The United Nations Security Council - Star Chamber for the 24½th Century

"Court sessions were held in secret, with no indictments, no right of appeal, no juries, and no witnesses. Evidence was presented in writing." Wikipedia

Bring on the glitter.

Pernicious

An unprecedented attempt by a British oil trading firm to prevent the Guardian reporting parliamentary proceedings collapsed today following a spontaneous online campaign to spread the information the paper had been barred from publishing.

Carter-Ruck, the law firm representing Trafigura, was accused of infringing the supremacy of parliament after it insisted that an injunction obtained against the Guardian prevented the paper from reporting a question tabled on Monday by the Labour MP Paul Farrelly.

Farrelly's question was about the implications for press freedom of an order obtained by Trafigura preventing the Guardian and other media from publishing the contents of a report related to the dumping of toxic waste in Ivory Coast.

In today's edition, the Guardian was prevented from identifying Farrelly, reporting the nature of his question, where the question could be found, which company had sought the gag, or even which order was constraining its coverage.

But overnight numerous users of the social networking site Twitter posted details of Farrelly's question and by this morning the full text had been published on two prominent blogs as well as in the magazine Private Eye.

Carter-Ruck withdrew its gagging attempt by lunchtime, shortly before a 2pm high court hearing at which the Guardian was about to challenge its stance, with the backing of other national newspapers.

MPs from all three major parties condemned the firm's attempt to prevent the reporting of parliamentary proceedings. Farrelly told John Bercow, the Speaker : "Yesterday, I understand, Carter-Ruck quite astonishingly warned of legal action if the Guardian reported my question. In view of the seriousness of this, will you accept representations from me over this matter and consider whether Carter-Ruck's behaviour constitutes a potential contempt of parliament?"

The Commons question reveals that Trafigura has obtained a hitherto secret injunction, known as a "super-injunction", to prevent disclosures about toxic oil waste it arranged to be dumped in west Africa in 2006, making thousands of people ill.

Farrelly is asking Jack Straw, the justice secretary, about the implications for press freedom of a high court injunction obtained on 11 September 2009 by Trafigura "on the publication of the Minton report on the alleged dumping of toxic waste in the Ivory Coast, commissioned by Trafigura".

The Guardian is still forbidden by the terms of the existing injunction, granted by a vacation duty judge, Mr Justice Maddison, to give further information about the Minton report, or its contents. Last month, Trafigura agreed to pay more than £30m in compensation and legal costs to 30,000 inhabitants of Abidjan in Ivory Coast, for "flu-like symptoms" they might have suffered following the dumping. The oil traders continue to deny that the waste could have caused serious or fatal injuries.

The use of "super-injunctions", under which commercial corporations claim the right to keep secret the fact that they have been to court, has been growing. Anonymity is also increasingly being granted to individual litigants.

Last week, an anonymity order was overturned at the supreme court under which Mohammed al-Ghabra, an alleged al-Qaida financier named in official UN and Treasury publications, was to be known only as G. A further pending supreme court case involving an MI5 officer's memoirs is currently only known as "A v B".

Alan Rusbridger, the editor of the Guardian, said yesterday: "I'm very pleased that common sense has prevailed and that Carter-Ruck are now prepared to vary their draconian injunction to allow reporting of parliament. It is time that judges stopped granting 'super-injunctions' which are so absolute and wide-ranging that nothing about them can be reported at all."

Carter-Ruck, whose partner Adam Tudor has been representing Trafigura, issued a press release conceding: "The Order would indeed have prevented the Guardian from reporting on the Parliamentary Question which had been tabled for later this week." But the firm said the Guardian's reporting on the issue had been "highly misleading".

The firm added: "There is no question of Trafigura seeking to 'gag' the media from reporting Parliamentary proceedings, and the parties have now agreed to an amendment to the existing Order so as to reflect that."

The previous night, Carter-Ruck had written to the Guardian saying: "The threatened publication would place the Guardian in contempt of court … please confirm by immediate return that the publications threatened will not take place."

At Westminster , the Liberal Democrat MP Evan Harris said there was a need to "control the habit of law firms" of obtaining secrecy injunctions, and his colleague David Heath told the Commons a "fundamental principle" was being threatened: that MPs should be able to speak freely and have their words reported freely.

On the Conservative side, David Davis, former shadow home secretary, criticised the rising use of "super-injunctions", in which the fact of the injunction is itself kept secret.

He said courts should not be allowed to grant injunctions forbidding the reporting of parliament.

Bercow said the issue could be raised formally as a matter of privilege, but he understood the injunction had been lifted.

Farrelly told the Guardian afterwards: "The issuing by the courts of so-called super-injunctions is rightly controversial and a matter of growing concern. That is why, using parliamentary privilege, I tabled these questions.

"The practice offends the time-honoured 'rule against prior restraint', which safeguards freedom of expression in this country.

"It also fails to protect whistleblowers acting in the public interest. The huge legal bills involved in fighting cases, too, have a chilling effect on legitimate investigative journalism.

"So often, the beneficiaries are big corporations. The fact that the press is also barred from reporting the existence of these gagging orders is doubly pernicious."

The Head of State

Cool. The CIA lists Michaëlle Jean as Head of State, but Steve's got his knickers in a twist about it. Funnily enough, the Governor General's website is off the air. So we have here a palace insurrection.

Parliamentary democracy is up to this challenge by Steve, who has contributed absolutely nothing to Canadian society, but is all in favour of an authoritarian state, as imagined by George Orwell. With a little help from his friends, particularly The Queen, he's toast.

Lyndon Johnson in Afghanistan

He was beginning to wrestle with himself, aware of what escalation might do to his domestic programs, wary of the military's promises, knowing that it might be easier to start that to finish, that it was his record and his Presidency which were at stake, and aware also of the charge that might be made against him if things went sour - that he was soft, and that he had lost a country. His enemies, he knew, were lying in wait out there to turn on him if he went wrong on Vietnam, to destroy him for other reasons. What good would it do, he told friends, not to spend American resources on the war is you lost the war, and in losing the war, lost the Congress? Yet knowing also that if he went ahead he might lose the Congress, too, and might lose the Great Society. He would say to friends, talking about this dilemma, "If we get into this war I know what's going to happen. Those damn conservatives are going to sit in Congress and they're going to use this war as a way of opposing my Great Society legislation. People like Stennis and Gross. They hate this stuff, they don't want to help the poor and the Negroes but they're afraid to be against it at a time like this when there's been all this prosperity. But the war, oh, they'll like the war. They'll take the war as their weapon. They'll be against my programs because of the war. I know what they'll say, they'll say they're not against it, not against the poor, but we have this job to do, beating the Communists. We beat the Communists first, then we can look around and maybe give something to the poor." It was, said a man who was with him that night, eerie listening to him speak, like being with a man who has a premonition of his own death.

David Halberstam
The Best and the Brightest
Ballantine Books, New York, 1992
page 597

Mother Jones on Truth and Afghanistan

Harper Tinkles While Afghanistan Burns

By the way, whatever happened to Grant Kippen and the Afghanistan Electoral Complaints Commission? It sounds like a band.

You know, it's a funny thing about the "UN-backed" ECC. It didn't exist in the first draft of the Afghan Constitution. and, interestingly enough, it doesn't exist in the Afghan Constitution as of March 2009. It was not in the Electoral Law of 2004, but was in the Electoral Law of 2005, by which time three members were also to be appointed by the Secretary General. And who advises him, one wonders?

The ECC is usually referred to as the "UN-backed" commission. I'm not sure what "UN-backed" really means. Which part of the UN? The General Assembly? The so-called Security Council, which rules by Chapter VII and Divine Right? The psychotic United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, an agency by gangsters, for gangsters, and of the gangsters?

So, exactly where did the Electoral Law of 2005 actually come from? Why does Grant Kippen, a Canadian white guy, actually have a job? Who pays him? And why is he suddenly irrelevant in the soap opera of the United Nations in Afghanistan, with JK Galbraith's son having a hissy fit, and Kai Eide reportedly firing him all over corruption in the Afghan federal election, which the "UN-backed" Electoral Complaints Commission (ECC)is investigating.

It's a funny thing about Galbraith. The UN was pressured by the US into taking him on, essentially over Eide's dead body, so that the United Nations mission in Afghanistan, modest though it is, had an American usurper as its deputy, which to any naive observer would make the UN mission seem just as corrupt as NATO and ISAF, and of course the Security Council, which rubber stamps continuing extensions of the ISAF presence in Afghanistan, which doesn't include Bagram or Operation Enduring Freedom, both of which seem well outside International Humanitarian Law, which the US treats as if it were UNESCO, a worthy enterprise but largely decoration.

I recall that some people were hung at Nuremberg for violations of International Humanitarian Law as it existed in 1939, never mind the Geneva Conventions.

Where was I? Oh, yes, Galbraith. As he said in his Washington Post "op-ed":

"President Obama needs a legitimate Afghan partner to make any new strategy for the country work. However, the extensive fraud that took place on Aug. 20 virtually guarantees that a government emerging from the tainted vote will not be credible with many Afghans."

Where did Obama come from? Who was Galbraith working for, the UN or the US? If he was having so much trouble, why didn't he take it up with the Secretary-General, rather than the press? If the election was a predictable train wreck, the train at least ran on time, and it makes one wonder why Galbraith and the US were so keen his having the job in the first place, unless they really bought into the fantasy that there was a real government in Kabul.

Meanwhile, back at the Electoral Complaints Commission, which may or may not be part of the United Nations, Mr. Kippen stated:

“I look at this as a huge opportunity both professionally and personally. It’s a huge opportunity to come in and help build institutions and processes,” said Kippen who reflects on the excitement of Afghans involved in the political process.

“We are in a country where there’s a lot of challenges on many different perspectives. I take a lot of strength from our Afghan colleagues and their determination for it to turn out well. This is really historic stuff.”

"It will be fair," Grant Kippen, the head of the ECC, said.

"We've got these international experts who have been doing this and who have advised that this is a good approach."

Either Mr. Kippen or Mr. Galbraith is living in Fantasyland. Or both.

On the other hand we have some American sanity, based on history, by Mr. W. Polk, who has written an open letter to Obama in The Nation. I recommend it to Mr. Galbraith, Mr. Kippen, Mr. Moon, and in fact, everybody with half a brain, which leaves out the military/industrial wing of the Conservative Party of Canada.

Sophisticated Explosive Devices

"But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought."

George Orwell
Politics and the English Language
Essays, Knopf, Toronto, 2002, pg. 964

What is an "Improvised Explosive Device"? It's a bomb. Like the one dropped on Nagasaki, which of course was an atomic bomb, and delivered from the air, it was definitely "improvised" because it had never been tested. The technology of course was very sophisticated, but so what? The technology of "explosively formed penetrators" is also sophisticated. The whole thing is sophisticated enought to have killed 76 of the 131 Canadian soldiers killed in Afghanistan.

So call rewrite. Substitute every reference to Improvised Explosive Device, or IED, with Sophisticated Explosive Device, or SEP, and see how it reads.