Gary writes:

I was actually taking a photo outside my house when a cop demanded to know my identity. His attitude was one of suspicion, which remained in place even when I gave my name and address and pointed to where I lived. He continued to demand proof of my identity I refused.

The flippant argument is "it is just one cop" but when do we start to classify this behavior as a failure of the political system?

Gary Sauer-Thompson discusses the complexity of issues to do with Afghanistan, Iraq and the Australian relationship with the United States. It is a curious nexus of politics, morality and foreign policy doctrines in navigating a path of least dissatisfaction through through the three areas.

Democratically and militarily Australia cannot completely rebuff the US in Afghanistan and Iraq. Australia is too reliant on America for the continuance of Australian military power. Democratically there is a strong conservative media that idealizes the Great and Powerful Friends doctrine who have to be placated, not to mention a significant enough constituency that concurs on the policy.

There is the politics as well. As Hugh White writes Rudd wants to disengage from Iraq while maintaining the relationship with the US. White writes:

Hence Rudd's dilemma. He wants to do the Bush administration some favours, but he is reluctant to send more troops to Iraq. The compromise seems to be that he and his colleagues will urge the Europeans to do more without promising that Australia will do more itself.

White argues that strategically Afghanistan is of no interest to Australia, and he is correct. As he noted extremists are operating in Pakistan now, and the likelihood of Afghanistan transitioning to a secular free-market democracy are slim.

The main difference is morality. Afghanistan is easier to swallow from a moral point of view than Iraq is. We went into Afghanistan to bring Osama Bin Laden to justice for his crimes against humanity. For that reason alone it is more morally palatable than Iraq is, the latter which was predicated on fraud, propaganda and incompetence. I think this is why the Rudd Government will choose to focus on Afghanistan in their policy.

I just finished Jane Mayer's The Dark Side. The sub title of the book is polemic, but basically it is a recent journalistic history of the internal legal battles within the White House and Pentagon over what was legally permissible during interrogation. The issue for the United States was that it had always abided by the Geneva Conventions, and the military had procedures and mechanisms to divide civilians out from soldiers, saboteurs and terrorists. This was blown away by Cheney's and Bush's 'get tough on terror' policies that enabled torture.

The legal mechanism for destroying all executive legal precedent for the Geneva Conventions was David Addingtons doctrinaire and political approach to the formerly independent OLC. The Office of Legal Counsel. It is a small legal department in the Executive which acts like a mini-supreme court in the Executive an writes memos and guidance on what is constitutionally and legally permissible for the Executive to do.

Like all the White House and Executive under the Bush Administration this independent office was politicized. John Yoo being the main perpetrator of giving Addington and Cheney exactly what they wanted in terms of legal advice. To make it worse, these legal memos were then made secret, so that the CIA and military had no real legal guidance over what they could do. Instead they were given legal advice such as 'take the gloves off' from the likes of Rumsfield, Tenet and Cheney.

To the FBI's credit under Mueller, they refused to torture. But the CIA appeared to be willing to do it and take it to abnormal lengths. Renditions were popular - they did exist during the Clinton Administration too - and suspects, real and imaginary, were sent to hellholes in Syria, Poland, Afghanistan and tortured.

The policy did not change despite the Supreme Court ruling against the legal policies of the Bush Administration. More independent lawyers such as Comey and Goldsmith fought against the secret and legal memos, but in each case where Cheney and Addington came up against people acting in conscience they replaced the person - usually when they resigned - with someone politically pliable. Gonzalez and Bradbury.

The Bush Administration proved it was not particularly good at governance in multiple areas, the war on terror was no exception. The Bush Administration at its highest levels, including the President, Vice President, Secretary of Defense, the head of the CIA, the Attorney General, etc all embraced the policies that the United States will torture suspects for information and will not have habeas corpus available to them. The latter a simple political right from the 13thC, the former supposedly banned from civil and moral society.

It is sad the United States willingly and openly stooped so low. Worse, it did it all for nothing. Torture did not work, there was no good information from it, and it made many people who should have been publicly prosecuted in a court of law for their crimes against humanity impossible to take before a court because they had been tortured. It was a catastrophic failure of judgment, morality and governance by the Bush Administration.