Daily News Review (Sunday 20 February)

Sydney Morning Herald

Bush the elder and Clinton arrive in Thailand for the start of their tsunami devastation tour.

Mike Carlton is determined to convince his readers he is unable to use a dictionary. Carlton also attempts to justify his fondness for environment destroying, small import crushing, 4X4 road beasts.

The interrogation versus interview brouhaha carriers over from Carlton to today's lead editorial. (Apparently no-one at the SMH knows how to use a dictionary.)

Just doing a test run here folks, to sort out the formatting. Hopefully a review of eastern states' morning news will become a regular feature.

Servant problem

Pity the poor Saudi confronting this wicked dilemma:

You need a maid and a driver, but you only have one room for servant’s quarters. What to do?

How about a dual purpose employee? After all, it's not like these are highly skilled jobs; surely it would be easy to find a male or female that could both. Oops, that isn't going to work, you can't have a male in the house with the missus unless she's chaperoned and females aren't allowed to drive because ... damn, there must be some reason. This is a difficult problem; time for some lateral thinking:

Many Saudi families these days are paying the wedding expenses of their maids and drivers, Asharq Al-Awsat newspaper reported. Some families do this either for fear that the driver and maid might engage in a relationship that goes against Saudi culture and religion. Some families do this because there is not enough space to house both a maid and a driver.

Fair enough, wouldn't want any of those non-Saudis violating Saudi cultural or religious norms, like arranged marriage:

The rather unusual circumstances sometimes lead to a little confusion. Nura, a 20-year-old Saudi woman, was happy when her family phoned to tell her a groom was coming to visit the house. She was dreaming of family life with husband and children when the groom arrived, and she learned the groom was a neighbor’s driver asking for the maid’s hand in marriage.

Nura must have been devastated, not to mention confused. But what's a Saudi to do if the maid and driver don't hit it off. Simple:

Not all these weddings take place based on servants’ desires to get married. Sometimes there’re forced marriages.

Um Khaled told Asharq Al-Awsat that her need of a driver forced her to put pressure on her Indian driver and Indonesian maid to get married. Despite the repeated pleas from the maid and driver against her decision, Um Khaled managed in the end to make them husband and wife.

Naturally, such goings on have not gone unnoticed:

Muhammad Al-Yaeesh, a marriage official and mosque Imam, told Asharq Al-Awsat that maids and drivers should never be forced to get married, and such a marriage is invalid.

“Most cases in which maids and drivers are married are based on emotional decisions, and those fail most of the time,” Al-Yaeesh said. “Their marriages sometimes don’t solve problems but create problems instead.”

At least the authorities are aware of the situation and are taking steps to discourage or outlaw forced marriage, right? Not exactly:

Right or wrong, the marriage officials still help couples get married.

“We try to facilitate the marriage of maids and drivers based on requests from their sponsors, either through us or through their embassies,” Al-Yaeesh said.

The modern world is just so ... complicated, especially when you're determined to live in the 8th century.

US half-blinds Omar

The Guantanamo atrocities continue:

A British permanent resident detained at the US camp for terrorism suspects in Guantanamo Bay was blinded in one eye following an assault by guards, his lawyer said yesterday.

“They brought their pepper spray and held him down,” he said.

“They held both of his eyes open and sprayed it into his eyes and later took a towel soaked in pepper spray and rubbed it in his eyes. Omar could not see from either eye for two weeks but he gradually got sight back in one eye.

“He’s totally blind in the right eye. I can report that his right eye is all white and milky — he can’t see out of it because he has been blinded by the US in Guantanamo.”

So, lets see, it would probably take four or more guards to hold this guy down, hold his eyes open and then flood them with pepper spray. It's pretty hard to imagine all this happening in a cell the size of a large mattress.

Semantics

The opposition continues to pressure the government on the involvement of Australians in the interrogation of prisoners, with the government continuing to insist that Australian personnel did nothing more than interview. According to David Kay, an interview and an interrogation are the same:

David Kay, the former head of the Iraq Survey Group that searched for weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), believes Australians did interrogate detainees.

"Anyone that was in a room with a prisoner was engaged in interrogation," he said. "You weren't playing bridge."

He has told ABC TV's Lateline he does not think there is any difference between an interview and an interrogation.

"If I was talking to someone [I] would have said I've had an interview, I've had a discussion.

"I didn't often use the word interrogation but that's what it was."

Mr Kay says he did not see any evidence that prisoners were mistreated.

Labor's spokesman on defence, Robert McClelland, says Mr Kay's comments discredit the Government's argument that there is a difference between an interrogation and an interview.

"The Government is absolutely playing with semantics," he said.

"Anyone can pick up any dictionary and look at a definition of interrogation if they want.

"In circumstances where someone is brought before the interviewer, if you like, to use the Government's language, in prison overalls, shackled, someone behind them holding a gun, that is for all intents and purposes an interrogation."

Some observations: an interview is not an interrogation; David Kay should fade into oblivion; isn't it the oppostion who's playing the semantics game?; if none of the prisoners are known to have been mistreated in any meaningful way, why should anyone care?; and shouldn't we expect that some of these nasty bastards would have received a bit of rough handling?

Kissing cousins

Everyone knows that pairing fucked-up relations will likely produce fucked-up offspring.

Iran and Syria heightened tension across the Middle East and directly confronted the Bush administration yesterday by declaring they had formed a mutual self-defence pact to confront the "threats" now facing them.

The move, which took the Foreign Office by surprise, was announced after a meeting in Tehran between the Iranian vice-president, Mohammed Reza Aref, and the Syrian prime minister, Naji al-Otari.

Syria and Iran do not have a natural affinity but are alleged by western governments to have engaged in covert military cooperation in the past.

The British official said the pact could just be rhetoric, "a marriage of convenience" for two countries feeling a need to bolster one another.

This little love affair will undoubtedly produce something ugly (and very furry).

Habib's shrink sacked

What was expert witness psychiatrist, Sydney University Professor Christopher Tennant, thinking when he went public to "substantiate" Mamdouh Habib's claims of torture?

CHRISTOPHER TENNANT: Well, he has evidence of having been, you know, exposed to very significant and unpleasant events, probably torture in that he was significantly depressed and had post traumatic stress disorder.

JAYNE-MAREE SEDGMAN: Professor Tennant says he then asked a colleague, a physician, to examine Mr Habib for physical indications of torture. He says the doctor confirmed the presence of cigarette burns along with old bruising on one thigh.

The Professor says it was the Government's rejection of that notion that prompted his decision to reveal what he'd found. He says he knew by speaking out, he was breaching doctor-patient confidentiality, but says he had good reasons for doing so.

CHRISTOPHER TENNANT: In technical terms, yes I did, but I did try to contact, you know, Mr Hopper and through him, Mr Habib and was unable to do so. And you know, after, like, considerable deliberation I thought at this point in time Mr Habib's version of events warranted at least some substantiation.

So, Mr Habib was in such a state – sad, suffering PTSD, with cigarette burns (exactly how the hell it was worked out that the burns were from cigarettes or who was wielding the butts at the time I don't know) and had an old bruise on his thigh - that Professor Tennant felt obliged to disregard the sanctity of doctor-patient confidentiality. Don't make me laugh, this is a professor with a political axe to grind. He saw a chance to score some points against the Howard government and took it, Habib's fragile mental state be damned.

But, it's always possible there might be more to Habib's abduction and torture claims than the more skeptical amongst us are willing to admit. After all, he's not the first to claim to have been abducted and probed by the yellow uniformed. These abductees have suffered horribly, if not silently.