Subject:
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Interview and interrogation, and who cares anyway? (Australia)
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.off-topic.debate
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Date:
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Fri, 18 Feb 2005 03:02:23 GMT
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Viewed:
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956 times
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Twelve months ago, our federal political leaders told us that no Australians
were involved in the interrogation of Iraqi detainees.
Now it turns out that Australians were involved in 'interviews', but not
'interrogations'. Interviews can be clearly distinguished from interrogations
on the basis that the two words have wildly different spellings (you dummy).
Our Prime Minister says in parliament that there is a distinction clearly
understood in military parlance. But he wasn't talking to the military, he was
talking to the Australian public. Perhaps one can understand how he might have
mistaken one audience for the other, not.
And even our military folks seem to have difficulty explaining how a detainee,
in prison dress, escorted by an armed guard, could possibly be considered an
interviewee and free to leave at any time.
But, says one of our learned journalists in the erstwhile
making-a-decent-effort-most-of-the-time-to-be-independent ABC, so what? So what
if they were involved in interrogations, isn't that worthy work?
And our Prime Minister says (something like) 'how dare anyone suggest that fine
Australians, working hard and earnestly under the most difficult of conditions,
are guilty of the heinous accusations of torture levelled at the US in Abu
Ghraib'.
Fools and liars. But I think the fool is probably me and the liars will
probably never be identified, and I'm supposed to be ok with that.
No-one is casting aspersions on Australia's people in the field. There is no
evidence of any untoward behaviour by our forces and peoiple in Iraq, and if
ever there is, I hope we will deal with it appropriately. This is a very tired
obfuscation, popularised anew in the US as soon as forces were sent to Iraq.
Guess I should have expected it from Howard sooner or later. Just because our
worthy and honourable folk are risking their lives at our direction is no reason
to not question what directions we are giving them, and how they are doing it.
Why is it important? Such short little memories are what the Howard government
counts on - and lord knows this approach worked a treat in the 'children
overboard' farce. These questions were raised last year in the context of
allegations that the US were mistreating detainees. The reasonable questions
asked of our political leaders were along the lines of 'are we involved in
this?', 'what do we know of this?', and 'what are we doing about this?'. The
answers to those questions all those months ago were 'No, we are not involved in
any interrogation of detainees.', 'No, we know nothing of this.', and "No, there
is nothing we should be doing about this because as far as we know there is
nothing to it, and we have faith in our very good friends the Americans'.
Now it turns out that we were involved, we had our own people time and again
raising with our defence and intelligence establishment grave concerns about
what was going on, and we apparently did not one damn thing about it.
Somebody has been telling grade A porkies. But lying happens all the time.
Politicians here are held to have a level of credibility just below that of used
car salesmen. So what of it?
The problem is that it goes directly to who we are.
On the one hand we're mad keen to play the role of global policeman as deputies
of Sheriff Bush, sallying forth on command, relying blindly on US intelligence
(that has proved to be extraordinarily inaccurate in regards to Iraq), but on
the other we are not prepared speak, let alone act, on concerns about the police
force's behaviour. Hell, we'll even lie about what we knew about it, and hope
that if it did anything inappropriate it can get away with it.
Team this with our shocking performance on the Kyoto Protocol which came into
effect this week, and its is one of the few weeks in my life when I am not proud
of Australia, not proud to be an Australian. I apologise for our conduct on
both these issues, but must warn you that it is very likely we'll continue to
behave this way for a while yet.
How the devil we can claim the moral high ground in international affairs just
stupefies me.
Richard
Still baldly going...
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