Owen abroad

Archive for the ‘Vasectomy’ Category

I know this is all very immature, but I thought this was a funny idea (via):

when you make a donation to Planned Parenthood in her name, they’ll send her a card telling her that the donation has been made in her honor. Here’s the link to the Planned Parenthood website:

https://secure.ga0.org/02/pp10000_inhonor

You’ll need to fill in the address to let PP know where to send the “in Sarah Palin’s honor” card. I suggest you use the address for the McCain campaign headquarters, which is:

McCain for President
1235 S. Clark Street
1st Floor
Arlington , VA 22202

PS make sure you use that link above or choose the pulldown of Donate–Honorary or Memorial Donations, not the regular “Donate Online”

I begin with a confession that I am an admirer of Craig Murray, the former British Ambassador to the Republic of Uzbekistan. He deserves praise for his courage and clarity in speaking out against vicious human rights abuses by the dictatorial regime of Islam Karimov, which (deplorably) receives funding and support from the US and the UK Governments. As well as calling the world’s attention to the repressive regime in Uzbekistan, Mr Murray has been outspoken against the use of information gathered through torture and the practice of extraordinary rendition.

Recently, Mr Murray has published a series of confidential documents which purport to show that the UK Government government knowingly received information extracted by the Uzbekistan government using torture. This revelation has caused quite a storm in the blogosphere, including at Bloggerheads and at Daily Kos.

Mr Murray says (and the documents appear to confirm) that he warned the UK Government that information being passed on by the Uzbek security services was torture-tainted. But in a thoughtful post, another former Ambassador, Sir Brian Barder (who happens to be my father) makes an important distinction between using information tainted by torture as evidence in court (which is, and should be, inadmissable) and acting upon intelligence, however obtained, as the basis of further investigation.

As my father says, if our security services get information about a possible terrorist attack they should investigate it further, knowing that information gathered under duress of torture is likely to be far less reliable than information from other sources. That is what Mr Murray says has been happening, and it isn’t obvious to me that it it is either ethically wrong or illegal.

Furthermore, I don’t think UK Government Ministers have ever said that we don’t, or shouldn’t, act upon information even it is has been obtained by torture. So it not clear to me that Mr Murray’s documents demonstrate that the Government has in any way misled us about receiving or using such information.

I suppose it might be said that our willingness to receive and use information obtained from torture somehow encourages the Uzbek government to torture people that they otherwise wouldn’t. But given the nature of that regime, I doubt if it makes any difference to them if we do, or don’t, use the information they provide.

What Mr Murray is surely right about is the need for the UK and US to be much more robust in isolating the brutal, dictatorial regime and putting maximum economic and political pressure for change (read Mr Murray’s comments on my father’s blog for some idea of the nature of the government). It is deplorable that the relationship between the Uzbek government and the US or UK is sufficiently friendly for us to be receiving any intelligence information at all from their security services, let alone doing anything to encourage them to torture people.

So on this precise point, I don’t think Mr Murray is right, as it is not necessarily ethically wrong, nor is it illegal, for our services to use whatever information they can get in the fight against terrorism; and it is not clear to me that our Ministers have ever said otherwise.

Tomatoes being unloaded in the market today in Berkeley.

An iron law of politics is that it is never the mistake that causes the political damage, but the cover-up. Think of Watergate, or the Lewinsky affair. Think of Peter Mandelson’s troubles over his loan from Robinson, or Blunkett’s resignation. The leak of the Attorney General’s advice on the legality of the war in Iraq makes compelling reading. It has emerged at a time when it will do maximum damage to Tony Blair’s prospects for re-election. The question is why the Government did not quietly release this document as part of its evidence to the Butler Enquiry, or at soon after the Butler Enquiry produced its report which (superficially at least) appeared to exonerate the Government from wrongdoing. But because the Government tried to avoid releasing it, it has acquired almost totemic status, and the damage done to the Government will be amplified. Having read the leaked advice, I find it hard to believe that Parliament would have voted for the war if they had been given the full advice, or even an accurate summary of it. By failing to reveal to Parliament that the legal case was questionable – even if the Attorney General concluded that on balance military action would be legal – the Government can fairly be accused of having misled Parliament. And that is not a good thing in a democracy.

I’m shamelessly going to quote my Dad’s blog, not because he is my Dad but because he is right. He dissects Tony Blair’s defence of the decision to go to war in Iraq, as given to Jeremy Paxman.

The idea that at that historic moment it had been Tony Blair’s personal responsibility to take that ‘hard’ decision whether to remove Saddam or to “leave him there”, “still running Iraq”, is not only weird: it is also frankly frightening, because it suggests that our prime minister is unable to form a realistic view of his own responsibilities, of the limits on Britain’s power and responsibilities in the world, or of his place in it.

Paul Krugman has two interesting articles in the New York Times, here and here about the US Health Care system.

Most Americans probably don’t know that we have substantially lower life-expectancy and higher infant-mortality figures than other advanced countries. It would be wrong to jump to the conclusion that this poor performance is entirely the result of a defective health care system; social factors, notably America’s high poverty rate, surely play a role. Still, it seems puzzling that we spend so much, with so little return. A 2003 study published in Health Affairs (one of whose authors is my Princeton colleague Uwe Reinhardt) tried to resolve that puzzle by comparing a number of measures of health services across the advanced world. What the authors found was that the United States scores high on high-tech services – we have lots of M.R.I.’s – but on more prosaic measures, like the number of doctors’ visits and number of days spent in hospitals, America is only average, or even below average. There’s also direct evidence that identical procedures cost far more in the U.S. than in other advanced countries. The authors concluded that Americans spend far more on health care than their counterparts abroad – but they don’t actually receive more care. The title of their article? "It’s the Prices, Stupid."

And:

So we’ve created a vast and hugely expensive insurance bureaucracy that accomplishes nothing. The resources spent by private insurers don’t reduce overall costs; they simply shift those costs to other people and institutions. It’s perverse but true that this system, which insures only 85 percent of the population, costs much more than we would pay for a system that covered everyone.