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December 10, 2005

The Age offers: Who's the real villain?

A rare positive treatment of the US torture debate is given in The Age, one of Australia's largest dailies.

Employing a different tactic than most right-wing American opinions on the issue, namely that the CIA should be the only entity at fault given its damaging leaks, writer Tony Parkinson draws parallels between the Saddam Hussein regime and his subsequent treatment under the rule of law, and the excoriation of the American prosecution of the war on terror abroad.

An interesting point in this editorial is made about the use of extraordinary renditions, which as mentioned in previous posts is something of a befuddlement to the European legal establishment. (Eric Umansky in Slate notes that this confusion is felt on the part of the leading U.S. media as well, including the leading gray ladies.) Parkinson's defense of the practice relates to the notion that the U.S. has been exercising rendition since 1984, so why should it stop at the beck of the European community?

He also mentions China and the global media's relatively lax coverage of the UN's report on Chinese torture, though this hasn't been taken up by the Administration for the apparent reason that the Chinese state is not an obvious source for emulation in the area of human rights.

He ends by noting:

it sometimes seems the intelligentsia of the Western world care only for those Iraqis killed, maimed or imprisoned by US or British forces. To those victims of Saddam Hussein's reign of terror, this must seem a very selective morality.

Posted December 10, 2005 12:44 AM

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