Our Enemies All Along

We've been eating them for millennia, and now the pigs are wreaking vengeance on Mexico, parts of the USA, and Canada. Over 149 people have been killed by swine flu, and panic is spreading fast. The virus, which is actually a hybrid of swine, avian and human strains of influenza, has mutated and can now be transmitted between humans, as opposed to being limited to pig-human contact. 

One of the most interesting things about the current panic, apart from the fact that we're all going to die squealing while the pigs laugh in mocking human tones (which is admittedly quite interesting), is that you can literally see the panic spreading by refreshing newspages online and seeing words like "concern" become "worry", and finally "terror"

You can even see it in the responses of the experts and administrators who we look to for guidance when mutated strains of hybrid pig-virus start leaking across our borders. 

Richard Besser(Head of the Centres for Disease Control): "As we look for more cases of swine flu, we are seeing more cases of swine flu. We expect to see more cases of swine flu."

and

Keiji Fukuda (WHO assistant director general): "The situation is fluid and the situation continues to evolve."

and also 

Sandra Mournier-Jack (London School of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene): "We should be, in a way, more alarmed, but at the same time we shouldn't panic because there a lot of things we don't know about this disease at the moment."

God help us all.

Yoo Make Me Wanna Shout

A lot of criticism has been levelled at President Barack Obama for his refusal to entertain the notion of prosecuting the individuals responsible for allowing torture (often in the form of waterboarding) to be used as an interrogation technique for detainees in American prisons. Mr. Obama's defence of the CIA and various officials under the Bush administration is political, pragmatic, and to an extent legal in nature. 

However, not enough criticism has been directed at John Yoo (pictured above). A professor of Law at the Berkeley School of Law, John Yoo was a pivotal figure in the Bush administration's drive to legalise torture. Mr. Yoo co-authored the Bybee Memo (downloadable here), a document issued by the Bush administration's Department of Justice in response to CIA enquiries regarding the legality of certain interrogation methods. 

Among other things, Mr. Yoo concludes in the memo that even though an act is "cruel, inhuman or degrading", it may yet not exceed the prerogative of the state to authorise it, and thus does not subject any interrogator to legal prosecution. Essentially, the CIA asked if it could torture suspects, and Mr. Yoo is the one who answered "yes".

Mr. Yoo had a chance to defend his position in a debate with Doug Cassel, a human rights scholar, at Notre Dame University. I've reprinted an excerpt:

Cassel: If the president deems he's got to torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person's child, there is no law that can stop him?

Yoo: No treaty.

Cassel: Also no law by Congress; that is what you wrote in the August 2002 memo-

Yoo: I think it depends on why the president thinks he needs to do that.

Mr. Yoo's position is a bald reminder of the vast gulf that exists between what is legal and what is just. There is an argument to be made that what interrogations conducted under the Bush administration were perfectly legal, enshrined as they were in a liberal and disingenuous reading of the law. They were nonetheless despicably criminal.

Summit Season Gets Ugly

The ASEAN summit scheduled to happen today didn't, due to a relatively large protest and an extremely lethargic security response. The protesters belong to the "red-shirts", who oppose incumbent Thai PM Abhisit Vejjajiva (who has now become officially "embattled"), who they claim took power undemocratically at the tail-end of Thailand's political crisis earlier this year. 

The ASEAN summit would have brought together the leaders of the 10 ASEAN nations, as well as leaders from Japan, China, South Korea, New Zealand, Australia and India. The summit was aimed at discussing how the current financial shitstorm will affect the region, as well as formulating a coherent policy response to North Korea's brazen missile-launching. 

ASEAN as an organisation was formed as a weak economic community with only six members, two of which were city-states (Brunei and Singapore), but has since taken on most of South-East Asia and has begun to talk the talk of European Union-style integration, producing a charter in 2008 promising closer co-operation, as well as an erosion of principles of non-interference which have historically held back advances in human rights.

A lot of people are claiming that this was a humiliation for the recently inaugurated PM, and it will no doubt embarrass Mr. Vejjajiva. It's incredibly important that summits including foreign dignitaries go smoothly, and although protests definitely have their place, especially at the front gates of summits, it's a major security breach when protesters break through the glass, enter the compound, and start helping themselves to the buffet lunch. The security forces are well within their rights to require protests to take place outside the summit's venues, and they should have ensured that this was the case. Protesting is healthy for a democracy; rioting is not.

The summit will have to be rescheduled, with optimistic estimates placing it at two months from now.

Obama Proves That Americans Understand Irony

In the days and weeks that went by after Mr. Obama's inauguration, we were patient and accepted that he could not immediately reverse all the damage the Bush administration had wrought on the USA and the world. It's now growing

 increasingly clear that with regards to civil rights and the rule of law, Mr. Obama's administration is not offering "change" at all, and is indeed reneging on some of the most important promises it made during its election campaign.

Mr. Obama has announced the closure of Guantanamo Bay, and has disallowed the usage of the term "unlawful enemy combatants"(a term which essentially gave free reign to those charged with detaining prisoners) with reference to that facility, however, he has repeatedly asserted (and is now contesting for) the government's right to do exactly the same things at a military base in Bagram, Afghanistan. 

When it comes to the protection of civil liberties on the domestic front, the Obama administration's inability to "change" or "progress" is increasingly embarrassing for anyone who wrote articles about Obama with titles like "A New Dawn and a Mythic Hope". Mr. Obama's administration has blocked at least three lawsuits brought against the NSA (National Security Agency) over warrantless wiretapping, citing the argument that state secrets had to be protected, and that to even entertain a trial, or allow any sort of out-of-court settlement would "cause exceptionally grave harm to national security" (source). This is exactly the argument the Bush administration used to justify its executive excesses, and exactly the argument the Obama campaign lambasted, derided, and whipped up fury over.

Further, Mr. Obama and his administration brazenly betrayed a commitment made last year by congressional Democrats to allow members of the Bush administration implicated in illegal surveillance (wiretappings and email interception, mostly) to be prosecuted. When called up on this promise, the Obama administration not only declared that they would not be allowing any of these lawsuits to go forward, they also added that in the future, lawsuits against the government on the grounds of illegal surveillance will be prohibited, unless the government openly disseminates your phone bills itself. By that point, though, I'll already be applying for jobs at Minitruth. 

There is yet hope, though. the outrage that Obama's attitudes has provoked has been vigorous and healthy, and decidedly bipartisan. If anything, Obama's campaign worked too well. You can't base a campaign on reigniting the electorate's interest in politics unless you're actually ready for them to actually be interested in what you do. Thankfully, closing Guantanamo Bay wasn't a salve strong enough to mask the creeping stains of the rest of the administration's actions.

"Change can't just be a slogan" - Barack Obama, 2007 

This Also Happened

Because Italy embarrassed itself far more this week than I could go over in one Politic Blunder 

feature, a follow-up post was needed. 

At a NATO summit earlier this week, PM Berlusconi (pictured left talking on his mobile instead of being a Prime Minister), refused to acknowledge German Chancellor Merkel and the rest of the most powerful men and women in the world who were waiting for him to make a symbolic walk across a symbolic bridge to symbolically meet French President Sarkozy, symbolising the enduring importance of symbolism in politics. 

Mr. Berlusconi is on record claiming that he definitely wasn't talking down his cracked out transexual prostitute on the phone.

Update: I've been told to make clear that Mr. Berlusconi claims he on his mobile in negotiation with Turkish PM Tayyip Erdogan, trying to get him to accept Danish PM Anders Rasmussen as Secretary-General of NATO. If this is confirmed, it will make his actions misplaced and arrogant, but less so.

Italy also embarrassed itself by throwing a clueless fit about the new law in Afghanistan which essentially legalises marital rape. Terrible though this law is, Italy has completely missed the point by threatening to withdraw all female troops from its operations in Afghanistan (pictured left: the comeliest of these troops). The problem with this is that the Italian military clearly didn't think it was realistic to remove all its troops from Afghanistan. The implication is therefore that the female troops are sufficiently expendable that withdrawing them to make a point about women is a feasible option. It's incoherent and entirely inappropriate.

If you want to make a point, Italy, do it like a normal country. Please?

A Politic Blunder Feature: G20 London

The G20 Summit here in London finished two days ago, amid much feigned interest, mild controversy and even milder actual interest. Almost the textbook definition of what is normally considered a stereotypical political talking shop, by virtue of the extraordinary circumstances, was actually a fairly big deal. 

                                            

The festivities (no, wait, what's the opposite of festivities?) took off in style with President Obama meeting Queen Elizabeth II, and soliciting his wife to manhandle her. Thereafter Mr. Berlusconi made a fool out of himself by doing his best Little Rascals face between Mr. Obama and Mr. Medvedev, seen left gesturing wildly at their respective secret service snipers. 

The actual summit was surprisingly productive. The focus was more on saving capitalism rather than reforming it. Lots of money was given to the IMF (amounting to about $750 billion) ostensibly to pass on to developing countries in loans. Fantastical amounts of money were accounted for fiscal expansion (that is, the government spending more money on programmes and projects, often to create jobs where the private sector is cutting them), amounting to over $5 trillion. 

Talk of actually reforming the financial system was thin on the ground, with resolutions to begin to monitor "systemically important hedge funds", and to begin to regulate excessive leverage. There wasn't much commitment on international standards on finance either, beyond a token dictum on the importance of "internationally agreed high standards", and changing the name of the Financial Stability Forum (FSF) to the Financial Stability Board (FSB), which will have the exact same members, with no indication of any specific change in function. 

In terms of politicking, in brief: The USA wanted less regulation and more funds to support fiscal expansion, Europe wanted more regulation but dragged its feet on the money. The G20 was very shrill about its commitment to the developing countries, presumably to make up for the fact that no strategically unimportant poor countries were allowed to attend. 

Everyone agrees that the world is going to hell in a handbasket for one reason or another (This man's been predicting it with frightening regularity and speed for a while now). This is exactly why the G20 summit was a good thing, and why it's important that people recognise that it is a good thing. 

Expanding the realm of substantive international policy-making from the G7 to the G20 is a wonderful thing, even if there is still an enragingly long way to go. Conferences such as these actually work, too. Pledges were made, and though they probably won't be followed through on completely, funds will be raised and legislation will be written. Politics isn't a technical exercise, there are hundreds of degrees between failure and success, and it's in those spaces that progress is made. This isn't rocket science. It's much harder.