Ouch! Or 'Who wants to be a klutz?
From the Australian

JERRY McBrien walked away from Monday night's episode of the Nine Network's quiz show Who Wants To Be a Millionaire with $32,000.

But according to some of Australia's keenest legal minds, he was robbed.

Playing for $64,000, Mr McBrien, wrongly according to the network, said that five justices sat on a full bench of the High Court of Australia. The correct answer, host Eddie McGuire told him, was seven. But news of Mr McBrien's $32,000 loss has reached the hallowed halls of Australia's highest court and the ears of Chief Justice Murray Gleeson. The Australian understands the Chief Justice, who did not see the program, reckons Who Wants To Be a Millionaire got it wrong and his opinion is backed by leading scholars.

While it is correct that seven judges sit on the High Court of Australia, the term Full Court or Bench is defined under the Judiciary Act 1903 as a hearing comprising "two or more justices".

Mr McBrien had four answers to choose from on Monday night: five, seven, nine or eleven.

Stop it! This is a deeply-serious post of high political import! How many PBL (Channel 9's owners) papers will report this travesty of justice? Or will they just rely on the program blurb?

This week on Millionaire, Jerry McBrien was back in the chair, he said he was nervous, but would take good care.

Naturally he started his journey with the $100 question, up the millionaire money tree in quick succession.

He made his way up to question 11 in a flash, gave it his best shot but left with $32,000 cash.

Tim Soltys from Victoria was just happy to get in the hotseat, for a shoe-man at Myer, that�s no mean feat.

But at question eight, he used the advice of his phone-a-friend, and found himself leaving with just $1,000 to spend.

From Dunedin, New Zealand came Stuart Faulds, after winning fastest finger, he was eager to go for gold! And with a guaranteed thousand, he will return next week, for his turn at climbing the million dollar peak�

Can Stuart successfully realize the coveted million dollar prize? Find out on Channel 9 Monday at 8:30pm.

We blog, you decide.

Sorry, that's not a Packer slogan, it's a Murdoch slogan. But then Murdoch owns the Australian...

I do not accept in any shape or form that the information in that second briefing paper was wrong. Those parts based on intelligence were indeed based on intelligence.

A relieved planet breathes a collective sigh of relief now that Tony Blair tells us those parts of the February dossier based on intelligence were indeed based on intelligence. Will we learn from the prime ministerial lips tomorrow that those parts of the February dossier which were a complete Horlicks were indeed a complete Horlicks? Or that those parts of the sky which are blue are indeed blue?

Whoops! 2
From the 7:30 Report

MAXINE McKEW: Mr Downer, on a related question about quality of intelligence, you'd know that today's news out of the White House is that President Bush got a key fact wrong in his State of the Union address that suggests either perhaps an interagency failure or selective use of material.

This, of course, is in relation to uranium out of Africa, possibly to Iraq.

How does this misstatement sit with you as a member of the coalition?

ALEXANDER DOWNER: Look, I think to call it a misstatement is a complete re-creation of history.

Obviously President Bush, as others, did use this information -

MAXINE McKEW: Sorry, the White House has admitted they got this wrong.

ALEXANDER DOWNER: Sorry?

MAXINE McKEW: The White House has said they got this wrong.

ALEXANDER DOWNER: Yeah, but I think to say that this was a misstatement or that to imply, as I've noticed some people have done, that somehow President Bush knew that this was wrong at the time he uttered these words is entirely unfair.

That's not true.

People don't follow these issues very closely -

MAXINE McKEW: Sorry, if that's not true, that means his system has failed him and if his system has failed him --

ALEXANDER DOWNER: No, I don't think that's fair at all.

MAXINE McKEW: ...and, if that system has failed him, then it's failed our intelligence agencies as well.

ALEXANDER DOWNER: I don't think that's fair at all.

Of course, nobody is claiming every piece of intelligence ever received by any government on earth is always right.

No-one ever claims that.

In this case, before the war against Iraq started, the International Atomic Energy Agency came out, I think in early March, and said that they thought they had concluded, having examined these documents relating to uranium trade from Niger, they had concluded that these documents were forgeries.

Well, that's fair enough.

And that's not to say when President Bush made his State of the Union address he knew these documents were forgeries.

Now some people say someone in the State Department had some doubts or other about it, well, fair enough.

But, in the end, the CIA would have made an overall assessment of the credibility of the information and they would have passed that on to the White House.

Now subsequently, the International Atomic Energy Agency in early March has established these documents were forgeries, and everyone accepts that.

No doubt the White House press office are all scurrying to deny their denial now that Australia's foreign minister has set them straight.

Whoops!
The US government has admitted the Niger claim was untrue. The Australian government agrees that it was untrue and has fallen back on a combination of the Sgt Schultz defence and desperate cries about moving on.

The waters are muddier in Britain. According to Blair the Niger claim is true and is based on separate evidence from the forged Nigerien letter. So the hunt is on. Any such intelligence must, as a matter of law, be passed to the IAEA. Our scene turns to the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee. From the Independent:

Sir John Stanley, the Conservative MP for Tonbridge and Malling, said: "We are talking about fresh intelligence which came to your Government and which underpinned putting into the September 2002 dossier the detailed statements that were made in emphatic terms about uranium supplies to [sic] Africa. That intelligence was under the obligation of your Government to pass on to the IAEA. When was it done?"

William Ehrman, the Foreign Office's director general of Defence and Intelligence, accompanying Mr Straw, replied: "The intelligence came from a foreign service, and it was briefed to the IAEA in 2003." Sir John asked: "What date in 2003?" Mr Ehrman responded: "I would have to check."

Mr Straw was also asked when Britain first learned that the US-supplied documents to the IAEA were forgeries. He replied: "We will find out." However, there has been no further information to the committee.

A senior diplomatic source close to the IAEA said yesterday: "The only information we received was from the US, and this included documents which turned out to be forgeries. This was sent to us in February.

"We certainly have not received anything from Britain, and we have not received anything from a third country.

"It did not take long to uncover the forged documentation. We did a Google search and discovered that someone named as a minister in the Niger government has stopped being so years ago. A lot of it was pretty crude - a cut and paste job."

The Blair contention then, is that they published the unreliable Niger intelligence in the September dossier to explain and justify the need for the war but did not publish the more reliable evidence that would have proved their case? Is this claim to be taken seriously? Where is the separate evidence? The US does not have it. The IAEA does not have it. Australia may have it, but we're not telling.

And why did that incompetent Alastair Campbell leave this devastating evidence out of the September dossier? Why did Blair allow Bush to embarrass himself in the US Congress by withholding the devastating evidence from his closest ally? Or is it just that the devastating evidence does not actually exist?

It Was The Politicians Who Took Us Into War, and Not The Intelligence Services

If the matter itself were not so grave, it would be entertaining to watch the antics of the government in evading responsibility for the September dossier. Alastair Campbell waxes indignant when it is suggested that anything in the dossier came from him. Foreign Secretary Jack Straw very deliberately told the Foreign Affairs Committee that the claim that weapons could be ready in 45 minutes was not his claim. The lack of enthusiasm to take credit for the September dossier is eloquent about the government's current lack of confidence in its claims.

But somebody somewhere has to take responsibility for how the government got it wrong, and I would not advise ministers to leave the blame to fall on the intelligence agencies. They have kept their heads down very loyally for the past month, but nothing would be more likely to provoke further murmuring from them than the sense that they were being set up as the fall guys.

Nor should ministers now be allowed to shrug their shoulders and say with a sigh that the intelligence agencies got it wrong. It was not the intelligence agencies that took the decision to go to war. The decision was that of the prime minister, and it was he who used intelligence to justify the case for war.

The tragedy was that the United Nations weapons inspectors had already demonstrated that the intelligence claims were unsound. Hans Blix observed again Sunday that whenever they went to a site identified by western intelligence they drew a blank. It is extraordinary that this gulf between our intelligence information and the reality on the ground did not prompt doubts in the government before they unleashed the war.

I fear there is some truth in the suspicion that Washington wanted the inspectors out of Iraq before they comprehensively proved that Iraq was no threat.

Last Sunday was the feast day of Doubting Thomas. Famously he was misplaced in his doubts. But it will no longer do for the government to take its cue from its sermons of last Sunday and urge us to have more faith in their claims that Saddam was a current and serious threat. If they hope to convince us that the war was justified, they will need to come up with weapons of mass destruction as tangible as the evidence that was required by Thomas.

The date the Nigerien evidence became inoperative is important. The Nigerien evidence was in Bush's state of the union speech and it was in Howard's war speech. The Nigerien evidence was used again and again by all three coalition leaders. If either of them knew at the time that they were citing an untruth their heads are going to roll. Or get thrown in the water.

The man of steel at the Sydney Institute

Howard's opinions and actions on the US and Iraq are well-known. I was interested in what he had to say about the Solomons and New Zealand:

Such a coalition of interest and effort will be well placed to provide the necessary assistance, especially the substantial policing, law and justice and economic resources required.

But we must also ensure that the environment is stable and secure enough to implement reform � without security the Solomons cannot begin the task of rebuilding.

Restoring security to the Solomon Islands is essentially a policing task. But any policing assistance must be provided with adequate protection and support. In finalising the shape of an Australian contribution we must ensure the safety and security of all those who are involved. This is likely to involve a substantial number of defence personnel and the precise mix of police and military personnel will be determined by the expert advice of the Chief of the Australian Defence Forces and the Commissioner of the Australian Federal Police.

The Solomon Islands is a sovereign country. Any action will be in response to a properly issued legal request from the government of the Solomon Islands, thereby ensuring that our assistance fully complies with the requirements of international law.

We recognise that such an action represents a very significant change in the way we address our regional responsibilities and relationships. But our friends and neighbours in the Pacific are looking to us for leadership and we will not fail them.

And the rest of the world, understandably, sees this as an area where Australia has particular responsibilities

and:

QUESTION:

Could I just ask a final question on Australia / New Zealand relationships. I mean, as you know, you�ve got a good personal relationship with Helen Clark, Australia and New Zealand are at distance on some strategic issues � New Zealand and United States is quite distant. How do you see New Zealand fitting into any Australia / US free trade agreement? I mean, I think you�ve said that you would speak for New Zealand�s interest. But it seems that the United States in this present frame of mind isn�t particularly interested in New Zealand in that respect. I mean, how do you see our relationship, vis-a -vie in New Zealand and New Zealand visibly to the US?

PRIME MINISTER:

Well there is a difference in the defence relationship between New Zealand and the United States and the defence relationship between Australia and the United States. New Zealand made a decision in the 1980�s under the leadership of David Longey, and it was not significantly reversed when there was a change of government, not significantly reversed, to pursue a less engaged approach. Now, that�s New Zealand�s decision and New Zealand�s right. One of the reasons why I think I have developed and maintained a good relationship with Helen Clark is that although we come from different sides of the political spectrum and neither of us from occasions is regarding entirely as sitting in the exact dead centre of our two parties. Despite that, I do sort of think that one of the ways in keeping that very important relationship is not to give too much public advice about what are essentially domestic matters for the other country in the partnership. We just do though have a different approach. As far as the free trade agreement is concerned, we are negotiating one for Australia and that�s my preoccupation. I�ve indicated that if there are ways in which out of that process we can assist New Zealand, we�d be very happy to do so, but there�s no conditionality involved in that, they have to be separate operations. We do, for example, have separate interests. I mean, clearly if New Zealand were ever to have a free trade agreement with the United States, dairy would� their dairy industry would bulk very large in anything that New Zealand would need, where as that is not necessarily the case with Australia.

If the Solomons intervention works (and I think it might) it will be another success to add to East Timor. The fact that this, like East Timor, a multilateral effort in response to an invitation from the Solomons government (and hopefully) parliament places it in a different category from Iraq.

Mystery behemoth proves to be American diplomacy

The mysterious dead gigantic sea creature that washed up on a Chilean beach yesterday has now been positively identified by scientists as American Diplomacy.

The 40-foot long rotting grey creature was at first misidentified as a whale, but then proved to have no spine. "That was our first clue," said Dr. James Mead of the Smithsonian Institute. "Then we had to start asking ourselves - what gigantic old creature has died recently?"

From the New York Times via This is not a blog:

Tonight, after Air Force One had departed, White House officials issued a statement in Mr. Fleischer's name that made clear that they no longer stood behind Mr. Bush's statement.

How Mr. Bush's statement made it into last January's State of the Union address is still unclear. No one involved in drafting the speech will say who put the phrase in, or whether it was drawn from the classified intelligence estimate.

That document contained a footnote � in a separate section of the report, on another subject � noting that State Department experts were doubtful of the claims that Mr. Hussein had sought uranium.

It's a little weird that the White House appears to be overruling one George Bush. It's even weirder that, according to the Los Angeles Times:

Former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson publicly revealed over the weekend that he was the mysterious envoy whom the CIA, under pressure from Cheney, sent to Niger to investigate a document � now known to be a crude forgery � that allegedly showed Iraq was trying to acquire enriched uranium that might be used to build a nuclear bomb. Wilson found no basis for the story, and nobody else has either.

What is startling in Wilson's account, however, is that the CIA, the State Department, the National Security Council and the vice president's office were all informed that the Niger-Iraq connection was phony. No one in the chain of command disputed that this "evidence" of Iraq's revised nuclear weapons program was a hoax.

Yet, nearly a year after Wilson reported back the facts to Cheney and the U.S. security apparatus, Bush, in his 2003 State of the Union speech, invoked the fraudulent Iraq-Africa uranium connection as a major justification for rushing the nation to war: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium in Africa." What the president did not say was that the British were relying on their intelligence white paper, which was based on the same false information that Wilson and the U.S. ambassador to Niger had already debunked. "That information was erroneous, and they knew about it well ahead of both the publication of the British white paper and the president's State of the Union address," Wilson said Sunday on "Meet the Press."

Bad luck for Blair and Bush that they don't live in Australia where the man of steel has announced that we've moved on from questioning the prewar intelligence.

I refute any suggestion that we misled Parliament and the people totally.

I assume that Blair thought he was refuting totally but actually he merely refuted that he had misled totally. What a tangled web we weave...

select intelligence
The House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee report is now online. It clears Alastair Campbell of the 45 minute allegation, but states that special advisers should not chair intelligence meetings (as Campbell did) and suspends judgement on the accuracy of the September dossier pending investigations in Iraq. Amazingly, it seems that Blair quoted the February dossier in parliament without knowing who prepared it or how. The Committee has also demanded specific dates in relation to the Niger uranium claim.

More to come when I've finished the entire report.

What is Australia doing to help with the reconstruction of Iraq?

An officer from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade is attached to the office of the ORHA�s Chief of Staff and is working closely with retired US Army Lieutenant-General Jay Garner, the head of ORHA.

Jay Garner was dismissed as US proconsul in Iraq on 6 April. One hopes that our humanitarian commitment to Iraq is not as out-of-date (non-core?) as the prime minister's new website.

asylum seekers not in the water either
Somehow Immigration Minister Ruddock just can't get it right. We now learn that the boatload of asylum seekers on Christmas island did reach the Australian mainland. Previously the minister had claimed they were intercepted offshore. First we had the children in the water. Now we've got the asylum seekers in the water. But for the Senate we'd probably have the Australian migration zone coterminous with the precincts of the parliament in Canberra.

Culture shock and awe

Bremer's task for Iraq is to form a political council of 25 to 30 Iraqis. This council, approved by Bremer, will then appoint ministers and be consulted on all key decisions, which will then be made by Bremer himself. Bremer said on Tuesday that this "provisional authority" was expected to be set up by mid-July. It's now clear that the project has been flatly rejected by the moderate yet heavyweight al-Sistani, "The project in question is fundamentally unacceptable." While he still condemns the non-stop attacks against the Americans and the British, he is at pains to point out that "the [occupation] authorities don't enjoy any prerogative to appoint the members of the assembly charged to elaborate the constitution". United Nations special envoy Sergio Vieira de Mello has witnessed first-hand the impatience and anger of the all-powerful al-Hawza - the "Shi'ite Vatican" in the holy city of Najaf. On Saturday, Vieira de Mello had a long conversation (behind closed doors) with al-Sistani, and then with al-Hakim and al-Sadr.

No leaders in Najaf - or anywhere in Iraq for that matter - have forgotten the promise made in February by the American special envoy to deal with the Iraqi opposition. Zalmay Khalilzad promised then that the government of the country would be handed over to Iraqis once the war ended. Al-Hakim is now saying that an Iraqi government should be formed soon "to work to end the occupation by peaceful means".

Vieira de Mello is now fully aware of the balancing act that he will have to perform to bridge the gulf between not only the Sunni community, but between the dominant Shi'ites (62 percent of the population) and the "occuliberators" (as the Americans have been dubbed by observers). Even though Shi'ite religious leaders are still talking about cooperation with the Americans and a strategy of non-violence, there is now a completely different ball game.

The best indication is the fact that al-Sistani told Vieira de Mello to deliver "a message to Paul Bremer" - implying that direct contact was not welcomed any more. The UN special envoy did not - and certainly could not - elaborate, but the message was almost certainly news about the fatwa declaring that an Iraqi constitution written by the Americans or even by Iraqis appointed by the Americans would be "illegitimate". Al-Sistani is clear: a new constitution can only be written and approved by popularly-elected Iraqis.

I think al-Sistani, the pre-eminent Shi'a leader in Iraq and elsewhere, may be close to saying: 'Bring it on'. Vieira de Mello had tremendous success, in an equally difficult situation, as UN transitional administrator for East Timor. The Bush administration could do worse than replacing Bremer with Vieira de Mello.

Hicks to face military tribunal

TANYA NOLAN: And from Roma in Queensland today, Prime Minister John Howard made clear his confidence in the American system of justice.

JOHN HOWARD: I am satisfied on the information that I have that if any Australians are tried in the United States, the basic conditions of a presumption of innocence, of access to a lawyer and so forth, all of the things that are basic to the judicial system as we understand it, will be applied.

TANYA NOLAN: But that's cold comfort to Stephen Kenny.

STEPHEN KENNY: The Attorney-General has done nothing for the two Australians that were there for the last 18 months while their human rights were being abused, so I can certainly have no faith in him doing anything now.

TANYA NOLAN: Do you know with any certainty whether the outcome of a military commission could indeed result in a death penalty being handed down?

STEPHEN KENNY: Yes, it can. The military commission does have the power to hand down death penalties and the reports from the United States in recent weeks have been that they are currently planning construction of an execution chamber in Guantanamo Bay.

It raises some very serious fears in my mind because it's even worse than that. It's not just that the military tribunal are in a position of handing down a death penalty. After the hearing at the military tribunal, the matter is then referred to President Bush for his final determination and so he could personally impose the death sentence.

I would have thought even Australia's own man of steel might have looked more carefully at information provided by the Bush administration. After all, Howard is fast moving towards 'George told me' as a complete explanation of the missing WMDs. Abandoning Australian citizens to trial by drumhead court is evil enough. Lying about the procedural guarantees is worse. Scrapping Australia's long and principled opposition to the death penalty is the worst of all.

US Declaration of Independence

WHEN in the Course of human Events, it becomes necessary for one People to dissolve the Political Bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the Powers of the Earth, the separate and equal Station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent Respect to the Opinions of Mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the Separation.

Brad de Long has the whole text. As a founding document it's a lot more exciting than Australia's:

WHEREAS the people of New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia, Queensland; and Tasmania, humbly relying on the blessing of Almighty God, have agreed to unite in one indissoluble Federal Commonwealth under the Crown of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, and under the Constitution hereby established:

And whereas it is expedient to provide for the admission into the Commonwealth of other Australasian Colonies and possessions of the Queen:

Be it therefore enacted by the Queen's most Excellent Majesty, by and with the advice and consent of the Lords Spiritual and Temporal, and Commons, in this present Parliament assembled, and by the authority of the same, as follows:-

Short title.
1. This Act may be cited as the Commonwealth of Australia Constitution Act.1

Act to extend to the Queen's successors.
2. The provisions of this Act referring to the Queen shall extend to Her Majesty's heirs and successors in the sovereignty of the United Kingdom.

Proclamation of Commonwealth
3. It shall be lawful for the Queen, with the advice of the Privy Council, to declare by proclamation2 that, on and after a day therein appointed, not being later than one year after the passing of this Act, the people of New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia, Queensland, and Tasmania, and also, if Her Majesty is satisfied that the people of Western Australia have agreed thereto, of Western Australia, shall be united in a Federal Commonwealth under the name of the Commonwealth of Australia. But the Queen may, at any time after the proclamation, appoint a Governor-General for the Commonwealth.

and so on and so forth and blah blah blah...

And someone really should remind George Bush about the phrase: 'a decent respect for the opinions of mankind', it's a tad more elevated than: 'Bring it on'.

website of steel
Signposts blogs on the newlook prime ministerial website. I agree with Signposts:

Can anyone say presidential? Seriously, I haven't seen such blatant use of a flag in political image-making since Pauline Hanson and this photo.

Is it any wonder that the opposition leader doesn't get the same amount of support with a slick campaign site like this?

I don't know if this is as funny outside Australia, but everyone who has looked at the man of steel's new site that I have spoken to has thought it was an absolute crack-up. It looks like a campaign poster for Monty Burns in the Simpsons gubernatorial race.

.

We should be thankful for small mercies. The ADF doesn't have a convenient flight deck so the man of steel will prolly not be slipping on a flight suit any time soon.

The Web is dead. Long live the Grid
From CERN:

The idea of computational and data grids dates back to the first half of the 90's. The vision behind them is often explained using the electric power grid metaphor. The electric power grid delivers electric power in a pervasive and standardised way. You can use any device that requires standard voltage and has a standard plug if you are able to connect it to the electric power grid through a standard socket.

As explained by Ian Foster and Carl Kesselman in Chapter 2 of their famous book "The Grid":

"The current status of computation is analogous in some respects to that of electricity around 1910. At that time, electric power generation was possible, and new devices were being devised that depended on electric power, but the need for each user to build and operate a new generator hindered use. The truly revolutionary development was not, in fact, electricity, but the electric power grid and the associated transmission and distribution technologies".

When you use electricity you don't worry were it is produced and how it is delivered, you just plug your device into the wall socket and use it. Currently we have millions of computing and storage systems all over the planet connected through the Internet. What we need is an infrastructure and standard interfaces capable of providing transparent access to all this computing power and storage space in a uniform way.

I'd been following this for a while, but today's Herald reports that the Grid goes live in a fortnight.

Descending into quagmire

At 10 per 1,000 population, the point of intersection between levels two and three, Quinlivan's numbers skyrocket to 240,000. (Interestingly, just in Baghdad, where the population is roughly 5 million, there are 55,000 troops, producing a ratio of 11 per 1,000.) Matching the British experience in Malaysia and Northern Ireland at 20 per 1,000 doubles this total to 480,000, which is the total authorized strength of the active US Army. Clearly, any of these levels are impossible to sustain given the demands for and on people. Even level two ratios may be impossible, given that five of the Army's 10 active divisions currently are engaged in Iraq.

At the onset of an insurgency the government, whether it's an occupying power or what, always denounces the guerilla attacks as banditry. At the onset of a conquest the conquering power explains in vast detail how this is not really a conquest. We were told that the occupation forces would be light and be needed only briefly. We were told t would be a cakewalk. We were told the invasion would be greeted with flowers. That seems not to be happening. Each of those reasons has failed. At each stage of this Iraq project we've been given reasons why Iraq would be an exception to previous historical experience.

If the US is planning 3 years to raise an Iraqi army then the 2 years deadline is already as dead as the 6 month deadline. The previous historical experience is that you need force ratios between 10:1000 and 20:1000 to suppress an insurgency. The numbers just do not add up. And the scary incident reported by Time may tell us why no-one ever bothered with the math.

The wisdom of the Solomons
From the Age:

The Howard Government has been persuaded of this reality for the reason that if these peripheral states are insecure, so is Australia. Their insecurity is Australia's insecurity.

Australia is now prepared to behave as the leading power in this corner of the world to protect itself from the vulnerability of shaky, failing and failed states to the forces of international terrorism and transnational crime.

As the influential Australian Strategic Policy Institute has put it in a recent report, "Unless the quality of government in the South-West Pacific can be restored, and social and economic development resumed, we risk seeing our neighbourhood degenerate into lawless badlands, ruled more by criminals than by legitimate governments."

At worst, it means that a small island nation can be bought. Its resources, flag, passports, banks, territory and officials can all be made available to gangsters and terrorists for running drugs and weapons, training insurgents, launching atrocities, laundering money, smuggling people, dumping toxic wastes and other activities that are likely to be highly prejudicial to Australia's interests

The Solomons is clearly a case for international humanitarian intervention. This intervention will be at the request of the Solomons parliament and government and is supported by New Zealand and a consensus of Pacific nations. Hopefully, the South Pacific Forum will restrain the government's enthusiasm for sidelining the UN.

Out of the mouths of spellcheckers...
Mine keeps trying to force me to talk about Blair's director of communications as Alsatian Campbell.

Blair No Longer Trustworthy, Says Newspaper Poll

LONDON (Reuters) - Most Britons no longer find Prime Minister Tony Blair trustworthy and nearly half think he should quit, according to a newspaper poll Sunday.

It showed most voters also say his record on health, crime, transport and asylum-seekers is poor.

Beset by questions over whether he exaggerated the case for war against Iraq and under fire from political opponents for what they call a botched cabinet reshuffle this month, Blair emerged badly from the MORI poll commissioned by the News of the World.

Fifty-eight percent of those questioned said he was not trustworthy, against 36 percent who thought he was, while 53 percent said he had run out of ideas. Gordon Brown was trustworthy.

The poll found 48 percent thought Blair should quit, 51 percent thought Labour's record on both health and crime-fighting was poor, while 53 percent thought his record on transport was bad.

Polling figures like these are a new experience for Tony Blair. The first stage in a government jumping the shark is a few bad polls. The next is to announce there's nothing wrong with the policies but the communications strategy is wrong. Media bias is often a minor counterpoint. If I were Alastair Campbell I might be looking up the job column for retired spin doctors about now.

Link via Eschaton.

Amended bill hits security target

The original bill was one of the worst introduced into the federal parliament. The amendments made by all parties have made a significant difference. Although the bill will still not satisfy those who argue against greater powers for ASIO, I believe that the right decision was made to pass the amended version as a one-off security measure. After September 11 and the Bali attack, national laws are needed to better protect the Australian people and to fulfil our international obligations to fight terrorism.

The bill can be justified in giving ASIO the power to question people about terrorism. It is true that the bill goes further than this and important reservations remain. But as a product of parliamentary compromise, it is a remarkable achievement. It is also a powerful example of the need to retain the Senate as an effective house of review.

Of course, if the prime minister's Senate proposal was now in force none of that review or compromise would have happened and the original bill would have been rammed through a joint sitting unamended.

[UK] Ministers knew war papers were forged, says diplomat

A high-ranking American official who investigated claims for the CIA that Iraq was seeking uranium to restart its nuclear programme last night accused Britain and the US of deliberately ignoring his findings to make the case for war against Saddam Hussein.

The retired US ambassador said it was all but impossible that British intelligence had not received his report - drawn up by the CIA - which revealed that documents, purporting to show a deal between Iraq and the west African state of Niger, were forgeries. When he saw similar claims in Britain's dossier on Iraq last September, he even went as far as telling CIA officials that they needed to alert their British counterparts to his investigation.

The allegation will add to the suspicions of opponents to the war that last week's row between the BBC and Tony Blair's director of communications Alastair Campbell was a sideshow to draw attention away from more serious questions about the justification for the war.

The comments of the former US diplomat appear to be at odds with those of the Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw. Appearing before a parliamentary committee last week, Mr Straw said the British intelligence community had not known of the forged documents' existence "at the time when [the September dossier] was put together".

The big point, in my opinion, about the flame war over the use of intelligence in the lead-up to the war was made by Sir John Stanley to Alastair Campbell before the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee:

You are a very, very skilled communicator, you are known universally as the Government's spin doctor, your business is to put the best possible presentation on the Government's policy, a perfectly bona fide role, everybody understands that, but I have to put it to you - and I do not put this to you in an offensive or personal way but in all seriousness because I share one thing in common with you, you said you were concerned to safeguard the integrity of the intelligence services and that is absolutely my position as well - as long as that policy in your paper is known, that you are in the business of making drafting suggestions to the chairman of the JIC, that Alastair Campbell's fingerprints are going to be on JIC source documents, I have to say I do not believe that is conducive to the integrity of the intelligence services.

For me, that's the heart of it. Parliaments were being given intelligence material where the data had been massaged for political advantage by people like Alastair Campbell.

No country can democratise another

Democracy means the right of people to make mistakes on the way to reclaim their own liberty. When France thought, along with the US and Britain, that the Algerians had made a mistake in voting in the 1991 primary elections for a relatively modest Islamic party in conjunction with the Algerian military they withdrew the democratic mandate. The resultant ten years of civil war, terrorism and the death of the middle class were far worse than if the electoral results had been supported.

Finally, democracies must be allowed to make fundamental political and economic decisions. The US with the complicity of Britain is making all of the vital decisions that will determine the future shape of Iraqi society before there is a government to either approve or disapprove of the decision. They have announced that there will be a privatised media, a privatised energy industry, an independent judiciary, a Bill of Rights and that Ba'athists will be persona non grata in future governments.

These may be prudent and wise decisions but they are not decisions for the United States to make. By making these sweeping changes on the ground, the fundamental sovereign decisions of an Iraqi regime have been removed. Even if in a couple of years Iraq achieves some form of minimalist democracy, the government will have nothing to do but decide the detail of how to apply the blueprints dreamt up in Washington. Democracy that empowers people is an apt answer to terrorism, which is an ideology of the powerless, but that democracy must be real.

Yesterday's decision to cancel local and provincial elections in Iraq confirms on the ground the intellectual weakness in the war party's project for Iraq. For practitioners of realpolitik they have some fairly unrealistic ideas.

The Cult of the CEO

They're corporate superheroes who lay claim to ever more millions - for better or for worse. And it's usually the little people who pay.

Four years ago, US president Bill Clinton went to Mississippi to visit the home of Bernie Ebbers and WorldCom, the company Ebbers had founded. At the time, the baby telco had expanded like a teenager on steroids to have a market value of $US120 billion.

"I came here today because you are the symbol of 21st-century America," Clinton said. "You are the embodiment of what I want for the future."

Oops. These days such symbols lie shattered in financial ruins and the future seems to belong to anyone but the Bernie Ebbers of the world. Instead, the global economy is still counting the real cost of billions of dollars worth of dodgy accounting, of grandiose business dreams unconnected to financial reality and of a corporate greed so pervasive that it makes previous eras of excess seem almost sweetly old-fashioned.

But of all the extraordinary corporate stories of the 1990s, none has been more powerful than what Gideon Haigh chooses to call the cult of the CEO. This cult might have been most advanced in the US, but Australia typically picked up the trend with blind enthusiasm.

Chief Executive Officer of the United States George Bush exemplifies the cult of the celebrity CEO as do CEO of the Commonwealth of Australia John Howard and CEO of the United Kingdom Tony Blair. None of the three have produced very stellar performances. All have problems with corporate governance issues, whether it's Bush insisting that 'advise and consent' makes consultation on judicial appointments unconstitutional or Howard trying to solve problems with the Senate by acquiring even more power for himself.

But CEO Blair's PR machine has managed to move from a cult to actual worship. Appearing before the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee Alastair Campbell said:

I find it incredible and I mean incredible that people can report based on one single anonymous uncorroborated source - and let's get to the heart of what the allegation is - that the Prime Minister, the Cabinet, the intelligence agencies, people liker myself connived to persuade Parliament to send British forces into action on a lie. That is the allegation. I tell you, until the BBC acknowledge that is a lie, I will keep banging on, that correspondence file will get thicker and they had better issue an apology pretty quickly.

And essentially that argument, repeated in similar terms in Australia and the US, is that we cannot think about the possibility of sexed-up intelligence because it would mean disbelieving the relevant CEOs. We know that sexed-up intelligence was used because we know the Niger claim was untrue. We know that sexed-up intelligence was used because we know, for example, that Rumsfeld's claim of WMDs deployed around Tikrit and Baghdad was untrue.

An injunction never to disbelieve the CEO was not good enough for HIH or Enron. It should not be good enough for Australia, the UK or the US.

Told to heel, this dog's still got bite

'It was a dark and stormy night. ASIO was knocking at the door ..." Apologies to Snoopy (and the late Charles Schultz), but I've been looking at a blank screen for well over an hour and that's the best I can come up with. Daryl Williams, QC, would understand. Williams is the federal Attorney-General, the country's first law officer. For 15 months he's been trying to write, not the great novel but a regime of bleak interrogation laws under which people can be arrested - the Howard Government prefers "detained" - for no reason other than what they might know, even if they don't know that they know. No such legislation has previously applied in Australia. Ever. Well, it does now.

Williams has authored, finally, a piece of legislation the Senate could accept. It took two inquiries, huge controversy, two rewrites, a year of wheeling and dealing with Labor's Senate leader, John Faulkner, and a great deal of political bullying and parliamentary brinkmanship. Now it's here, for three years, minimum. What it is is the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) Legislation Amendment (Terrorism) Bill 2002. All 40 pages of it, plus protocols. And, in the end, the Senate did not approve it - the Labor Opposition did.

People who can't count pretend that four independents (Tasmania's Brian Harradine and Shayne Murphy, South Australia's Meg Lees and Queensland's Len Harris) hold the Senate balance of power. They don't. They only share it - with two Greens, seven Democrats and 28 Labor senators. The Government, with 35 senators, needs four of the others - any four, whoever - to join it for a simple Senate majority on any given piece of legislation. Mix and match, if necessary. And if Labor backs the Government, whatever the issue, there isn't a thing the others, the 13 minor party/independent also-rans, can do to stop them. Game, set and match.

So while the Democrats came to the Government party in 1999 to get the GST into law, and John Howard's accident-prone Communications Minister, Richard Alston, has again failed spectacularly, this time to seduce the four independents to end Paul Keating's 1986 cross-media rules, it is Labor who has bargained with the Coalition to allow Williams to have his new ASIO powers for three years, minimum.

They are much-watered-down powers to the ones Williams and his Prime Minister first wanted 15 months ago. But they're still powers the others refused to endorse. Thus when the final vote was taken two nights ago, the two big battalions lined up to crush the tiny rest, 51 votes to 12, with only Tasmania's Brian Harradine from among the "others" voting with the major parties.

and:

ASIO does not have to knock on your door, either. Nor does ASIO do the arresting. They simply accompany the wallopers. Section 34JA says any police officer who "believes" a person named in an ASIO warrant is on "any premises ... may enter the premises, using such force as is necessary and reasonable, at any time of the day or night for the purpose of searching the premises for the person or taking the person into custody".

And exactly how much force can police use? Well, section 34J says any person subject to a warrant "must be treated with humanity and with respect for human dignity, and must not be subjected to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, by anyone exercising authority under the warrant or implementing or enforcing the direction". Yet police can shoot you if they think it "necessary and reasonable" and they have all the authority in the world to do so, even if you're guilty of nothing except maybe taking fright and running, or some other panic reaction.

Section 34JB says: "A police officer may use such force as is necessary and reasonable in a) taking a person into custody, b) preventing the escape of a person from such custody, or c) bringing a person before a prescribed authority for questioning, or d) detaining a person in connection with such a warrant." However, police "must not use more force or subject the person [under warrant] to greater indignity than is reasonable and necessary". Nor can police "cause the death of, or do grievous bodily harm to, the person unless the officer believes on reasonable grounds that doing that thing is necessary to protect the life or prevent serious injury to another person, including the officer [my emphasis]".

Reassuring, indeed.

Alan Ramsey looks set to become Oz' answer to Paul Krugman if he keeps this up. The digest for the Act is deeply scary. That Labor would combine with the Coalition to pass it is scarier still. The Amnesty International analysis is somewhat out of date but damning. These are the people who tell us that a charter of rights would be a bad thing because our liberties are safe in the hands of the parliament and do not need further protection. And this is the opposition that claims it has policies to offer the Australian people.

In March 1763 William Pitt addressed the House of Commons:

The poorest man may in his cottage bid defiance to all the force of the Crown. It may be frail, its roof may shake; the wind may blow through it; the storms may enter, the rain may enter, but the King of England cannot enter; all his forces dare not cross the threshold of the ruined tenement!

This sort of ancient common law is supposed to replace the horrors of governments having to observe human rights. Bugger that, opposing the bill might cost Labor votes.

Suddenly, America has a brash neighbor up north

Canada has long been the United States' virtually invisible neighbor to the north.

But suddenly it is coming out of its shell - and sharpening an identity that increasingly looks like a slice of Europe on America's back porch.

It's moving to become the third nation on the planet to legalize gay marriage. It's primed to decriminalize possession of small amounts of marijuana. And it vocally opposed the US war on Iraq.

These moves reflect a growing cultural assertiveness - especially on the importance of tolerance and multiculturalism, which are enshrined in Canada's version of the Bill of Rights. The shift is increasingly putting the US and Canada - the world's biggest trading partners - on a cultural collision course.

"We look at you Americans and see the [National Rifle Association], rigged elections, Christian fundamentalists, and pre-emptive wars," says Michael Adams, author of the best-selling "Fire and Ice: The United States, Canada and the Myth of Converging Values." By contrast, Canada is a place that prizes "peace, order, and good government." It's "a social welfare state where we raise taxes to pay for transit, housing, and more," he says.

Canada's newfound assertiveness stems, in part, from a growing confidence in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, adopted in 1982. It's akin to the US Bill of Rights. But it guarantees, for instance, equality for women, aboriginal groups, and minority-language groups.

It's led to Canada even having a cabinet position for multiculturalism.

And it's one reason for Canada's wide-open immigration policy. Fully 18 percent of Canadians are foreign born, compared with about 10 percent of Americans. In Toronto, 40 percent of residents are foreign born.

Recently Canadian courts have also interpreted the charter to guarantee rights for gays, including the right to marry.

All in all, "It's not just that Canadians are comfortable with diversity," it's something they are increasingly proud of, says Andrew Parkin, codirector of the Center for Research and Information on Canada in Ottawa. "They're now saying this is what makes them proud to be Canadian."

I know that neither Howard nor Crean are especially strong on envisioning what Australia stands for, other than assuring that refugees do not achieve their preferred migration outcomes, but there should be room in our politics for a vision of what Australia might and should be. A better reaction by the traditional parties to the idea of a charter of rights might be a good start.

He's back!
The BBC says:

Looking thinner and greyer than three months ago during his daily press briefing, [al-Sayyaf] declined to tell the Arab TV stations about the final days before Baghdad fell.

"The time is not yet ripe to say what happened. When history's ready, then we can talk about it," he said.

He refused to retract his wartime claims that Iraqi forces were "burning the Americans in their tanks", saying only that his reports came from "authentic sources - many authentic sources".

He said the war was "a difficult situation, not for one individual, but for everybody".

He denied being part of Saddam Hussein's inner circle, saying he was a professional doing his job.

All those rumours he was working on the SARS issue for Beijing or on the WMD issue for the White House must have been grossly exaggerated.

Well it's about F-ing Time
As Jody over at Naked Writing says...

[US] Supreme Court Strikes Down Texas Sodomy Law

snark of the week
A letter to the Asia Times:
Dear Asian times. The United States (with little help from the useless Northern Alliance who from first hand accounts retreated at every possible chance) killed at least 5000 Taliban supporters US turns to the Taliban, Jun 14. It was a f****** bloodbath. Second, the United States military has a long and honorable tradition of reporting military deaths, so the myth of not reporting the truth in causalities is bullshit. Thirdly, the second the Taliban resurface, the United States and its allies would f****** annihilate them. It would be retarded (which is an accurate description for all you f****** homo jihadists) for the Taliban sympathizers to assemble forces. The US technology and ferocity of our weapons systems caught the enemy off guard in 2001 and it would do so again now. Fourthly, The USSR's military was a joke and if it wasn't for the CIA and the stinger missiles, the anti-communist forces would have never won. Even if there was a resurgence in Taliban activity, the United States would win. Finally, as for the "surge in gorilla attacks' you must referring to when some illiterate taliban sympathizer sets up poorly constructed rockets to fire haphazardly and completely miss their targets. Stop your f****** propaganda. Do the civilized world a favor and find another way to make yourselves useful to the rational world.
F... you truly,

Senate derails media merger bill

The Government's push to deregulate the media industry was derailed last night when the Senate voted to ban mergers of newspapers and TV stations.

Labor, the Democrats, Greens and the three independents supported Tasmanian senator Brian Harradine's move to amend the proposed media ownership bill to prohibit TV and newspaper mergers in the mainland capital cities.

The Government voted against the amendment which would prevent Rupert Murdoch buying a TV station or Kerry Packer buying a newspaper company like Herald publisher Fairfax.

The Communications Minister, Richard Alston, said the "watershed amendment" would not achieve any of the Government's objectives to overhaul the media ownership regime.

The Government's bid to relax the media ownership restrictions now seems to doomed to fail, because it will not support the bill with Senator Harradine's amendment.

Without the amendment the Government is unlikely to secure the four extra votes it needs to change the media ownership laws. "It would be a shame if the Government threw the baby out with the bathwater and voted against the bill just over the protection of some big players," Senator Harradine said.

Sadly the ASIO bill passed with opposition support but at least the media bill is dead as a dodo. Considering the talents of the responsible minister the dodo is not an inappropriate metaphor.

Live link to UK parliamentary inquiry on WMDs

Alastair Campbell claims he sexed the dossier down, not up.

Not me, guv
From the BBC:

Two of Mr Straw's former cabinet colleagues, Clare Short and Robin Cook, have already said the public were misled.

Shadow foreign secretary Michael Ancram said Mr Straw's evidence had "left Alastair Campbell out to dry".

"If the government's credibility is to be established, it is vital that Alastair Campbell answers the relevant questions openly and completely and does not seek to hide the truth in a miasma of clever words."

Liberal Democrat foreign affairs spokesman Menzies Campbell said there was a sense of "not me guv" which would make Alastair Campbell's questions session something like "high noon".

He said the intensity of Mr Blair's speeches had left nobody doubting the immediacy of going to war, despite Mr Straw's insistence the words "immediate" or "imminent" were not used about the Iraqi threat.

I continue to be amazed, first at the power of opinion which has now forced parliamentary inquiries in 3 of the 4 coalition countries and second at the tortured arguments being used to prove that a large arsenal of WMDs ready to fire at 45 minutes' notice is somehow not an immediate or imminent threat. US Senator Byrd has again laid out some of the more salient quotes, the non-immediate, non-imminent and non-threatening ones.

New reef found in Australia

The reef is in unusually deep and murky waters.

A new coral reef has been found off the coast of Australia. Its 120 square kilometres sit in murky waters 30 meters below the surface, leaving researchers rethinking their understanding of the world's reefs.

In May, researchers cruised into Queensland's Gulf of Carpentaria to study the transport and dispersal of sediments from coastal rivers. Instead they found themselves charting a previously unknown reef. "We were quite surprised," Peter Harris of Geosciences Australia. "Initially I thought it was an old relic reef."

The find hints that there may be many more reefs lurking in rarely-studied waters. "It shows you how little we know about reefs," says James Darwin Thomas of the National Coral Reef Institute in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

The Australian crew spent 5 days mapping the sea floor with echo beams. As each day's work added to the image, it became clear that they were cruising atop a reef, recalls Harris. So they lowered a video camera. "We were surprised to see corals growing there in such abundance," he says. They carefully collected samples to study upon their return to the lab. � Geosciences Australia

New Guinea Went Bananas: Agriculture's roots get a South Pacific twist

Situated in the South Pacific islands, remote New Guinea seems an unlikely place for the invention of agriculture. Yet that's precisely what happened there nearly 7,000 years ago, according to a new investigation.

Inhabitants of this tropical outpost cultivated large quantities of bananas about 3 millennia before the arrival of Southeast Asian seafarers, say archaeologist Tim P. Denham of Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia, and his colleagues. Agriculture thus arose independently in New Guinea, the scientists conclude in an upcoming Science.

Until now, convincing evidence for ancient agriculture came only from the Middle East (SN: 10/28/00, p. 280), China, the eastern United States (SN: 9/20/97, p. 180), South America, and a region encompassing parts of Mexico and Central America (SN: 5/24/97, p. 322). Reports in the 1970s that New Guinea belonged in this group were criticized for relying on patchy remains and uncertain dates from an excavation of a swampy highland site called Kuk.

"Only a few regions were geographically suited to become homelands of full agricultural systems," says archaeologist Katharina Neumann of J.W. Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany, in a commentary accompanying the new article. "New Guinea seems to have been one of them."

This discovery challenges the traditional notion that agriculture inevitably led to the rise of large civilizations with stratified social classes, Denham and his coworkers assert. Current New Guinea societies are relatively small and grounded in egalitarian practices, much as they seem to have been before the rise of agriculture, according to the researchers.

You've seen the movie, now try and find the truth
Atrios blogs in some detail about a forthcoming 11 September movie. It is worth reading, if only for his final question:

UPDATE: Alert readers raise the question: Which will be released first: the 911 report, or the 911 movie? I say the movie. Any takers?

Sadly the real question is whether the fiction or the factual account will do more to sway people's attitudes.

Wise appointment confirms why the system needs fixing

Because the new Governor-General is one man's choice and because politics dictated that choice had to be extremely cautious, a selection which broke with convention was never a possibility.

There was never a chance, for example, that Howard would be the first prime minister to choose a woman for the job.

But these are the reasons why this choice confirms that the current system is a failure. A choice in which political imperatives are the overriding factors compromises the chances of a governor-general who is the people's choice candidate.

But it says a lot about the parlous state of the Australian republican movement that despite the Hollingworth debacle John Howard was under very little pressure to do other than he has done.

I would argue it also compromises any sense of reality that in the twenty-first century we are all cavorting about insisting that autocratic appointment of the head of state is the only safe or even thinkable way to go. If the debate was informed by any sense of history the commentariat would realise they sound like chaps in frock coats at Versailles circa 1780.

duplicity and the Roadmap
There's a weird argument being raised here and there that, if the Bush administration is lying about the threat of WMDs, the duplicity is not relevant because the outcome of the Iraq war was good. People who believe that should turn to what is happening to the Roadmap.

From the Guardian:

At the Middle East summit with Mr Bush in Aqaba this month, Mr Sharon committed himself to dismantling nearly 100 Jewish "outposts" in the West Bank. But only a dozen have come down, and about 10 more have been constructed.

Only one of those dismantled was inhabited and it was taken down the day before a visit to Israel by Mr Powell, leading to speculation in the Israeli press that it was done for show.

Ephraim Halevy, the director of Israel's national security council and former head of the Mossad spy agency, resigned yesterday after losing a battle for influence over Mr Sharon's approach to the road map.

Several months ago, Mr Halevy warned the prime minister that George Bush was serious about the road map and that Tony Blair was exerting considerable influence over the US president on the issue. Mr Halevy argued that Israel should draw up its own plan and announce that it would lay out the path and conditions to peace.

Mr Sharon's chief aide, Dov Weissglass, disagreed and persuaded him that the hawks in the White House would ensure that the road map was never taken seriously and that Mr Bush was duping Mr Blair.

"Either they've been playing us the entire time or they're playing the British," Mr Weissglass said in March.

When a government starts on the road to public lying (for whatever motive) that fact is known to other governments. What is Bush going to say to Israel? What is Bush going to say to governments like Iran which see themselves facing the same kind of propaganda campaign that Iraq faced? 'Read my lips'?

Senate may still rebuff media changes

Senator Alston said Australia would be left in the "information stone age" unless the Government's plans were adopted.

"You want a dynamic and expanding sector, to provide more media opportunities, not less. I think you will see new companies coming in from offshore and a much healthier environment as a result."

According to Senator Alston, it was not Rupert Murdoch or Kerry Packer who was leading the charge for change.

"Murdoch and Packer are already very well entrenched. They are doing very nicely, thank you," he said. "It is pretty much the rest of the industry who are out there saying, 'We need these changes'."

The Government's plans received a blow on Friday when independent Senator Brian Harradine said he would amend the bill to prevent mergers of major TV stations and newspapers in capital cities.

Labor, the Democrats and the Greens oppose the changes, as do many community groups. A spokesman for Friends of Fairfax, Alan Kennedy, said they would reduce diversity and hurt consumers.

"It's an extraordinary example of a mates-helping-mates decision on the media," he said. "It will mean fewer media proprietors and fewer media outlets."

Senator Meg Lees has linked her support for the changes to increased funding for the ABC, but Senator Alston was non-committal on this issue yesterday.

"We'll continue to explore all the possibilities," he said.

Senator Alston has actually declared victory over deregulating the media on a number of occasions and he has not enacted anything yet. The Broadcasting Services Amendment (Media Ownership) Bill 2003 would:

* remove controls on the foreign ownership of television
* provide for exemptions to the cross-media rules in certain circumstances, and
* ensure that local news services are maintained in regional areas subject to exemptions
from the cross-media rules.

I suggest that each of those of changes would be bad for the diversity of views and bad for Australia. The new media argument raised by Senator Alston is fairly silly. 11% of the community get their information from new media. That is only a marginal impact and in any case new media content is dominated by the ABC, News Ltd, PBL and Fairfax - all traditional news providers. If the senator really wants to get us out of the stone age he might have a look at repealing his net censorship laws.

My guess is that Senator Lees and Senator Harradine will both bolt and the bill will fail.

global coffee goes flat
The excellent Oligopoly Watch reports:

But the anti-globalists may have less to worry about than they thought. A recent story in Business Week (June 9, 2003, ?For Starbucks, There?s No Place Like Home?) reveals that Starbuck?s international move is turning out to be a bust. There are over 1,500 international stores now, but they are net money losers. Japan, the largest overseas Starbucks presence, has reached a capacity, and is now losing money. Starbucks has closed its stores in Israel, and exiting joint ventures in Switzerland and Austria.� In Britain and Germany, growth is stalled.

The big reason, according to Business Week, is local competition. In all of these countries, once the concept of a coffee bar catches on, there spring up local versions with lower prices that take business away from the costly Starbucks. There?s no indication that this is fueled mostly by anti-Americanism (though Starbucks stores, like MacDonald?s, have been targets of anti-war protests). It seems to be a rare case of real-world limits on multinational growth, and the interesting thing is that it?s based not on protectionism, but on local preferences.

About a year ago my favourite cousin came back from a trip muttering, with an expression of genuine shock, that you cannot get decent coffee in New York. Some months later Starbucks outlets began sprouting all over Sydney like bad mushrooms after rain. It would be interesting to see how well they're doing in Oz against more traditional coffee bars. I did find one mention in The Age:

Despite the money being spent at the moment by these US giants and Hudson and the brand and marketing power they bring, Melbourne's traditional coffee retailers remain unperturbed.

Sisto Malaspina, a partner of one of Melbourne's most famous coffee establishments, Pellegrini's, on Bourke Street, said he was all for them as he believed they were good for coffee drinking in Australia generally.

"It's a good thing for everyone because it introduces coffee to a lot of people who wouldn't otherwise go into a coffee shop like us, and it also gets the young people into coffee too.

"Their coffee is good - our coffee is excellent," he said.

Mr Malaspina reports that Pellegrini's business has been unaffected by the emergence of these chains in the CBD - Pellegrini's is selling more than 500 cups of coffee a day - with caffe latte the most popular drink and espresso (short black) also showing a bit of a revival at the moment.

He has no plans to introduce a Caramel Rooitea Ice Blended at any stage soon

Serious conflict-of-interest disclosure. Some in my suburb are quite proud that Macdonalds had to close their outlet here for want of business.

Otro poema de los dones
Jorge Luis Borges


Gracias quiero dar al divino Laberinto de los efectos y de las causas
Por la diversidad de las criaturas que forman este singular universo,
Por la raz�n, que no cesar� de so�ar con un plano del laberinto,
Por el rostro de Elena y la perseverancia de Ulises,
Por el amor, que nos deja ver a los otros como los ve la divinidad,
Por el firme diamante y el agua suelta,
Por el �lgebra, palacio de precisos cristales,
Por las m�sticas monedas de �ngel Silesio,
Por Schopenhauer, que acaso descifr� el universo,
Por el fulgor del fuego,
Que ning�n ser humano puede mirar sin un asombro antiguo,
Por la caoba, el cedro y el s�ndalo,
Por el pan y la sal,
Por el misterio de la rosa, que prodiga color y que no lo ve,
Por ciertas v�speras y d�as de 1955,
Por los duros troperos que en la llanura arrean los animales y el alba,
Por la ma�ana en Montevideo,
Por el arte de la amistad,
Por el �ltimo d�a de S�crates,
Por las palabras que en un crep�sculo se dijeron de una cruz a otra cruz,
Por aquel sue�o del Islam que abarc� mil noches y una noche,
Por aquel otro sue�o del infierno,
De la torre del fuego que purifica
Y de las esferas gloriosas,
Por Swedenborg, que conversaba con los �ngeles en las calles de Londres,
Por los r�os secretos e inmemoriales que convergen en m�,
Por el idioma que, hace siglos, habl� en Nortumbria,
Por la espada y el arpa de los sajones,
Por el mar, que es un desierto resplandeciente
Y una cifra de cosas que no sabemos
Y un epitafio de los vikings,
Por la m�sica verbal de Inglaterra,
Por la m�sica verbal de Alemania,
Por el oro, que relumbra en los versos,
Por el �pico invierno,
Por el nombre de un libro que no he le�do: Gesta Dei per Francos,
Por Verlaine, inocente como los p�jaros,
Por el prisma de cristal y la pesa de bronce,
Por las rayas del tigre,
Por las altas torres de San Francisco y de la isla de Manhattan,
Por la ma�ana en Texas,
Por aquel sevillano que redact� la Ep�stola Moral
Y cuyo nombre, como �l hubiera preferido, ignoramos,
Por S�neca y Lucano, de C�rdoba
Que antes del espa�ol escribieron
Toda la literatura espa�ola,
Por el geom�trico y bizarro ajedrez
Por la tortuga de Zen�n y el mapa de Royce,
Por el olor medicinal de los eucaliptos,
Por el lenguaje, que puede simular la sabidur�a,
Por el olvido, que anula o modifica el pasado,
Por la costumbre, que nos repite y nos confirma como un espejo,
Por la ma�ana, que nos depara la ilusi�n de un principio,
Por la noche, su tiniebla y su astronom�a,
Por el valor y la felicidad de los otros,
Por la patria, sentida in los jazmines, o en una vieja espada,
Por Whitman y Francisco de As�s, que ya escribieron el poema,
Por el hecho de que el poema es inagotable
Y se confunde con la suma de las criaturas
Y no llegar� jam�s al �ltimo verso
Y var�a seg�n los hombres,
Por Francis Haslam, que pidi� perd�n a sus hijos por morir tan despacio,
Por los minutos que preceden al sue�o,
Por el sue�o y la muerte, esos dos tesoros ocultos,
Por los �ntimos dones que no enumero,
Por la m�sica, misteriosa forma del tiempo.

The accession of Queen Victoria

Saturday June 24, 1837

QUEEN VICTORIA - The accession of our young queen is a circumstance full of hope and promise. Humanly speaking, it is perhaps desirable that the event should have been postponed a few years, that her character might have become more fixed, and her acquaintance with the world and with those branches of knowledge which are peculiarly appropriate to her situation and her duties, more enlarged. But it has been ordained otherwise, and, we have no doubt, ordained for the best.

From all that we have read and heard, her majesty's conduct hitherto seems to have been marked by great propriety both of feeling and demeanour. Her address to the privy council, on the day of her accession, which will be found in a subsequent column, was every thing that could be wished; and there is not a true Englishman who will not warmly respond to her prayer, that "Providence may give her strength for the performance of the work to which she has been thus early called." The declaration, beautiful in its composition, and constitutional in its spirit as it is, has been savagely criticised and misrepresented by the Times. We trust, however, and believe, that very many even of the tories recoil with unmingled disgust from the hateful spirit which that journal so perseveringly evinces.

That would all be a quaint piece of history if Australia did not have a constitution which describes a mythical Australia largely ruled by Queen Victoria. More to the point the royal prerogative remains intact, although it it is in the hands of the prime minister, and authorises more than faintly monarchical statements like:

PRIME MINISTER: I'm the person who was responsible for them going and if the outcome had been very different people would not have been reluctant in anyway to criticise me and I'd have accepted responsibility for it. I don't think it's unreasonable that I welcome people home. He says I hog the limelight. Well, I'm the Prime Minister, I'm the person who's to blame, I'm the person responsible. If I didn't turn up? Just imagine if I didn't turn up at the parade and I said nothing - people would say, for heaven's above, he's the bloke who sent us, he hasn't even come along to welcome us back.

Iran muddies Afghanistan's waters
The Asia Times again reports US/Taliban negotiations.

KARACHI - With the ground situation in Afghanistan expected to deteriorate even further in the coming weeks, Pakistan will once again serve as a back yard for US military and diplomatic initiatives to contain the spreading guerrilla warfare.

At the same time, Iran, which is steadily being pushed against the wall by the United States, still has a few cards left to play in Afghanistan, as well as in Iraq, in an attempt to tie down harassed US forces further in those countries and divert attention from itself.

and:

The decision for these operations follows the breakdown of tentative talks among the United States, Pakistan and the Taliban. A first contact was dismissed out of hand by the Taliban because the go-between was former Taliban leader Mullah Ghous, who had been expelled from the hierarchy when the Taliban were still in power in Kabul. Another round of talks with a more acceptable intermediary was held in Quetta, Pakistan, but they failed to make any headway.

and:

And the re-emergence of the Taliban movement suits some elements in Pakistan, who hanker after the days when Pakistan, through its support of the Taliban, wielded much influence in Afghanistan - for example, the former director general of the Inter-Service Intelligence, Lieutenant-General Mehmood Ahmed. Mehmood was chosen by Pakistani President General Pervez Musharraf to talk the Taliban into a peaceful solution to the Afghan situation after September 11, 2001, when Pakistan, under US pressure, renounced its support of the Taliban. Instead, though, Mehmood prepared the Taliban to fight the United States. He was removed from his post when the US attacked Afghanistan on October 7, 2001, and placed under house arrest. He has now been released, and serves as managing director of Fauji Fertilizer (a production unit owned by the Pakistani army).

Such hawkish elements in the army and among Pakistan's militant groups are just waiting to make Afghanistan their playground once again.

Unlike Saddam, the Iranians are unlikely to sit and wait for the US to come to them. Unlike Saddam, the Iranians control a cohesive and powerful state that has not been wrecked by years of sanctions and bombings. The US armed forces are stretched thin covering Afghanistan and Iraq. I am almost prepared to bet that we will soon be told the way to relieve the military pressure in Afghanistan and Iraq is to take out Iran.

US wages war from within Iran

With commendable stupidity usually only reserved for the most powerful and isolated from reality, President George W Bush has managed to go some way towards repeating the catastrophic mistakes of Lyndon Johnson and ensnare the United States in an increasingly unpopular and probably unwinnable foreign military involvement. Just two months after the sudden collapse of organized Iraqi resistance to the US-led invasion, US troops are back in a Vietnam-scenario with the ambushing of military convoys, the regular use of grenades and rocket launchers against isolated American targets and indeed suicide bombers.

It has always been a truism that if you cannot avoid wars, then at least learn the lessons of previous conflicts. This, however, the US has signally failed to do. Not content with the ultimate failures of the campaigns in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, of Somalia, and indeed even Afghanistan, to achieve the stated aims and the supposed improvement in the state of the inhabitants of those nations, the US has blindly embarked on a dangerous and unsound course of action. US forces are already launching operations suspiciously similar to the "search-and-destroy" tactics of 40 years ago and with a similar response from an increasingly hostile civilian population.

Using a marked degree of devious propaganda about the imminent threat of weapons of mass destruction and largely in the dark about the true allegiance and likely response of the majority of Iraqis, the US has now succeeded in alienating much of both the developed and Third World, and indeed signaled to both Russia and China that Washington's new-found military belligerence and diplomatic toughness are a profound threat to their influence and future powerbase. Not content with expending much of America's wealth and the lives of its young service personnel in largely fruitless campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq, Washington is now clearly preparing the ground for an attack on Iran.

What offends me most about the neo-realpolitik school of diplomacy is that it is so damn unrealistic. Their prewar claims of WMDs, a clear and serious threat, a brief occupation, a light occupation force are all now discredited. The carnage they said would never happen continues and their only response is Rumsfeld trying to spin the number of US and British dead by conflating dissimilar statistics. These people have been spinning so long they've forgotten there's a real world which cannot be spun. If Iraq was a distraction from the failures against al-Qa'ida I guess logic dictates a new distraction to disguise the failure in Iraq.

Tehran here we come. The same drivel about light mobile forces and no need for a large garrison can be expected as well. After all, it worked in Afghanistan didn't it? And in iraq?

Iraq democratizing Iran?

In Najaf, SAIRI cadres are actually hoping that the Iranian Islamic Republic will not influence Iraq; they'd rather see the new Iraqi experiment being able to democratize Iran. Meanwhile in Qom, the Grand Ayatollah Saanei, who talked to Asia Times Online last year, has told French daily Le Monde that "it is out of the question to transfer our system to Iraq. The United States should not interfere politically in Iraq, and this also applies to ourselves." Saanei remarked that all great "sources of imitation" - or marja'a, the highest echelon of the Shi'ite clergy - who have lived in Qom, all of them came from Najaf. For him, Najaf and Qom complement each other.

Will Iran and Iraq complement each other? The answer may hinge on the impact of the more than 3,000 Iraqi Shi'ite religious leaders who came back home from exile in Iran. If a separation between religion and politics successfully takes place in Iraq, the road is paved for a secular Shi'ite-dominated Iraqi regime being able to give the Iranian theocracy a democracy lesson. If the Americans allow it, of course.

The whole article should be read, if only because the neologism 'occuberator' deserves to get a run. More seriously, there must be someone among the Bush advisers who knows something about the tensions between Iraq's Shi'a clergy and Iran's. Surely? Please? Maybe?

snark of the week
From Hellblazer:

The Libertarian utopian fantasy is that if we could all just communicate, everything would be all peachy and we'd live in some Libertarian free market love fest of ideas. But like all Libertarian utopias, it just descends into despotism and roving bands of warlords. Heathers on crack.

Blogdom is the Somalia of the web.

I was beginning to worry...

Whale Watchers Demand Voice at World Whaling Body

BERLIN (Reuters) - Whale watchers say their industry, now worth over $1.5 billion per year, has come of age, and want recognition at the International Whaling Commission (IWC) -- to the consternation of whaling nations.

The International Alliance for Commercial Whale Watchers (IACWW) made its first appearance as an observer at the annual IWC meeting this week and called for the body to recognize their industry, and that whaling threatens it.

They also want the commission to tackle conservation issues, such as pollution, which pose a risk to whales.

"We see ourselves as the new whalers," Frank Future, the Australian head of the fledgling IACWW, told Reuters.

Whaling nations, led by Japan and Norway, insisting the IWC should stick to its original aim of deciding hunting quotas. They say conservation and whale watching are side issues.

This is amusing. Given the fairly parlous state of the old whalers I'd love to be a fly on the wall while they argue that slaughter is good but more profitable nonlethal industries are bad.

Bush's 9/11 coverup?

For months, the commission was struggling to get by on a minuscule budget of $3 million. That low funding and the yearlong delay in creating the commission stand in stark contrast to previous panels formed to investigate momentous disasters in American history.

For instance, on April 15, 1912, the Titanic sank after hitting an iceberg, killing approximately 1,500 of its 2,200 passengers. According to historians, Titanic survivors began disembarking in New York at 10 o'clock on the night of April 18. The next morning at 10:30, a special panel of the Senate Commerce Committee was gaveled into session inside the ornate East Room of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York.

Last year, when Cheney called Daschle to urge him to limit any hearings into 9/11, the V.P. argued it would drain sources away from the war on terrorism. By contrast, just 11 days after Japanese bombers hit the U.S. with a sneak attack killing nearly 3,000 people, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed an executive order creating a commission to "ascertain and report the facts relating to the attack made by Japanese armed forces upon the Territory of Hawaii on December 7, 1941 ... and to provide bases for sound decisions whether any derelictions of duty or errors of judgment on the part of United States Army or Navy personnel contributed to such successes as were achieved by the enemy on the occasion mentioned." It was the first of eight government-led investigations into the Pearl Harbor.

The Warren Commission, headed by Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren, was formed just seven days after President Kennedy was assassinated. Last February, after seven astronauts died when the Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated 200,000 feet above Texas, NASA's Columbia Accident Investigation Board was created 90 minutes after the incident; $50 million was immediately set aside for the probe. And in just four months, the board has already made public significant findings about the crash investigation.

By contrast, nearly two years after the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center, the 9/11 commission only recently opened up its New York City office. The commission's budget has been increased to $14 million, but many experts say that's still far short of the sum needed to do the job right.

It's just weird that the US could hold an independent commission while fighting World War II but not now. But then an independent commission might ask why US air defence was AWOL that morning.

Bumps in the Road Map

The recent promises by Sharon's government to eliminate some, or even all, of the "illegal" settlement outposts (as if to imply that all the settlements are not equally illegal) should not be allowed to obscure Israel's long-term policy vis-�-vis the occupation, most concretely demonstrated by the vast, multimillion-dollar "separation wall" now under construction. Seventy-five miles of this forbidding structure have already been built, with a total projected length of more than 200 miles. The wall, which is more than twenty feet high, with guard towers, electronic fences and two-lane patrol roads, would annex up to 10 percent of the West Bank to Israel; it has already cut off thousands of Palestinians from the rest of the West Bank and from their agricultural lands. The 40,000 citizens of Qalqilya, for example, are now surrounded on three sides by this wall, and most of their farmland has been seized. They are now virtually imprisoned.

This is a grim scenario, but the situation still offers some possibility of forward movement. A recent poll by Israel's Jaffee Institute for Strategic Studies shows that 56 percent of Israelis--up from 48 percent last year--would "support a unilateral withdrawal from the territories in the context of a peace accord, even if that meant ceding all settlements." Here is the signpost for a realistic road map that could be charted by the Bush Administration. If the Administration were to insist unequivocally on a total Israeli withdrawal from the territories as part of a regional peace treaty, it would find widespread support within Israel, perhaps far more than expected. And Washington could use the power of its purse to ease the transition, guaranteeing a subsidy for every Israeli settler moving back to Israel proper. There would no doubt be resistance from the Washington lobbyists and Congress, but the Administration would have compelling arguments on its side. Thirty-two months of conflict have not only devastated the Palestinian civil society and economy, they have led Israel to a dead end. The dream of Greater Israel has become a nightmare.

It would be a very good thing if John Howard, his new role as the hyperally, suggested this course to the Bush administration. It would be an even better thing if George Bush looked more closely at the failure of Greater Israel and applied the lessons of that failure to the project for Greater America.

Governmental cock and bull about Iraq
Andrew Wilkie writes:

But sooner or later the cock and bull surrounding Iraq and WMD is going to catch up with the Australian Government. The deception and its consequences are just too great to be ignored.

The Government sold us the war on the basis of Iraq's "massive" WMD program. The image was of a huge and deadly arsenal imperilling us all. Time was of the essence.

Allowing the chief United Nations weapons inspector, Hans Blix, the little more time he asked for would have been foolish (even though the Coalition is now taking for itself much more than the little extra time he asked for.)

However, no huge program has been found. If the WMD program was destroyed just before the war it must have been small. And whatever may yet be found would need to be so limited in scale as to have been concealable during weeks of searching.

Wilkie is a former senior analyst with the office of national asessments. He appears on Thursday before the house of commons select committee on foreign affairs.

The coalition governments are just going to have to learn that you can't fool all of the people all of the time in a world of asymmetric media. No doubt Wilkie will appear before the inevitable Australian inquiry as well. The prime minister's bleat that: 'Those from the opposition who now seek to denigrate what this government and this country do are, in effect, calling for the restoration of Saddam Hussein as the ruler of Iraq.' will not make the questions go away.

Downer and intelligence
From the Sydney Morning Herald:

Foreign Minister Alexander Downer today said he was told Bali could be a terrorist target four months before the deadly attacks that killed more than 200 people - but Australia had no intelligence information or specific advice that the Bali attack was likely to occur.

Speaking to reporters in Darwin, Mr Downer said the warning came from an Office of National Assessment (ONA) analyst who was theorising about likely targets for terrorist group Jemaah Islamiah (JI) in the South-East Asian region.

Officers from the ONA met Mr Downer on June 18 and 19 last year and one officer told him Bali, the Indonesian province of Riau, and Singapore would be attractive targets for the JI terrorist network.

"This was hypothesising, it was theorising by one particular analyst; it wasn't based on any (specific) information that he had," Mr Downer said.

"Of course, perceptive as it turned out, ... (because it was) based on theorising by one particular analyst and not based on any hard information, there was no sense among the officials or ONA that we should upgrade our travel advisories.

"Our travel advisory was already warning people about possible terrorist attacks in Indonesia."

I'm glad the foreign minister views intelligence with such a sceptic eye. Now if only he had done the same with the intelligence on the missing WMDs, but somehow when there's a war to justify mere hypothesis seems good enough for the minister.