White Men With Short Hair

I suppose you expect me to talk, Goldfinger.
No, Mr Bond, I expect you to die.
I agree with the other BB (we really must change my name) and Captain Cabernet. Nick's own site shows a photo of our humble watchee. Here's the Wikipedia entry on Timothy McVeigh and the one on David Copeland. Were the latter two trying to 'destroy our way of life'? One would think so. But did Nick advocate torture in 1995 after Oklamhoma? Or in 1999? There's a bomb in a gay pub (OK that won't convince the Sun) and the clock is ticking. Or there's a bomb in a truck under a government building (Daily Mail: tea drinking skivers blown to smithereens) and the clock ... You get the idea. But police hold a brown man and Nick is suddenly on the side of PC Nasty.

On the morning of 1 October, 2002, Wolfgang Daschner, deputy chief of police in Frankfurt-am-Main, gazed at Magnus Gaefgen, a law student and the prime suspect for the kidnapping of the 11-year-old son of a Rhineland banker. The policeman was certain he knew where the boy was, but Gaefgen refused to talk and had every reason to maintain his right to silence.
Suppose that Jakob von Metzler was slowly starving in a cellar. It was in Gaefgen's interests to let him die and dispose of his body when he was sure the police were not watching him. Alive, the boy would be a prosecution witness. Dead, he would be the source of forensic evidence. If Gaefgen stayed quiet, he might get away with murder and the police knew it.
Daschner considered his options and wrote a memo. Gaefgen should be tortured, he said. 'After being warned, he should be questioned again, under medical supervision, with the infliction of pain [no injuries].' The kidnappers of children aren't brave men and the mere threat of a beating caused Gaefgen to confess that he had murdered Jakob and hidden his body in plastic bags under a jetty.

I particularly like The kidnappers of children aren't brave men - what are they supposed to do? Laugh? and say, Le Chiffre, you'll die scratching my balls?
Now, I think Nick is quite intelligent. So this is probably the best case he could find. You may take note that the threat of torture did not save the boy's life. It would be a different story if it had. Nick could have written the murderers of children aren't brave men and it would be no less true. I assume from this that Nick can't find an example where torture saved a single life.
His Lordship was right. The moderation of British trade unionists drove Marx wild, but he never tried to persuade them to think again and start a revolution.
Mr Karl Marx, a German denizen of Soho, Westminster, London, co-authored a pamphlet with his friend Mr Engels of Manchester, titled 'The Communist Manifesto', which is widely believed to persuade just that, your honour.
I'm truly boggled by the number of Marxists who misread the old git. He didn't want a revolution after all; gosh they wasted their efforts. Lenin, you silly sod.
But the most infuriating sentence is this:
Because Germany has experienced the horrors of both fascism and communism, torture is a taboo, banned not only by laws, but by the constitution.
Has Nick not noticed that torture was banned in the US - and long before fascism or communism? The US, and for that matter this country, has experienced persecution and we have our own taboos - and for reasons every child is taught. If [o]nly the English held firm could he explain the method of extracting the confession of Guy Fawkes?
For the first time in British history, there are asylum seekers who could attack the country which gave them sanctuary.
Guy Fawkes, Nick. But what's the difference between asylum seekers and citizens? Why should Lord Haw-Haw or Melanie Phillips be treated differently?
BTW, what do you propose to do if their governments will not so promise, or if in the case of some - Libya, for example, or Jordan, I can't believe a thing she says - we don't trust them? Anyway, shouldn't we apply the reverse logic? If their countries promise not to torture them, we know they're the bad guys. How did Libya treat the Lockerbie suspects? or the murderer of WPC Yvonne Fletcher? Nick knows that Saudi Arabia is a racist, sexist fascist hell. 14 of the 9/11 hijackers were Saudis. If they won't torture suspects, surely that confirms that they're agents.
Shuggy, my colleague on the Sharpener, posts on Drink-Soaked Trots for War site, also disquieted by Nick, though he says Many of the responses already in accuse Cohen of advocating torture, which he doesn't. Well, if Nick doesn't, why does he mention it in his opening paragraphs? What does Nick advocate? He certainly seems to advocate something other than the universal human rights he was so keen on until recently: now he thinks one law for John Bull, a different law for asylum seeking chancers.
Nick likes to think he's George Orwell. Imagine him writing in the 1930s: Swiss Asylum seeker in bomb plot. Swiss National, Albert Einstein, who has found sanctury in Princeton University today wrote to President Truman outling a truly outlandish bomb which he says could be placed in a port by boat. Nick Cohen questions whether this self described agnostic really is a Jew and persecuted by the Nazis as he claims. His device could be used by people who hate us just as easily as it could be dropped by high altitude bombers on Japanese cities. I consulted the Observer astrologer on details of this device, and he claimed he couldn't make head or tail of it. Send this man back now.