I have posted on Twitter my account of the most memorable features of J’s and my flight from London to New York on Virgin Atlantic a couple of days ago. My Twitter posts (‘tweets’, in the jargon) are as follows:
# BrianLB Filled in exhaustive ESTA form for US Immigration online before US visit. Provided same info for US when booking flight online. Then same info inflight. Insane.
# Checked in for Virgin online, then queued at LHR for 50 mins for bagdrop behind man on same ticket as his namesake for same flight. 50 mins to sort out.
# Virgin flight LHR to JFK: baggage discrepancy delayed takeoff by 95 minutes. In premium economy seat for over 10 hours total. Purgatory.
# On Virgin Atlantic flight London-NYC woman across the aisle coughed non-stop for 10 hours. Assume viruses & bacteria recycled every 10 mins.
__________________
(Note: Some tiresome text-speak abbreviations, necessitated by Twitter’s 140-character per tweet limit, have been expanded in this version for the sake of clarity.)
In fairness to Virgin Atlantic, I should add that the food, once we got off the ground, was perfectly all right and the cabin staff friendly and helpful (not least when I spilled a full glass of Spanish white wine between my legs). Our landing at JFK was exemplary. Sir R. Branson might however care to look at the software which provides consistently inaccurate information on the television screen about 1 metre from your face about the aircraft’s position on the map, local time at the destination, and the number of hours of flying still to be endured before arrival. One just hopes that the information supplied by the aircraft’s computer system to the Navigation Officer is better related to reality. Presumably it is, since the plane seemed to find New York without much difficulty.
Originals of my Twitter posts, and my earlier tweets, are at http://twitter.com/brianlb. Join Twitter, open http://twitter.com/brianlb again, and click Follow to see my forthcoming Tweets — and that will allow me to ‘follow’ yours. It’s perfectly harmless, not particularly time-consuming, and quite enjoyable.
More on Twitter for beginners here.
Brian (in New York)
Another dispute between parents who wish their child’s medical treatment, however hopeless, to continue, and the hospital doctors, who judge that treatment is burdensome and pointless and should be terminated, has just been decided by the court in favour of the doctors. Treatment was “withdrawn” and the baby (“Baby OT”) died next day. In his column in today’s (23 March) Guardian, Marcel Berlins debates the appropriateness or otherwise of such painful cases being decided by the courts and concludes, a little reluctantly, that they probably should, until someone devises a better arrangement.
I’m a little surprised that Mr Berlins didn’t also discuss what is unarguably a much more offensive feature of these decisions. When the courts agree to the withdrawal of treatment, in cases where the treatment is the only thing that’s keeping the patient alive, terminating the treatment, e.g. by turning off the ventilator, is all that the law permits. The doctors may not administer a lethal injection or a lethal dose of some oral drug to hasten death and minimise suffering. In some cases the patient may linger on for days, eventually dying of thirst and starvation rather than of the condition which is incapable of cure and which will eventually anyway cause death. There’s even a lively debate over whether artificial feeding by tube constitutes ‘treatment’ which in some cases may legitimately be ‘withdrawn’, obviously and inevitably resulting in the patient’s death. Defenders of this grisly paradox argue that withdrawing treatment is morally acceptable even when everyone concerned knows that it will result in death, provided that the treatment is not stopped with the intention of causing death. Those of us who were denied the benefits of education by the Jesuits may be forgiven for gagging on that.
In an interview yesterday on the BBC radio Today programme, the Most Reverend Peter Smith, Roman Catholic Archbishop of Cardiff, talked about his church’s position on cases of this kind. The interview is no longer available on the BBC website, but here are my notes on what he said, made while listening to him:
Must not kill an innocent person under any circumstances — there’s no moral justification for that. But when it comes to the end of life, we wouldn’t take a vitalist [?] view that somebody must be kept alive by the most extraordinary means. The Church’s view, the moral view [sic] is that if the treatment needed to keep the person alive is burdensome or futile, we wouldn’t take the view that you must always continue it to keep the person alive because it’s absolutely pointless.
So you may do something to a patient which you know will result in his death, but you may not actually take any direct action to hasten death. The point of withdrawing treatment is so as not to subject the patient to treatment that may cause suffering and loss of dignity, but you may not then administer a drug that will have exactly the same effect: sparing the patient unnecessary suffering and loss of dignity after the withdrawal of treatment by hastening his inevitable end.
But, the Archbishop might say, to administer a lethal injection would constitute euthanasia; and anyway “there’s no justification for killing an innocent person in any circumstances“. But to stop feeding a helpless patient is to kill him just as surely as giving him a lethal injection: it just takes longer and is likely to cause more suffering. It’s still by any rational definition euthanasia. How starving a man to death can be morally and theologically acceptable, when a quick and painless injection that achieves the same result but spares the patient days in agony is deemed to be ethically wrong, is quite beyond me. It surely puts sophistry and unfeeling ideological doctrine before common humanity, and as such is morally repulsive. It’s an irony that the Most Revd. Peter Smith — formerly, by the way, the hot tip to succeed Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor as Roman Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, but now regarded as perhaps too ‘liberal’ for the job — should provide such a public example of doctrinaire heartlessness in the same week as the Pope’s comparable pronouncement condemning the distribution of condoms in the campaign against HIV/AIDS, almost certainly causing uncounted additional deaths and unmeasurable avoidable suffering just by what he said.
It’s only fair to say, though, that it’s not only Roman Catholics who are unfazed by the idea of withdrawing a patient’s treatment in the knowledge that death will result, but can’t quite bring themselves to accept a quicker, more merciful but more activist way of achieving the same result. Many members of the medical profession and some lawyers seek to protect their delicate consciences by drawing the same bogus and hypocritical distinction. Arthur Hugh Clough (1819-1861) no doubt thought he was being wittily satirical when he wrote, in The Latest Decalogue:
Thou shalt not kill; but needst not strive
Officiously to keep alive.
It would be nice to believe that Clough would have been distressed to think that all these years later his Latest Commandment was being taken literally. (The rest of his Latest Decalogue is equally pointed and worth reading, although less well known.)
Brian
Psssst! Heard the one about the Frenchman, the German and the Portugoose…?
Or did someone mention Broon?
Some of us on the eastern side of the great ditch have been bemused by what appears to be a certain ambiguity in American attitudes to torture. Waterboarding and other ‘harsh’ interrogation techniques had their defenders during the GW Bush administration and it was some time into that dismal period before the use of torture in the context of the so-called ‘war on terror’
became a live issue, or so it seemed from here.
Mark Danner
So many of us will be fascinated to read a long and authoritative article on the subject in the New York Review of Books by Professor Mark Danner.
The article’s special interest lies in the fact that Professor Danner has somehow managed to get hold of a copy of a secret report on torture by the International Committee of the Red Cross, which almost always insists on the strict confidentiality of its reports — for the obvious reason that governments are unlikely to agree to allow Red Cross access to prisons and detention centres if there’s any danger that their resulting reports are going to be made public. In an equally fascinating interview and Q&A session on C-Span (also available on the Web) Mark Danner understandably declines to say how he obtained this Red Cross document, on which much of his NYR article is based.
The New York Review of Books biography of Mark Danner says that he is a –
longtime staff writer at The New Yorker and contributor to The New York Review of Books, [and] the author of three books: The Massacre at El Mozote: A Parable of the Cold War; The Road to Illegitimacy: One Reporter’s Travels Through the 2000 Florida Recount; and Torture and Truth. Danner’s work has been honored with many awards, including a National Magazine Award, three Overseas Press Awards, and an Emmy. In June 1999, he was named a MacArthur Fellow. He is Professor of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley and Henry R. Luce Professor of Human Rights and Journalism at Bard College. He divides his time between Berkeley and New York. His work is archived at http://www.markdanner.com/.
He deserves a medal.
Brian
‘Diplomatic Superstar’ is how a friend described Nicko Henderson in e-mailing to me the website addresses of the obituaries in the Times and the Daily Telegraph of Sir Nicholas Henderson, GCMG KCVO, who died yesterday aged 89. For my money, however, the best, most penetrating and most personal of the obituaries in the heavies (not counting The Independent which hasn’t yet published one) is in today’s Guardian, by Fiona MacCarthy, the biographer and cultural historian.
But there is a quite remarkable lacuna in the Guardian’s obituary. Ms MacCarthy, alone among the obituarists, omits to describe the circumstances in which Henderson (universally known as ‘Nicko’ even by those, like me, who didn’t know him personally) was appointed British ambassador in Washington, the plummiest of all plummy diplomatic posts, after he had reached the mandatory Diplomatic Service retirement age of 60 and had indeed formally retired. His last posting before retirement had been as ambassador in Paris, and in accordance with then standard practice (one foolishly abolished by those currently in charge of our diplomacy) he wrote a final valedictory despatch from Paris summing up his impressions and experiences in 40 years as a star British diplomat, offering general thoughts about the place of Britain in the world and what could be done about it. Also in accordance with invariable practice, the despatch was classified ‘confidential’, enabling Henderson to write with great frankness about what he saw as Britain’s sad decline in the world. However, the despatch was leaked to The Economist magazine, which published it in its entirety. The appearance of the despatch — formally declassified years later and now available in facsimile on the Web (PDF file) — caused a rumpus; Margaret Thatcher, just installed as prime minister, read it and liked it, despite its strongly pro-European stance; and it has always been assumed that it was Mrs Thatcher’s admiration for the despatch which caused her to send this retired, 60-year-old former diplomat as Britain’s representative in the United States in 1979 — although according to Wikipedia, “It is now known that Mrs Thatcher had first asked Sir Edward Heath to take up the post, but he had refused the offer”). As it turned out, Henderson’s was an inspired appointment: Nicko laid on a bravura performance in defence of British interests when Argentina invaded the British colony of the Falkland Islands in 1982, appearing all over the American media, exploiting his excellent personal relations with everyone who counted in Washington DC, tirelessly setting out the British case for recovering the islands by military force, winning over nervous US public opinion, and thus enabling the US government (which included several powerful figures who sided with the Argentinians for the sake of US relations with Latin America) to provide Britain with indispensable intelligence and hardware without which the recovery of the Falklands would almost certainly have been impossible.
It seems curious, against this background, that the Guardian obituary should have omitted the story of the leaked despatch, even going so far as to assert that it was the then Foreign Secretary, Lord Carrington, who had “asked Henderson to take over in Washington”: no mention of Mrs Thatcher, no word of the despatch. So far as I know, no-one has ever revealed who was responsible for this major leak, nor, despite intense speculation, whether Henderson had himself been privy to it or even perhaps had personally engineered it. There seems to have been no formal leak enquiry. Under the 30-year rule the relevant official documents should be made available this year in the National Archives at Kew. Perhaps some diligent researcher will then be able to unearth the answers; or with Henderson’s death, perhaps the Economist will feel free to reveal who had passed that famous document to them, giving them what must be their most celebrated scoop. Meanwhile we can only speculate about the significance, if any, of this striking omission from the Guardian’s obituary.
I didn’t know Nicko Henderson personally, although his was an almost tangible presence in the British ambassador’s residence in Warsaw where J and I lived many years later: he and his Greek wife Mary were exceptionally fondly remembered by the Polish staff there. Before his time in Poland (and later as ambassador to Germany and then France) Henderson had been for a time the number two in Madrid, during the Franco era. At that time I, much more junior and younger, was doing the decolonisation job in the UK Mission to the United Nations in New York. One of the great issues at the time was the future of Gibraltar, with Spain continuously angling for a UN resolution calling on Britain to give back the Rock (and simultaneously giving the Gibraltarians a hard time in the apparent belief that this would eventually persuade them to ask to be handed over to Madrid), while the UK asserted that its legal title to Gibraltar was impeccable and above all that a huge majority of the people of Gibraltar wanted no change in their status as citizens of a British colony. I (and others in the British Mission to the UN) had considerable correspondence with Henderson in Madrid on the tactics to be adopted at the UN on the Gibraltar issue. Some British diplomats succumb to the temptation to see the world through the eyes of the government of the country where they are serving, and it wouldn’t have been too surprising if Henderson had deployed to London and to us in New York the arguments for handing over the Rock to Spain, thus greatly improving Anglo-Spanish relations and so promoting British interests in Spain. But my recollection (possibly faulty — the files in the National Archives may either show otherwise, or confirm my impression) is that Nicko was robust in his support for the principle that the wishes of the inhabitants must be paramount and that they should not be delivered like cattle into the hands of Spain whether they liked it or not, whatever the consequences for Anglo-Spanish relations. Fiat justitia, ruat coelum! I sometimes wondered whether his equally robust defence of the rights and wishes of the Falklanders, years later when he was ambassador in Washington, might have owed something to his dealings with Spain over Gibraltar.
Fortunately post-Franco Spain has adopted a rather more far-sighted attitude towards Gibraltar, and without in any way giving up its claim to the territory, has moved to a policy of cooperation and dialogue as a more promising route to an eventual decision by the Gibraltarians to consent to the territory being transferred back to Spain — if the famous apes ever give their consent as well.
Brian
Last autumn our most debased and shameless tabloid newspaper, Murdoch’s Sun, denounced with its usual fake indignation a ‘comedy workshop’ at an English prison, attended by a convicted Muslim terrorist and other assorted evil-doers. Did the minister responsible, the so-called ‘Justice Secretary’ patiently explain to The Sun the reasons for restoring prisoners’ self-respect by teaching them valued skills that would reduce the chances of their re-offending after their release? Here’s a clue: the Justice Secretary is one Jack Straw, former Home Secretary, Foreign & Commonwealth Secretary, and half a dozen other exes. Now read on:
By JOHN KAY, Chief Reporter
Published: 21 Nov 2008AN al-Qaeda terrorist involved in a plot to bomb London was taught how to be a stand-up COMIC at his top-security prison, The Sun can reveal. Evil Zia Ul Haq was enrolled on an eight-day “comedy workshop” at Whitemoor jail, along with murderers and rapists.
An inquiry was launched today by the director of high security prisons to consider whether further action was needed, the Ministry of Justice said. A spokeswoman added: “The director general of the National Offender Management Service is personally briefing governors from all prisons on the need to take account of the public acceptability test in relation to prison classes.” Once they “graduated” they were due to get a certificate and display their new talents with a comedy show for fellow lags and guards.Last night Justice Secretary Jack Straw canned the “totally unacceptable” course after The Sun alerted him. He also vetoed a plan by the Category A Cambridgeshire prison to set up its own comedy club.
[The Sun, 21 November 2008 (emphasis added)]
The Daily Telegraph helpfully expanded on the Justice Secretary’s prompt remedial action:
…[J]ustice secretary Jack Straw stepped in and closed the course after three days, The Sun reported. “As soon as I heard about it, I instructed it must be immediately cancelled,” he said. “It is totally unacceptable.” Senior managers in the Prison Service, who were also unaware of it, take the same view. “Prisons should be places of punishment and reform. Providing educational and constructive pursuits is essential but the types of courses and the manner in which they are delivered must be appropriate.” … A spokeswoman added: “The director general of the National Offender Management Service is personally briefing governors from all prisons on the need to take account of the public acceptability test [in relation to prison classes].”
[Daily Telegraph, 21 November 2008 (emphasis added)]
This was too much even for Mr Murdoch’s down-market Times, whose columnist Libby Purves wrote:
A month ago … I recorded the dismay spreading through the UK Prison Service as a result of Jack Straw’s banning of a well-established comedy course at Whitemoor Prison. Some nasty little toe-rag outed it to indignant tabloids looking for something to get cross about.
The result, you may recall, was the Justice Secretary’s ruling that comedy in prison is “totally unacceptable”, “not a constructive pursuit”, and that all inmate activities – even if not funded by taxpayers – “must be justified to the community”. Comedy sounded too much like fun…
A PSI – Prison Service instruction – followed this, laying down formally that all activities must now be judged not only by whether they do any good but by how they “might be perceived by the public”. Sir David Ramsbotham, the former Chief Inspector of Prisons and patron of several prison arts projects, robustly described the PSI as “lunacy”. Organisations that take arts into prison … were scared, disheartened and in some cases had projects abruptly cancelled by understandably nervous governors. Nobody, after all, has defined the parameters of a “public acceptability test”… Even obviously humane projects bringing together prisoners and families found themselves threatened. It has been a difficult time. It still is. And it shouldn’t be. Prisons should be free to do whatever contributes to rehabilitation, purpose and human connection. The “public acceptability test” still needs harpooning. [The Times, March 2, 2009 (emphasis added)]
Ms Purves’s column went on to praise, in moving terms, a production of the great musical West Side Story by a mixture of prisoners, prison officers and a few professional actors from Pimlico Opera, in Wandsworth prison, the biggest in the country. The production, said Ms Purves, sent two vital messages. The first and most obvious one was about the futility and cruelty of street gang violence:
That second message is about work: co-operation, learning, taking direction and how it takes the sweated patience of theatre to create, in a live moment, a magical emotional unity between audience and performers.
Similar praise for what was evidently an outstanding and deeply moving production came from Fiona Maddocks in The Observer on 15 March:
Rejoice in these jailhouse blues
Jack Straw is clamping down on arts inside prisons. If he’d been at HMP Wandsworth last week, he might just change his mind …
Between his Wagner performances at the Royal Opera House last week Bryn Terfel slipped into Wandsworth prison in south-west London. He had a free afternoon and responded to an impromptu invitation. After visiting a few cells, the world’s most famous bass-baritone volunteered to join a group of inmates in a song…
Together they sang “Somewhere”, the yearning ballad from Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story. For anyone incarcerated in one of the largest prisons in western Europe together with 1,643 other male offenders, the lyrics have unbearable poignancy: “Peace and quiet and open air/ Wait for us/ Somewhere…/We’ll find a new way of living/ We’ll find a way of forgiving/ Somewhere.“
Even the austere Financial Times was moved, Peter Aspden writing:
We were, of course, all expecting the barnstorming “Officer Krupke” to be rich in dramatic irony (“Gee, Officer Krupke, we’re very upset; We never had the love that ev’ry child oughta get. We ain’t no delinquents, We’re misunderstood. Deep down inside us there is good!”) and so it proved, especially when the last verse was sung extra-lustily to the prison project’s patron, former cabinet minister Michael Portillo, smiling sheepishly in the stalls.
There was still more poignancy in store when the entire male chorus, inmates every one, sang the lyrics of West Side Story’s loveliest melody: “Some day, somewhere, we’ll find a new way of living…” It can’t be often that the mise-en-scène of this particular musical is as moving as its substance, but that was certainly the case here, where its theme of redemption passed for much more than mere romantic conceit. [FT, 6 March 2009]
A friend who works as a volunteer at Wandsworth prison was also there:
[L]ike Libby Purves, I was at the opening night of this amazing show last Friday … Those of us who work as volunteers (monitoring day-to-day conditions and events in prisoners’ lives in HMP Wandsworth), know … about the inestimable value of drama and the other arts in prisons … And [Libby Purves is] absolutely right too about the quality of the production — the audience wouldn’t stop applauding at times — and what it must be doing for the prisoners taking part. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry much of the time — so, like many other people, I did both. Just imagine prisoners singing: Gee Officer Krupke….We never had the love every child oughta get…We ain’t no delinquents, we’re misunderstood.. Deep down inside us there is good…! And: He don’t need a judge he needs an analyst’s care…It’s just his neurosis that oughta be curbed… He’s psychologic’ly disturbed…! And so on. Hilarious stuff. But I wondered about the men singing it. Did they sense the irony? What did they feel? Learn?
I’ll try to find out from some of them in the near future when reality re-imposes itself.
Jack Straw’s ignorant, cowardly fiat, surrendering instantly to The Sun’s bullying, very nearly caused the abandonment of this hugely worth-while project. He didn’t, you’ll notice, attempt to defend the ban on ‘inappropriate’ courses such as training in comedian’s skills in prisons, nor to deny their potential value as rehabilitation tools, boosters of morale and self-respect, bonding and community spirit. His sole concern is whether any activity is publicly “acceptable” — acceptability, it seems, defined not by what is acceptable to Lord Ramsbotham or to others who understand that the punishment of being sent to prison is the withdrawal of liberty, not ill-treatment and mindless deprivations while behind bars: acceptability defined purely, or impurely, by what is acceptable to The Sun newspaper. How low can a minister entrusted with ‘justice’ sink?
The Justice Secretary
But what should we expect of Mr Straw, Justice Secretary — indeed also Lord Chancellor in his spare time? He was the Foreign Secretary at the time of the Blair government’s illegal attack on Iraq, the senior minister whose own department’s legal advisers had warned him in writing that an attack on Iraq would constitute the crime of aggression, but who apparently had not had the courage to relay that warning to his Cabinet colleagues (we would have heard about it by now if he had) nor to resign when it was brushed impatiently aside by Mr Blair. He was the home secretary who, as recorded by Wikipedia, “brought forward the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000, increased police powers against terrorism and proposed a reduction in the right to trial by jury. These policies won praise from Margaret Thatcher who once declared ‘I trust Jack Straw. He is a very fair man.’ They were deemed excessively authoritarian by his former students’ union, which in 2000 banned him from the building…” He was was responsible for allowing General Augusto Pinochet to return to Chile. In 2000 he turned down an asylum request from a man fleeing Saddam Hussein’s regime, saying “we have faith in the integrity of the Iraqi judicial process and that you should have no concerns if you haven’t done anything wrong.” Only Gordon Brown, Alastair Darling and Jack Straw have served continuously in every Labour cabinet since Labour’s triumph in 1997. We have accumulated ample evidence by now of what kind of politician the Justice Secretary is. Nothing that he does should surprise us.
Brian
