Town of Braintree

the liberal equivalent of a mind

IF a terrorist knows the whereabouts of a ticking bomb that could kill thousands of Americans, would torturing him be permissible to prevent catastrophe?

The question was posed by Sen. Arlen Specter to three witnesses testifying before the committee that's conducting hearings on Attorney General-nominee Alberto Gonzales ?— a man the three consider ''dangerous.''

Harold Koh, dean of the law school at Yale: ''I think that my approach would be to keep the flat ban, and if someone ?— the president of the United States ?— had to make a decision like that, someone would have to decide whether to prosecute him or not.''

John Hutson, former Navy judge advocate general in the Clinton administration: I agree with, uh, with Dean Koh that it is always illegal. Now, you may decide that you are going to take the illegal action, ummm, because you have to.

Doug Johnson, director of the Center for Victims of Torture in Minneapolis: ''I think that it's very overblown in our imaginations, and ?— and it's very ripe with what I would . . . could only call fantasy and mythology.''

Translation of academic double-speak: Make it illegal except when you have to do it, and then prosecute the person who did the torturing. Or, it's a problem that will never exist except our imagination, so I don't have to answer the question.

Is it any wonder why Americans don't trust leftists with national security?

How is this for a record

Iraq is not the only place where the UN has covered itself with less than glory in disbursing and managing aid. We have seen millions of dollars squandered or siphoned off in Angola, Somalia and Cambodia. In Kenya, UNICEF botched a project worth millions of dollars.

At the height of the infamous famine in Ethiopia during the 1980s, the UN spent $ 75 million in building and upgrading apartment complexes for its administrators and staff as food rotted in the docks due to lack of transport. In East Timor, $50 million of aid money, administered by the UN, has been reportedly used for building hotels and malls instead of schools and health centres.

As much as 70 per cent -- and that is a conservative estimate -- of the UN's operational costs goes towards staff salaries, inflated bills, first class air travel, fancy cars, fancier accommodation, often in five-star hotels, huge allowances and other pecuniary benefits. Half the UN's workforce, whether at headquarters spinning red tape or in the field administering aid, former Secretary General Boutros-Ghali famously told The Washington Post, 'does nothing.' But everybody has his or her snout in the trough.

A pioneering study on how the UN operates while administering aid provides a revealing insight: In a particular year, the 'Executive Board of the (UN) Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation received $1,759,584 for travel and lodging. During the same time it spent $49,000 on education for handicapped children in Africa, and $1,000 to train teachers in Honduras.'

All this, of course, is necessary to disburse and administer aid. Little wonder, then, that the UN should have described the US as 'stingy' for its initial contribution to the tsunami aid fund. While others are accountable, not so the UN, it is accountable to none -- the robe of moral supremacy that it claims to wear, is but a figment of its imagination. But who is to tell the king that he struts around naked?

After a rather bleak 2004 when the UN found itself squeezed out of Iraq and the lucrative multi-billion-dollar 'oil for food' programme, and scandal after scandal of financial malfeasance and worse surfaced, painting the world organisation, to quote a particularly colourful though apt description, as a 'miasma of corruption beset by inefficiency,' a 'Kafkaesque bureaucracy' that deliberately obfuscates the truth and maintains a conspiracy of silence, it is party time for Kofi Annan and his aid administrators.

All those who have pledged money to help the survivors of Black Sunday, Kofi Annan has been quick to tell them in Jakarta, should pay up and pay up fast. The party has begun, the bills can't be allowed to pile up.

PS: If you wish to help survivors of Black Sunday, help organisations like Bharat Sevashram Sangha whose monks still travel by second class sleeper on Indian Railways and yet are among the first to reach disaster sites with food, clothes and medicine.


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