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Truth is our Trench

When Art is Incapable of Matching Life

Our political world is now represented on the stage weeks after the real thing

By Robert Fisk

07/01//06 "The Independent" -- -- Art and reality have a strange relationship. Take Stuff Happens, David Hare's account of the build-up to war in Iraq, its title taken from Donald Rumsfeld's reaction to the widespread looting and pillage on 11 April 2003. But one of the most powerful scenes in the play is Colin Powell's appearance before the UN Security Council on 5 February.

I was sitting in the UN chamber at the time and my notes of the meeting show considerable cynicism and a good deal of disbelief on my part. I was dumbfounded by the cheap pictures of a mobile chemical weapons laboratory - it was supposed to be in a train, of all places - and the nonsensical transcript of a conversation between two of Saddam's henchmen ("consider it done, boss"). But only in the text of Hare's play do I realise what I missed.

"My colleagues, every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources ..." Powell says. "These are not assertions. What we are giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence." How come I didn't take this down in my notes? How come I missed the biggest whopper of them all? The source for the mobile weapons lab is "an eyewitness, an Iraqi chemical engineer". In fact, the "source" was in Germany and had never been interviewed by the CIA. And so on and on.

And the effect of Hare's play is devastating - far, far worse than the original Powell performance which I witnessed at first hand. Is that the effect of art or artifice? Maybe both, because it is now standard fare to watch our political world represented on the stage only weeks or days after the real thing.

It didn't used to be that way. Although Sassoon's and Owen's poetry were contemporary with the war they condemned, it was a long time before the stage caught up. R C Sherriff's Journey's End came long after 1918, and we had to wait for Graves and Blunden to tell it how it was in the coming years. All Quiet on the Western Front took years to be made - I am still fond of the second version with Ernest Borgnine that was produced after the Second World War - and the 1939-45 conflict yielded few great movies at the time.

Yes, I'll tip my hat to Leslie Mitchell and The First of the Few and to the forgotten 1942 film One of Our Aircraft is Missing. I used to watch them all on commercial television on Sunday afternoons, along with Casablanca, which was popular then more for the singing of the "Marseillaise" than for "Play it Sam".

I would watch Colonel Strasser arriving at Rick's café - he was played by a Jewish actor who might have died in Auschwitz had he not been in Hollywood (where he died on a golf course in 1943) - and always felt the best line was Bogey's half-drunken: "Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world - and she has to walk into mine."

Yet it took 17 years after the event before we watched a movie about Dunkirk - John Mills's plucky infantryman is still strangely moving although I never got over watching the blowing up of Teston bridge near Maidstone which was doubling at the time for the battlefields of northern France. By comparison, The Longest Day was a clunker.

It was the 1960s before Britain's film-makers really got down to work on the Second World War. Of course, there were some favourites made then - The Great Escape comes to mind, not least because it contains cinema's most pointless word. As Hilts (Steve McQueen) races his plundered German motorcycle towards the mountains of Switzerland, he pulls to a halt and stares at the Swiss snows and says - yes - he says: "Switzerland!"

But I am being unfair. The Battle of Britain - in which the music was almost as good as the Spitfires - didn't duck the horrors of air warfare and Lean's The Bridge on the River Kwai was probably the first cinema movie to show the terrible suffering of British PoWs in Asia. But I think I'd have to conclude that one of the finest post-war movies was A Bridge Too Far, the Arnhem epic which I now realise - on re-watching it only the other day - is about the end of empire and the tragedy its collapse imposes upon ordinary men and women. Arnhem was utterly worthless and the sheer waste in that film comes close to great art. It also gave Sean Connery one of his finest roles.

There was, more than 20 years ago, a stunning three-hour television drama on the Suez crisis which I watched in Beirut during the civil war - and which comes close to Hare because the British government was in 1956 caught lying almost as outrageously as the American variety 47 years later.

So what comes next? Will we see new Hare works every time we go to war? Or is there a three-year gap - which is the time it took to put Flight 93 on celluloid? My own suspicion is that it won't take that long - and that it will be our politicians who will be playing themselves; in other words, that reality and the world of movies (or stage plays) will become one.

After all, who can deny that the international crimes against humanity of 11 September 2001 were not more powerful images, more awesome in their effect, than Flight 93? Al-Qa'ida Productions got there first - by timing the second aircraft into the Twin Towers to coincide with real-time television coverage. This was why no claim of responsibility was ever made. There was no need for such a claim when the terrifying pictures told us all we needed to know. Which is why the video butchers of Baghdad have now slotted themselves on to the internet, showing near-live coverage of their decapitations.

Violence has now become so close to all our lives that art sometimes seems incapable of matching the reality. Indeed, actors might be losing their credibility. After all, wasn't the 43rd President of the United States all dolled up in a jumpsuit when he mouthed the greatest lie of all? Mission accomplished?

© 2006 Independent News and Media Limited

Did Bush Commit War Crimes?

Supreme Court's decision in Hamdan vs. Rumsfeld could expose officials to prosecution.

By Rosa Brooks

06/30/06 "Los Angeles Times" -- -- THE SUPREME Court on Thursday dealt the Bush administration a stinging rebuke, declaring in Hamdan vs. Rumsfeld that military commissions for trying terrorist suspects violate both U.S. military law and the Geneva Convention.

But the real blockbuster in the Hamdan decision is the court's holding that Common Article 3 of the Geneva Convention applies to the conflict with Al Qaeda — a holding that makes high-ranking Bush administration officials potentially subject to prosecution under the federal War Crimes Act.

The provisions of the Geneva Convention were intended to protect noncombatants — including prisoners — in times of armed conflict. But as the administration has repeatedly noted, most of these protections apply only to conflicts between states. Because Al Qaeda is not a state, the administration argued that the Geneva Convention didn't apply to the war on terror. These assertions gave the administration's arguments about the legal framework for fighting terrorism a through-the-looking-glass quality. On the one hand, the administration argued that the struggle against terrorism was a war, subject only to the law of war, not U.S. criminal or constitutional law. On the other hand, the administration said the Geneva Convention didn't apply to the war with Al Qaeda, which put the war on terror in an anything-goes legal limbo.

This novel theory served as the administration's legal cover for a wide range of questionable tactics, ranging from the Guantanamo military tribunals to administration efforts to hold even U.S. citizens indefinitely without counsel, charge or trial.

Perhaps most troubling, it allowed the administration to claim that detained terrorism suspects could be subjected to interrogation techniques that constitute torture or cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment under international law, such as "waterboarding," placing prisoners in painful physical positions, sexual humiliation and extreme sleep deprivation.

Under Bush administration logic, these tactics were not illegal under U.S. law because U.S. law was trumped by the law of war, and they weren't illegal under the law of war either, because Geneva Convention prohibitions on torture and cruel treatment were not applicable to the conflict with Al Qaeda.

In 2005, Congress angered the administration by passing Sen. John McCain's amendment explicitly prohibiting the use of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment of detainees. But Congress did not attach criminal penalties to violations of the amendment, and the administration has repeatedly indicated its intent to ignore it.

The Hamdan decision may change a few minds within the administration. Although the decision's practical effect on the military tribunals is unclear — the administration may be able to gain explicit congressional authorization for the tribunals, or it may be able to modify them to comply with the laws of war — the court's declaration that Common Article 3 applies to the war on terror is of enormous significance. Ultimately, it could pave the way for war crimes prosecutions of those responsible for abusing detainees.

Common Article 3 forbids "cruel treatment and torture [and] outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment." The provision's language is sweeping enough to prohibit many of the interrogation techniques approved by the Bush administration. That's why the administration had argued that Common Article 3 did not apply to the war on terror, even though legal experts have long concluded that it was intended to provide minimum rights guarantees for all conflicts not otherwise covered by the Geneva Convention.

But here's where the rubber really hits the road. Under federal criminal law, anyone who "commits a war crime … shall be fined … or imprisoned for life or any term of years, or both, and if death results to the victim, shall also be subject to the penalty of death." And a war crime is defined as "any conduct … which constitutes a violation of Common Article 3 of the international conventions signed at Geneva." In other words, with the Hamdan decision, U.S. officials found to be responsible for subjecting war on terror detainees to torture, cruel treatment or other "outrages upon personal dignity" could face prison or even the death penalty.

Don't expect that to happen anytime soon, of course. For prosecutions to occur, some federal prosecutor would have to issue an indictment. And in the Justice Department of Atty. Gen. Alberto Gonzales — who famously called the Geneva Convention "quaint" — a genuine investigation into administration violations of the War Crimes Act just ain't gonna happen.

But as Yale law professor Jack Balkin concludes, it's starting to look as if the Geneva Convention "is not so quaint after all."

Copyright 2006 Los Angeles Times


Rupert Murdoch is Effectively a Member of Blair's cabinet

Only a spin doctor would deny that the media baron has a say in all major decisions taken in Downing Street

Lance Price

Saturday ,July 1 2006

The Guardian

Rupert Murdoch has never been a man to let details get in the way of a good headline. This week he accepted the accolade of being the most influential Australian of all time, even though by his own admission there were others on the shortlist who'd done a lot more to make the world a better place.

Surely he should be stripped of his title without further ceremony - and not because of the inconvenient little fact that he's been an American citizen for the past 21 years. His editors insist that he never influences the way they produce their papers. The politicians maintain that, for their part, they act in the best interests of the country, not those of Rupert Murdoch.

He may carry some clout in the boardroom, but in the cabinet room? Mr Murdoch should throw up his hands, give back the award and admit that he has no more influence over government policy than you or me. Less, in fact. At least we have a vote in this country.

In my spin-doctoring days I might have tried an argument like that, although not without that tell-tale flicker of a smile. It's true that Rupert Murdoch doesn't leave a paper trail that could ever prove his influence over policy, but the trail of politicians beating their way to him and his papers tells a different story.

There is no small irony in the fact that Tony Blair flew halfway round the world to address Mr Murdoch and his News International executives in the first year of his leadership of the Labour party and that he's doing so again next month in what may prove to be his last.

I have never met Mr Murdoch, but at times when I worked at Downing Street he seemed like the 24th member of the cabinet. His voice was rarely heard (but, then, the same could have been said of many of the other 23) but his presence was always felt.

No big decision could ever be made inside No 10 without taking account of the likely reaction of three men - Gordon Brown, John Prescott and Rupert Murdoch. On all the really big decisions, anybody else could safely be ignored.

I was reminded just how touchy Downing Street is about Mr Murdoch when I submitted the manuscript of my book, The Spin Doctor's Diary, to the Cabinet Office. The government requested some changes, as is its right. When the first batch came through, it was no surprise that Tony Blair's staff were deeply unhappy. The real surprise was that no fewer than a third of their objections related to one man - not Tony Blair or even Gordon Brown, as I might have expected, but Rupert Murdoch.

In my first few weeks as Alastair Campbell's deputy, I was told by somebody who would know that we had assured Mr Murdoch we wouldn't change policy on Europe without talking to him first. The Cabinet Office insisted that I couldn't say in my book that such a promise had been made because I did not know it for a fact. With some reluctance I turned the sentence around so that it read: "Apparently News International are under the impression we won't make any changes without asking them." Every other request relating to Murdoch was rejected. It seemed to me that the government was simply trying to avoid political embarrassment on a subject of wholly legitimate public interest.

All discussions - and let us hope the word "negotiations" isn't more appropriate - with Rupert Murdoch and with Irwin Stelzer, his representative on earth, were handled at the very highest level. For the rest of us, the continued support of the News International titles was supposed to be self-evident proof of the value of this special relationship. The Sun and the Times, in particular, received innumerable "scoops" and favours. In return, New Labour got very sympathetic coverage from newspapers that are bought and read by classic swing voters - on the face of it, too good a deal to pass up.

In fact, New Labour gave away too much and received too little that it couldn't have expected to get anyway.

Rupert Murdoch loves power and loves the feeling that he has the ear of other powerful men. Who else was going to give him that feeling? Would he get it from William Hague? Iain Duncan Smith? Michael Howard?

It may be that Rupert Murdoch has never once vetoed a government decision, nor tried to do so. I just don't know. What I do know is that, as the entries in my book show, I spent far too much time trying to stop ministers saying anything positive about the euro. When two prominent Conservatives, furious at Tory policy on gay rights and Section 28, decided to defect to Labour, I made them say that it was over our management of the economy. I attended many crisis meetings at the Home Office - the influence of the Murdoch press on immigration and asylum policy would make a fascinating PhD thesis.

Now Mr Murdoch tells us he might support David Cameron, and his papers take regular potshots at Gordon Brown. Do Messrs Cameron and Brown take notice? You bet they do. In a close election the support of News International will be courted as never before. They know that Rupert Murdoch likes to back a winner and that it is support in the country that separates the winners from the losers, but they won't dare risk leaving it to the voters. So in the meantime, Rupert, much as it pains me to say so, you can keep the award.

· Lance Price, a media adviser to Tony Blair from 1998 to 2001, is the author of The Spin Doctor's Diary lanceprice.co.uk