You have to hear and see the sycophantic, drooling drivel of interviewer Emma Alberici. Never mind Robertson: he is herein already blaming Israel for what he accuses Israel of allegedly going to be doing in the future!
THE BELOW IS ABOUT AS PATHETIC AS YOU GET!
Robertson is a pompous prat*****
I wonder if he spoke soooooo slowly in his esteemed 'hypotheticals'.
And where was Alberichi?
Drinking his words of mellifluous, ponderous, pompous tripe.
Oh - I could do worse!!
Geoff Seidner
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Interview with Geoffrey Robertson, lawyer and author
Is Iran close to getting the bomb and would Israel or the US be justified in launching a pre-emptive strike? Geoffrey Robertson discusses these questions and his new book, Mullahs Without Mercy.
Interview with Geoffrey Robertson, lawyer and author
Australian Broadcasting Corporation
Broadcast: 15/11/2012
Is Iran close to getting the bomb and would Israel or the US be justified in launching a pre-emptive strike? Geoffrey Robertson discusses these questions and his new book, Mullahs Without Mercy.
Transcript
EMMA ALBERICI, PRESENTER: Our top story is the conflict between Israel and Gaza and the implications for a broader escalation in regional tensions.While attention is now fixed on Israel, some have an eye to the potential for solidarity strikes from Islamic groups.
Strategists in Israel have been war-gaming scenarios involving waves of air strikes on nuclear targets in Iran to stop Iran developing nuclear weapons.
Is Iran that close to getting the bomb and would Israel or the US for that matter be justified in launching a pre-emptive strike?
Human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson has been delving into those questions in his new book, Mullahs Without Mercy: How To Stop Iran's First Nuclear Strike. Geoffrey Robertson QC joins me now from London.
Thanks so much for being there for us.
GEOFFREY ROBERTSON, HUMAN RIGHTS LAWYER & AUTHOR: Good evening, Emma.
EMMA ALBERICI: Hamas says the killing of its military chief has opened the gates of hell. What's your assessment of the current conflict between Israel and Gaza in terms of its implications for the wider region?
GEOFFREY ROBERTSON: This is absolutely nothing compared to the crunch that's going to come next year when Mr Netanyahu will be re-elected in January, that's pretty clear. And he will want a military strike - he will probably launch it himself - on a number of Iranian institutions in spring or early summer of 2013.
Even though Iran in my estimation and that of most people is at least a year away, probably two or three, from having a operational nuclear bomb. president Obama has said that a coalition will stop Iran from getting the bomb. Whether by coalition he probably means England, whether he means Australia as well, we don't know yet. But that will be the equivalent - it'll be worse; it will be a clear breach of international law.
And while I think the Hamas attacks that Israel are suffering are themselves unlawful, it will give Hamas from the south and Hezbollah from the north an excuse to attack Israel.
And we don't - everyone thinks that an Israeli attack on Iran is going to be a surgical strike rather like Osirak when they flattened Saddam's reactor in 1981. It's not. There are 5,000 people round the clock at Natanz, which will be their first target. There are 371 tonnes of uranium hexafluoride in the target areas, and once they explode into the atmosphere, there's toxic gas to blow as the wind takes it across cities.
And so we're talking about thousands, possibly tens of thousands of casualties from an unlawful attack on Iran. So it's not a very happy prospect because sanctions, although they're causing hardship, they're causing hardship mainly to the middle class who are opposed to the mullahs and were part of the green movement.
Diplomacy isn't working. The Iranians are talking and talking and enriching and enriching while they talk. So, that's not going to be effective. And it's a real problem for the world how to stop proliferation, because this isn't the Cold War. This is a new era where the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty has broken down, North Korea has 12 nukes, Pakistan has 110 and the Islamic extremists almost seized them. So that's the kind of world and the kind of dilemma that we have to face.
EMMA ALBERICI: Can I just ask you, because clearly you believe Iran is without doubt building a nuclear weapon. What makes you so convinced of that?
GEOFFREY ROBERTSON: Oh, I've looked at the evidence, which is my day job. And ever since - the first Iranian to want the bomb was the Shah. The Shah put in place plans back in the 1950s, and initially there was, when the Ayatollah came in in 1979, he said, "Oh, this is a Western device. It's un-Islamic.”
But then Saddam started to use chemical weapons on the Iranians and the Ayatollah changed his tune. And from 1986 when they invited AQ Kahn, the Pakistani mastermind bomb maker, to Iran, they have been gradually building towards the bomb.
I don't think, mind you, that they want the bomb to nuke Israel. They'd be crazy to do that because Israel has up to 200 bombs, many of them sitting on submarines and the minute there's any attack on Israel, Tehran will be wiped out. I don't think that's the ...
EMMA ALBERICI: In fact - sorry, I was going to make the point that in fact not only Israel, but North Korea, Pakistan, and India also have nuclear weapons and all four of them have refused to ratify the Non-Proliferation Treaty.
GEOFFREY ROBERTSON: That's right.
EMMA ALBERICI: So I'm wondering why you say Iran presents a bigger risk than any of them, especially given Pakistan's links to al-Qaeda.
GEOFFREY ROBERTSON: Well, that's quite right. In - only in August an Islamic terrorist group attacked Minhas Air Force Base where a lot of the Pakistani nukes are and they did burn down a building before they were beaten back.
So I think it's only a matter of time where these new countries - Saudi Arabia is doing a deal with Pakistan at the moment to buy some of its bombs. So you are going to have not just a Middle East, but a world in which you don't have the security of the Cold War where the Communists were rational, they had children, they had pension plans; the Americans, similarly, were rational.
That's not going to happen. We're going to have up to 20 or 30 countries with the bomb. Unless - and this is the case that I argue and it's a case that I think Australia has had a very historic role in trying to progress, because it was Doc Evatt who made it first in 1946 and then Lionel Murphy when he attacked the French tests in the Pacific, which have done, now we know, a great deal of damage to humans, not to mention to fish.
And then Gareth Evans and the Australians in the mid-'90s argued in the World Court that acquisition of new nuclear weapons were illegal. Well, that was before the development of human rights law, and the argument in my book is that acquiring new nuclear weapons by Iran or by Saudi Arabia or by any other country is now a crime against humanity, contrary to the right to life, and of course, contrary to the war law rules that weapons that can't distinguish between soldiers and civilians, weapons that cause unnecessary suffering, dum-dum bullets, landmines, and I think nuclear weapons.
So, I think the only way forward is for a declaration, either by the World Court or the Security Council, that the acquisition of new nuclear weapons is a crime against humanity and that would allow the Security Council, not just Israel acting unilaterally or with America, to take action at the last stage to stop any other country getting nukes, and there is the one part of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty which is operational, puts a binding duty on the countries that do possess nukes slowly and gradually to disarm and reduce nukes in the world to zero. There are 20,000 of them at the moment and they're increasing.
EMMA ALBERICI: Well, exactly. And by - and I would've thought that there is some hypocrisy in countries like the US, Russia, China and the UK, France, to be saying to others that that's a crime against humanity when they are being very slow to decommission their nuclear weapons?
GEOFFREY ROBERTSON: You're certainly right, Emma. The Americans - Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize when he conjured up the vision of a world without nukes. And he did reduce. America reduced to 8,000, Russia - Medvedev reduced to 10,000. So progress was made.
But the French are pretty deceitful. They've still got about 600. The British - Britain is almost bankrupt and the fools are spending $83.5 billion on reinvigorating their Trident nuclear program. Israel doesn't say, but it's got up to 200 nukes. So it's not going to be easy, and I think ...
EMMA ALBERICI: So would your - sorry to interrupt you, but would your proposed law then, making it a crime against humanity, implicate the UK then with its Trident program?
GEOFFREY ROBERTSON: No, because I'm saying that's a refurbishment of an existing program. But I think the law that all these countries that do possess nukes are stuck with is the World Court decided in 1996 that the treaty that they had signed required them as a legal obligation gradually to disarm, to bring - and I think if you want to do that on a first come - first in, first up basis, obviously the first out would be North Korea, which has 12 nukes at the moment, reducing to, I suppose it would be wonderful to envisage a ceremony in about 2035 in which Grandfather Obama and Putin in a wheelchair would be there and the last nukes in the arsenals of America and Russia were dismantled.
But that's a long way off and there's a lot of work to be done. And it may be that the world will only see sense if, in this new climate of proliferation, there's an accident or an incident or a war. And after that, the world may see sense and bring in binding laws and the Security Council may enforce them.
EMMA ALBERICI: If I can just change subjects entirely, you've been a long critic of the Vatican. The Catholic Church of course has been very vocal this week in its reaction to the announcement of a royal commission into child sex abuse. On the issue of the confessional in particular, one leading bishop has claimed that, "... no-one would ever confess to paedophilia because those who confess are only those truly repentant ...". What's your response to that?
GEOFFREY ROBERTSON: Well, no, my response is there are many examples which I looked at and analysed where priests have confessed to other priests. In fact, I think that was part of the problem in Wollongong. Father Crocker, the great priest who blew the whistle on a paedophile ring.
There have been many cases all over the world of priests confessing to each other, frequently confessing to people who were part of the ring. So, I think you've got to accept, I think the Catholic Church has to accept that the confessional isn't as inviolable as it likes to think.
But at the end of the day, the new Australian royal commission must perhaps narrow its terms to those organisations against which most complaints have been made. I mean, not just the Catholic Church. We've had a case in the last couple of days in Britain where a bishop has been under arrest. He's in the police cells at the moment for child sex abuse. Jimmy Savile, the much-loved and particularly by the - by Mrs Thatcher, who knighted him, turned out to have been a serial child molester. And the BBC is in trouble for wrongly identifying Lord McAlpine as one.
So it's not just churches. It's youth groups, it's even - even the ABC on the BBC line because kids were allowed into green rooms unsupervised. I'm not suggesting a new protocol for Play School, which is certainly the ABC's most successful program, but it is important for all institutions which allow children, use children, entertain children to have safeguarding policies.
And I think what hopefully will come out of this commission is there are safeguarding policies being developed in different parts of the world and they should be adopted by law if necessary, there should be laws that require churches and other institutions to report paedophile suspicions to the police. There's no doubt about that.
And so I think that the commission, if it narrows its reference, could do a great deal of good by picking up the safeguarding policies. I mean, I wrote a book a couple of years ago, The Case of the Pope, which really was the first book to look at child abuse within the Church as a human rights problem. And now it has been taken up by Amnesty International.
It is a terrible crime against children which is a kind of soul murder. People who are kids who are molested in their early days have a very difficult psychological life thereafter. And so it is certainly - churches have no claim, I think, for confidentiality. The royal commission should have compulsory powers to look at the files in the Church to see just how active and responsible they have been in dealing with allegations of child abuse.
EMMA ALBERICI: Geoffrey Robertson, we have to leave it there. We thank you very much for joining us.
Do you have a comment or a story idea? Get in touch with the Lateline team by clicking here.
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| 1. | prat | 755 up, 202 down |
n. English term, primarily used in United Kingdom. The literal meaning is "bottom" or "rump"; aka backside, buttocks, sacrum, tail end. This lends itself to the slang meaning of "ass," or "clueless person of arrogant stupidity." It is not always directly translatable to American slang. For example, if you used the term "prat hat" in the U.K., you would likely be laughed out of town by the locals.
I can't believe what an overbearing idiot he is. What a prat!
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| 2. | prat | 1159 up, 367 down |
Basically someone whos a major idiot, or is delusional and dumb. Acts against logic and thinks hes self-righteous. AKA: Major dumbass.
Good example: Percy from HP and from 5th book
"You stupid prat!"
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| 3. | prat | 473 up, 181 down |
a self-aggrandizing, pompous fuck. Someone who is full of themselves and, almost invariably, stupid as well. With a hint of 'deluded.'
"I'm getting really tired of listening to Vince brag about his conquests. What a prat."
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