Two days ago, if you were listening to the international news, it was all about the 'siege' in a chocolate shop in the rich financial centre of Sydney Australia. It was perpertrated by a lone disturbed gunman with a shotgun, holding hostages inside the shop, and was startling, though not very dreadful, until the police stormed the shop at 2 in the morning, killing the gunman and two other hostages.
The very next day this incident was dwarfed by an attack in Peshawar, Pakistan. In an act of the utmost barbarism, even by Pakistan's violent standards, heavily armed militants stormed a school run by the army for children of military personnel, not to take hostages and demand ransoms, though that would have been bad enough, but with intent purely to massacre as many children and teachers as possible. They burst into the morning assembly, where over 100 pupils were gathered, and shot nearly all of them, and then worked their way from classroom to classroom. By the time the Pakistani army regained control, and killed the militants, 145 were dead, including 136 children.
The Pakistani Taleban claimed responsibility, claiming that it was in revenge for the fairly successful military offensive against their tribal strongholds in the last few months. Will this mark a turning point, a sea change, in the fight against the Taleban in the region? Pakistan is the wierdest of countries, officially with a pro Western Government, but with factions of the military and certainly the secret sky agency (ISI) with sympathies to the Taleban. The attention of the world has been focussed on ISIS in Syria and Iraq, but the old problems remain.
Will it make a difference, will the Taleban and other extremist groups ever be rooted out, or will the politics and violence in the region continue as it always has done?
Meanwhile, forget about your family and financial problems this festive season. If you have an illness, forget about it. Just hold your children tight, and give thanks they go to school in a peaceful part of the world.
Wednesday, December 17, 2014
Sunday, December 14, 2014
Torture and denial
The most bizarre international news this week was the admission by the US that it had used 'extreme interrogation techniques' otherwise known as torture on captured prisoners suspected of involvement in the 9/11 attacks. This admission could not have been more high profile, taking the form of a two hour speech by a lady in the US senate, broadcast in full on CNN - actually Dianne Feinstein, the chairman of the senate Intelligence committee, and the report was the result of a four year investigation, trawling through some 6 million pages of CIA - the US central intelligence agency - documents. In so doing they found ample evidence of these interrogation techniques. Of course, much of this is not new - everyone has heard of waterboarding and seen the pictures of the humiliated prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad. Everyone knows that the CIA, once an abstract intelligence gathering organisation, had morphed into a kind of secret police force after 9/11.
The first point was that the CIA had never denied that these 'techniques' had taken place, but had justified them on the grounds that in the wake of 9/11 it was urgently necessary to obtain information from captured suspects to possible future or imminent attacks on the US; the assumption being that such information was obtained, to prevent further attacks, and that the extreme techniques were therefore justified.
But this was exactly what was refuted in the Senate report, which said that no information obtained by torture had been useful or valuable in stopping attacks, and that counter-terrorism intelligence had been obtained by more conventional means. To an ordinary person, this seems obvious - any 'information' obtained under torture is likely to be of low quality - the prisoner will tell the torturer anything he wants to hear. So that even the expedient justification for the extreme interrogation techniques falls away.
The next point is that the report sought to exonerate the previous US (Bush) administration, to some extent, by implying the the CIA ran a 'disinformation' conspiracy which destroyed evidence, emails and tapes, and kept its activities and methods hidden from the President.
The third point is that of course these kind of admissions and disclosures are highly unusual, especially for a major power like the US. (Can you imagine the Russian or Chinese governments coming out with an account apology for mistreatment of inmates in its prisons, let alone treatment of political prisoners, or even admission that they had any? It should have been hoped that these disclosures would be a cathartic experience for the US - one where responsible political leaders from both sides of the spectrum in the US came together, acknowledged previous faults, and vowed such treatment of prisoners would never happen again. It would have captured the moral high ground for the US and redounded greatly to the country's credit. Indeed, John McCain, the former Republican presidential candidate and corm Vietnam vetern who was capture and tortured by the north Vietnamese, made a statesmanlike speech in which he broadly accepted the report's findings and said that the matter was more about us than the alleged terrorists.
Of course, this did not last - immediately the matter degenerated into the usual Democratic-Republican partisan battle, with the Republicans bitterly disputing the findings of the report, questioning its timing (with the Republicans about to take over both houses of the US congress) and claiming that it would put US personnel abroad at risk, although of course US personnel are always at risk from jihadists. The CIA were drawn in, with both the present and previous directors defending their tactics and claiming the interrogation techniques did yield useful information, for instance leading to the discovery of the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden. A furious row erupted as to whether former president Bush was fully informed as to what was going on, with his loyal extreme conservative vice president Cheney claiming that he did. So that instead of salvaging the US's international reputation from this episode, it has probably made it worse.
Meanwhile, there is an embarrassed silence from America's allies. Why they must be asking, did the US have to spill the beans? The countries which houses the CIA's secret prisons? Britain, which during the Iraq war, followed the lead in everything the US did, so must have knowledge of the US torture techniques, or even imitated them with some of its own. Calls for disclosures are being made, but Britain has a tradition of bureaucratic secrecy probably surpassing that of every other nation. It has not released a long promised inquiry into the Iraq war, and already the official curtains are being drawn. Back to business as normal.
The first point was that the CIA had never denied that these 'techniques' had taken place, but had justified them on the grounds that in the wake of 9/11 it was urgently necessary to obtain information from captured suspects to possible future or imminent attacks on the US; the assumption being that such information was obtained, to prevent further attacks, and that the extreme techniques were therefore justified.
But this was exactly what was refuted in the Senate report, which said that no information obtained by torture had been useful or valuable in stopping attacks, and that counter-terrorism intelligence had been obtained by more conventional means. To an ordinary person, this seems obvious - any 'information' obtained under torture is likely to be of low quality - the prisoner will tell the torturer anything he wants to hear. So that even the expedient justification for the extreme interrogation techniques falls away.
The next point is that the report sought to exonerate the previous US (Bush) administration, to some extent, by implying the the CIA ran a 'disinformation' conspiracy which destroyed evidence, emails and tapes, and kept its activities and methods hidden from the President.
The third point is that of course these kind of admissions and disclosures are highly unusual, especially for a major power like the US. (Can you imagine the Russian or Chinese governments coming out with an account apology for mistreatment of inmates in its prisons, let alone treatment of political prisoners, or even admission that they had any? It should have been hoped that these disclosures would be a cathartic experience for the US - one where responsible political leaders from both sides of the spectrum in the US came together, acknowledged previous faults, and vowed such treatment of prisoners would never happen again. It would have captured the moral high ground for the US and redounded greatly to the country's credit. Indeed, John McCain, the former Republican presidential candidate and corm Vietnam vetern who was capture and tortured by the north Vietnamese, made a statesmanlike speech in which he broadly accepted the report's findings and said that the matter was more about us than the alleged terrorists.
Of course, this did not last - immediately the matter degenerated into the usual Democratic-Republican partisan battle, with the Republicans bitterly disputing the findings of the report, questioning its timing (with the Republicans about to take over both houses of the US congress) and claiming that it would put US personnel abroad at risk, although of course US personnel are always at risk from jihadists. The CIA were drawn in, with both the present and previous directors defending their tactics and claiming the interrogation techniques did yield useful information, for instance leading to the discovery of the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden. A furious row erupted as to whether former president Bush was fully informed as to what was going on, with his loyal extreme conservative vice president Cheney claiming that he did. So that instead of salvaging the US's international reputation from this episode, it has probably made it worse.
Meanwhile, there is an embarrassed silence from America's allies. Why they must be asking, did the US have to spill the beans? The countries which houses the CIA's secret prisons? Britain, which during the Iraq war, followed the lead in everything the US did, so must have knowledge of the US torture techniques, or even imitated them with some of its own. Calls for disclosures are being made, but Britain has a tradition of bureaucratic secrecy probably surpassing that of every other nation. It has not released a long promised inquiry into the Iraq war, and already the official curtains are being drawn. Back to business as normal.
Monday, December 08, 2014
Opposition what opposition?
Now that the dust of the national election has settled, the fact that will strike most outside observers is the total dominance of Swapo, who took more or less 80% of the vote, and the multitudinous opposition parties who shared the remaining crumbs between them. This is not good for democracy, as, from the outside again, it makes Namibia look like a banana republic in which the vote is ridiculously rigged in favour of a ruling junta, whereas everyone knows the vote is free and fair: it is just that the opposition is rubbish.
As the nominal runner-up in the presidential race, McHenry Venaani admitted, the ambition of so-called opposition politicians is not to advance alternative paths for the country, but simply to get a parliamentary seat, again, not as a platform for their political voice, but simply to be assured of a nice pension and a seat on the gravy train.
Alarmingly, some of the 'parties' seem quite satisfied with their sub 1% support from the electorate. What are they there for? There was no NBC debate between presidential candidates, and without trawling some old documents or obscure websites, it is impossible to know what these parties actually stand for, if anything. What would they do, differently from SWAPO? Mostly, they seem to be ethnically or regionally based, and date from the pre-independence political era. So to someone versed in Namibian political history, these parties may have some cultural origin or meaning, and have a vaguely socialist political flavour, but to an outsider they are incomprehensible.
The only glimmer of hope (from the opposition point of view) is that these parties over the weekend schedules a closed door meeting. It should have been done long before the election. Hopefully, the intent, although it is very doubtful if it will be realised, is to forge a common policy and name - maybe a Democratic Alliance, along the South Africa model, based on an open market economy, totally non-racially based, and with a commitment to combat corruption, Such a united alliance may have some political prospects and hope, Otherwise the Namibian opposition will be doomed to irrelevance.
As the nominal runner-up in the presidential race, McHenry Venaani admitted, the ambition of so-called opposition politicians is not to advance alternative paths for the country, but simply to get a parliamentary seat, again, not as a platform for their political voice, but simply to be assured of a nice pension and a seat on the gravy train.
Alarmingly, some of the 'parties' seem quite satisfied with their sub 1% support from the electorate. What are they there for? There was no NBC debate between presidential candidates, and without trawling some old documents or obscure websites, it is impossible to know what these parties actually stand for, if anything. What would they do, differently from SWAPO? Mostly, they seem to be ethnically or regionally based, and date from the pre-independence political era. So to someone versed in Namibian political history, these parties may have some cultural origin or meaning, and have a vaguely socialist political flavour, but to an outsider they are incomprehensible.
The only glimmer of hope (from the opposition point of view) is that these parties over the weekend schedules a closed door meeting. It should have been done long before the election. Hopefully, the intent, although it is very doubtful if it will be realised, is to forge a common policy and name - maybe a Democratic Alliance, along the South Africa model, based on an open market economy, totally non-racially based, and with a commitment to combat corruption, Such a united alliance may have some political prospects and hope, Otherwise the Namibian opposition will be doomed to irrelevance.
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