Gutter snipe all you want Geoffrey Robertson QC but you are on our side now!!
Last night (20/10/2014) I saw this on the ABC Lateline program.
EMMA ALBERICI: You were against the 2003 Iraq invasion, but you support the fight against Islamic State. What’s the difference?
GEOFFREY ROBERTSON: Correct. Well, in a sense there’s a link because if we had obeyed the law, we wouldn’t have overthrown the Baathist regime in 2003 in Iraq, which – and underneath that stone, once it was rolled over, crept all these horrific fighting groups and the latest one of them being ISIS. So it may well be that ISIS wouldn’t be with us if we’d obeyed the law, and let’s face it, there were only four who didn’t. There was George Bush, who wanted to kill the man who had – he thought had threatened his father. There was Tony Blair, who went in because he thought the British could restrain the Americans. There was that Spanish President whose name I forget. He reminded me of Manuel in Fawlty Towers. I think he’s now been made a member of News Corp board. And there was Johnny Howard, who perhaps didn’t look at the law or had forgotten it or never studied it when he became a solicitor. But it was a bad mistake to go in to overthrow Saddam Hussein and we are now left with ISIS and we have to deal with it. We have an obligation to deal with it, I think, because it is committing genocide. It is certainly committing war crimes and crimes against humanity and that engages international attention. There was no crime against humanity or genocide being committed by Saddam. He committed genocide in 1988 against the Kurds, but the world turned a blind eye to that. And so we have a duty, I think, to go in. I don’t think air strikes is going to solve of the problem. The problems are extremely deep and will take a lot of solving and we have problems in our own backyard with returning members of ISIS in Britain. They’ve adopted a view, initially, that they should keep them out, but that means …
EMMA ALBERICI: That’s a view that’s shared here too …
GEOFFREY ROBERTSON: Yes, I know.
EMMA ALBERICI: … in our government.
GEOFFREY ROBERTSON: But you can’t make people stateless. The answer I think is that you have to bring them back, arrest them and put them on trial for war crimes and crimes against humanity. We can do that. There are those crimes under the Crimes Act. And I think that view is gathering force in Britain.
EMMA ALBERICI: So you think it’s wrong to deny them – to cancel their passports, deny them re-entry to Australia?
GEOFFREY ROBERTSON: Well perhaps cancel their passports if they’re going, but when they come back, I think the answer is not to refuse them and leave them stateless because that’s – what we should do is prosecute them, send them to prison for a long time, or perhaps – the view in Britain is the Channel program. We’re developing programs with psychologists and imams and possibly returned jihadis to discourage young people from joining. And it may be that instead of getting a 25-year sentence for being an accomplice to war crimes in Syria, you will get a reduction if you’re prepared to help discourage other people from taking this primrose path. But it’s a problem that both countries are facing. I think the answer is to prosecute for the crimes that they’ve committed, for their accompliceship in these monstrous events and to punish them and hopefully the punishment will act as a deterrent itself.
EMMA ALBERICI: We have to leave it there. Many thanks for coming in, Geoffrey Robertson.
END
That dear reader is what the ABC puts to air and after all why not a great many people love him? All one has to do is listen to the disparaging personal attacks that pass unchallenged by the ABC reporters to realise how low it has sunk as a so-called independent news provider.
However, one can still say – thank you come in spinner as another anti-war liberal has joined the ranks of the pro-war elements. OMG we are currently so shamelessly broad in our ranks that we will even have this contemptible refugee from the old not in my name brigade. ROBERTSON may well rather be passing a sentence on the Spanish Prime Minister, George W Bush and Tony Blair as war criminals – but he will just have to content himself with a bit of gutter sniping instead! Little Johhny Howard indeed!
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