Guantanamo payout: a deal that suits both sides
“IF ANYTHING, a million pounds is not compensation enough for seven years’ detention without trial in Morocco and Cuba, including subjection to starvation, sleep deprivation, regular beatings and having your penis mutilated with a scalpel. For that reason, Binyam Mohamed deserves the money.
Sure, the pay-off means that legitimate questions over whether he received paramilitary training in Afghanistan in 2001, and what he was doing when he tried to fly to the UK on a false passport before he was lifted in Karachi the following year, will now never be answered. It may be that Mr Mohamed is not a morally meritorious person.”
Dave (above) writes a whole lot of sense about the Government’s payout to the former (and one present) detainees, and his conclusion is (to me, anyway) extremely persuasive:
“This is, in short, a deal that suits everybody. The government clearly has things that it wants to hide. It may be that some of those on the other side of these proceedings also prefer ready cash to cross-examination under oath.”
This deal smacks of a sordid cost-benefit calculation on the part of the Government, with nothing to do with truth, justice or morality of any kind. Nevertheless it remains true that a civilised society cannot tolerate the abuse of the rule of law, or the use of torture, even when the victims are enemies of civilisation itself: Britian did not use torture on prisoners during WW2, even if they were known Nazis.
These men have a right to compensation, but no right to be considered innocent holidaymakers, and sensible people (including Amnesty International) should not accept that picture of them.
Charlie Brooker must be stopped!
The dangerous homicidal maniac Brooker has issued a terrifying threat, menacing in its content and obviously so. It could not be more clear. Any ordinary person reading this would see it that way and be alarmed:
“The moment I’ve finished typing this, I’m going to walk out the door and set about strangling every single person on the planet. Starting with you, dear reader. I’m sorry, but it has to be done, for reasons that will become clear in a moment.
“And for the sake of transparency, in case the powers-that-be are reading: this is categorically not a joke. I am 100% serious. Even though I don’t know who you are or where you live, I am going to strangle you, your family, your pets, your friends, your imaginary friends, and any lifelike human dummies with haunted stares and wipe-clean vinyl orifices you’ve got knocking around, perhaps in a secret compartment under the stairs. The only people who might escape my wrath are the staff and passengers at Sheffield’s Robin Hood airport, because they’ve been granted immunity by the state.”
Read the entire blood-curdling communication here.
I’m sure you will agree with me, Judge Jacqeline Davies, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown and , indeed, all right-thinking folk, that such bloodthirsty maniacs as Brooker, Paul Chambers and Councillor Gareth Compton must be arrested and banged up immediately. The usual “civil liberties” lobbyist will bleat on about ”draconian measures”, etc, but the safety of the nation depends upon it.
Catherine Bennett, predicitably, is with the bleating civil libertarians on this. And Dave seems to think there’s a difference between a bad joke and a death threat.
Aung San Suu Kyi is free; her country is not
Some good news about a heroic person:
Not, perhaps a ‘Mandela moment’, but still a great day for a person of courage and her nation.
The Youtube film (above) also raises some issues about India’s relationship with the Burmese dictatorship.
Let’s give the last word (for now) to a taxi driver:
“Tomorrow, I won’t drive. I’ll go to hear her speak. She is good for Burma. She is our true leader, not the government.”
AWL visit to Israel / Palestine
Comrades….
Resnick and Pres
Thanks to Mike Fletcher for introducing me to the ‘Resnick’ police procedural novels of John Harvey. They’re bloody good in a sort of bleak, East Midlands, latter-day Chandleresque way. I don’t know whether Harvey’s choice of name for his anti-hero is a reference to the eccentric (but excellent) trombonist Ephie Resnick, but Inspector Charlie Resnick is a jazz fan, and Harvey’s writing contains some very good descriptions of the records Resnick listens to, like this (from ‘Rough Treatment’, 1990):
“Lester was bouncing through ‘Just You, Just Me’,
the first chorus almost straight, a trio of those trade-mark honks marking his place near the end of the middle eight, perfectly placed, perfectly spaced, rivets driven in a perfect line. Intake of breath, smooth and quick, over a flick of brushes against Sid Catlett’s snares, and then, with relaxed confidence and the ease of a man with perfect trust both of fingers and mind, he made from that same sequence another song, another tune, tied to the first and utterly his own:
What are these arms for?
What are these charms for?
Use your imagination.
The reason Resnick didn’t get an answerphone: how else to keep bad news at bay? The messages that you didn’t want to hear.
He had seen a photograph of Lester Young taken in 1959. He is in a recording studio, holding his horn, not playing.
The suit he is wearing, even for those days’ fashions, seems overlarge, as though, perhaps, he has shrunk within it. His head is down, his cheeks have sunk in on his jaw; whatever he is looking at in those eyes, soft brown, is not there in the room. His left hand holds the shield with which he will cover the mouthpiece, as if, maybe, he is thinking he will slip it into place, not play again. It is possible that the veins in his oesophagus have already ruptured and he is bleeding inside.
The coffee would be ready. In the kitchen Resnick picked up the envelope that was not brown, the address on which had not been printed via computer. He was trying to work out how long it had been since he had seen that writing. How many years. He wanted to tear it, two and four and six and eight, all the multiples until it was like confetti.
‘Here’
He lifted Bud with one hand and set him back in his lap. The cup of coffeee was balanced on the arm of the chair. The first take of ‘I Never Knew’ ended abruptly;
some saxophone, a piano phrase never finished. Lester is standing there, tenor close to his mouth, but now he is looking away. As if something has slipped through the door in 1943, unbidden, out of time. A premonition. A ghost.”
Book display in Aleppo
I’ve been on holiday, starting off in Istanbul, then taking the train to the south of Turkey and then buses and a train through Syria, ending up in Jordan. Damascus is a fascinating city and almost everyone I met in Syria was friendly, but this book display in a shop window in Aleppo gave me a start. The shop was round the corner from my hotel in the commercial district.
Stand with the students!
Let’s be clear: the prat who threw a fire extinguisher from a roof into a crowd deserves all he gets. It is also the case that of all the sections of society coming under Con-Dem attack at the moment, students and lecturers would not – ideally – be our chosen ground for the first confrontation. That said, the NUS / UCU demo on Wednesday made its point and has clearly got the Con-Dems rattled. And the Tories’ Millbank HQ was not a bad spot to trash.
There is a danger, as Dave points out, that in the absence of a working class response to the Con-Dems’ attacks, sections of the left will resort to late ’60′s -70′s-style IMG/Pabloite “student vanguardism.”
But I for one, refuse to condemn what happened. The unemployed, sick and disabled are our first concern, but the anti-cuts movement cannot afford division. If students and lecturers have gone into battle first, then so be it. As Tony Woodley says, “the anger and passion” shown by students is shared by millions of trade unionists: “”Unless the ConDem coalition starts to draw some conclusions from the outrage their cuts are causing, more and more people will start taking to the streets. Unite and other trade unions are fully committed to linking up with the broadest range of other groups, including students, to make the government change its mind.”
So come on, Woodley: let’s get Unite and the industrial unions out on the streets, eh?
Q: how do you know when Nick Clegg is lying?
A: His lips move.
“Eagle flies on Friday” (T Bone Walker)
Stormy Monday Blues: T-Bone’s masterpiece. And it’s Friday, and the eagle has indeed flown:
Aaron Thibeaux (“T-Bone”) Walker: May 28, 1910 — March 16, 1975.
“When I heard T-Bone Walker play the electric guitar I had to have one.”- B.B. King
“All the things people see me do on the stage I got from T-Bone Walker.” – Chuck Berry
“When T-Bone Walker came, I was into that. That was the sound I was looking for.” – Albert King
Another Russian journalist attacked and nearly killed
Hundreds of Russian journalists have been attacked, maimed and killed since the early 1990′s. Concern at the number of unsolved attacks and killings soared after Anna Politkovskaya‘s murder in Moscow on 7 October 2006.
Here’s a list of killings and disappearances of Russian journalists in recent years.
No-one is ever convicted or punished for these crimes.
Most recently, this month Oleg Kashin, a reporter on the daily newspaper Kommersant, suffered a fractured skull, shattered jaw, broken leg and smashed fingers after two men attacked him on the doorstep of his Moscow home. He is lucky to be alive.
This time, the authorities have a fairly obvious line of enquiry to follow: Kashin was known for his exposures of nationalist youth groups like the Nashi and Molodaya Gvardiya, the youth wing of prime minister Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party; In August, Molodaya Gvardiya called Kashin a “journalist-traitor” and published a caption: “will be punished.”
It will be interesting to see whether President Dmitry Medvedev (who has said the culprits must be “found and punished“) will follow up on this particular line of enquiry.
