Inside the Asylum

The UN says we have nothing to worry about.

The international community is better prepared than ever to deal with the threatened spread of a new swine flu virus, a top UN health chief has said.

Unless of course they mean "better" in the sense of "better than absolutely unprepared, but still hopelessly unready." Or maybe Mr Creosote's "how do you feel today sir?" "Better." "Better?" "Better get a bucket, I'm going to throw up."

This just in from the North Korean News Agency:

Shortly ago, the commander of the U.S. imperialist aggressor forces present in south Korea flew aboard a fighter of the south Korean air force while a brasshat of the puppet military who is deputy commander of the south Korea-U.S. "combined forces command" made a similar flight aboard a fighter of the U.S. air force for the purpose of examining the "posture of air operation and capability carrying out a combined operation... it was aimed to... round off the preparations for a war of aggression against the DPRK they have pushed forward so far... If the DPRK remains a passive onlooker to the moves of war against it pursued by the U.S. and the Lee Myung Bak group under the pretext of "alliance," it will be as clear as noonday that the whole land of Korea will turn into a theatre of a nuclear war and all Koreans in the north and the south will have to suffer a nuclear holocaust.

I would say that this is frightening stuff, except for the fact that the North Koreans say this kind of thing all the time.

UN torture envoy: US must prosecute Bush lawyers. Manfred Nowak, who serves as a U.N. special rapporteur in Geneva, said Washington is obligated under the U.N. Convention against Torture to prosecute U.S. Justice Department officials who wrote memos that defined torture in the narrowest way in order to justify and legitimize it, and who assured CIA officials that their use of questionable tactics was legal.

As I always ask: what do we know about the person behind this? Well, Manfred Nowak is the same UN official who had this to say in September 2006

He told journalists at a briefing in Geneva that he had yet to visit Iraq, but he was able to base his information on autopsies and interviews with Iraqis in neighbouring Jordan. "What most people tell you is that the situation as far as torture is concerned now in Iraq is totally out of hand," the Austrian law professor said. "The situation is so bad many people say it is worse than it has been in the times of Saddam Hussein," he added.

This is also the same Manfred Novak behind a report condemning Guantanamo despite refusing a US invitation to visit the prison. His definition of the "torture" inflicted on prisoners at the prison included the fact that hunger-strikers were force fed.

Novak described his intellectual inspiration

"[A]s is well known," Nowak observed, the Commission had qualified the five "deep interrogation techniques" employed by the British security forces [in Northern Ireland] as torture. I can still well remember Ermacora's dismay when the [European] Court [of Human Rights], on the urging of the British judge, corrected the opinion of the Commission and found the British forces responsible for "merely" inhumane treatment. More than 30 years later, I am now, in my role as U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture, charged with the qualification of similar interrogation methods employed by the USA in Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, and other camps. I think, in this difficult question, I will permit myself to be inspired by the legal opinion of my former teacher rather than by the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights."