Britain: leading the world in fake explosive detectors, because brown people's lives are cheap

On Newsnight tonight how Britain's military and government promoted selling dowsing rods to third world countries for thousands of pounds. It isn't even like they didn't know about it - they banned their sale to Iraq and Afghanistan but nowhere else:

"It has been alleged that hundreds of Iraqis died in explosions in Baghdad after ADE651 detectors failed to detect suicide bombers at checkpoints. 
...
between 2001 and 2004 a Royal Engineers sales team went around the world demonstrating the GT200, another of the "magic wand" detectors which has been banned for export to Iraq and Afghanistan, at arms fairs around the world even though the British Army did not consider them suitable for its own use.

The government's Department of Trade and Industry, which has since been superseded by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, helped two of the manufacturers sell their products in Mexico and the Philippines."

The disgusting mandarins of the British government do the security equipment equivalent of letting companies manufacture and export sugar pills to third world countries labelled as antiretroviral drugs for HIV. And they still won't ban their sale because:

The Department of Business, Innovation and Skills told Newsnight that there was little point: "The impact of any further UK action in preventing the supply of these devices from the UK would be limited if they are available elsewhere"

It makes me sick.

Iraqi Quislings

This shameful article by Neil Clark on the Guardian's Comment is Free site has rightly received the contempt it deserves - I was particularly struck by his claim that:

"An illegal, immoral war doesn't become a legal and moral one as soon as it breaks out. I am pleased that Britain and the US have had a major setback in Iraq, in the same way I'm pleased that the German invasion of the Soviet Union was defeated."
...
"it's an intellectual cop out to say that we oppose the war, but that we hope Britain and America are successful."

Surely many of us on the anti-war left recognised that Saddam was a tyrant the Iraqis would be better off without, but worried that the US would screw up both the war and the reconstruction (and it looks like we were right about that) - but that's consequentialist thinking, something I'm not sure Clark understands with his talk of it being immoral and illegal - morality and legality are not quite so black and white, particularly not morality, it may be morally wrong (and illegal) for a policeman to recklessly and indiscriminately fire at terrorists, causing death to civilians, but that doesn't mean we should cheer on the terrorist, or that we shouldn't prefer the policeman to avoid killing civilians, or be happy that he kills the terrorists. To make the analogy even closer, that doesn't change even if the policeman's motivation is due to his psychopathic love of firearms rather than altruistic motives.

I don't even think he's making some larger consequentialist point about giving the US and UK a bloody nose for their imperialist adventure (the sort of point that people like the SWP might make in backing the insurgency) - no - he sees it as some kind of conflict of good versus evil - where have we heard that before?