Give me something better

It’s been a bit quiet round here recently, apart from bananaphones. Partly that’s because I’ve been ill with the accompanying demotivation that that brings but there’s the usual problem of there not, apparently, being anything new happening that I’ve seen. Vexing and disgusting perhaps, but not new.

I mean, take the whole Condoleeza Rice / torture / secret prisons thing. The general practice of rendition is not new. It’s been going on for years. The fact that the CIA has been rendering people to various places in Europe rather than just the Middle East was new, but isn’t really new any more, though it still bears repeating as the whole idea of rendition in the first place still seems to be considered something shockingly new. Goodness! They’ll be telling us next that they used napalm! Really, if you consider yourself at all aware of the issues surrounding US conduct in Iraq and foreign policy generally and you didn’t know about rendition, please attach electrodes to yourself until you sign a document saying “I will pay attention in future”.

Another thing that isn’t new is the constant sophistry about legality, and the acceptance of this in the media.

Mrs Merkel said Ms Rice had given “important” reassurances that the US would use “every lawful means” to protect citizens from the threat of international terrorism.

Ms Rice said the US respected the sovereignty of its partners, adding that the US had an obligation to defend its people and would use every lawful means to do so.

“We will live up, in the United States, to our commitments under our laws, and to our international obligations,” she said.

If enough lawyers can be marshalled to prove that actually, kidnapping people without due process and flying them off to places where they can be detained and tortured is legal under international law, and that actually, waterboarding and so on aren’t legally torture anyway, then what that says is that there is something definitely wrong with international law. Reductio ad absurdum. Yet we still get all this thrown up as if it’s a legitimate defence – and as if they actually gave a toss in any case, rather than just, if enough lawyers can’t be marshalled, going ahead anyway as long as it doesn’t threaten anybody’s re-election chances or bank balance. And that’s behaviour that’s even less new than any of the other things here.

What’s meant to happen exactly? Are people who think that such behaviour is dangerous and wrong meant to be reassured on the off-chance that it turns out to be legal? “Oh, well, I was worried, but now that I learn it’s fine under international law I suppose it doesn’t matter. Thanks, Condi!” If I’m going to go along with whatever my rulers do but also avoid cognitive dissonance, I need something a bit better than “legal trumps wrong, and we define legal”. Please help me out.