Bill's Comment Page

The standards democracies need to live by when at war

This post has been prompted by some comments on a few of my recent postings. I wrote a lengthy post on 12th May about the treatment of prisoners held by the Coalition in Iraq - read it by clicking here (you'll need to scroll down to get to the post entitled "The treatment of prisoners in Iraq under US and UK detention" - I've never been able to understand how to link direct to posts on Blogger using the permalinks, I'm afraid -but see UPDATE at the end).

I wish to quote most of one parapgraph of what I wrote in that post:

Some have said that the scale of what has been done by some Coalition personnel in Iraq is dwarfed by what occurred during Saddam Hussein's time in power in Iraq. No doubt. The hypocrisy of critics, specially those in some Arab countries and other countries who do not have a democratic system of government and whose governments probably sanction or tolerate, routinely, the mistreatment of citizens and others in their territories, has been mentioned in an effort, presumably, to minimise the impact or the validity of their criticisms. These efforts miss the point entirely - there is no justification, ever, for torture. It is not open to any government, citing any justification whatsoever, to subject persons under its control to cruel and unusual punishment, or 'torture' for short. This applies just as much to those held at Guantanamo as to those held in Iraq.

- this remains my firm view.

UPDATE: (Friday 9JUN04 10.32 BST) A couple of days I switched on 'titles' in my blog style sheet and did a few changes to allow this to work properly. A side-effect seems to be that my permalinks now actually go where they are supposed to - amazing!