My colleague Craig Murray throws down the gauntlet; There is an interesting link between Charles and I on torture … All the CIA rendition flights to Uzbekistan came from Szczytno-Szymany in Poland. We now know that the CIA had both use of that airbase and a secret torture prison nearby.https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,621450,00.html I […]
My posting below on Torture has prompted various comments, some of which have come from people arriving here via my former FCO colleague Craig Murray’s site and who support strongly his insistence that Torture Does Not Work. See for example Moo: I hope you’re not seriously suggesting two things: that torture works and […]
Lots on this subject. Some US conservative thoughts. Newt Gingrich says President Obama is a huge success, in his own terms at least: In just 100 days, President Obama has been devastatingly effective in moving forward swiftly the most radical, government-expanding agenda in American history. At home, in everything from his economic […]
Here is a fine article by Richard Fernandez on the T-word. He takes up an article by Jeff Jacoby which points up the moral dilemmas in all this: Suppose the CIA had been denied permission to use brutal interrogation tactics, and Al Qaeda had consequently gone on to murder thousands […]
Update: Welcome readers from Mark Steyn and Deborah Gyapong. This issue – can Western Civilisation be defended? – is aired a lot these days. A big part of the answer lies in one’s assessment of the value of that civilisation – and its intrinsic strength/resilience. If you think that something is […]
I hitherto have not ventured very often on to the noisy battlefield of Torture and its diplomatic and political and moral ramifications. Although this posting about the unnoticed and permanently pained victims of terrorist violence says most of what I feel on the issue. I have steered clear because everyone else appears […]
The United States’ policy towards Cuba has failed. So says US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. And she should be in a good position to know, as her husband presided over this failing policy for eight years. Meanwhile equally ailing and failing Fidel Castro wants the USA to go even […]
Geoffrey Wheatcroft in the Guardian writes about the Impotence of Might: There are few more startling illustrations of this impotence of might than the pirates, or the country they come from. A hundred years ago, any one of half a dozen imperial powers could have conquered Somalia in a matter […]
Some Good Friday thoughts. Most people (including until yesterday myself included) do not know that it is only quite recently that the USA established full diplomatic relations with the Vatican, namely in 1984 under President Reagan. The issue was controversial in US domestic terms and even provoked litigation. Did establishment […]
President Obama has called for a world free of nuclear weapons. But he accepts that it might not happen in his lifetime. Why it is so difficult to scale back these systems once they are there? Basically, nuclear weapons are ghastly because they can not be used on any scale […]
