Murder the ingrates

Shell Pays The Money And Runs

2009-06-16T08:51:00.005+10:00

by Jess Hill + June 11 2009
First published on New Matilda

Shell has dodged the court case over Ogoni deaths in Nigeria, but its cash settlement is still a big win in the fight against corporate human rights abuses.

As Ken Saro-Wiwa Jr wrote on Tuesday, there was no hat-in-the-air moment.

On 3 June 2009, US District Judge Kimba Wood of the Federal Court in Manhattan adjourned the Wiwa v Shell trial indefinitely. Coming 14 years after the death of poet and activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, the adjournment marked yet another delay in the protracted and complex fight for justice by the Wiwa family and several other Ogoni people, as reported in a recent newmatilda.com article.

Observers interpreted the adjournment to mean either that Shell had yet another appeal underway to move the case or that another Shell subsidiary in Nigeria was also being made to stand trial — or that a settlement was being negotiated.

On Monday 8 June, a settlement was reached: $US15.5 million to compensate for nine dead men, one amputated arm, one life led in exile, several others tortured and detained and 13 years of legal fees. Perhaps the subject of the final email to Ken Saro-Wiwa Jr confirming the settlement says it best: "It's done???"

The plaintiffs knew the decision would not satisfy everyone. Their supporters fronted the media, characterising the settlement as an admission of guilt from Shell. Their lawyers claimed to be "very satisfied" with the result. And Shell made yet another contribution to the canon of corporate farce with a press release titled "Shell settles Wiwa case with humanitarian gesture".

When I first heard the news, I was confused and disappointed. A very public trial was due to start the following day in New York City. The plaintiffs had always wanted Shell to be held publicly accountable, and their lawyers believed they had enough evidence to pin the company to several counts of torture and execution. And Shell would never have even considered a settlement unless they thought they could lose.

But to be disappointed at this result is simplistic — the all too typical reaction of an armchair observer. To understand why this is still a landmark victory requires a closer look.

Wiwa v Shell is only the second case to be settled under the Alien Tort Claims Act (ATCA), a US federal statute that enables victims of human rights abuse — wherever it happens — to bring US civil suits against their oppressors. The ACTA was once used to try individuals (such as a military leader in the former Yugoslavia) but is now more commonly used against corporations, and survived concerted attempts by the Bush administration to have it dismissed. No guilty verdict against a corporation has ever been reached in an ACTA case, but two have now been settled out of court.

The first successful case involved a group of Burmese peasants that brought a civil suit against Unocal; it was settled in 2004 for an undisclosed sum (some reports put it at $30 million). Most companies who settle on cases such as these demand the details remain private, so as not to create a precedent. That case sailed past without causing much of a ripple.

On the other hand, the second settlement, reached in Wiwa v Shell, was splashed across the world on Tuesday from the Guardian to the New York Times, most reports couching Shell's statements in a damning evidentiary context. It has brought significant attention to the likelihood of Shell's complicity, and to the ACTA itself — which will no doubt embolden current and future ACTA cases, and prime the media to take notice of them.

Speaking to Voice of America News, Jonathan Drimmer, a lawyer who advises multinational corporations, said "Each one of these cases that actually gets to this stage, right up to the door of trial, are important cases. They're important in demonstrating that these types of issues, human rights violations, can indeed make it through a judicial system and be heard."

The Wiwa v Shell settlement does not preclude future challenges by Ogoni people. Separate challenges are already in train against Shell — one by an Ogoni in New York, another by environmental activists in the Netherlands. Elizabeth Bast, International Program Director for Friends of the Earth US, believes Wiwa v Shell is just the tip of the litigation iceberg. "Shell will be dragged from the boardroom to the courthouse, time and again," she says, "until the company addresses the injustices at the root of the Niger Delta crisis and put an end to its environmental devastation."

The legal victory aside though, it wasn't until I read Ken Saro-Wiwa Jr's opinion piece in Tuesday's Guardian that I understood what this settlement meant to the plaintiffs. In his closing paragraphs, Saro-Wiwa Jr wrote:

"For the plaintiffs and more specifically for me, it is time to pause for breath, a time to contemplate that this settlement can finally release us from the torments of the past so that we can face the future with a tangible measure of hope.

Or just maybe it is time to stop being the son of my father and be the father to my sons."

Ken was 27 when his father was killed. He is now 41. The best years of his adult life have been spent waking up every day to the constant presence of his father's death, and the hideous task of taking one of the world's largest multinationals to court. Perhaps when Shell indicated they would settle, he and his fellow plaintiffs saw an opportunity to achieve a sort of victory, some financial relief for their community, and the chance to get on with their lives. We all love to read about David v Goliath cases fought against the odds, but how many of us would devote 14 years of our lives to fighting one?

So forget about the sum for a minute, and get over the disappointment of having missed Shell going on trial. The Wiwa v Shell victory has been settled against all odds, and will hopefully be remembered in years to come as the case that opened the floodgates for oppressed peoples worldwide to hold their oppressors accountable in a court of law.

Will the real George Friedman please stand up?

2009-06-02T06:39:00.008+10:00

by Jess Hill + May 28 2009
First published on NewMatilda.com

George Friedman might have the goods when it comes to predicting short-term trends, but as a long-range futurist he's a bit of a dud, finds Jess Hill.

With futurists like Jacques Attali, Fareed Zakaria and Philip Bobbit all predicting the end of US supremacy, North Americans must really like George Friedman. His new book The Next 100 Years — an ode to enduring American muscle — debuted at number five on the New York Times bestseller list, and nearly 100,000 copies of the book are circulating the globe.

The attention is not unwarranted. Friedman is an accomplished political analyst. His private intelligence company STRATFOR, dubbed by Barrons magazine as "the Shadow CIA", is familiar to corporate executives and Washington strategists alike, and Friedman's one and 10-year forecasts have brought him a lot of deserved attention. His assessment of geopolitics past and present in The Next 100 Years is enlightening, a welcome antidote to the seat-of-your-pants minutiae of 24-hour news.

Friedman uses his short-range forecast methods to make long-range predictions. "A lot of people say it can't be done," he says self-assuredly.

And it turns out a lot of people are right. In The Next 100 Years, Friedman forecasts the 21st century with a 20th century mindset — and a narrow one at that. Here's a quick wrap of his 21st century:

The United States will rule supreme.

The US-Islamist war is already ending, and will hardly be remembered.
China will collapse like a flan in a cupboard, torn apart by internal divisions between the impoverished interior and the rich coastal provinces. The US will try to bolster it to make it a counterweight to the Russians.
There will be another Cold War between Russia and the US which will result in the collapse of Russia.
By 2050, the world's population will decline dramatically.
Climate change? Fuhgeddaboutit. By the second half of the century, two forces will combine to "moot" global warming — population decline and the dominant use of space-based solar energy.

Three new major powers will emerge: Turkey, ruling the Islamic world; Japan, whose history of militarism will preclude it from remaining a pacifist power; and Poland, which will become the leading power in a coalition of states facing the Russians.
Japan, Turkey and the US will battle for supremacy in space.

When its baby boomers are all retired and its population is in decline, the United States will not only reduce restrictions on immigration, but start paying people to move there.
Mexico will emerge as a mature, balanced economy with a stable population, and will rank among the top six or seven powers in the world. By 2080, Mexico will have a serious confrontation with the United States, which likely won't end until 2100.

I met Friedman on a rainy afternoon at the Sydney Writers' Festival. He is an intimidating figure, not least because he bears an uncanny resemblance to a recent leader of the free world. He's short, a little stockier, with grey hair, those same close-set eyes and his laugh is eerily familiar. He lives in Texas.

Essentially, Friedman is your classic Cold War warrior. A refugee from Communist Hungary, he once designed computerised war games, and his academic life focussed largely on Marxism, particularly in examining the US/Soviet relationship from a military perspective. When the Soviet threat ended in 1989, Friedman started eyeballing the horizon for America's next arch-nemesis, and published The Coming War with Japan in 1991.

The flaws in Friedman's divination methods — which had festival punters interested, amused and agitated — can essentially be boiled down to one key fault: his close-minded obsession with geopolitics. Geopolitics totally dominates Friedman's field of reference, to the exclusion of several other mitigating factors: paradigm shifts, radical technological breakthroughs, and, incredibly, climate change.

For Friedman's predictions to come true, the 21st century would need to progress without any major disturbances in the aforementioned categories. According to the "black swan" theory, that is almost impossible — the increased frequency of unpredictable, game-changing events (World War I and the internet, for example) illustrate the severe limitations of using the past to predict the future.

The success of Friedman's theories hinges on one superior paradigm remaining static: nationalism.

"In our time," he writes, "national identity matters a great deal. Geopolitics teaches that the relationships between these nations is a vital dimension of human life, and that means war is ubiquitous."

"Our time" in terms of nationalism has only been the past century. In 1900, most people — aside from a few Europeans, who invented nationalism — had little concept of their nationality. Few, notably Karl Marx, had any clue that nationalism would come to define the 20th century, much less underpin the two world wars, and later, the Balkan conflict.

It's not the fact that Friedman bases his theories on nationalism that bothers me, but rather that he presents its enduring dominance as incontrovertible. In the recent A Brief History of the Future, Jacques Attali predicts that sovereign states and nations will give way to a "super empire" tenuously coordinated by a few powers, and by 2050, coalesce around a market that is planetary and stateless. That may sound a bit nuts, but at least it takes into account the evolving state of nationalism — to forecast the 21st century without doing so is negligent.

All this focus on "ubiquitous war" also agitates my conspiracy gland, which finds it pretty hard to resist the notion that certain vested interests, ie the military, will be especially supportive of Friedman's new century, given it signals a continuation of the colossal profits the military industrial complex reaped in the 20th.

Since Friedman saw fit to address the future risk of climate change only in his epilogue, it seems a fitting note on which to end my interview with him. In the two paragraphs he devotes to the subject, he quotes Marx as saying, "Mankind does not pose problems for itself for which it does not already have a solution." He believes this will be true of global warming, which he says will be "moot" by two forces which will emerge halfway through this century: population decline and space-based solar power.

Since there is a generally accepted consensus that any mitigation of global warming would have to start well before 2050 — and many believe that it's already too late to avoid major climatic disruption — I wanted to know how George came to this surprising conclusion.

"All the people publishing those reports are obviously moving and changing where they live," Friedman replied, sounding a little irritated.

I must have looked confused. "I take a look at the scientists that make these predictions, and I look at how they're changing their lifestyle," he explained. "As an intelligence guy, the method I use is not engaging in discussions that I'm not qualified to have opinions on. I don't know whether the science is right or not. I take a look at a man who says to me, 'In 20 years, we're going to have X, Y and Z', and I see if they're moving, if they're leaving the areas that are dangerous or what."

"So are you saying that by that measure, that you doubt ... "

"We've just settled the issue that there's human-caused climate change. The question of time frame is far from settled," he interrupted.

"But there's general consensus that there's something already ... "

"There's general consensus that China is a great power. The whole thing that I've been pointing to you is that I don't go by general consensus."

Okay then.

Friedman continued. "The weakest problem with all of these models that you see is all the change is negative. I used to design war games, so I do military modelling. I've never seen a model where all the outcomes are negative," he said. "You know what you call those models? Bullshit. How do you have a model with no trade-offs — no positive outcomes anywhere in the world?"

At this point I started getting the wrap-it-up signal from Friedman's press assistant, so I wasn't able to push him any further. But I think I know the real reason Friedman doesn't include climate change in The Next 100 Years: he doesn't know how. His strict geopolitical framework can't accommodate disruptive change. If he addresses climate change, a shift away from nation structures or radical inventions, his future quickly starts to unravel.

Overall, the most disappointing thing about Friedman's 21st century is that it's so, well, predictable. Much of what he predicts is already talked about so commonly, it feels almost overdue. Here's my prediction: the geopolitical world Friedman knows and loves will, in the near future, become so last century.

But what do I know? I think John Maynard Keynes summed up the future better than anyone when he famously said, "In the long run, we are all dead."

Now that's something you can bet your house on.

Shell on Trial

2009-05-25T20:02:00.006+10:00

Shell On Trial

by Jess Hill + May 22 2009

First published on NewMatilda.com

Next week, Shell will appear before a US federal court on charges of torture, extra-judicial killing and crimes against humanity. Will it be the first multinational found guilty of human rights abuses?

Just after sunrise on 10 November 1995, internationally renowned writer and activist Ken Saro-Wiwa was taken in leg irons to a hastily prepared gallows in the yard of a small jail in Port Harcourt in Nigeria. It took five attempts to hang him. "Lord take my soul," he said finally, "but the struggle continues." His body was then doused with acid and buried in an unmarked grave, along with eight of his colleagues.

Saro-Wiwa, a native of the Niger Delta, was five years into his campaign against Shell when he was executed. As the founding leader of the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP), he had brought international attention to Shell's environmental destruction and human rights abuses in Ogoniland, a thousand-square kilometre area in the Delta.

It was in Ogoniland that Shell first discovered Nigerian oil in 1956. When Saro-Wiwa addressed the United Nations in 1993, Shell had extracted US$100 billion worth of oil and gas from Ogoniland alone. Despite promises of community building from Shell, the Ogoni people were living in abject poverty.

Saro-Wiwa had already been detained several times before his final arrest, but when soldiers pulled him from his bed on that Sunday morning in May 1994, he knew this time was different.

"This is it," Saro-Wiwa had said, a month prior. "They are going to arrest us all and execute us. All for Shell."

Saro-Wiwa had obtained a leaked memo issued by the head of the Rivers State Internal Security Force of the Nigerian Army. It detailed an intensified military presence in Ogoniland, with explicit instructions to make sure that those "carrying out business ventures ... within Ogoniland are not molested". A new law would enforce the death penalty for those found guilty of involvement in any communal clashes.

Saro-Wiwa didn't see the memo that was sent in reply. By the end of January 1994, the eight major oil companies had calculated their losses during 1993 at US$200 million, citing "unfavourable conditions in the areas of operation". They called for urgent measures to combat the situation.

On 12 May, 10 days before his (and eight fellow MOSOP leaders') arrest, a second memo was sent from Lieutenant Colonel Okuntimo, who orchestrated the Mobile Police Force's terror campaign. "Shell operations still impossible unless ruthless military operations are undertaken for smooth economic activities to commence," it said.

Its recommendations included "wasting targets cutting across communities and leadership cadres, especially vocal individuals in various groups". To finance this, oil companies were to be pressured for "regular imputs, as discussed". (Emphasis added)

Eighteen months later, just before he was sentenced to death, Ken Saro-Wiwa wrote a statement he was not permitted to read to the military tribunal that tried him. "I and my colleagues are not the only ones on trial," he wrote. "Shell is here on trial ... There is no doubt in my mind that the crimes of the Company's dirty war against the Ogoni people will be punished."

Now, he will posthomously have his day in court. Twelve years after the case was first filed, Wiwa v Shell is finally going to be heard before a US federal court in Manhattan. The plaintiffs, which include both the Wiwa family and several other Ogoni people, are charging not only Shell but Brian Anderson, its former managing director in Nigeria, with:

Conspiring with the Nigerian military to prosecute, and finally execute, Saro-Wiwa and his eight colleagues.

Arming, financing and transporting the Nigerian military, which used brutal force to repress opposition to Shell's operations in Ogoniland that resulted in 2000 Ogoni being killed, some 30,000 made homeless, and countless others being tortured and raped.

And the wanton destruction of villages throughout the Ogoni region, where over 3000 oil spills have occurred and gas flares are located on private property.

But this is a Nigerian case involving a Dutch corporation. How can it be tried in America?

It was filed under the Alien Tort Statute (1789), which enables non-US citizens to file suits in US courts for human rights violations, and the Torture Victim Protection Act, which allows individuals to seek damages in the US for torture or extrajudicial killing, no matter where it occurred.

And unlike countless other corporate civil suits which hold a faceless, impersonal corporation accountable, Wiwa v Shell isn't just charging Shell — it also attempts to hold Brian Anderson, former managing director of Shell in Nigeria, personally liable. You don't have to be caught with the noose in your hand to be found guilty, just proved to be aiding and abetting.

A multinational company has never been found liable of human rights abuses by a US jury. The Shell case, which could result in hundreds of millions of dollars in damages, is the third to go to trial and the second involving a major oil company.

There's a reason there has been no conviction of this kind recorded in the past. Corporations, notoriously bad at keeping records on their human rights abuses, have always stayed one step removed from the gun. That step might be a military dictatorship, for example — that is to say that if a government defends its interest with a heavy hand, it's not the corporation's fault.

"Shell attempted to persuade [the Nigerian] government to grant clemency [to Saro-Wiwa]; to our deep regret, that appeal — and the appeals of many others — went unheard, and we were shocked and saddened when we heard the news," said a Shell spokesperson at the time of Saro-Wiwa's execution.

The plaintiffs are quietly confident of a conviction, and international commentary has long concurred that Shell is a guilty party. But circumstantial evidence is one thing — do the plaintiffs have a smoking gun?

No, but they do have some pretty persuasive evidence.

When Shell heard of a demonstration planned in late 1990, they specifically requested the Mobile Police Force, known locally as the "kill-and-go" police. They quelled the demonstration with massive scorched earth operations, and killed 80 villagers. In September 1993, by which time Ogoni protests were a regular occurrence, these policemen travelled in Shell boats and a helicopter chartered by Shell to Ogoni villages where, over several days, over 1000 villagers were massacred.

In relation to the charge of conspiring with the government to falsely try Saro-Wiwa and the MOSOP leaders, two chief prosecution witnesses signed affidavits attesting they had been bribed directly by Shell and others to testify against Saro-Wiwa, for which they were given 30,000 Naira (Nigerian dollars), a house, and a contract from Shell. Shell representatives were present with government officials when the bribes were tabled.

Wiwa v Shell will likely conclude towards the end of June, but no doubt Shell will keep the case in the appeals court for much longer if convicted. If Anderson and/or Shell are convicted, it won't just be corporations rethinking the way they exploit the resources of third world countries, but also the military dictatorships that have thrived on this nexus of abuse.

BIDEN V PALIN

2008-10-05T13:18:00.007+11:00

FROM THE OBAMA CAMPAIGN PARTY IN DOWNTOWN SAN FRANCISCO

If Obama’s San Franciscan campaign staff were looking to supersize the stereotype on West-Coast-granola-crunching-pinko-latte-liberals, they couldn’t have picked a better venue for Thursday night’s VP debate than downtown’s Prana restaurant – Temple nightclub. Clean cut Democrats nursed drinks in martini glasses under the watchful eye of floor-to-ceiling statues of Buddha, the privileged few lounging in white-cushioned booths, indulging in organic vegetable spreads. One wonders if the RSVP didn’t require ethnic registration, just so the blacks, Asians, Latinos and Indians could be seated right up front.

The mood was clearly anticipatory – America has been frothing at the mouth over this debate for weeks. On Fox news the night before, one commentator had quipped that during the debate, Republicans wanted Sarah to just be Sarah, while Democrats wanted Joe not to be Joe.

When the candidates arrived on stage, the crowd erupted Superbowl style. The introductory pleasantries between Biden and Palin looked much more natural than those between Obama and McCain the week before; McCain had barely looked Obama in the eye when they first shook hands.

Biden was first out of the gates, and he immediately came across as the kind of guy you wish you were related to. Palin opened in typical I’m-just-like-you style with a soccer game analogy about the economy that had the Obama camp roaring. In America’s answer to ‘The Worm’, undecided voters from Ohio shared the room’s sentiment, with both men and women turning their dials way down low.

From the outset, Biden’s play was the good cop in the Senate. It was a well-judged play against McCain’s “I’m not Miss Congeniality” – Biden pushed that idea that he can reach across the aisle to influence both Republicans and Democrats, vote on conscience rather than party line, and still be liked and respected by everybody. By comparison, he made McCain look like an angry bitch.

From the very beginning, it was clear that this debate was going to be a lot more satisfying than Obama v McCain. While Obama ate shit as McCain accused him of raping the coffers for earmarks for Illinois (with no retort from Obama regarding Palin’s documented abuse of earmarks which, per capita, outstrip his ten to one), Biden was quick to jump on Palin’s untruths and unfounded accusations. In responding on Afghanistan, Biden pointedly remarked, ‘Facts matter, Gwen’. It was like the naughty kids of the campaign had been caught out by a calm and reasonable father.

One of Biden’s most memorable moments was his “John McCain is not a Maverick” spiel. Having illustrated how both Obama and himself had exhibited maverick-like behaviour during their years in the senate, he delivered a withering deconstruction of McCain’s maverick myth (offset with his ‘I love him’, a brilliant softener). “He's been a maverick on some issues, but he has been no maverick on the things that matter to people's lives,” Biden began. The room roared with approval, stopping just short of a Mexican wave of high-fives. It’s what we’d all been waiting for – someone to call McCain on his bullshit persona. Biden decimated McCain’s voting history – his support for Bush’s budgets, his vote against health care coverage for 3.6 million more children, votes against the LIHEAP assistance bill, votes against tax cuts. There was a palpable sense of relief in the room – this guy knows what he’s talking about, he’s had a gutful of spin, and he’s senior enough to give his retorts serious cred.

On that same Fox program the night before, pundits said that if Palin could just appear coherent, she would win the debate. While most people would expect coherence as a baseline skill for governance, Palin was coming from so far behind that clearly her base just needed a reason to feel justified in supporting her. Coherence she managed, and confidence. She was most effective when she was speaking symbolically – her jab that Obama/Biden wanted to throw up the ‘white flag of surrender’ got a huge swing up from those Ohio voters. Republicans would have been sleeping soundly last night as a result of her performance, but all it’s really done is returned her momentarily to the competition (until the next televised interview, that is). Once coherence was established, however, the disparity between her and Biden’s intellect and accomplishments was striking. (Case in point: Palin’s total misunderstanding of Ifill’s question about Cheney’s extreme interpretation of the role of vice-president – Palin fumbled, Biden elucidated).

Palin certainly didn’t want to come off as being related in any way to the Republican incumbent. Her strategy throughout was to distance herself not only from the Bush administration, but from government in general: “Patriotic is saying, government, you know, you're not always the solution. In fact, too often you're the problem...” Many of her comments sounded like they should have come from a Democrat. “How long have I been at this, like five weeks? So there hasn't been a whole lot that I've promised, except to do what is right for the American people, put government back on the side of the American people, stop the greed and corruption on Wall Street.” At the mention of just five weeks in the hot seat, Ohio voters drove the Worm way south.

Palin made some unusual comments. When she referred to Biden as being a ‘Washington insider’ vs her fresh approach, viewers may have thought for a moment that she was running for president – hold up, isn’t your principle running mate a veteran of 26 years in the Senate? There were several times when Palin clearly was not prepared to reply to Ifill’s questioning; most strikingly, when she was asked to rebut on the mortgage crisis, and after a one-sentence reply she segued straight into her credentials on energy. The Huffington Post ran a graph on Palin’s debate plan that illustrates this:

Biden won points again with his jab that McCain’s healthcare credits plan was ‘the ultimate bridge to nowhere’. That tickled the Obama camp pink.

What emerged from the debate was two confident debaters facing off in what was clearly not a dress rehearsal, a vast difference from Obama v McCain the week before. Palin has bought some time and legitimacy (conservative commentators in the States have been suggesting she cry uncle and step down from the candidacy) and Biden has healed his reputation as a walking gaffe machine (when moderator Gwen Ifill accused him of being undisciplined, Biden responded smartly with a corrective about him being ‘passionate’).

There’s the temptation to read the debate in terms of how successfully we might think their various points carried to ‘unthinking’ America. However, as Biden himself said, facts matter. Biden’s sharp debating stopped Palin getting cocky with baseless Rovian accusations, and brought the campaign briefly back to debate on real policy. (A brief reprieve, it may be – today’s Los Angeles Times reported that from now until election day, the Republicans are going full steam ahead on character assassination).

Palin might have come across equally as impressive in terms of confidence and effect, but the fact remains that the smart money in the room know that Biden is obviously the superior candidate – as does most of the mainstream American press (and that focus group of undecided Ohio voters).

ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT JOHN MCCAIN

2008-09-16T20:31:00.004+10:00

"My hero is Jack Bauer."

"My hero is Jack Bauer," John McCain has told American talk show host Rachael Ray, in an interview that will go to air September 22. "He always escapes. I never escape."

Yes, Jack Bauer does always escape - often by the same means that serve the current President of the United States. To quote the Independent in February 2007:

In the hugely popular television series 24, federal agent Jack Bauer always gets his man, even if he has to play a little rough. Suffocating, electrocuting or drugging a suspect are all in a day's work. As Bauer - played by the Emmy Award winner Kiefer Sutherland - tells one baddie: " You are going to tell me what I want to know - it's just a matter of how much you want it to hurt."

Jack Bauer has been an inspiration to many Americans. According to the recently released expose on Guantanamo Bay, Torture Team by Phillipe Sands QC, top Bush administration officials (including Alberto Gonzales and assistant attorney general John Woo) took their cues from Jack Bauer's interrogation techniques when they designed their own aggressive new style of questioning Guantanamo Bay inmates. Many news reports claim that these defy the Geneva conventions (Geneva, says Woo, is, like, so last war).

And further afield, old Jack has been an inspiration for American troops stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan, who ask 'If Jack can do it, why can't we?'

So significant has the influence of 24 been on the mindset of troops, Brigadier General Patrick Finnegan, from the prestigious US military academy West Point, travelled to California to ask the show's producers to tone down the torture. "I'd like them to stop. They should do a show where torture backfires," said Gen Finnegan. "The kids see it and say, 'If torture is wrong, what about 24'? The disturbing thing is that although torture may cause Jack Bauer some angst, it is always the patriotic thing to do."

Because the ends justifies the means. Just what kind of end is John McCain seeking, and what kind of means is he willing to employ to get it?

HEAVEN CAN WAIT

2008-09-14T09:43:00.009+10:00

Stormclouds gather at Club Med's Plantation D'Albion, Mauritius

I travelled to Mauritius in May 2008 for Vive magazine. The story will be published in its October/November issue.

The rain started in small spills on the windscreen. Six retirees heaved into the Club Med mini-bus, followed gingerly by umbilical young newlyweds. Evening was slowly claiming Mauritius as we turned onto the country’s only highway, a gift from ex-French President Jacques Chirac, who wanted to halve the time it took to reach his resort. The road forged a path through adult sugarcane, a month shy of harvest, obscuring two-legged signs advertising Big Macs and diving tours. Two billboards towered above the cane, one emblazoned with ‘Villas Valriche’, for development, the other ‘Dose of Hope’, for AIDS.

Behind me, the elderlies were busy discussing the vagaries of civil aviation. ‘Those seats were relatively comfortable,’ said one. ‘Oh yes, I was surprised,’ replied the other. Under blue twilight, an Indian woman in a faded, sagging blue t-shirt and bulbous floral skirt threw a fist-sized scythe over her shoulder, bending down to collect the sugarcane. ‘Not so good for sleeping in, though,’ came the news from up back. ‘Reckon they’d make business class seats that have the foot rest?’

Under trees and beside footbridges, candles flickered and red bulbs shone in diminutive Hindu shrines. To my left, red-and-yellow convenience stores signed in French; to my right, a hospital named for Jawarhalal Nehru, India’s first prime minister. Up back, a consensus. ‘Even that trip we did from the Maldives back to Singapore had foot rests,’ ventured one. ‘The foot rest would have definitely been an improvement,’ agreed another.

Dismount. Club Med’s elite squad silenced the chit-chat with a fluorescent cocktail. Here were the GOs, or Gentils Organisateurs: invariably good-looking, bi-lingual and genial. The happy makers, the first people on the dancefloor, the tour guides, the mind-if-I-join-you-for-breakfasts, the can-I-introduce-to-someones. My private escort, Niseko, had given Club Med the best years of her life. Through the behemoth resort she cheerfully led me, past the nighttime golfers practicing their dealmaking, past the adobe two-storey villas, the water features, the soccer field, to my room. To the west, witch-hat mountains were carved dark in the sky, the only assailant on the sugarcane’s charge to the sea.

From the comfort of a magnificent resort worthy of its own postcode, I was looking for action. Not the kind you get with a seasonal worker, but the ‘real Mauritius’ kind. Mark Twain had done objectivity a great disservice when in 1896 he quoted an islander as saying, ‘Mauritius was made first and then heaven; and heaven was copied after Mauritius.’ Travel writers ever since have used Twain as an excuse for simplistic, superlative frothfests (except for Indian writer VS Naipaul, who called it an ‘overcrowded barracoon’).

If they are to be believed, Mauritius is a faultless tropical paradise with sunshine all year round, a veritable Shangri-La where the only resident ever to have suffered is the dodo. A developing African nation 800 miles from Madagascar, boasting the highest density of five star-resorts in the world and populated half by Hindus, the rest by African Creoles and Indian Muslims, had to have a better story to tell.

In the meantime, there was Club Med. Early that next morning, storm clouds advancing across the clear sky, I joined the slow-shoe shuffle of holidaymakers headed for the breakfast buffet. Politely declining the friendly-but-non-intrusive offer from a GO to join me, I sat alone at a table for two overlooking the beach below.

A policeman in blue and white was politely turning people away from the beach, and a few hundred metres away at the end of a long pier another officer paced, looking out to sea. On the deck sat scattered British couples, sipping coffee absentmindedly, and the French, engaged in passionate conversation, quietly waging war on ugly summer fashion. From the vast buffet hall South African men bore their bacon and eggs with Hemmingway swagger.

According to the Ministry of Tourism & Leisure, the average hotel guest stays two weeks in Mauritius and rarely leaves the grounds. On the wild, undeveloped west coast, home to the newly deluxe and mature Club Med, escaped tourists rove mostly in groups. They travel roads bound by wild green, visit the colonial-era Eureka House, play the straight guys in the jokes of a wicked French greenhouse owner, marvel at seven different colours of earth cordoned off on a hill, and ignore the entreaties of rival ice-cream vans at the rim of an ancient volcano crater.

At Grand Bassin, a lake believed by the Hindus to be connected to the sacred Ganges river, women in saris kneel in prayer at the water’s edge as thousands of fish mouths gasp at the surface, creating the illusion of rain. Little ginger kittens stalk the ghat waiting for tourists to lure the fish with bread; when the bread appears, the kittens jump calf-deep in the water, trapping their prey between their paws.

I stood beside Bilal, one of Club Med’s tour guide GOs, watching this curious event take place. His hands were clasped together, and on the surface of his right, a Shiva trident tattooed in old green. ‘It was my father’s design. I had it done when I was 10,’ he said. Bilal’s parents were a common example of the Mauritian nuclear family – his father a Hindu priest, his mother a devout Muslim. As she was dying, his mother implored him to convert to Islam.

‘I did the study, converted to Islam and changed my name to Bilal. My mother died last year, so now I’m like it’s okay, I fulfilled her wishes.’ Communities are similarly mixed. Hindu shrines glow in front yards next to porches decorated in the flag of Islam and flower patches adorned with dioramas venerating Mother Mary. Mauritians recognise each religious holiday as if it were their own – public holidays mark Divali, Eid, Ramadan. All up, there are 20 religious holidays observed annually.

Large red Shiva tikkas marked most tourist brows by the time they lumbered out of vans and minibuses at Chamarel, a waterfall in the Black River Gorge, so named for the black slaves who once bathed there. Small feral cats with ragged ears haunted the edge of the forest, emerging and disappearing with the passing of each group.

This forest had hidden Mauritians with varying levels of success since the Dutch first arrived in the 16th century. The dodo bird, christened ‘walghvogel’ for its nauseating taste, was woeful at hide-and-seek, and within 40 years of settlement the last of its kind was dead.

After the Dutch had abandoned the cyclone-prone island in the 18th-century, the French arrived to find an island inhabited by pirates and covered almost entirely in sugarcane. To tend it, they bought African slaves. When the British took over and abolished slavery in the 19th-century, the slaves fled to the forest. They hid on the mountain of Le Morne deep in the Black River Gorge, and suicided if they were caught. The British were left with a lot of sugarcane, and no bodies to work it. So they shipped over the coolies, indentured labourers from India. Within fifty years over 200,000 Indians had been brought to the island.

The next morning, en route to breakfast, I ran into Maryanne, a senior GO. I asked her how the guests were enjoying the weather. ‘Oh, you should hear the complaints! They didn’t pay to spend a week in the rain.’ But for one benevolent day, rain had besieged the west coast of Mauritius for the past week. ‘At the moment, I’m just like “I’m not here! Call back later!”’ Surely they weren’t holding her accountable for a force of nature, I replied. She shrugged. ‘When people come to Mauritius, they expect sunshine.’

I ran into Bilal at the cereal desk. Over coffee and yoghurt he told me why Mauritians needed tourism to go without a hitch. ‘Europe used to buy Mauritian sugar at protected prices,’ he began. ‘But a few years ago, Brazilian and Australian farmers lobbied the WTO to remove them. Mauritius can’t compete in an open market, so the government has had to find a way to replace the sugar industry.’ High-end tourism has replaced sugar as number one, both for employment and the country’s economy.

But it’s not the only industry to fill sugar’s place. Just a few miles away from Plantation D’Albion, a new road sign points to Cybercity. It’s ground zero for the island’s burgeoning new income stream – call centres. ‘I went to work in one of the call centres for two weeks to see what it was like,’ Bilal told me. Mauritians commonly speak at least two languages, French and English, which makes Mauritius an attractive destination for French outsourcing. ‘My name at the call centre was Frederic Le Roche,’ he said in a theatrical French accent. ‘I couldn’t say my name was ‘Bilal’ because it doesn’t sound very French.’

On the wall in front of him were signs showing the weather in France and recent football results. ‘If the person I was speaking to said, “You don’t sound very French,” I had to tell them I was a part-time student in France, and make up where I was from. “Oh yes, of course I am in Lyon, the weather is fine, isn’t it?”’ I shook my head in disbelief. “We were all working very late at night, because of the time difference,” he said. “People can only work for call centres for one, maybe two years. After that, they are burnt out.”

By 11am, the sheltered bar area was humming with couples surrendered to the now familiar rain. I took a seat at the bar, ready to take advantage of the bottomless drinks policy. To my left, a middle-aged, balding French man sat happily on his own, his allegiance sworn on a faded Club Med t-shirt from the Turks & Caicos. To my right, a GO called Andy took his cue to proffer Club Med familiarity. Keen to share my new daytime drinking habit, I gratefully accepted.

Couple clusters were formed on every spare lounge, hanging swing and barstool. They drank, scrabbled and snuggled, lost and found in the joy of one another. In the corner, a daytime entertainer with a long grey ponytail and a solid paunch gripped the microphone earnestly, and in pitch-perfect Louis Armstrong sang ‘What a Wonderful World’. Outside, the sun emerged from behind the clouds and, as if on cue, a brilliant rainbow could be seen stretching from one end of the horizon to the other. The couples cheered, for the sun and for Louis.

In front of me, a twitchy sparrow alighted on the bar for a moment, and as soon as it had arrived, it was gone again. A perfect day had begun.

NATHAN REES: TAKING OUT THE TRASH

2008-09-05T17:48:00.013+10:00

Take out the papers and the trash
Or you don't get no spending cash,
If you don't scrub that kitchen floor
You ain't gonna rock and roll no more
Yakety yak (don't talk back)

ALL HAIL NATHAN REES
NEW HOPE FOR THE LABOUR LEFT

There's just one problem...
Our new leaders are visually impaired.

LABOUR PUTS CONCRETE BOOTS ON IEMMA AND COSTA

2008-09-05T13:38:00.018+10:00

"I don't feel I have to wipe everybody out - just my enemies, that's all." Michael Corleone, The Godfather II

Nobody puts Michael Costa in a corner. When Iemma told Costa he would not be 'part of his ticket' in the controversial frontbench reshuffle, he signed his own death warrant. Like Siamese twins who share the same heart, Iemma and Costa needed each other.

BETRAYER OF THE LABOUR FAITHFUL?

Iemma should have known not to cross a picket line. On Saturday August 30, while angry Fairfax journalists were on strike, Morris Minor contributed an op-ed piece to the Herald titled, "How the power of one treacherous leader sold out the people of NSW."

Alex Mitchell from Crikey writes:

It is inconceivable that former NSW Labor premiers Neville Wran, Barrie Unsworth or Bob Carr would write for a "scab" newspaper produced by non-unionised editorial labor.

Throughout their political careers, it was an article of faith that you didn't cross picket lines and you didn't contribute articles to "scab" papers when journos or printers were on strike. It was the approach adopted by all the state's Labor premiers dating back to the first Labor premier, Jim McGowen (1910-1913).

But this same political principle hasn't been embraced by the current NSW Premier Morris Iemma.

The timing of Iemma's article couldn't have been more inflammatory. His article appeared in the edition from which popular columnist Mike Carlton was axed because he refused to be a strike-breaker.

So Iemma and Costa are given the kiss off, and we now have a former garbage collector nobody's ever heard of, who's sat in parliament for just 18 months, serving as NSW Premier. Let's face it - Labour could appoint Captain Feathersword as Premier and their governance would still be unassailable.

Welcome to the Jungle

2008-09-03T18:40:00.000+10:00

Imagine there's no heaven...

All good principles must come to an end.

As of two weeks ago, I now begin five days of my week walking through the revolving glass doors of News Limited.

What’s more – I like it.

(I did, however, set off the alarm on my first day. I guess the machine knows a liberal when it sees one.)

I like the fact that Rupert has put tampon machines on three of five floors, and that there’s an ATM in the cafeteria. I like the fact that the tea is replenished within minutes of it running out. Dammit, I’m a cog in the wheel of a conservative publishing house and I’m loving every minute of it.

Today, I discovered that News Limited sells sandwiches at '90s school canteen prices, so I canned my usual gin joint up the road and cruised to the cafeteria.

When I arrived at the sandwich bar, filling instructions were being delivered with supreme nonchalance. A middle-aged woman with thin, gripped lips approached the bar and asked for a toasted sandwich with carrot, mushroom and lettuce. When the little Malaysian sandwich hand asked her to repeat something, she replied, "Don't you remember? I just told you." She must be an editor, I surmised.

In the cafeteria, I chose a seat next to the window, beneath kitsch wall art and halogen lights. Outside, a group of young punks looked like they were organising, hoodies smooching the glass, piercings and orthodontics glinting in the sun. The ‘creative arts’ school is just down the road, which gives Holt St in Surry Hills its ethnic mix of gray, wheezing journalists and poor, pimply musicians.

A man sat in front of me, dressed in black jumper and black pants. He was morbidly obese, and his News Limited dog tag hung from his front trouser pocket like a tongue. In front of him was just one page from The Australian – the Fashion Extra, where gelled men who look like they’re grieving stared blankly above headlines alluding to luxury. He wasn't reading it; he just stared absently ahead, chewing slowly on his sandwich. Behind him, a woman in cheap pinstripe and heels was focused on her mobile phone, her diamond engagement ring bobbing up and down on the keypad.

Sitting beside me, a man dressed like an urban sophisticate was immersed in mX, the nadir of News Limited's noxious influence on the population. His ring tone sounded the theme from Superman. He let it ring out. A colleague approached him and asked what he was doing. He replied, ‘Nothing much, I’m just reading a newspaper.’ I felt like asking him if his mother raised him to be a liar.

A company man made a joke about keeping busy, laughed, then stroked his tie and checked his watch. Cutlery echoed against crockery. Everybody here sits alone.