Extenuating Circumstances?
Last week I criticised the Observer for suggest- ing that the International Commission of Jurists, whose report on the lamentable state of Iaw in Dr. Castro's Cuba had just come out, was 'fast becoming an instrument in the Cold War.' Since then the reasons for the paper's attitude have been made public. It was the failure to publish the Commission's report on the state of law in Spain which led to the belief, right or wrong, that American pressure was being brought to bear on the Commission. . .', but now that the report is being published (on December 7) 'that allegation will be confounded' (and presumably the Observer's comment of the week before, but the apology is implicit rather than stated). There are two things to be said about this. In the first place, the Observer's editorial on the Cuban report failed to go into the grounds for the Cold War accusation against the Commission, `grounds' which it now seems to suggest no longer exist. In the second place, if there is denial of legal rights, torture of prisoners and arbitrary police tyranny in Cuba, then it is good that it should be made known, quite irrespective of what other reports the Commission publishes or may publish. The Observer's original comment did not contain one single word in condemna- tion of these facts—only a plea of extenuating circumstances, the very 'state of emergency' argument used by Hitler after the Reichstag fire.
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