Outrage - Australian academics advocating torture

Gideon Polya writes:
Outrage- Austyralian Academics Advocating Torture

Two law academics have caused a transient storm in Australia by their advocacy of legalised torture (see ABC News On-line: http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200505/s13704 47.htm).

In a paper to be published in July in the University of San Francisco's Law Review Journal, the Head of the Law School and a female colleague at Melbourne's Deakin University argue for the use of torture in interrogation of terrorist suspects.

Notwithstanding the outrage of victims of torture, refugee support and human rights groups, Deakin University has supported the right to free speech of these pro-torture academics. On interview, the law professor has favoured pins under fingernails as a method of choice.

Controversially, the law professor sits on the Refugee Review Tribunal which passes judgement on desperate refugees, of whom many have suffered torture and other human rights abuses.

The previous claim to notoriety of the second-rank Deakin University was a professor who faked his commercially-linked contraceptive pill research and subsequently died in disgrace.

Australia has an appalling 2 century record of genocide, slavery, racism and involvement in brutal British imperialism. While the repugnant White Australia policy was shelved about 30 years ago, resurgent White Australian racism in the last decade has seen indefinite incarceration of thousands of mainly Asian and Muslim refugees (including hundreds of traumatized children) in desert detention centres (concentration camps).

Australia participated in the illegal US-UK-led invasion and occupation of Iraq that has been associated with a post-invasion avoidable mortality (excess mortality) of about 370,000 and an under-5 infant mortality of 260,000 (as readily estimated from the latest UN and UNICEF data but not reported by mainstream Anglo-American media).

Current Australian excesses - gross human rights abuse of refugees, complicity in the non-reported 1.9 million avoidable deaths in post-invasion Iraq and Afghanistan, and now academic advocacy of torture - all reflect a profound moral crisis within the countries of the Anglo-American Coalition.

Dr Gideon Polya

29 Dwyer Street, Macleod, Melbourne, Victoria, <3085, Australia
e-mail: gpolya@optusnet.com.au
website: http://members.optusnet.com.au/~gpolya/links.html
Day & night telephone: +61 3 9459 3649
Credentials: Dr Gideon Polya published some 130 works in a 4 decade scientific career, most recently a huge pharmacological reference text "Biochemical Targets of Plant Bioactive Compounds" (CRC Press/Taylor & Francis, New York & London, 2003), and is currently writing a book on global mortality - numerous articles on this matter can be found by a simple Google search for "Gideon Polya" and on his website: http://members.optusnet.com.au/~gpolya/links.html"