Protecting Our Masters

The Minister for US Interests in Europe has blocked European censure of the American practice of kidnapping people and torturing them in secret locations. According to the last forty-three words of this story in the Guardian, Bomber Hoon was kind enough to intervene at a meeting of foreign ministers in order to protect the Bush administration against any unpleasantness.

The preceding five hundred and forty-two words of the story are about Hoon's protectee, which is utilising the not quite brand-new political tactic of warning that imminent apocalypse will result from any failure to let the Bush administration do exactly as it wishes. The US Supreme Court having ruled that the Bush administration's military tribunals for detainees violated American law and the Geneva conventions, the White House has denounced the conventions as "vague" and is trying to change American law.

"Time is running out," Dick Cheney informed a press conference, through the usual channel. It is "vital that our folks on the frontline" - that would be the brave, upstanding kind of folks who drive innocent men to acts of anomalous warfare at Guantánamo - "have the tools that are necessary to protect the American people" because "the enemy wants to attack us again". And after all we've done for them, too.

Colin Powell has added what the Guardian tactfully calls his "prestige" to the cause of Republicans who oppose the White House proposals. Powell wrote that the proposals would create doubts about the "moral basis" of the War Against the Abstract Noun. It says a great deal for the character and honour of Geoff Hoon that he appears to have fewer doubts about the legal and moral basis of the White House's actions than the former secretary of state and pointer-out of big Iraqi trucks.