerheads)

Hang on a second; hasn’t he been in a position to order an inquiry into this for the past few years? He’s been the chief legal advisor to the government since 2001 and he waits until he no longer holds that position before mentioning this concern of his? Seriously, is this a joke? And if not, why hasn’t this man been lynched yet, big balls or no big balls?

Ah, but wait a second. Lord Goldsmith goes on to say:

“These techniques were outlawed on a cross-party basis in 1972. We have to seek why anyone thought these were permissible techniques. I think there needs to be an inquiry…
[But] Lord Goldsmith told the parliamentary committee that he was only aware such interrogation techniques were being used after Baha Musa, an Iraqi hotel receptionist, died in British custody.

Ibid.

Well, fair enough then. I’m hardly going to criticise the guy for not launching an inquiry into something he was unaware was happening. Arguably someone in his position should have been informed about the activity of British troops, but if he wasn’t then he can hardly be blamed for failing to act on information he didn’t have. So yeah, fair enough.

Except no! Not “fair enough”. Not even a little bit “fair enough”! You see, The Guardian article reminds anyone who didn’t know that:

Mr Musa, 26, had been detained under suspicion of being an insurgent. He died in Basra in September 2003. Seven members of the Queen’s Lancashire Regiment, which is now the Duke of Lancaster’s Regiment, faced the most expensive court martial in British history, but all were eventually acquitted. One soldier, Corporal Donald Payne, 35, became the first British serviceman to admit a war crime, that of treating Iraqi prisoners inhumanely, and was jailed for a year.

Ibid.

September 2003? That’s almost four years ago. Lord Goldsmith’s mitigation for not calling for an inquiry sooner is that he only found out about the situation four years ago.

As I say… what balls!

Just over a week ago, fifteen British service personnel were captured by the Iranian navy. Iran claims the British soldiers were half a kilometre inside Iranian territory and — according to the recording function on their GPS navigation — had regularly entered Iranian waters as part of their patrols. The captured soldiers confirm this version of events. Of course, the British response is “you’re fooling nobody, Mahmoud”. The troops were in Iraqi waters, goes the British argument, and are now being fed scripted lines to speak on-camera by the dastardly Iranians!

Clearly there’s only a handful of people who know the truth, and neither you nor I, dear reader, will ever be among them. Long after these troops are released (as certainly they will be) the UK will claim they did nothing wrong and Iran will claim they illegally entered their territory. So that particular fact is unlikely to ever be resolved. Mind you, it’s worth pointing out that as far as Iran is concerned, US/UK troops in Iraqi territory constitute an illegal army of occupation. Nonetheless, the incident has highlighted some intriguing differences in the manner in which Iran has treated these soldiers and how the US/UK coalition treats captured “enemy combatants”.

There are those who will dismiss the comparison. We’re not at war with Iran, they’ll point out, so British troops aren’t “enemy combatants” as far as Iran should be concerned. Which would be a good point if it wasn’t such bullshit. Under Tony Blair, the British military has been transformed into an extension of U.S. foreign policy. And it’s not just any U.S. administration we’re talking about. It’s the regime of George W. Bush; a man who announced that Iran was part of an axis of evil and then bombed the hell out of its neighbours to the east (Afghanistan) and to the west (Iraq). According to one estimate, between 2 and 3 percent of the Iraqi population has died violently since the US/UK launched their invasion.

If China openly announced that it considered the UK to be “evil” and then launched massive bombing campaigns and invasions of France and Ireland, followed up by routine patrols right along the edge of British waters while all the time urging the rest of the world to impose crippling sanctions against Britain as response to their nuclear programme; then I submit to you that any captured Chinese military personnel would be treated as ‘the enemy’.

I also submit to you, based upon the recent track-record of Britain and the United States, that the captured Chinese would receive far worse treatment than the British soldiers have so far received in Iran.

We do not, of course, know how the British personnel have been treated while the cameras have been turned off. We don’t know whether they’ve been stripped naked except for the bags over their heads and then forced to simulate sex with one another. We don’t know whether they’ve had to huddle naked in the corner of a tiny cell while Iranian soldiers held massive snarling dogs just inches away. We don’t know whether they’ve had electric wires held to their genitals or were piled high so that Iranian guards could laugh at them and take souvenir snaps.

Conversely, I suppose you could argue that we only saw the worst of Abu Ghraib. We didn’t see the detainees sitting around in comfy chairs, sharing a cigarette and a joke, before being fed good meals and asked nicely to apologise for whatever wrongs they were accused of. I wonder why.

Iran has thus far resisted the temptation to make the captured soldiers “disappear” into a shadowy system of unofficial prisons and rendition flights. They haven’t dumped them into an illegal and immoral prison camp in Cuba to rot without representation. They haven’t decided to hold them for years without charge.

Incidentally, did anyone else notice this report from a couple of weeks ago… Escape from UK-run prison in Iraq…? There’s a line in the report, about halfway in, that completely overshadows the relatively mundane story in the headline… A security source told the agency that the prisoners had been held without charge for the past two years. It seems that Britain’s reluctance to criticise Guantanamo Bay too loudly is now explained… the British government is running one or more similar institutions itself. And why is it that we only hear about Britain locking people up for years without charge when the prisoners stage an escape?

If Iran treated these prisoners the way Britain and America treat enemy prisoners, we wouldn’t have heard about them once they’d been captured. They’d have disappeared into some anonymous camp to be degraded, terrorised and tortured. Within a couple of years, some of them may have been driven to suicide. An act that the Iranians would describe as “a good PR move“.

No, not a new buddy-cop movie starring Jim Belushi and Chevy Chase. Instead it’s two blog memes. Well, not quite. Well, kind of. They both arrive from Justin over at Chicken Yoghurt who — despite his protestations — appears to enjoy blog memes as much as any 14-year-old Livejournalist. The fact that I’m running with these memes does not, of course, make any similar comment about me.

Honest.

First up, nice chap that he is, Justin has bestowed a ‘thogger‘ upon me. This means — apparently — that I write a “thought-provoking” blog. Which is about as much as any blogger can ask for. I don’t make any such claims about myself (at least not in public), but Justin’s is a consistently excellent political blog that has certainly got me thinking on plenty of occasions. So, given the source, I shall gracefully accept the award. Apparently it now falls upon me to pass on the award, and nominate five blogs that I consider thought-provoking in some way. Chicken Yoghurt’s already got one, so I’ll omit him from my official list.

• Bristling Badger.
• Dreamflesh.
• Biroco Journal.
• Smokewriting.
• David Byrne’s Journal.

If you can’t find something to provoke thought via each of those links, then I humbly suggest that you may well be incapable of it in the first place. Perhaps you’d be better off watching TV.

It was four years ago today…

Justin follows up that list with another (originally kicked off over at Bloggerheads). It is — almost unbelievably — the fourth anniversary of the US/UK invasion of Iraq. Actually it’s the fourth anniversary of the eve of war (Jeff Wayne, where are you now?) and Justin was wondering: “what did you post on 20 March, 2003? (Or on as near to the day as possible)… Doesn’t have to be a blog entry; it could easily be in usenet or in a forum.”

Using the Way Back Machine, I discovered that the first entry on my old blog wasn’t until early May 2003, and I can’t seem to get the site to drag up the blog from norlonto.net, where I posted prior to that. But I did discover — on the U-Know! web forum — a post discussing the run up to the Iraq war and why I felt that the Peace Movement in the west was wrong-headed in its approach, though right in its aims.

And I still feel the same. My essential point was that rather than expending time and energy protesting against the war, it would be far more effective to focus that same effort on eliminating the demand for those resources over which wars are fought. I know there are many who believe that the Iraq war was about WMD or humanitarian intervention to bring about regime-change. I believe it was about oil. And it seems clear to me that reducing our demand for oil would consequently reduce the likelihood of us invading oil-rich nations. This would have a greater practical effect than demanding our politicians stop supplying us with the oil we also demand.

I’ve mentioned it before, but it’s a vivid image and worth repeating… I recall attending the big anti-war demonstration in London during the run up to the invasion. From hundreds of coaches at Hyde Park, I saw many thousands of protesters disembark carrying “No Blood For Oil” banners. As the samba band struggled to be heard over the idling of so many diesel engines I realised that there was a very serious disconnect at work. People clearly believed — as did I — that the war was about oil. Yet they didn’t seem to grasp the fact that Tony Blair and Dubya Bush weren’t going to personally burn all that oil themselves… that our representatives were responding very directly to the demands of their oil-consuming constituents.

Around the same time, myself and Merrick co-wrote an article to express this.

From Europhobia (now dressed in lovely WordPress trousers and sporting a shiny new URL) comes news that investigations into European complicity in US war crimes have identified 147 occasions when Irish soil was “suspected of being used for ‘extraordinary renditions’ or transfer of prisoners without trial or legal redress to sites such as Guantanamo Bay or Uzbekistan.”

It’s clear that the so-called “neutrality” of Ireland is a sham. At Shannon we provide transfer, refuelling and storage facilities for the US Air Force. I suspect that our government would not have offered the same hospitality to the Iraqi airforce in the geographically unlikely event that Saddam Hussein had made the request.

That said, our constitution is pretty damn clear about the neutrality of Ireland, and it’s always been a strict rule that Shannon could not be used for combat missions. This means that long-range bombers can’t refuel in Ireland on their way to drop explosives on a city, but a plane full of marines on their way to shoot people in that city is acceptable. I wonder whether the revered group of idealists, poets, socialists and agitators who framed our constitution would be proud of a government willing to make such spurious distinctions.

Or of a people willing to quietly acquiesce.

But use of Irish soil during these CIA ‘extraordinary renditions’? That brings the moral transgression and culpability to a whole other level. Here we have the Irish State actively and regularly assisting a policy of kidnap and torture. And 147 flights over a period of a few years is pretty damn regular. We’re not talking about a couple of isolated incidents here.

Protestations of ignorance are hollow and meaningless. An independent neutral republic not only has a right, it has a duty, to regulate any foreign military traffic that crosses its border. And for precisely this reason! So that we are not complicit in acts inconsistent with our international obligations. If a US airforce plane lands in Shannon and it contains people snatched from the street by the CIA en route for torture in an Uzbek detention centre, the Irish authorities have an absolute legal obligation to detain that flight and prevent a crime against humanity.

That these flights were never once detained demonstrates either than the Irish authorities were aware of their nature and chose to provide assistance nonetheless; or that a deliberate policy of ignorance was in place. Imagine an Irish airport had been used as a stop-off point for plane-loads of Afghan heroin for the past few years. Imagine that in order to gain favour with the heroin producers, the Irish government ordered the contents of the planes not to be examined. Imagine that the government later claimed they didn’t realise anything dodgy was going on. Lastly, imagine how naive you’d have to be to believe them.

You may consider that an extreme analogy. And it’s true, it would take a peculiar kind of eejit to think nothing dodgy was going on if Afghan heroin producers asked them to ignore some planes. But the C.I.A.? I mean, come on! You can trust them to be completely legit and above-board, right?

As I say; a peculiar kind of eejit. The kind we seem to elect.

What’s worse is that even despite widespread acknowledgement that these torture buses were fuelled and resupplied by Ireland, we have not denied the US military use of the facilities at Shannon. Instead we have accepted assurances that such flights will never stop in Ireland if indeed they ever happen which they don’t.

So we’re checking the planes now? Well no. They’ve promised to be all legit and above-board from now on, so we don’t need to.

Who has? Ummmm… the C.I.A.

You mean the kidnappers and torturers? Doh!

The television news reporter was on the streets of Tel Aviv tonight. He was gathering vox pops from “ordinary Israelis” about the conflict currently raging on their northern border. A woman with an Israeli-American accent expressed concern and regret about the civilian deaths in southern Lebanon. But, she pointed out, those people had been warned. The Israeli government had told them to leave their villages, so it wasn’t Israel’s fault that they were getting killed.

I was struck by the odd way that people – even educated Israeli-American students with tie-dyed t-shirts who probably have all manner of liberal social views – will develop a fundamentalist tribal mindset that allows them to judge Them and Us by radically different standards.

If the Syrian army announced that it was soon to begin carrying out airstrikes against Northern Israel, would the people living there voluntarily leave? Because the Syrians told them to? The memory of what happened when their own government asked Israeli settlers to leave illegally occupied territory is still fairly fresh.

You see, by and large, people try to avoid being driven from their land by foreign armies. By anyone in fact. So me? I blame Hezbollah for the deaths in Northern Israel. I blame the people who launched the missiles and those who told them to… aware that they may well be condemning decent, peaceful human beings to violent deaths. I certainly don’t blame the victims of terrorism because they refused to obey orders from the very people launching bombs at them. Indeed, to blame a dead child in Haifa for its own death at the hands of Hezbollah attackers is a peculiarly twisted thing to do.

Similarly, when a dead body is pulled from the rubble of southern Lebanon, it takes a twisted fundamentalist mindset to blame the person whose life has been stolen. All bombing is terrorism.

I was watching the TV news last night. From the Middle East came yet another horror story to chill the blood of anyone with an ounce of empathy or compassion. On the BBC website the story is headlined, Hamas militants vow to end truce. The wording of the headline angers me, although the events reported anger me far more.

There’s a trend among right wing mouthbreathers to insist that the BBC has a significant bias against Israel when discussing the Israeli / Palestinian situation. This trend is perhaps exemplified by Biased BBC but by no means confined to them (anyone citing Melanie Phillips as an authority rather than a cautionary example clearly isn’t receiving the medication they require).

I doubt, for instance, that the next deplorable act of Palestinian terrorism will be reported beneath the headline “Israeli army vows new airstrikes”. I suspect, rather, that the headline will quite rightly call attention to the innocent children murdered. So why is a report – the primary content of which is the murder of a Palestinian family by the Israeli military – headlined by a threat of violence from Palestinians?

Perhaps there’s another story somewhere on the BBC site beneath the headline “Israeli military shells Palestinian children”, but if so it’s well hidden. Unlike the one on the site front page.

I’m also somewhat irate about the use of the phrase “apparent Israeli shelling”. I understand of course, that so soon after a chaotic event such as this, there can be no official confirmation of the causes. No investigations have been carried out, no forensic teams have reported their findings from the scene. But within minutes of a suicide bombing, the word “apparent” is dropped from reports. Certainly long before the Israeli government gives its official reaction.

This is because it is obviously a suicide bombing. Eye witnesses confirm it, and the aftermath tells its own story. Is there a tacit assumption that Palestinian eye witnesses just aren’t as reliable as their Israeli counterparts? Is there any reason at all to believe that the Palestinians killed had set up a makeshift bomb-factory on the beach (I’ll bet the sand plays merry hell with the microswitches) and they were a victim of their own murderous intentions? Any evidence that the eye-witnesses who talk about an incoming shell are deliberately covering up the truth?

Certainly the television news made it clear that there was some confusion as to whether the shell came from a naval gunship a few miles offshore, or whether it was army artillery to blame, but there seems no doubt that it was a shell from the Israeli military. It appears that…

For many months, the Israelis have regularly shelled open areas such as fields and orchards in an effort to prevent Palestinian militants using them to fire their home-made missile into crudely made missiles into nearby Israeli territory.

BBC News | Hamas militants vow to end truce

I wonder what the life-expectancy of Palestinian fruit farmers is? (And yes, I know that BBC quote is awful copywriting / editing)

Statistically speaking that’s a policy guaranteed – over a long enough timescale – to result in events like yesterday’s massacre. Whether it’s faulty mechanical equipment or human error, if you spend several months shelling areas, some of your explosives are going to stray off course. It’s what the perpetrators euphemistically refer to as “collateral damage”. What Condi described as “tactical errors”. What many moral philosophers and legal experts would describe as “murder”.

How’s this for a defence in court… “well yes, your honour, I did regularly fire my machinegun into the loft of my neighbour’s house. You see, he sometimes uses that loft to shoot at me. Unfortunately I wasn’t paying enough attention yesterday and sprayed the floor below it with bullets instead. I’m sorry to say that his lodger and her 3 year old daughter were killed. But really, what else am I supposed to do? Killing some of my innocent neighbours is the only way to ensure that my family remains safe.”

For me, blowing up someone else’s child in order to reduce the risk to your own is not an acceptable way to act.

The attitude we adopt toward the Arab minority will provide the real test of our moral standards as a people.
– Albert Einstein

There can be little question that the Israeli people are failing that test.

I’m fascinated by the news that the Iranian president (religious mentalist, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad) has sent an 18-page letter to the American president (religious mentalist, George Bush). As yet the letter hasn’t been published publicly, but the leaks make it sound just as weird as I could have imagined. Of course all the leaks are coming from the US end of things, but in these days of internets and whatnot, it’ll be easy enough for the Iranians to disseminate an accurate copy should fabrications begin to appear…

I got hold of what Reuters are calling “an abridged version”. Make of it what you will:

Dear George (or may I call you “Dubya”),

America has been a force for evil in the world. For years you have blundered about the globe meddling in the affairs of everyone else. In 1979 we decided to have nothing more to do with you and have had no official contact since then. Sadly that is no longer possible now that you have flattened and invaded half our neighbours, called us part of “the axis of evil” and your administration has begun pointedly denying that an invasion is planned every time they’re asked about bombing Iran. This has us all a bit worried here in Tehran.

Frankly we think it’s about time you pissed off out of the middle east and central asia. No seriously. You’ve no business being here, and we think it’s about time you left. Your unwavering support for unelected dictatorships and royal families in the name of democracy whilst you napalm villages in the name of peace was embarrassing to watch while you were doing it to other countries. Now that you seem to be looking at us with those war-room eyes, I felt it was time to contact you directly and ask whether you’ve completely taken leave of your senses?

Look, so long as you’re willing to pay the market price (in euros), we here in the middle east don’t mind sending shipfuls of our oil across the oceans to be burnt in American cars. We’ll sell as long as you can afford to buy. We just don’t like the idea of you stealing the stuff by setting up client governments all over the place.

So in the interests of stability – something you seem to value so much – we feel it’d be a good idea to get rid of the majority of the weapons and bombs currently in the region. We’ve done a lot of consultation, focus groups and research and discovered that everyone would feel a lot less twitchy around here if you, therefore, took all your soldiers and tanks and guns and planes home to America. Or go save the Sudanese maybe? We honestly don’t care just as long as you’re moving in a direction that is “away” from us. And they do seem to genuinely need assistance.

Oh another thing… and I know this is a bit of a touchy subject, but this being our first chance to chat in 27 years, I’d be a fool if I didn’t take the opportunity… would you mind taking Israel back home with you? Yes, yes, I know all that stuff about them being the chosen people and God giving them that piece of land. But here’s the thing… we don’t actually believe that, and there’s no hard evidence to support it. So from where we stand, it looks like – far from being God-given – the modern state of Israel was actually created by a bunch of colonial powers stealing Palestinian land under pressure from Zionist terrorism in order to assuage their feelings of guilt about the holocaust.

Frankly – despite the bad press I get over in the West – I don’t have a problem with a homeland for the jewish people. But we in Iran do have to wonder why the Palestinians should pay for the atrocities of the Germans. Would it not make more sense to give, say, Bavaria to the jewish people? Or if you Americans are really that concerned, well you’ve got plenty of land. Give them North Dakota. Who’d notice?

I know, that’s probably a bit much to expect. But honestly, it’s difficult to see how better to improve stability than by removing US and Israeli influence from the region.

Oh and listen up George. You going around calling yourself a “Man of God” is starting to give us genuine “Men of God” a bad name. Either shape up, or ship out. Hear what I’m saying? America’s “separation of church and state” tells us all we need to know about how much a Man of God you are. Right? And let that be a warning to you by the way. Saddam Hussein was a secular dictator. Of course God chose your side in that war. But if you try to take us on, well… you’ll be cruisin’ for a bruisin’ and no mistake.

This is a religious state for crying out loud! We’ve got clerics who can kick me out of office if they want. That’s proper “Man of God” stuff let me tell you. Whose side do you think God would be on if it came to a straight choice between you and me? Eh? Seriously George, I’d think twice before pissing off Allah The Most Merciful. He can be a right ruthless bastid when He gets going.

Anyways, I’ve got more to say but I’ve just noticed the time and Buffy is on in 10 minutes and I want to catch the last post before it comes on (they’re repeating Season 5 on satellite. Glory is a fantastic ‘Big Bad’, but I still think I like The Mayor best). I hope I hear back from you soon; particularly re: the whole pulling your military out of the region thing that I mentioned. Love to Laura and the kids.

Yours,

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

PS: That whole nuke issue? We’ve decided to continue enrichment. Bye now.