Every Precaution a Provocation According to the Reuters , Australia may be guilty of preparing its soldiers to resist interrogation which go...
Every Precaution a Provocation
According to the Reuters,
Australia may be guilty of preparing its soldiers to resist interrogation which
goes beyond that allowed by the Geneva Convention.
Australian soldiers are stripped naked, hooded, deprived of sleep and
threatened with physical and sexual abuse, methods banned under the Geneva
Convention, to train them to resist interrogation if captured by hostile
forces. Defence Minister Robert Hill told parliament in a written statement
that Australia had been conducting the training for the past five years. Hill
said no soldier was actually abused and that soldiers who would be conducting
interrogations of prisoners were not permitted to undergo the training.
An Australian civil liberties group criticised the government on Sunday,
when news of the training first became public, saying such training was
unacceptable. ... "These people are people who ultimately may have to
look after prisoners of war and this is not the example that should be set.
It's not a fair enough argument to say that they should be trained by being
tortured," Murphy told reporters. Photographs of U.S. soldiers abusing
prisoners in Abu Ghraib jail in Iraq shocked the world when published in 2004.
If the inner logic of the accusation seems strange, it shouldn't. The US and
Australia are at war with a gentle enemy. Noble insurgents who wouldn't hurt a
fly and against which no such rigorous preparation is necessary, though if they
turned out not to be noble, it wouldn't be their fault. But if any captured
Australians weren't prepared for torture, it would be due to the
negligence of John Howard, just as it is Rumsfeld's fault there aren't enough
armored Humvees in Iraq, despite the fact that it is a waste of money to divert
spending away from social programs and environmental concerns to the War
Machine.
According to Newsweek,
Kim Jong Il can still be dissuaded from building nuclear weapons if America
gives him what he wants.
George W. Bush has given Kim ample reason to worry. The president has long
insisted that North Korea scrap its nukes before Washington makes concrete
offers of aid or other inducements. ... Rice noted hopefully that Pyongyang
still aimed for a "denuclearized Korean Peninsula," and she said
America's approach was to continue diplomacy: "The United States has no
intention of attacking or invading North Korea." But in truth, the
administration has not put any new diplomatic solutions on the table since
June—not least because some senior Bush hawks believe talking and cutting
deals won't work. ...
If bribes are not enough, America should consider laying down a few arms to
show North Korea how much we care.
Some worry that American scientists already are losing a bit of their edge.
"Pakistan is now producing more nuclear pits [the plutonium charge in the
first stage of a fusion weapon] than the U.S. does," says Peter Pye of
the House Armed Services Committee. "Do we really want to lose the
technological lead which we have built up at such cost over the years?"
That concern is fueling talk that even fresh weapons tests may be needed. A
few lawmakers think that some erosion of U.S. nuclear know-how is a risk worth
taking if it will help diplomatic efforts to halt nuclear proliferation. The
spread of nukes, they point out, is perhaps America's biggest nightmare in the
age of terror. And as the propaganda from Pyongyang suggested, Washington will
have a hard time insisting that other nations remain nuclear-free if it
continues to insist on developing new warheads.
It is American strength that has encouraged North Korea to arm; and it will
be American weakness that will induce Pyongyang to disarm. But it is equally
true, according
to US House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi that the reckless Bush
Administration policy of weakening the military has embolded Kim Jong Il, who is
otherwise peace-loving, to threaten to incinerate North Asia.
"This administration has not paid enough attention to the situation in
North Korea," Pelosi said. "The North Koreans know that we are
otherwise occupied in military actions in other parts of the world and they
have taken the liberty to be brazen."
Once upon a time the simultaneous accusations of too much preparation and too
little; not enough bribery and too much; a surfeit of strength and a want of it
could be made without much trouble. If being on the Left meant never having to
say you're sorry; not being on the Left meant being guilty without effort. You
could be a Filipino cook jumping from a 110 storey building and still be a
"Little Eichmann". The miracles of the saints were as nothing to the
transubstantiations of the Left. But the trouble came with memory. The Internet.
And with remembrance the dim recollection of betrayal.
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