At a press conference last night Jack Straw said:
"It's hard to imagine what it must be like to go through so terrible an ordeal.
"But it's even harder to imagine how anyone could inflict such suffering. To kidnap a man, to subject him and his family to the agony of prolonged uncertainty and, then to murder him in this way in inhuman."
This is something we could all sign up to.
But if he really believes it why isn't he saying the same things about the Bush administration - which is treating innocent people in exactly this way - and why is the Blair Government arguing in the courts that it should be entitled to use information extracted by torture in other countries?
2 comments:
Thats a bit rich. The Guantanamo Bay residents may be kept under circumstances which are not exactly up to scratch but the analogy is not reasonable.
Kidnapping innocents, terrifying them for the cameras and slicing their heads off for no reason other than where they come from is bestial behaviour of the most extreme kind. Nothing even approaching that has been perpertrated by either US or UK governments.
The words Jack Straw used were:
"To kidnap a man, to subject him and his family to the agony of prolonged uncertainty and, then to murder him in this way in inhuman."
I believe that the US have kidnapped, held indefinitely and murdered innocent people. There are official inquiries going on into these actions.
My point is that Jack Straw et al would be justified in making such statements IF the US and their allies had themselves acted in accordance with international law.
By ignoring international law, and the fundamental rights we claim we support, we have substantially weakened our case against the likes of these kidnappers.
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