A bit of a must-see this one.

Where does Mohamed ElBaradei get off with his mock outrage and indignation over the Israelis bombing something or other in Syria and the US covering it up? It’s got to be for show, surely? He can’t be genuinely surprised. Where’s he been for the last six year?

Hey, Mohamed, two words: Hans Blix. Don’t tell us you don’t know what the score is, mate. If ‘being treated like a dick by Republicans’ isn’t in your job description you need to have a word with the UN’s Human Resources department and get it sorted.

ElBaradei wants to be careful. Much more of this and he’ll be getting a visit from a bunch of thickset gentlemen commenting what a nice International Atomic Energy Agency he’s got and what a shame it would be if it got broken. Just ask the likes of Jose Bustani. The worst thing you can do in that kind of job is your job.

Bushed!

The former U.S. Attorney General and middle-ranking demon John Ashcroft on mock executions:

When you’re strapped to a bench, there’s a big difference between water being poured and forced into you. I’d quite like to try this ‘waterboarding’ as described by its supporters. Sounds like just the thing for a warm spring day.

When do we get an Olbermann?

Where to start with this? In this brave new world, due process starts at 35,000 feet:

On a fateful day in this war, airmen delivered justice to the al Qaeda terrorist Zarqawi, in the form of two precision-guided, 500-pound bombs. (Applause.)

Justice takes many forms, my friends. We like the ones that go bang the best. I love the way the transcriber included the applause as well. The rest of the speech, as usual, reads as if it was beamed in from a parallel universe.

I met Christopher Hitchens once. He was foul-mouthed and graceless. The lecture he’d just given was rambling and at the Q & A session afterwards he’d shown barely disguised contempt for the paying audience. It didn’t make me want to read his books and I’m sort of puzzled as to how he’s as acclaimed as he is, particularly of late.

His latest piece, in which he gives us his theory as to why alpha males like disgraced governor of New York Eliot Spitzer enter politics, is a corker:

Hitchens [...] has written the obituaries of more than a few political careers, and he has a theory about the ones with poor coital judgment: They just don’t see illicit sex as an obvious threat to their political survival. In fact, they see it as a primary reason to seek higher office in the first place.

“You wouldn’t be doing any of this if one of the objectives was not to increase the amount of pussy that was available to you. That is what you do,” Hitch says. “You don’t do it to be, ah, the most approval-rated governor of New York, for fuck’s sake.”

Not even I’m this cynical or simplistic and God knows I try. I can’t think of many mere bloggers who are. But there sits Christopher Hitchens, wit, polemicist and intellectual.

(Via Aarowatch)

(via Crooks and Liars)

Senator, you are now campaigning as if Barack Obama were the Democrat and you were the Republican.

The US State Department’s 2007 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices is out.

In it there are both brickbats and bouquets for those at the sharp end of The War Against Terror. A feedback sandwich you might say.

“Despite President Musharraf’s stated commitment to democratic transition, Pakistan’s human rights situation deteriorated during much of 2007,” said the annual report released on Tuesday.

‘Six of of ten, see me’, in other words.

The US itself doesn’t feature in the State Department’s list. I think it’s like the Eurovision Song Contest where you’re not allowed to give points to your own side.

So, it’s down to others to judge the US government on its human rights record. How’s it getting on? Well, it’s a little hard to say.

The U.N. investigator on torture said on Tuesday the United States had denied his request to visit U.S.-run jails in Iraq and insisted a visit could help clear its legacy of the prison abuse scandal in Abu Ghraib.

It’s a canny tactic and one that Andy Abraham should adopt in Belgrade later this year. He could refuse to perform his soulless, insulting piece of dreck. That way nobody can judge if it’s any good and he can declare himself winner at the end.

Like the Chardonnay Chap over at Aaronovitch Watch, I wish I’d written this:

If Bush had spent that $3,000,000,000,000 on shoes, no American child would ever have to wear the same shoes more than once. Or he could have bought everyone in Iraq an Aston Martin. Those would be the actions of a madman, of course, yet still more sensible than what he actually did do.

I’ll have my complimentary cheap shot, please…

There’s something of a brouhaha over the proposed George W Bush presidential library, museum and institute. This was my favourite bit:

Alarm has also been expressed over the independent institute that will fund research promoting Bush’s ideas and vision.

How much money will it take to research Bush’s ideas and vision? Once you’ve ascertained that shooting, bombing and torturing people doesn’t make them free, I mean. You could hold a whip-round in a phone box and raise enough money.

Never mind a library, a small book case would suffice. The George W Bush presidential tea chest, perhaps. It’ll be an important monument to wrong. Put a big sign on the door warning anyone visiting that they are risking their life chances and intellectual well-being, and then let them get on with it.

Let him have his ‘library’. It’ll let us milk this over-producing cow for a little while longer.

So, the knives are being sharpened for Ralph Nader now that he’s announced his intention to run for US president as an independent candidate.

“I remember when he did this before, it didn’t turn out too well, for anyone, especially our country,” Mrs Clinton said.

“I hope it’s kind of a just a passing fancy that people won’t take too seriously.”

There you go: Back off Nader, there’s no place for you in the world’s greatest democracy. The American democratic process is like the ‘No Homers Club’ from Simpsons episode ‘Homer The Great‘.

Democrats like to blame Nader for splitting the vote and Al Gore getting beaten in 2000 like it wasn’t Gore’s job to provide the requisite appeal to voters. That Gore didn’t have what it takes to inspire and fire voters’ imaginations is hardly Nader’s fault. That Gore in 2000 was a dullard who couldn’t even out-debate George Bush seems to have passed everybody by.

‘If it wasn’t for Nader,’ people whine, ‘they’d have had no choice but to vote for our guy’. Taking votes and voters for granted - it’s a trait you see the world over. Yay, democracy.

It’s like New Labour over here when left-wing voters look in the direction of the Liberal Democrats. A vote for the Lib Dems will let the Conservatives in via the back door they tell us. What they conveniently forget is that a (supposedly) left-wing party doing its moral and ideological job properly wouldn’t have to worry about defectors and protest voters. And its the same for the Democrats.

The trick to politics should be how tell people why they should vote for you, not issue dire warnings about what will happen if they don’t. If people don’t want to vote for you, you’ve got nobody to blame but yourself. If people want to vote for Nader then Clinton and Obama need to ask why and say why not. And give better reasons than ‘Wah! Your votes belong to me!’

“This Saturday at midnight,” you said Thursday, “legislation authorizing intelligence professionals to quickly and effectively monitor terrorist communications will expire. If Congress does not act by that time, our ability to find out who the terrorists are talking to, what they are saying and what they are planning will be compromised.” You said that “the lives of countless Americans depend” on your getting your way.

This is crap.

And as a bonus, John McCain, torture flip-flopper:

Will you and the equivocators who surround you like a cocoon never go on the record about anything?

Even the stuff you claim to believe in?

Silly me.

One of the biggest threats to US security may now come from within Europe, US Homeland Security head Michael Chertoff has told the BBC.

Yes, but does he have a dossier cut and pasted from the Internet? Without one of those, all this is just so much wind.

When you think about it though, this could be a way out of trouble for Peter Hain. All he need do is defect to the Americans and spill the beans on our weapons of mass destruction programmes, our burgeoning nuclear ambitions and our links to rogue states in return for a pile of CIA cash and certain assurances.

Then, the humanitarian intervention going off without a hitch, the British people welcoming their American rescuers with open arms and flowers, and our natural resources (minor celebrities and buy-to-let landlords) liberated eight ways from Sunday, Hain can head the new puppet government.

It’s perfect. We’re saved from terrorism (one way or another), Hain salvages his career and the likes of David Aaronovitch, Nick Cohen, Melanie Philips, along with their attendant keyboard battalions and armchair artillerymen, can finally shut their big yap.

Update: Ladies and gentlemen, Michael Chertoff’s gut:

Thanks to pro_tempore in the comments.

The Daily Mash:

Wayne Hayes, professor of American Studies at Dundee University, said: “I think America is ready to vote for a woman, they’re just not ready to vote for an absolutely ghastly woman.”

Fiery.

The presidency is now a criminal conspiracy:

“Waterboarding is torture,” Daniel Levin was to write. Daniel Levin was no theorist and no protester. He was no troublemaking politician. He was no table-pounding commentator. Daniel Levin was an astonishingly patriotic American and a brave man.

Brave not just with words or with stances, even in a dark time when that kind of bravery can usually be scared or bought off.

Charged, as you heard in the story from ABC News last Friday, with assessing the relative legality of the various nightmares in the Pandora’s box that is the Orwell-worthy euphemism “Enhanced Interrogation,” Mr. Levin decided that the simplest, and the most honest, way to evaluate them … was to have them enacted upon himself.

Daniel Levin took himself to a military base and let himself be waterboarded…

The mighty Keith Olbermann and the mighty George Carlin, together at last:

Philip on the potential fallout from an investigation into whether the US used British territory - Diego Garcia - as a “black site” Guantanamo style prison:

[I]f our ministers had even a residual capacity for embarrassment, their average time in office would be a good deal lower and their suicide rate a good deal higher.

I think you can be pretty sure that should any evidence emerge, ministers will plead a puzzled, rueful ignorance - like they did when it came out that they’d been ‘misled’ by the US over the use of incendiary weapons (ie, napalm) in Iraq.

Because, after all, it’s much better for our leaders to appear to be stupid and ignorant - to be confused and hurt like a mugged pensioner - rather than mendacious, isn’t it? When push comes to shove, we’d prefer our public servants to be idiots not evil. This ignorance, however, is mendacious in its own right because it is willful.

If the government want to know whether Diego Garcia is a mini-Guantanamo, why don’t they just ask? Because, this is a coquettish game of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ that gives British ministers a get out clause at a later date, that’s why. It’s that old devil called plausible deniability again. They can then whine that their major partner in The War Against Terror lied to them. How’s that for anti-Americanism?

Blackwater security contractors in Iraq have been involved in at least 195 “escalation of force” incidents since early 2005, including several previously unreported killings of Iraqi civilians, according to a new congressional account of State Department and company documents.

In one of the killings, according to a State Department document, Blackwater personnel tried to cover up what had occurred and provided a false report. In another case, involving a Blackwater convoy’s collision with 18 civilian vehicles, the firm accused its own personnel of lying about the event.

read the rest

Former New York mayor and US Republican presidential ‘hopeful’ Rudy Giuliani’s been in town and dissing the NHS.

Speaking at an event at a London hotel, he said: “Healthcare right now in America - and I think it has been true of your experience of socialised medicine in England - is not only very expensive, it’s increasingly less effective.

“I had prostate cancer seven years. My chance of survival in the US is 82%; my chance of survival if I was here in England is below 50%.

I think he probably ‘misspoke‘. What he, of course, meant was:

A prominent politician’s chance of survival in the US is 82%…

I’d be interested to see, to pluck an example at random, the survival rates of black men from New Orleans having no medical insurance. It’s a question of who you are, I would say.

A bit like having a dodgy ticker over here. One imagines that if Gordon Brown were to wake up this morning with a prostate gland the size of a grapefruit, his chance of survival would be considerably greater than 50%.

[W]hy do the Saudis need military aid at all? Their favourite weapon seems to be the stone. I suppose now if a woman commits adultery or speaks out of turn she’ll be battered to death with a bloody great ruby instead.

read the rest

‘Mr Bush was “in good humour” afterwards and ready to resume “his normal activities” at Camp David, Mr Stanzel said.’