Friday, July 25, 2008



How we should deal with torturers

While the New Zealand police are doing their best to protect a torturer, Argentina shows us how they should be dealt with. In 1977, during Argentina's "Dirty War", Luciano Menendez oversaw the disappearance, torture, and murder of four left-wing activists, who were held bound and drugged for a month at a disappearance centre before their bodies were dumped in the street to make it look like they had died in a gun battle with authorities. Today, he was convicted of that crime, and sentenced to life imprisonment. Its not justice for the hundreds of other people he had murdered (as usual in these cases, they focused on the four murders they could solidly prove rather than the hundreds he was actually responsible for), but its something.

This is how we should be dealing with torturers: arresting, prosecuting, and convicting them. Instead, our government is shaking their hand, while the police look the other way on their crimes. And we claim to have a good record on human rights...