Public Address - Hard News (Home)

A tragedy for everyone | May 07, 2004 12:59

It appears that we may not have seen the half yet of the Iraqi prisoner abuse scandal. The Washington Post has taken possession of more than 1000 disturbing digital images ("a soldier holding a leash tied around a man's neck in an Iraqi prison. He is naked, grimacing and lying on the floor") from the occupation. The paper's editorial pots Rumsfeld as the author of the culture of abuse.

Sy Hersh, whose New Yorker story helped lift the lid, told Bill O'Reilly that it's going to get much worse:

This kind of stuff was much more widespread. I can tell you just from the phone calls I've had in the last 24 hours, even more, there are other photos out there. There are many more photos even inside that unit. There are videotapes of stuff that you wouldn't want to mention on national television that was done. There was a lot of problems.

There was a special women's section. There were young boys in there. There were things done to young boys that were videotaped. It's much worse.

Bright spot, of sorts: Hersh praises the hard-nosed pursuit conducted by US Major General Antonio Taguba, author of the lacerating report on abuses at Abu Ghraib. There is clearly still decency in the US military, but something has gone horribly wrong with the conduct and culture of the occupation; something for which its architects will ultimately have to answer, if only because it is shaping up as a tragedy for America itself.

Electronic Iraq has a lacerating commentary on the latest photos:

And these bright-eyed young Americans are war criminals. They did not achieve such infamy overnight or on their own, however. Rather, they, like the Americans they represent back home in Iowa, Nebraska, North Carolina, and Texas, gradually lost their bearings as a result of a media- and policy-induced trance asserting that Americans and the United States constitute a special class of humanity: privileged, above the law, stronger, better, and more deserving than others.

From the evident joy they experienced while violating Iraqis arrested and imprisoned in a murky political and legal twilight zone of Iraq/Guantanamo/Afghanistan spawned by the "War on Terror," it is clear that they have not actually violated human rights or international humanitarian law: These young Americans, and their superiors, do not consider Iraqis to be human beings. From the photos, it seems they have mistaken Iraqis for dogs.

Remember the "untermenschen" story?

America's right-wing attack media has responded not with reflection on the moral mire, but by going further into denial. Rush Limbaugh told his listeners this week that the guards who abused prisoners at Abu Ghraib were just "having a good time" and that their actions served as an "emotional release." It was the second time this week that sexual torture has been compared by a commentator to "frat hazing".

Meanwhile, the floodgates crank open. British Labour MP Ann Clwyd, Tony Blair's personal human rights envoy to Iraq spoke this week about a case in which US soldiers detained an elderly Iraqi woman last year placed a harness on her, made her crawl on all fours and rode her like a donkey.

The head of a US military police unit at Abu Ghraib prison is under investigation following charges he secretly photographed naked female American soldiers. He was their commanding officer.

Amer al-Saadi, the former Saddam weapons scientist who approached US forces and turned himself in for questioning only three days after the fall of Baghdad has been held in solitary confinement ever since. His wife has been unable to see him for a year. Apparently "there were no weapons" is still not regarded as the correct answer.

GQ magazine's story on Colin Powell's battles in the White House says much that you've heard unattributed before: the difference is that his top aides and confidants are unabashedly on the record.

Indymedia New Zealand has blogger Raed Jarrar reading out his roadmap for Iraq.

FightingTalk's Patrick Crewdson has an extremely funny post (Helen - one of the junior members of staff should be able to explain it) - with a serious conclusion - on this week's assembly at Parliament. See: Clark to hikoi: why you buggin'?

Peter Rees had a comment on yesterday's hikoi post:

I just want to express my uneducated fug of confusion about this issue. It first started coming on when I was in Harvest Wholefoods and a mohawked young pakeha guy came in with a poster for the hikoi. It occurred to me, perhaps unfairly, that I spent much of the 80s and 90s protesting against privatisation in this country and here was this spotty youth, who in appearance might have stepped straight out of any of those marches, standing up for the exact opposite.

Although I'm proud to live in a country that has made some effort to fixing past wrongs, I've always felt a little queasy about alienating public land for any reason. Perhaps it's a sign of ageing. And now the right-wing are opposing private property rights ... I feel as if the political goalposts have been repositioned Hone Heke-style. I'm just so very confused. Perhaps I should read the proposed legislation, but I rely on the media for that. There. That helped.

Yes, I know what you mean. I wonder if some of the people swinging in behind the hikoi have quite thought through it all. It's not clear-cut, and I certainly don't know exactly what implications the awarding of another form of title in what had been regarded as public property - had it happened - would have had. The Herald's editorial today, Government between a rock and a hard place, is fairly on the money, especially in its conclusion that "the hikoi suggested a deep-seated grievance that transcends one issue." Quite. Things might have been different had emotions not been cranked up so far in the past 10 months. Ironically, Labour is reaping Brash's whirlwind.

Anyway, that enough gloom. It's Fiona's birthday (wish her many happy returns here) and we're off out for some lunch. Thanks to Murray Hewitt for the feedback on the Old Faithful Chops recipe (told you it was good) and thanks especially to our kind and judicious sometime advertisers Festival Mushroom Records for a hell of a good party last night (those folks have some contacts list), at which I bumped into a chap called Michael, who told me a story.

In the late 90s, Michael was tour-managing the British band Bush, and in 1997, their travels took them to Brazil for a big outdoor show in a bullring, with No Doubt and David Bowie. As was his habit, Michael connected over the Internet to 95bFM to listen to Hard News, back when it was a weekly radio rant. And there he was, backstage, and he saw the opportunity to do something: he connected his laptop to the desk, and sent my dulcet tones booming out, live from Auckland, through the PA to 50,000 - doubtless puzzled - Brazilian pop fans as they waited for the main acts. Briefly, I was world famous in Brazil, and I never even knew it. That has made my week …

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Expectations | May 06, 2004 11:35

So the movement associated with the hikoi has genuine momentum: that's clear. What's less clear is exactly what the marchers want, and whether they all want the same thing.

If the belief regarding the key issue (the government's response to the Appeal Court decision on the foreshore and seabed) is something like that of the Treaty Tribes Coalition - accepting that freehold title is unacceptable to the majority of New Zealanders, and thus politically undeliverable, but that any government intervention in the public interest should take place after due process in the courts and not before - then the gulf in expectations might be manageable.

After all, Maori will have the right to explore their rights in the Maori Land Court and, if desired, the High Court. The government has explicitly left open the potential for compensation in such cases as the courts find that the customary right of a particular group would have amounted to freehold title - had not the government already legislated to remove that possibility by taking the foreshore and seabed into Crown title. (The scary T-word - "title" - has disappeared from the current version of the legislation, replaced by more soothing talk of "ancestral connection" and "customary rights".)

The problem for any Maori claimants is that in taking their cases, they'll be laying out a great deal of money to, probably, gain relatively little that they don't already have. It may or may not prove the case, as Stephen Franks says, that they will gain customary rights with which they can do little other than annoy their neighbours.

But if the predominant belief is that of the Tainui representative of the hikoi who appeared on Holmes earlier this week and declared - I hope I'm paraphrasing appropriately - that all Maori, as an ethnic group, had "tipuna rights" to the whole coastline, and that the rest of us could only venture there with their permission, than I can't see a chance in hell of resolution.

Ironically, this kind of talk resembles the National Party's unfortunate caricature of the situation (and they're still wilfully misrepresenting it - check out this week's press release from Nick Smith, which, on my understanding of the proposed law, is flat-out baseless fear-mongering) more than it does what the Appeal Court actually said. There is simply no sense in which Maori as a group have sweeping rights to the coastline.

For a start we're not talking about the coastline itself, or even the beach above the high tide mark, but as John Tamihere puts it, "the bit that gets wet at high tide, and the bit that stays wet."

Customary title, if it was found to exist at all by the courts, could be claimed not by Maori as a whole, and not even by iwi, but by small local groups - right down to the whanau level - who can show continuous use of a particular area of foreshore since before 1840, when the Treaty of Waitangi was signed. (The proposed legislation also allows Pakeha to explore their rights on the same basis, but it's far from clear whether anyone will actually qualify in that respect.) It seems that Maori around the East Cape have most to lose from the legislation, although Tainui has a strong interest in a harbour claim.

On a case by case basis, this might have been managed in a way acceptable to the bulk of New Zealanders: if we got a look at customary title in practice in one or two cases, all sides of the debate might be a little calmer about the implications. It could have been worked through.

But the Appeal Court decision suddenly made the issue national, urgent, and, to many people, quite frightening. It upset understandings that had pertained for decades. Access to the coastline is part of our culture. With all manner of alarm being sounded by the political right, the government felt itself with little option but to explicitly guarantee two things: no freehold title, and no exclusive right of access.

Would it have been better to seek the same safeguards at the other end of the process? Yes. But hindsight is a wonderful thing.

Meanwhile, I think nothing has damaged the image of the Maori land Court so much as the appalling speech by one of its former judges Ken Hingston, who not only compared the Labour government to that of Robert Mugabe (isn't it odd the way Zimbabwe is conjured up at both extremes of the debate?), but slammed the government for legalising prostitution, banning smoking in workplaces, and preparing the Civil Union Bill. It was nutty: and I know he is, fortunately, retired, but my immediate, emotional response was that I was glad that not too much would be at stake if Hingston was any indication of the calibre of the court.

I have no idea what the response of New Zealanders will be to this week's events, but I find myself gloomy about the extent to which people are talking past each other. Perhaps it is time for a Maori political party, but it will probably fail if it's just a Tariana Turia personality cult. And it will certainly stumble if it comes to Parliament toting all the many and varied expectations expressed by the hikoi.

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Old Faithful Chops | May 04, 2004 09:27

For now, my money's on the Daily Mirror's pictures of British soldiers abusing Iraqi POWs being fakes, even if the stories they relate to aren't.

The expert analysis of evidence in the pictures, if reported correctly, raises some serious questions. And the photographs themselves look too clean, too newsworthy (like, what squaddie is shooting crisp black and whites in a prison?). As has become evident in recent days, a story with pictures is a far more powerful thing than one without.

The Internet being what it is, the real Abu Ghraib pictures from the CBS 60 Minutes programme have gone far and wide - including to Scoop, which picked them up from an Arabic website and - very stupidly - also briefly ran pictures from the same website which purported to depict the rape of an Iraqi woman by US troops. I chanced on the same page via an Iraqi blog today and it immediately appeared to me that they were actually military-rape-fantasy porn (yuck - there's some Google hits I could do without …).

This won't be the last time the real Abu Ghraib pictures will be used to legitimise fakes. So there's brutal imagery loose out there now, and it's scary any way you look at it.

Meanwhile, pretending nobody's really dying reaches a new plane with 24% of American households unable to see an ABC Nightline programme, The Fallen, in which the names and pictures of more than 500 dead US service personnel will be broadcast, because eight ABC affiliates will ban it.

The New Zealand Association of Rationalists and Humanists (hereafter, "the Rationalists") has an amusing new web feature called The Fundy Post ("We Read This Crap So You Don't Have To"), which keeps an eye on the religious Right. It points to this barking-mad barrage of bullet-points from Maxim literary contributor Alexis Stuart in the Otago Daily Times (you folks who read the South Island papers do get a lot of this stuff, don't you?). The "Bible Study with Ian Wishart" bit at the end is funny too. Truly, these people are the enemies of thought.

As Nanaia Mahuta now declines to confirm whether she'll stay with Labour or resign over the foreshores, Colin James has an interesting column in the Herald. If Mahuta really has, as the stories suggest, been promising her fealty to one party but quietly thinking something else, I'm not impressed. I can completely understand their point of view on the foreshore proposal, and perhaps it is time for a Maori party, but both she and Turia have been extended a fair bit of goodwill by the executive over the years, and the least they could do is return the courtesy.

That said: what was Clark thinking with that "haters and wreckers" crack about the hikoi organisers? (And no, I'm not buying Chris Trotter's "Tampa" theory …) I realise she was only referring to the Harawira faction - and quite explicitly not the bulk of the marchers - but she ought to have been savvy enough to realise that the phrase would rise to the top of every news story.

Wow - Steve (yes, that Steve) has lined up behind John Kerry - that'll piss Rush Limbaugh right off. This Bloomberg story suggests that he and Warren Buffett, the world's second-richest man, will be giving Kerry economic advice.

Mum went home yesterday, possibly a little heavier than when she arrived. I like cooking for Mum, after all those years she spent cooking for me. I even made a point of cooking something she used to make for me. It's called Old Faithful Chops, it's simple and reliable and this is the recipe:

6-8 lamb shoulder chops
One large red onion or two middling ones
Two large tomatoes
One large yellow or red capsicum
One cup basmati rice
Two cups chicken stock
Some chopped fresh thyme

Trim excess fat from chops, cut each in half if desired. Slice onions, capsicum and tomatoes into rounds. Spread rice across the bottom of a large casserole or similar vessel with a close-fitting lid. Pour in two-thirds of a cup and mix with rice. Sprinkle on the chopped thyme. Place chops over the rice in a single layer, then layer again with the rounds of vegetable. Season with some decent salt and fresh-ground pepper and pour on remaining stock. Cover and bake for about 70 minutes at 180 degrees Celsius. Serve.

Obviously, you might tweak this or that, but the main thing is to keep that lid tight. Enjoy.

And farewell then, Camillia. You were the best singer on NZ Idol but your taste in songs was just too awful. In the "Rock" round you sang that crap Alannah Myles song 'Black Velvet' when you should have sung 'Bat Out of Hell' by Meatloaf. Seriously. But have fun with your boy. And then get someone else's money and go and re-record that arrangement of 'Purple Rain' you did a few weeks back. Really let rip. Then send it to Prince and ask him if he'd like to contribute some guitar to it. You never know.

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Dumb and dumber | May 03, 2004 10:59

So, having killed who knows-how-many-hundred Iraqis, created tens of thousands of refugees and flattened whole neighbourhoods, the US military command is now to hand over Fallujah to a group of officers from the Iraqi Army it disbanded only last year. It would be funny if it wasn't so tragic.

Having backed off a conflict it didn't need to enter and could not truly win, the US must now watch the gunmen of Fallujah celebrating their "victory". Leaving aside questions of right or wrong, this has just been overwhelmingly stupid

That all this has happened in pursuit of the unknown killers of four security guards almost defies belief. I'm actually pretty much over the fact of the invasion. It has happened, and Iraqis deserve the chance to make a future for themselves, for better or worse. Perhaps, if the strategy hadn't been so riven with arrogance and ideological blindness, it might have worked out. Perhaps it still might, in some sense.

But to justify the policy, the coalition governments had to build up quite a head of righteousness. And that righteousness has come back to bite them now that they have, inevitably, failed to live up to their own billing as high-minded liberators.

Typically, Seymour Hersch at the New Yorker has provided a thorough examination of the official report on what went on at Saddam's old prison at Abu Ghraib, and dismisses the idea that it was hidden to commanding officers (he also casts doubt on Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski's self-serving claims to have raised the alarm):

Under the fourth Geneva convention, an occupying power can jail civilians who pose an "imperative" security threat, but it must establish a regular procedure for insuring that only civilians who remain a genuine security threat be kept imprisoned. Prisoners have the right to appeal any internment decision and have their cases reviewed. Human Rights Watch complained to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld that civilians in Iraq remained in custody month after month with no charges brought against them. Abu Ghraib had become, in effect, another Guantánamo.

As the photographs from Abu Ghraib make clear, these detentions have had enormous consequences: for the imprisoned civilian Iraqis, many of whom had nothing to do with the growing insurgency; for the integrity of the Army; and for the United States' reputation in the world.

Amnesty International has weighed in on the unpleasant realities of the new Iraq as well.

"Our extensive research in Iraq suggests that this is not an isolated incident. It is not enough for the USA to react only once images have hit the television screens".

Amnesty International has received frequent reports of torture or other ill-treatment by Coalition Forces during the past year. Detainees have reported being routinely subjected to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment during arrest and detention. Many have told Amnesty International that they were tortured and ill-treated by US and UK troops during interrogation. Methods often reported include prolonged sleep deprivation; beatings; prolonged restraint in painful positions, sometimes combined with exposure to loud music; prolonged hooding; and exposure to bright lights. Virtually none of the allegations of torture or ill-treatment has been adequately investigated by the authorities.

Riverbend reports from Baghdad:

All anyone can talk about today are those pictures... those terrible pictures. There is so much rage and frustration. I know the dozens of emails I'm going to get claiming that this is an 'isolated incident' and that they are 'ashamed of the people who did this' but does it matter? What about those people in Abu Ghraib? What about their families and the lives that have been forever damaged by the experience in Abu Ghraib? I know the messages that I'm going to get- the ones that say, "But this happened under Saddam..." Like somehow, that makes what happens now OK... like whatever was suffered in the past should make any mass graves, detentions and torture only minor inconveniences now.

Diana Wichtel wrote a good column about local blog culture for the Weekend Herald, noting Gordy's poetry competition. The curiously lame winning entries are here if you're interested. I actually thought the funniest thing about the whole business was his wildly precious reaction when a few contributors to the competition had some fun at his expense (or, in Gordy-world, when he received "an unrelenting stream of personal abuse from Brown's readers" - he seems to have no sense of irony whatsoever.) As usual, his anger stems from the world not behaving as he believes it ought to, and he's loading all the anger on me in the hope that might make him feel better.

Meanwhile, lots of people seem to be remembering what a bad idea they thought Iraq was all along. The cover story in The American Conservative magazine is headed The Best of Bad Choices:

The administration's Iraq policy is in shambles. Iraq has become a geopolitical humpty-dumpty that America cannot put back together, and the time has come for the United States to withdraw.

In the same issue, Pat Buchan contributes Fallujah: High Tide of Empire?

Kautilyan notes identical sentiments in the Wall Street Journal from retired US general William E. Odom, of the conservative Hudson Institute, former director of the National Security Agency under Reagan:

Following the planned June 30 handover of nominal sovereignty, Iraqis may go to the polls and vote. But the result, Mr. Odom explains, will resemble theocracy more than liberal democracy. As televised images of Iraqis cheering attacks on U.S. troops suggest, it's not likely to be anything Americans would consider worth the war's cost in blood and treasure.

"Anybody that's pro-American cannot gain legitimacy," he says. "It will be a highly illiberal democracy, inspired by Islamic culture, extremely hostile to the West and probably quite willing ... to fund terrorist organizations." The ability of Islamic militants to use Iraq as a beachhead for attacks elsewhere may increase.

But can't U.S. troops there tamp down such hostile activity? Well, yes, he says -- at a cost of rising hostility to the U.S. throughout the region.

"It probably will radicalize Saudi Arabia, [and] it could easily radicalize Egypt," Mr. Odom says. Violence yesterday between security forces and terrorists in Syria hinted at what may come, heightening dangers for Israel and the U.S. Iran might agree not to stir trouble among fellow Shiites who are 60% of Iraq's population -- provided the U.S. eases its hostile stance toward Tehran's nuclear ambitions.

Yet the stakes, in Mr. Odom's view, are much bigger. The longer U.S. troops hang tough, he reasons, the more isolated America will become. That in turn will place increasing strain on international economic and security institutions that have undergirded the emergence of "America's Inadvertent Empire," as Mr. Odom's latest book calls it. "I don't know that the UN, the IMF, the World Bank, [or] NATO can survive this," he says.

Goodness. These hand-wringing, Guardian-reading, me-too "western pop-intellectuals" are everywhere these days, aren't they?

A couple of people sought to admonish me for Friday's comments about Tariana Turia, but I think I was right. As she admits in the Herald this morning, she began the year promising not to even vote against the foreshore legislation, let alone resign and force a by-election:

In January she said the only "honourable" option for her was to abstain when the bill was debated in Parliament.

"I'm not prepared to cross the floor and vote with people who would do us worse harm."

To be fair, almost everyone involved in this issue (not least Helen Clark and her government) has had a change of mind or two. But what has annoyed me lately is Turia's habit of saying one thing to Radio Waatea and another thing to the rest of us. She seemed to say last week, as a minister, both that she would and she wouldn't join the hikoi.

On the matter of resignation from her ministerial warrants she said to Willie Jackson last week that "I haven't done anything wrong, and usually people resign because they have done something wrong. They've either been drink-driving or not quite told the truth in a way the public would expect." But at the same time she was telling the mainstream media she fully understood the meaning of collective Cabinet responsibility; which was that if she intended to vote against the policy she would have to either jump or be pushed. The idea that she has been singled out for punishment could hardly be further from the mark. It's been her decision to make.

That said, she did acquit herself well on Morning Report today, handling the tricky question of whether she supported a separate Maori assembly within Parliament (yes) when it was put to her. But you'd have to say her claim that her people looked favourably on the National Party for all it had done for them was, politically speaking, just a bit too cute.

So Turia will contest the Te Hauaurau by-election as in independent, rather than as a member or the new Maori party many of her backers feel she should lead (she's, er not committing). But no other major party will turn up - leaving her vulnerable to accusations that's she's wasting public money. What kind of a turnout she is likely to have to generate to ensure her own credibility is unclear, but with the hikoi underway, she may do quite well.

Interestingly, she used the word kotahitanga - "to make one" - on the radio this morning. That was the catch-cry of the hikoi of 1984; which was undone at the last, when Tainui's representatives appeared to set themselves apart from the other walkers at Waitangi. The fault lines won't be in the same place this time, but it would be a leader of genius who could keep the many strains of Maori aspiration together in one political movement. This is the core problem of any Maori party.

Intriguingly, Helen Clark, who declined to appear on Morning Report this morning, sounded positively unburdened when she talked to Matt and Chris on 95bFM this morning. Perhaps two can play at passive-aggressive politics. "We're not devoting any more attention to her any more," she declared, cheerily, of Turia. She won't be attacked - overtly anyway - but she won't be sheltered any more either. She'll have to make her own luck from now on.

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