Howard on the Solomons: he just cannot help himself

From the Sydney Morning Herald:

If Australia had failed to intervene in the Solomons Islands the Pacific nation might have become a haven for terrorists or drug runners, Prime Minister John Howard said today.

The vanguard of an Australian-led military and police peacekeeping force will arrive in the Solomons tomorrow as part of an effort to restore law and order in the troubled pacific nation.

Mr Howard said Australia was sending the force at the request of the Solomons parliament, and had a responsibility to help countries in its own backyard.

"If we do nothing and the country slides into further anarchy, and then it becomes a haven for evildoers, whether they're involved in terrorism, or drugs, or money laundering, or anything else, we will rightly be condemned, not only by the Australian people, but also by countries around the world," Mr Howard told the Nine network.

"This is our patch and we do have a special irresponsibility here, and we're doing it in a very careful deliberate cooperative fashion.

"We're not throwing our weight around, but we're willing to do our fair share of the heavy lifting in an area that the rest of the world sees as very much Australia's responsibility."

Note the use of 'evildoers' imported directly from the USA. Note also the attempt to conflate the Solomons intervention with Iraq despite the clear differences. Oh yeah, and the typo of the year in boldface.

To prevent Medicare hit, senators must not fall for the myths

"Subsidising the private system takes the pressure off public hospitals." This is a Howard favourite. Despite its commonsense appeal, it's rubbish. Private hospitals carefully cherry-pick the most profitable patients, services and locations. Howard's 30 per cent health insurance rebate is wasting $2.5 billion dollars a year on the private health-care industry.

Poor people's taxes are subsidising wealthier people's private treatment. The Government and the private sector tell us the rebate is worthwhile by repeating how busy private hospitals are, but the pressure on public hospital emergency departments and operating lists hasn't fallen. Let's hope the senators aren't fooled by these myths.

Far better than destroying Medicare, they could focus on the Commonwealth and state governments developing a national health plan to provide high-quality, publicly funded health services for all Australians; increasing bulk-billing by GPs by increasing the Medicare rebate; encouraging the development of primary health-care centres where GPs work with other health professionals to provide a comprehensive service; increasing the funding for Aboriginal health; residential care for older people; dental care; community health services and health promotion; and also possibly public hospitals.

This sounds expensive but much of it could be funded by abolishing that ineffective private health insurance rebate. Perhaps we also have to increase the Medicare levy, something surveys have repeatedly shown Australians would be happy to do.

Howard's Government wants low taxes so you'll vote for it again. The private health-care industry cares more about its profits than your health. A strong, well-planned, adequately funded Medicare is the best and cheapest way to provide first-class health care for all Australians.

My only disagreement is that I think calling the non-Medicare health industry 'private' is ridiculous. They are entirely dependent on federal subsidies and without those subsidies they would disappear. Now the Howard government allegedly believes in the market, but not if it means allowing the non-Medicare funds to go under.

The real solution to Medicare's problems is to increase the bulk-billing rebate paid to doctors by Medicare. The current plan does not do that and merely offers a top-up far short of what the medicare rebate should be.

Further, by introducing categorical payments the Howard plan drives a wedge through medicare as a universals service and that wedge will presumably allow them to campaign on the future on overuse of medical services by evil dolebludgers. It's wedgefare not welfare - social policy as a campaign tool.

Statement by Lord Hutton on the range and nature of his inquiry into the death of David Kelly

The government has invited me to conduct an investigation into the tragic death of Dr David Kelly, which has brought such great sorrow to his wife and children.

My terms of reference are these:

Urgently to conduct an investigation into the circumstances surrounding the death of Dr Kelly.

The government has further stated that it will provide me with the fullest cooperation and that it expects all other authorities and parties to do the same.

I make it clear that it will be for me to decide as I think right within my terms of reference the matters which will be the subject of my investigation.

I intend to sit in public in the near future to state how I intend to conduct the inquiry and to consider the extent to which interested parties and bodies should be represented by counsel or solicitors. In deciding on the date when I will sit, I will obviously wish to take into account the date of Dr Kelly's funeral and the timing of the inquest into his death.

After that preliminary sitting I intend to conduct the inquiry with expedition and to report as soon as possible. It is also my intention to conduct the inquiry mostly in public.

This will be the first independent judicial inquiry (although I suspect not the last) to touch on the question of distorted intelligence in the lead-up to the war. That makes Lord Hutton's determination to assert his independence crucial.

O tempora! O Mores!

I should never visit LanguageHat. Ever. All that happens is I find about a dozen new things I want to read, followed by dozens of blogs and references I want to subscribe to, followed by a severe case of blogostipation while I try to read more text than is humanly possible.

I will just have to while away my unproductive hours by reading the T�in B� C�alnge which comes (miracle of miracles) with an Irish pronunciation guide you can actually understand. I will never make it into the blogeoisie at this rate.

Gareth posts about the most recent allegations against David Hicks by the foreign minister, who tells us Hicks received training from al-Qa'ida. I think the government should stop this practice. Hicks should be charged and tried under Australian law, not by press release. However I congratulate Homer Paxton for his comment to Gareth's post:

Was his training completed in Niger?

United Nations in Iraq

Paul Bremer, the U.S. administrator in Baghdad, said Thursday that he hopes to hold elections next year and that he's asked a U.N. expert to come advise him on how to set up voter registration. While he's at it, he should ask a few more U.N. experts to come advise him how to do peacekeeping.

It is becoming increasingly clear that, at some point, the United Nations will have to take over the postwar reconstruction of Iraq. The only question is whether Kofi Annan ends up rushing in on his own terms to fill the gaps of a desperately overwhelmed American occupation force�or whether President Bush comes to his senses, realizes that the task is much harder than his advisers had predicted, and admits that he can't manage it by himself. If he reaches this conclusion in six months or a year, it will look like a mortifying retreat; if he does so much sooner, like now, he might still be able to look courageous and wise.

The chance of such a swift switch is remote. Secretary of State Colin Powell, meeting Wednesday with German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, acknowledged that some nations "have expressed the desire for more of a mandate from the United Nations" and added, "I am in conversation with some ministers about this." But Powell is famously out of synch with the rest of this administration on the question of unilateralism versus multilateralism. And, notice, even he owned up to being merely "in conversation" with "some ministers," as opposed, say, to arranging action with pertinent U.N. agencies.

Elsewhere in the article Kapaln, not by any means an opponent of the war, notes that various high officials of the Bush administration seem unable to identify the nations or numbers involved. According to Anne Summers, in today's Sydney Morning Herald, the numbers are 13 000 allied troops out of 160 000 all told, which hardly represents a triumph of multilateralism.

More on Montreal

Billmon has more on the Montreal Protocol

This may seem like a relatively minor issue. Methyl bromide, after all, only accounts for about 7% of all ozone layer depletion, according to the Times story. But, like most multilateral treaties, the Montreal Protocol is a delicate tissue of compromises and concessions. Bush's environmental Visigoths are not only trying to use that tissue to wipe their own rumps, they're actively encouraging other countries to do the same.

This conceivably could bring about the collapse of the entire agreement, as each country tries to avoid being stuck with the treaty's obligations while the others enjoy its benefits. The classic prisoners' dilemma.

The Montreal Protocol has probably been the most successful environmental treaty in history. It was that very success that encouraged the community of nations to try its collective hand at drafting a similar compact to deal with global warming. The administration, of course, has already deep-sixed that one. Now it's setting its torpedo sights on the original. Which leads one expert to ask a question:

Dr Joe Farman, the Cambridge scientist who discovered the Antarctic ozone hole, added: "This is madness. We do not need this chemical. We do need the ozone layer. How stupid can people be?"

I don't think anyone who's watched Shrub in action will find it too hard to provide the answer.

Note the restraint. I say nothing about Bush's environment policy consisting of the usual bromides.

Sinking in the mire of a messy peace

In other words, there is no end in sight. There is no exit strategy. Rumsfeld and his fellow cowboys in the Pentagon not only spurned the UN, insulted "old" Europe and generally wrought diplomatic mayhem in the lead-up to the war, they also ignored the (Colin) Powell Doctrine, articulated by the man who used to head the US Armed Forces, who supposedly learned the lessons of Vietnam and who is now Secretary of State.

The Powell doctrine says that a country should avoid intervening in international conflicts unless there is a vital interest and a clear, achievable goal.

If the clear goal in Iraq was to get rid of Suddam Hussein, that has only partially been achieved. His government is gone but he appears to be still around, distributing inflammatory tapes and, for all we know, orchestrating the guerilla resistance from a bunker somewhere.

When you look at the costs, the lack of end in sight and the likely need to bring in more and more troops, the war they said would never become "another Vietnam" has all the hallmarks of already being another Vietnam. The US has been desperate to increase the presence of soldiers from other nations, as only 13,000 of the 160,000 troops in Iraq are not American. It has tried to get India to commit 17,000 but they, like Russia, France and Germany, refuse to do so unless there is a new UN mandate.

Australia had no such inhibitions before the Iraq war, and as our thinking is unchanged this could clear the way to our troop commitment increasing further if the Prime Minister's good friend George Bush requests it.

It is a new and unsettling trend for this country to have so many military engagements of this scale and risk. Have we been adequately prepared for it? No. How much consensus is there that it's what we should be doing? Very little.

I guess the US really is dependent on the decisions of others, after all. If only Powell had followed his own doctrine.

snark of the week

From Greg Palast (bold face mine, to separate the snark from the contextual material):

Faced with having to unmuddle the President's inchoate response, Blair hiked up his eyebrows then fetched up this stunner: "People don't generally know� in the 1980s that Iraq purchased 270 tons of uranium from Niger." Indeed, people don't know that, Tony, because your government and the US government did its damned best to cover it up. In the 1980s, Saddam was OUR butcher in Baghdad, a buddy of Ronald Reagan and Bush Senior. During my investigations for BBC television, I discovered during the Reagan-Bush years, Saudi Arabians gave Saddam, with a wink and nod from the US and UK, $7 billion to build a nuclear weapon so he could incinerate his enemy, Iran. However, that was back before there was an 'Axis of Evil' and Iran was the Unicycle of Evil.

Forceful and moderate

This is an excellent plog and includes the following quote from the plogger's placard:

'George Bush's World Tour 2003. Visiting:

Iraq March 2003

Iran ?

N. Korea ?

Syria ?

Further venues to be announced soon

Featuring: Tony 'Poodle' Blair on guitar &
George 'Dubya' Bush - singing from the same hymn sheet

Playing 'He's got the whole wide world in his gun sights'

Blair should resign
says MP Glenda

REBEL MP Glenda Jackson has swung behind Hampstead Labour members to call for the resignation of Tony Blair.

The Hampstead and Highgate MP says the Prime Minister led Britain to war under false pretences and wants him to step down before the end of the year if troops fail to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Her call comes five months after members of the Frognal and Fitzjohn�s branch of the Hampstead constituency Labour Party demanded �the resignation of the Government and the election of a new Labour Government that respects international law, Labour Conference and the UN Charter.�

At the time, Ms Jackson stopped short of calling for Mr Blair�s resignation.

But this week, she told the Ham&High: �[Tony Blair] took us to war on the arguments that these weapons existed and could launch in 45 minutes.

�He didn�t give the United Nations weapons inspectors much time to find them but there are now between 1,300 and 1,400 people in Iraq looking for the weapons.�

Ms Jackson added: �My colleague (Claire Short) said that he should have until the end of the year, but I don�t think he needs that long. If they are there, they will be found before that.�

I'm old enough to remember Elizabeth R. I have to ask if Blair will pull a finger from his mouth and snap: 'Not yet, Master Secretary!'

Follow the Yellowcake Road

What began as a minor Italian mystery is now a drama testing Bush�s credibility as never before. Inside the Iraqi intel wars.

The article is a good overview, but the headline is brilliant.

Bush ready to wreck ozone layer treaty

New US demands - tabled at a little-noticed meeting in Montreal earlier this month - threaten to unravel one of the greatest environmental success stories of the past few decades, causing millions of deaths from cancer.

The news comes at a particularly embarrassing time for the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, who pressed the President in their talks in Washington last week to stop his attempts to sabotage the Kyoto Protocol which sets out to control global warming: one of the few international issues on which they differ.

Now, instead of heeding Mr Blair, Mr Bush is undermining the ozone treaty as well, by seeking to perpetuate the use of the most ozone-destructive chemical still employed in developed countries, otherwise soon to be phased out. Ironically, it was sustained pressure from the Reagan administration, in which Mr Bush's father served as vice-president, that ensured the treaty was adopted in the first place. It has proved such a success that environmentalists have long regarded it as inviolable.

The Montreal Protocol actually works. Naturally this administration therefore opposes it, we cant have any example of international treaties that function as they are designed, it might give people ideas.

The UN strikes back!

From the Asia Times:

This is poison for a president.

There are signs that Bush realizes this, particularly after meeting with Annan. Before this week, Washington showed little interest in returning to the UN for a new resolution. But that changed this week, as Secretary of State Colin Powell began sounding out US allies - including German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer - about what kind of resolution could persuade Berlin to help out.

Annan himself was encouraging. Diplomatic sources pointed to his statement Wednesday in which, after noting the divisions that existed in the Security Council before the war, he stressed that "Now that the war is over, we should focus on stabilizing and building a peaceful and prosperous Iraq."

"It's getting more and more obvious that the [Security] Council's leverage [vis-a-vis Washington] is increasing," said one source who noted the growing sense in the US capital that the optimistic predictions of the hawks had put the president in serious peril.

The question is, what will be the UN's price for bailing the administration out, and will Bush be willing to pay it

And from the Christian Science Monitor

RIS � Pressured by signs of fatigue and dissent among US soldiers fighting a guerrilla war in Iraq, and disappointed by allies' reluctance to join what many see as an occupation army, the US may be forced to cede some control over Iraq's future to governments who disagreed with the war.

That is likely to be the price of coaxing major nations into an Iraqi force through the United Nations, a process Secretary of State Colin Powell said Wednesday he was discussing with the UN and allies. "The situation in Iraq is highly complicated and we are interested in a real, strategic trans-Atlantic debate," said German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, who met with Mr. Powell in Washington, signaling the European desire to help shape events in Iraq.

Faced with the need to keep some 150,000 soldiers in Iraq to hold the lid on a deteriorating security situation, the US has asked about 80 countries to contribute troops.

So far, the US has cobbled together a multinational force that will total 9,200 troops from about 30 countries when it deploys fully in September

Last week the US Senate voted 87/0 to ask Bush to request UN and NATO troops.

The Bush administration's command diplomacy was always going to fail. The diplomatic cost of Iraq had already ensured that no further pre-emptive wars would ever get off the ground. New Zealand demanded and got Australian assurances that the Solomons would not be wrapped into the War on Terror. The tragic cost for Bush's unilateralism, a cost we may all end up paying is a nuclear Iran and North Korea.

NB I corrected a typo. I always meant to say Iran in the last line.

Correction on Guant�namo Bay detainees

Proceedings have also been suspended agaoint the Australian detainees, although our government is taking a rather different line from Britain's.

JOURNALIST:

Prime Minister, what's happened in relation to David Hicks?

PRIME MINISTER:

Well, what's happened is that it's been agreed, it's been agreed with the Americans that the military commission process for the time being will be put on hold. Two senior officials from the Attorney General's Department, namely the Secretary Mr Robert Cornall and the relevant branch head, left Australia this morning to go to Washington to conduct discussions with the Americans. It's likely, if necessary, that Chris Ellison, the Justice Minister, who in our system is the equivalent of the British Attorney General, will join the discussions at the concluding stages. And we'll be having discussions with the Americans about ensuring that if these people are tried in the United States, the process will be as transparent as possible and as compatible with the notions of justice and fair dealing that we regard as meeting those requirements in Australia.

JOURNALIST:

Do you expect the military trials to proceed after these negotiations?

PRIME MINISTER:

Well, the process is yet to be finalised and I don't want to pre-empt the discussion. One of the things you've got to bear in mind is that it's quite conceivable in these situations that somebody may have committed an offence under American law and not committed an offence under Australian law. And it could well be that if Mr Hicks, for example, were to come back to Australia, it may not be a prosecutable offence, yet if he's retained in the United States there is an offence.

Coral reefs in steep decline

The Caribbean is losing coral reefs at a horrific rate, British scientists say.

A team from the University of East Anglia reported in the journal Science yesterday that the average amount of hard coral cover on the reefs had fallen from 50 per cent to 10 per cent in the past 30 years.

Tropical coral reefs are among the world's richest habitats, and are at risk everywhere, chiefly from overfishing, pollution, storms and sedimentation.

Experts have warned repeatedly that corals are sensitive to temperature. Reefs in the Indian and Pacific oceans have suffered dramatic bleaching during cycles of warming. But in the Caribbean the problems have been of a different kind.

"The feeling has long been that the Caribbean corals are doing badly," said Toby Gardner, who led the study. "We are the first to pull information together from across the region and put a hard figure on coral decline. The rate of decline we found exceeds by far the well publicised rates of loss for the tropical forests."

There are similar troubles much closer to home. The State of the Reef Report:

The Great Barrier Reef is under mounting pressure. For example:

since the European settlement of Australia, the annual flow from the land of sediments and nutrients into the Great Barrier Reef has increased four fold;

since 1998, the Great Barrier Reef has suffered its two worst ever recorded coral bleaching events, caused by unusually hot sea water;

the effort in the Reef Line Fishery has doubled since 1995;

recreational fishing effort continues to increase as population increases and fishing and boating technology improves;

over the last 40 years, numbers of nesting loggerhead turtles have declined by between 50 percent and 80 percent; and

estimates of dugong populations adjacent to the urban coast of Queensland indicate that they are currently only about 3 percent of what they were in the early 1960�s.

While many areas of the Great Barrier Reef are in good condition, mounting pressures on the Reef leave no room for complacency.

Similar pressures, elsewhere in the world, have contributed to the loss of up to 25 percent of the world�s coral reefs.

None of these problems are (of course) due to global warming which as (as we all know) is not happening and if it is happening (which it isn't) has no effect on the economy.

Be very, very afraid

From the Sydney Morning Herald:

North Korea is poised to build at least one nuclear missile, according to new Chinese intelligence, taking the crisis over its weapons program to a dangerous and alarming phase.

The finding comes amid reports that Beijing has recently determined that Pyongyang has reprocessed enough spent nuclear fuel rods to produce the plutonium for a nuclear bomb.

This would partly support North Korea's recent claim to the United States that it had reprocessed 8000 rods - enough for at least six bombs.

The confirmation by Beijing of the advanced state of North Korea's nuclear program would explain China's intense efforts in the past week to bring it to the negotiating table.

China's Vice-Foreign Minister, Dai Bingguo, was due in Washington last night to brief the Secretary of State, Colin Powell, about Mr Dai's rare audience on Monday with the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-il.

He is believed to have a letter from China's President, Hu Jintao, for President George Bush. In Pyongyang, Mr Dai delivered a letter from Mr Hu to Mr Kim, as China pressured North Korea to join talks with the US, hosted by Beijing.

As intensive diplomatic rounds continued in the region, South Korea struck an optimistic note, telling the Prime Minister, John Howard, yesterday that it was confident of forging a peaceful resolution to the crisis.

Mr Howard said such a development would remove any question of Australia joining a proposed naval force to intercept North Korean vessels suspected of carrying weapons and drugs.

I am not certain history will forgive Bush and Blair if it turns out that the axis of evil speech and the lurch to military adventures merely persuaded Iran and North Korea that the only defence against these new empire-builders is going nuclear.

Ruddock v Clarke

Alan Ramsey tells us:

When Clark went to Ireland last year on a trip as the most senior elected official of Australia's peak Aboriginal organisation, ATSIC, he took his wife. Clark's board had approved the trip. Clark's minister, Philip Ruddock, had approved Clark's wife going with him on the basis that she had "significant duties". Taxpayers weren't asked but they paid the bill. Taxpayers always pay the bill. The Clarks were away for 10 days. Their trip cost $31,000. Last year, just before the Clarks went to Ireland, Ruddock spent 15 days in Switzerland, Canada, Malaysia, the Philippines and Korea. The cost was $113,404 and 67 cents. Taxpayers paid that bill, too.

What Ramsey does not address is why Ruddock demanded immediately that Clarke step down when faced with civil rape proceedings but felt a former governor-general's options in identical circumstances should be quite, quite different. Perhaps Ruddock was seeking a preferred political outcome?

US suspends proceedings against Guantanamo Britons

The United States has agreed to suspend controversial military court proceedings against British detainees held at Guantanamo Bay, pending talks with British legal officials, it was announced today.

The prime minister's official spokesman said a joint US-British statement, due to be released later today by the White House, would confirm the decision, which follows Tony Blair's talks yesterday on the subject with US President George Bush.

"The president listened to the concerns of the prime minister and we believe that this is the best way forward," the spokesman told reporters travelling with Mr Blair to Japan.

There are nine Britons being held at Guantanamo Bay - two were on an initial list of six detainees out of a total of 667 prisoners to be tried by a military tribunal in the camp.

Proceedings against the two are now off until a British legal team, led by the attorney general, meets a high-level American legal team to discuss "all aspects" of the nine Britons' cases next week.

A pity the man of steel did not argue this issue as vigourously about the Australians facing proceedings before military tribunals. Rather than argue that they should face a fair trial the government chose to leak prejudicial information about Hicks.

MoD to hold inquiry into Kelly death

The Ministry of Defence is to hold an independent judicial inquiry into the circumstances leading up to the death of David Kelly, the prime minister's official spokesman said today.

The move has yet to be confirmed by the MoD itself, although a judge is expected to be appointed as early as this afternoon.

Mr Blair's spokesman, speaking as the prime minister arrived in Tokyo on the latest leg of his marathon diplomatic mission, said: "We have indicated that if this is Dr Kelly's body, then the government intends to hold an independent judicial enquiry.

"In these circumstances, people should not jump to conclusions and they should exercise restraint."

He said: "The prime minister is obviously very distressed for the family.

Mr Blair's official spokesman added: "The prime minister has been speaking for a fair amount of time on the phone in recent hours to the permanent secretary at the ministry of defence, Sir Kevin Tebbitt and the defence secretary, Geoff Hoon, and [the] constitutional affairs secretary, Charles Falconer."

The discovery of the body in the Oxfordshire beauty spot -now presumed to be the missing defence scientist - will also require a coroner's inquest. The remains are expected to be identified formally tomorrow.

David Kelly appeared before the House of Commons foreign affairs committee and was said to be the source who briefed Andrew Gilligan about the sexing up of the September dossier.

Mandela's Birthday
Nelson Mandela turns 85 today. The link will take you to a book of birthday messages. History might forgive Tony Blair but it will smile at the memory of Nelson Mandela.

Bad news for Cheney, very bad news for Saudi Arabia and the UAE

(Washington, DC) Judicial Watch, the public interest group that investigates and prosecutes government corruption and abuse, said today that documents turned over by the Commerce Department, under court order as a result of Judicial Watch�s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit concerning the activities of the Cheney Energy Task Force, contain a map of Iraqi oilfields, pipelines, refineries and terminals, as well as 2 charts detailing Iraqi oil and gas projects, and �Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts.� The documents, which are dated March 2001, are available on the Internet at: www.JudicialWatch.org.

The Saudi Arabian and United Arab Emirates (UAE)documents likewise feature a map of each country�s oilfields,pipelines, refineries and tanker terminals. There are supportingcharts with details of the major oil and gas development projectsin each country that provide information on the projects, costs,capacity, oil company and status or completion date.

Judicial Watch has been seeking these documents under FOIA since April 19, 2001. Judicial Watch was forced to file a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia (Judicial Watch Inc. v. Department of Energy, et al., Civil Action No. 01-0981) when the government failed to comply with the provisions of the FOIA law. U.S. District Court Judge Paul J. Friedman ordered the government to produce the documents on March 5, 2002.

Unbelievable. The second paragraph should be treated as very bad news by Suadi Arabia and the UAE because it implies they may appear on somewhere on Cheny's axis of conquerable oil-rich states.

Link via DailyKOS and Atrios from Tom Tomorrow

Jack M Balkin is really angry

Being a decisive leader is not the same thing as being a good leader. Decisive action may make a person appear tough and principled, but it may just be a cover for recklessness, stubbornness and the refusal to listen to reason. These are characteristics that leaders can do without. For that sort of leadership, willfully blind to consequences, engaged in wishful thinking, and disgusing its real motives, may cause enormous problems for the country down the road. I have long believed that this President, and this Administration, are not providing strong leadership, but rather reckless leadership. That recklessness is becoming more apparent every day, as the economy worsens, the deficits soar, and more and more Americans die in a war that the President stated was officially over as he strutted like a popinjay up and down the deck of the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln. Good government is not a crap shoot, nor is it best achieved through bluffing. It is a sign of the President's failure of leadership that all he has to offer now is what he has always offered-- tough talk, vague generalities, and attempts to change the subject. Such forced machismo rings increasingly hollow as the casualties mount, the predicted duration of occupation lengthens, the forces necessary to our self-defense are stretched to the breaking point, and the long term economic health of the nation is endangered by a massive redistirbution to the wealthy and the powerful.

snark of the week
From Arianna Huffington in the Los Angeles Times:

Suddenly everyone is asking: What didn't the president know, and why didn't he know it? And why does he know less and less every day?

The worms are turning

Atrios has an excellent post summarising the state of play on the US media. In just a week the Bush/Blair conventional wisdom has collapsed.

John Howard should read the Time article, in particular, with special care:

The Niger yellowcake uranium imbroglio concerns a piece of intelligence Washington knew was bad that was nonetheless restated in President Bush's State of the Union address. A bureaucratic snafu, says the Bush Administration, and one which doesn't detract at all from the case for war; in fact it was hardly a significant part of that case in the first place. Indeed. But three months after taking control of Iraq, the deeper question looming on the horizon is less how one item of bad intelligence slipped into a keynote speech than how so much of the intelligence the Administration had believed was solid appears to have been rather liquid, even gaseous.

Time is not usually widely-regarded as an organ of the Left. If Blair and Bush find themselves not just under fire, but ridiculed, for advancing arguments identical with Howard's than that is very bad news for the prime minister.

Maverick Maine charts its own course on key issues

AUGUSTA, MAINE � Folks in Maine take great pride in bucking conventional wisdom - in taking feisty and independent stances on everything from war to politics to health care. And even breakfast food.

Back in 1839, for instance, Maine risked losing a big chunk of territory to the British. So it took the unusual step of declaring war on Britain. It's the only time a state has threatened to attack a foreign power.

Maine was also the first state to elect an independent governor - and to send one woman to both houses of Congress. As for food, Yankees here still consider apple pie a perfectly nutritious breakfast item. (Try explaining that to Californians.)

Now this independent streak is leading to big policy differences with the Bush administration, differences that symbolize growing gaps between Washington and many states.

� Maine recently became the first state to pass a law to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. It's quite different from President Bush's approach to the issue.

� It was the first state to seek a waiver from Mr. Bush's No Child Left Behind education policy - and is now part of a wider rebellion on the issue.

� Prompted by federal inaction, Maine recently passed a first-in-the-nation plan to provide affordable health insurance to every resident within five years - a costly idea at a time of big state budget crises. The plan is called Dirigo Health after Maine's Latin motto, which means, "I lead."

"It's a kind of cranky independence," says former Gov. Angus King of Mainers' approach to life. He served two terms as Maine's second independent governor.

The US is a lot more than Bush and the ideologues in Washington.

Australia's Treatment Of Asylum Seekers: The View From Outside

by Julian Burnside

A speech at Parliament House, Victoria on World Refugee Day 2003

The universal declaration of human rights is the most widely accepted international convention in human history. Most countries in the world are parties to it. Article 14 of the universal declaration of human rights provides that every person has a right to seek asylum in any territory to which they can gain access. Despite that almost universally accepted norm, when a person arrives in Australia and seeks asylum, we lock them up. We lock them up indefinitely and in conditions of the utmost harshness.

The Migration Act provides for the detention of such people until they are either given a visa or removed from Australia. In practice, this means that human beings men, women and children innocent of any crime are locked up for months, and in many cases years.

They are held in conditions of shocking harshness. The United Nations Human Rights Commission has described conditions in Australia's detention centres as "offensive to human dignity". The United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention has described Australia's detention centres as "worse than prisons" and observed "alarming levels of self-harm". Furthermore, they have found that the detention of asylum seekers in Australia contravenes Article 9 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which bans arbitrary detention.

The Delegate of the United Nations Human Rights Commissioner who visited Woomera in 2002 described it as "a great human tragedy". Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have repeatedly criticised Australia's policy of mandatory detention and the conditions in which people are held in detention.

In short, every responsible human rights organisation in the world has condemned Australia's treatment of asylum seekers. Only the Australian government and the Australian public are untroubled by our treatment of innocent, traumatised people who seek our help.

Just for the record, the text of Article 14 reads:

(1) Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution.

(2) This right may not be invoked in the case of prosecutions genuinely arising from non-political crimes or from acts contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.

Read the whole speech. And weep.

Australia/America

Weird that I picked this up at Crooked Timber instead of Virulent Memes, but that's the way the blogosphere works.

Via Virulent Memes, I see that an American-Australian academic is recommending Australia merge with the U.S. This kind of suggestion comes up a lot, though for some reason the suggestion always seems to be that Australia would become the 51st state. Wouldn�t it be better if the six Australian states stayed as separate states? Not sure.

The article doesn�t mention the obvious reason this merger won�t happen any time soon. Australians aren�t about to give up universal public health insurance, and Americans aren�t about to vote to bring that in. More generally, once they hear anything about it Australians aren�t going to voluntarily become part of the American health care system. (Would anyone?) Maybe there is some way Medicare could be converted to a state-based system and keep working, but I suspect this would be an insurmountable problem in the medium term.

What�s more interesting to think about is what the consequences would be politically if Australia joined America. I�ve always thought that Australians would vote overwhelmingly Democratic. The point isn�t that Australians are particularly left-wing, it�s just that (urban) Australian conservatives seem more like right-wing Democrats than like Republicans. (By �conservatives� here I mean people who vote Liberal, not the self-labelled conservatives one sees on the op-ed pages. Some of them would be Republicans.) They believe in balanced budgets, don�t care for religious arguments in politics, have at least some sympathy for libertarian values, are pragmatists about gun control, are usually pro-choice, and so on. In other words, practically everything the DLC believes in. These people aren�t going to vote for Dennis Kucinich, or perhaps even Dick Gephardt (b/c of the union connections) but they would I think vote for Clinton, and probably Gore, much more than Bush. Obviously this is analysis is so simplistic to barely count as half-baked (maybe quarter-thawed?), but if it�s right maybe there are partisan reasons to push for a merger!

Google's number one response for weapons of mass destruction


This site has been around for some months. A friend emailed it to me back in February. Apparently it's now made it's way so far up Google's algorhythm that it comes out as their first site. Voltaire said the ancien r�gime in France was destroyed not by power but by le ridicule. Here's hoping.

Tuvalu seeks mass migration

KERRY O'BRIEN: The tiny Pacific nation of Tuvalu is pleading for a large-scale exemption from Australia's tough immigration laws.

Tuvalu wants to move its entire population of about 12,000 to Australia to escape an increasingly precarious existence on the coral atolls it inhabits.

The islanders fear the combination of global warming and cyclones will swamp their low-lying homeland and, with strong connections to Australia, they want to come here.

And while the Federal Government has promised help in the event of a disaster, it's not throwing out any lifelines yet.

Tuvalu's previous claim to fame was when they sold their top level domain, .tv, to Rupert Murdoch. Now they are the first small island state to propose a dramtic policy on global warming. They believe they have to leave their islands.

I guess the people of Tuvalu take global warming seriously. They do not have much choice. Already, according to the report, one of their islands has been washed away by increased storm surges and cyclonic activity.

America's Unintelligence Community

SO THE INTELLIGENCE community has provided faulty information to policy makers who then used it to justify disastrous decisions. When have I heard this story before?

Was it in 1944 when a savage Allied air war against cities was based on British intelligence assessments (disputed by some Americans) that bombing would destroy enemy ''morale''?

Or was it in 1945 when Manhattan Project intelligence, overseen by Brigadier General Leslie R. Groves, provided estimates (disputed by scientists) that the Soviet Union would not have the atomic bomb for up to 20 years?

Or was it in the 1950s when American intelligence so emphasized the monolithic character of world communism that it missed the obvious anti-Moscow nationalist fractures in Yugoslavia and China?

Or was it in 1960 when US Air Force intelligence, having seen a ''bomber gap,'' then discovered a ''missile gap,'' sparking major escalations in the arms race with the Soviet Union?

Or was it in 1968 when military intelligence, obsessed with ''body counts,'' had so exaggerated the progress of the war (counting dead women and old people as soldiers) that the Tet offensive took Washington by surprise?

Or was it in 1969 when Richard Nixon, to justify his anti-ballistic missile proposal, cited intelligence reports (disputed by the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency) that the Soviet Union was preparing to launch a first strike?

Or was it in the 1970s when US intelligence, propping up the shah of Iran, dismissed as irrelevant the tape-recorded rantings of an exiled mullah named Khomeini?

Or was it in the 1980s when, emphasizing the ''evil empire,'' American intelligence missed entirely both the internal collapse of the Soviet economy and the historic significance of the nonviolent democracy movements?

Actually, it's worse than this article suggests. Several of these intelligence failures were also dramatic policy failures such as supporting the shah, then Saddam, then anyone-but-Saddam, all in order to stabilise the Middle East. Or abandoning Afghanistan to the Taliban. Or arming the jihadis in Afghanistan with Stinger missiles. Presumably the Central Asian fiasco was a way of stabilising the Middle East as well. As was invading Iraq.

Bush is a coward

On 9/11, when the nation needed leadership, Bush hid at an Air Force Base. The most protected person on the planet went into hiding, not because he was in danger, but because he is a coward. I cannot imagine another president who would have hid like that. Even the spineless Nixon would have seen it is the job of a president to go to the White House and assure the masses that everything is under control.

The Democrats seem unable to locate an issue with which to oppose Bush, most having voted for everything he's requested to date. May I suggest the truth? The single image Bush has promoted is flag-waving hero of the Republic. The evidence proves he is a coward.

Link via my increasingly incestuous relationship with This is not a blog.

Return of the vulture

Vultures have been making a comeback in mainland Europe. Experts say it won't be long before we see them circling over Britain, reports Paul Brown

This is not the kind of nasty, politically-obessed blog (ploblog?) where you would read a cheap crack that the returning vultures are heading directly for the dead meat at Number 10.

snark of the week

That Iraq was lynched by Bush and Blair has become plain as a pikestaff. Take the saving of Private Jessica. Said at first to have been shot and held hostage by Iraqi doctors, and now revealed to have been in their care after a road traffic accident, her story serves as a metaphor for the mendacity so deep and treacly-black it might be an oil sump: from the 45-minute warning to the banks of the Niger and the sweepings of the internet floor.

By George Galloway, himself not unfamiliar with the impact of forged documents, writing in the Guardian.

Galloway quotes another famous snarker:

Now does he feel

his secret murders sticking on his hands;

now minutely revolts upbraid his faith-breach;

those he commands move only in command,

nothing in love: now does he feel his title

hang loose about him, like a giant's robe

upon a dwarfish thief.

British justice and Guant�namo

From the Guardian

The home secretary, David Blunkett, and the constitutional affairs secretary, Lord Falconer, believe that if the two alleged terrorists were returned to Britain, they may well not be sent to trial due to the way in which any evidence has been extracted from them. The decision would rest with the crown prosecution service.

Mr Blunkett leans towards trial in the US civil courts, rather than repatriation, but such a trial risks ending with the death penalty, leaving ministers without an easy option.

This is cloud cuckoo land. The US has abandoned its own human rights tradition in order to justify its conduct at Guant�namo Bay. If the Australian and UK detainees cannot be tried in their own countries that does not justify drumhead courts which, like so much of the Bush administration, give the appearance, but not the reality, of justice.

Gone to the blogs

From MaxSpeak

"A senior administration official said Bush's chief speechwriter, Michael J. Gerson, does not remember who wrote the line that has wound up causing the White House so much grief."

Not credible. A speechwriter doesn't forget unless he is told to "forget". A speechwriter KEEPS RECORDS OF DRAFTS AND CHANGES TO DRAFTS. It's called cover your ass. Presumably Mr. Gerson's memory lapse also entails considerable shredding of paper and physical destruction of hard drives. There will be no "eighteen and a half minutes of erased tape" this time.

A speechwriter forgetting a phrase like that? I lived through Watergate even if I was on the other side of the planet. I knew about Richard Nixon. Richard Nixon was my antihero. Mr President you are no Richard Nixon. He had a brain.

Link courtesy of Brad de Long

What little intelligence was new on Iraq's suspected weapons has been called into question
The various items of intelligence provided by the US and Britain are all beginning to look like vaporware. To summarise:

Nigerien yellowcake - denied by US and Australia, maintained by Britain

Activity at nuclear sites - not happening

New Scuds - not happening according to UN

Aluminium tubes - not happening

Mobile labs - not happening

Iraq/al-Qa'ida link - actively denied by UK, maintained by US and Australia

Rice said Britain was unable to share more information it has with Washington because of sensitivities surrounding the source. But Britain, like all U.N. members, is resolution-bound to share any intelligence on Iraq's weapons programs with U.N. inspectors.

Robin Cook, who resigned from Blair's Cabinet to protest the war, told the House of Commons committee that information sharing between Washington and London was so intense that it was often difficult ''to spot which raw data was originally gathered in the United Kingdom and which was originally gathered by the United States.''

Other new intelligence presented by the United States and Britain before the war included a charge that Iraq was hiding scud missiles. So far no scuds have been found, U.S. weapons hunters told The Associated Press.

The United States claimed there were signs of suspicious activity at a number of sites previously used in Iraq's former weapons program. U.N. inspectors checked those sites and found no such activity. American weapons experts have not found anything either.

U.S. claims that Iraq was trying to buy aluminum tubes for a renewed nuclear program were dismissed by the International Atomic Energy Agency and by an outside panel made up of two American nuclear physicists, two British experts and a German expert. The United States however insists the tubes were for a nuclear program.

Two mobile labs found in Iraq which the Bush administration believes were designed to be used in a biological weapons program were reviewed by three different groups of experts who couldn't agree on the trailers' use. Some State Department analysts have questioned the CIA conclusion the two truck trailers were mobile weapons labs.

Compelling evidence linking Saddam to al-Qaida also has not been confirmed. In the run-up to the war, the United States failed to convince much of the world of the ties. Most U.N. Security Council members said flatly that they didn't believe a connection existed.

A U.N. terrorism committee says it has no evidence other than Secretary of State Colin Powell's assertions in his Feb. 5 U.N. speech of any ties between al-Qaida and Iraq. And U.S. officials say American forces searching in Iraq have found no significant evidence tying Saddam's regime with Osama bin Laden's terrorist network.

The US and Britain share everything, including raw intelligence. Nothing has ever been held back before in order to protect a source. Blair and Straw can rabbit on all they like about separate intelligence of the Niger claim but they haven't shared it with anyone else, not the US, not Aistralia, not the IAEA, not even their own parliament. Why is that?

We do not need to go through lists of faith-based intelligence like this. We already know from Rumsfeld what the quality of prismatic intelligence is. Oh, and we now know one more thing - these people will say and do anything to avoid admitting a mistake.

Australian describes breakdown in security

The head of Australia's agricultural team in Iraq says security has deteriorated markedly in the past few weeks, forcing Australian civilian workers to wear flak jackets and helmets, restrict their movements and cut back meetings with farmers in the countryside.

Trevor Flugge, who was in Washington for meetings with Bush Administration officials, said a shooting had occurred recently just across the street from the Agriculture Ministry where he is working.

"We are seeing sabotage to some of the utilities. We are seeing these random shooting events," he said. "Whether they are linked to something organised we don't know.

"The fact of the matter is they are occurring. So for us, as civilians, I think it is really going to change, certainly for the next month or so, the way we go about our business."

Mr Flugge said that when he first arrived in Iraq it was possible to travel extensively in the north and south of the country, meeting farmers, and his team had received a positive welcome. Now, however, the honeymoon is over.

"I must admit that the last couple of weeks things have changed. In the short term, security is going to become a fairly high priority on all of our lists."

Mr Flugge and his United States colleagues cited power failures, water shortages and lack of telephones as serious problems, but he said there was now also a new sense of fear among some Iraqis that the countries that invaded the country might pull out if the attacks continue. He echoed the views of some State Department officials and US senators that the coalition had relatively little time to stabilise the security situation.

The facts on the ground are so far from what the Pentagon and the White House proclaimed would happen it's no wonder the facts on the desk in the White House and Number 10 are so far from the truth as well. Oh well, at least we have a fair chance these difficult ideas will not reach any desk where the buck stops.

The enemy of our friend, the US, is not necessarily our enemy

The war on Iraq has arguably made the pursuit of the war on terrorism more difficult. The US has dissipated the friendship generated in September 2001. We have made ourselves the closest of allies in this war on terrorism and have supported strategies which make its achievement more difficult. America's enemies will unnecessarily become Australia's enemies.

I have a living memory of what is, for many, history. Britain was left alone with Commonwealth support for two years and five months in the war against Nazism. Britain was bankrupt and desperate but fighting with a tenacity that led to democracy's greatest victory. I do not believe America would have joined that war if Japan had not attacked Pearl Harbour. There were many who believed the US could deal with a triumphant Hitler. The US was concerned that Britain could not again be a financial power. Were it not for Pearl Harbour, America would probably have stood aloof.

If America could not see the way its interests coincided with the interests of Britain at that time, until it was forced by Japan's actions, how can we believe that the US will see its interests coincide with ours?

I do not believe that America, however benign the exercise of its current power, would necessarily use that power for Australia's protection. It has, in fact, become a fundamentalist regime believing fervently that what it judges to be right, is in fact right, and that others do not have anything much worthwhile to contribute. Such an America will not make friends.

Dean Nye, from the Kennedy School of Government, and Henry Kissinger have both conceded this point. They recognise the need for America to wrap its military power with the cloak of diplomacy, with persuasion, with respect and esteem for the views of other states.

This is not the America we deal with. This is perhaps emphasised in the presidential order establishing military tribunals which makes it clear that the US expects any country to give up any person the US believes to be covered by the order. From that point of view it makes no difference whether Hicks is in Guantanamo Bay or walking free in Sydney.

Such a presumption should make us more cautious. The US is not prepared to comply with international law carefully drafted and supported by legal authorities from many countries. It is prepared to assert and, I believe, to enforce its law well beyond normal US jurisdiction if it perceives it to be in America's interests.

Do we really serve Australia's interests by such uncritical support and by such an apparent loss of our own sense of purpose and independence?

Malcolm Fraser has come a long way since he lost the prime ministership in 1983. John Howard and Attorney-General Darryl Williams would do well to listen to him instead of dribbling out spin like the claim that Hicks has confessed when that confession would not be accepted in any Australian court. They would also do well to confess that Hicks probably cannot be successfully prosecuted in any Australian court because none of the so-called evidence collected in Guant�namo Bay would be acceptable under Australian law.

Nigerien yellowcake claim was pulled from a Bush speech last October

There is evidence that there was concern in the C.I.A. about the credibility of the uranium information and that those doubts reached at least some White House officials months before the State of the Union address. Administration officials involved in drafting another speech Mr. Bush gave about Iraq, in Cincinnati on Oct. 7, said that at the C.I.A.'s behest, they had removed any mention of the central piece of intelligence about African uranium � a report about an effort by Iraq to obtain "yellowcake," which contains uranium ore, in Niger. No one has fully explained how, given that early October warning to the White House, a version of the same charge resurfaced in the early drafts of the State of the Union address just three months later, and stayed there, draft after draft.

I guess they must be forgetful types at the White House. If the Nigerien claim was known to be suspect in October how had they managed to forget that by January?

the real numbers who support the war
I've used US data only because I cannot find a poll in quite the same terms in Australia. According to the Washington Post at end of June:

The survey also suggests that the fog of war extended far beyond the Iraq battlefield. About one in four Americans incorrectly believes Iraq used chemical or biological weapons against U.S. forces during the conflict. Slightly more than six in 10 said Iraq had not, while the remainder weren't sure.

We can assume there would be few if any citizens who believed the nonfact of WMD use and opposed the war. The same article cites US support for the war at 67%. If you subtracted the 25% whose decision is grounded on a nonfact then the level of popular support starts looking fairly shaky.

The dramatic dip in Bush's numbers and in Blair's suggests that popular support was never all that deep and can be expected to continue eroding quite dramatically in light of the collapsing and contradictory stories coming out of Canberra, London and Washington. Sometime soon, for example, someone in the tradmedia is going to ask why Blair has not shared with Bush the slamdunk Niger vidence he claims to possess.

US Defence Secretary Jorge Luis Rumsfeld
According to The Age:

"The coalition did not act in Iraq because we had discovered dramatic new evidence of Iraq's pursuit" of weapons of mass destruction, Mr Rumsfeld told the Senate Armed Services Committee. "We acted because we saw the evidence in a dramatic new light - through the prism of our experience on 9/11."

Now I approve of Borges a lot. I even approve (mildly) of Rumsfeld's burgeoning poetic career. But I think you have to treat any evidence proffered by the Pentagon or the White House carefully. It may, by their own admission, be prismatic.

Whoops 4
The Independent claims that the September dossier was plagiarised from the net as well. They do not publish text-by-text comparisons so it is impossible to test their claim. The Independent has to publish their sources. this is 2003 and press reports should be taken at face value about as much as intelligence reports should.

One claim that can be tested is the Blair claim of separate evidence on Niger. If he had it he could pass it to Bush and save his ally's bacon. Not only has it not gone to Bush, it has not gone to Oz or the IAEA either.

BTW, the defence intelligence agency has now joined the office of national assessments and the department of foreign affairs in claiming they omitted to make the prime minister aware of any doubts about the Niger claim. (Audio link only at this stage) I hope they charge intellectual property fees to George Tenet who seems to have borrowed the technique.

Whoops 3
From Seeing the Forest:

Atrios points to Oliver Willis, who remind us:

Condi June 8, Meet the Press: "We did not know at the time - no one knew at the time, in our circles - maybe someone knew down in the bowels of the agency, but no one in our circles knew that there were doubts and suspicions that this might be a forgery."

Today's news:

"There was even some discussion on that specific sentence, so that it reflected better what the CIA thought and the speech was cleared," Rice said.
"Some specifics about amount and place were taken out...with the change in that sentence, the speech was cleared."

It's beginning to look a lot like the art of intercontinental fibbing is beyond the abilities of the coalition leadership.

Time to narrow the gap

Aid, debt relief and improving governance must be part of any rescue strategy. But the truth is that the biggest single factor that would help developing countries would not cost the west anything at all. In fact, developed countries would gain by doing it.

And what is this elixir? It is simple: abolish agricultural subsidies. Not some of them, but all of them, so that there is no scope for wriggling out of it.

It almost beggars belief that the Bush administration, which came into office to reduce subsidies, has actually massively increased them to farmers.

This means that US farmers are paid by the US taxpayer to produce crops, such as cereals and cotton, that could be more economically produced by countries in the developing world. It is economic and social madness. In Europe, farmers in Scandinavia, thanks to EU subsidies, are growing sugar beet, a product far better suited to being grown in parts of Africa. This is barmy.

Not only do African producers find it extremely difficult to sell in export markets against this subsidised competition, but they are even undercut in their home markets by surplus EU beet produced at ludicrously subsidised prices.

Abolishing agricultural subsidies is, virtually, a free lunch. Practically everyone gains. Consumers in rich countries will gain from lower prices (worth �20 a week for a family of four, according to Oxfam), taxpayers will pay less to fund the subsidies, and developing countries will have the opportunity to sell products in which they have a competitive advantage (lots of land and low wages) on world markets.

Agricultural reform is a dry-as-dust topic but ultimately it would make a huge difference to millions of people in the developing world.

The Sgt Schultz defence...

JOURNALIST:

But you actually did raise it though Prime Minister and you don�t want to look foolish so when you raised the information in Parliament and then your own office has got doubts about, you don�t want to look foolish and you don�t want the Australian people to �

PRIME MINISTER:

It�s not a question of looking foolish. It�s a question of keeping things in perspective and what I said was that if I had been told in January of this material it would not have altered in any way our decision to participate in the military operation. That�s the point I�m making. The other point to remind you of is that the assessment that the British made, they are still standing by. I mean everybody is going around incorrectly saying that the International Atomic Energy Agency has concluded a document was forged. But what the British are saying is put that aside because they have other evidence. That�s their judgement. It�s not mine because I haven�t seen any of the evidence. I�m only reporting their judgement, I�m not saying that I have independently reached the same conclusion. I can�t do that. But what the British are still saying as of now is that forget the forged document, accept that it is a forgery, it doesn�t alter the view that we held then and which we still hold to. So the suggestion that the original claim has been disproved is itself not proved and all that�s been established is that one piece of evidence on which it rested has been established as a forgery but according to the British they have other evidence which does not in any way alter their conclusion

and

JOURNALIST:
Prime Minister, you claim that weapons of mass destruction will be found, as times goes by without having found any are you more convinced (inaudible)?

PRIME MINISTER:

Well look, I�m certainly� I remain rock solid in the belief that the decision we took was justified on the basis of the intelligence assessments that were available. There were clear, compelling intelligence assessments available to the effect that Iraq had a WMD capacity and nothing I have seen since has shaken the assessments that were made at that time. As far as the current search for evidence and material, that goes on and I think it�s too early for people to jump to the conclusion that it won�t be successful.

We have a pure repeat of the Children Overboard affair where information available to the prime minister's office mysteriously failed to reach the prime minister. Just as with that incident the prime minister tells us he did not know until long after he had milked it for every political advantage he could gain.

Update
From the Sydney Morning Herald
The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) admitted last night that it knew intelligence on Iraq's nuclear program was questionable shortly before the Prime Minister, John Howard, presented it to Parliament to build a case for war.

The revelation will deepen the damaging controversy about the Government's use of flawed intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction capabilities.

The department claims it did not tell Mr Howard or the Foreign Minister, Alexander Downer, of information from the American State Department in January that cast doubt on claims that Iraq was seeking uranium from Africa.

This follows the extraordinary admission yesterday by Australia's peak intelligence agency, the Office of National Assessments (ONA), that it received the same information but had also failed to pass it on to Mr Howard.

So now the foreign affairs department as well as the office of national assessments have mysteriously failed to make ministers aware of things. It's not even worth asking if the government will take any action will be taken to discipline the relevant officials.

Grave crisis! Britain breaches UN Resolution 1441! Bush calls for war!
Okay, a light blogging day has caused me to have a rush of blood to the head. However, the Independent reports:

But Tony Blair was adamant in testimony this week that the UK had "separate intelligence" on Iraqi attempts to import uranium from Africa. Last night, the Foreign Office stated that Britain's information was based on "additional evidence other than documents, forged or genuine".

Britain has not handed this "evidence" to the IAEA for assessment, despite its obligations under the mandatory UN Security Council resolution 1441 to do so. The Foreign Office maintained last night that "we comply fully with our obligations to provide evidence with the IAEA" but that "in the case of uranium from Niger, we did not have any UK-originated intelligence to pass on".

A UN diplomatic source told The Independent that the UK position was "incredible". Another diplomatic source said: "The only concrete evidence the UN got was the Niger set of letters [subsequently proved to be forgeries] and it was told that there was nothing else."

In a letter to the US congressman Henry Waxman - who has been at the forefront of those questioning the White House's evidence - Paul Kelly, the State Department's assistant secretary for legal affairs, pointed out that when it passed the documents to the UN's Iraq Nuclear Verification Officer in Vienna, it inserted a caveat. Mr Kelly wrote: "[It] included the following qualification: 'We cannot confirm these reports and have questions regarding some specific claims'."

Mr Baradei told the Security Council in March: "Based on thorough analysis, the IAEA has concluded, with the concurrence of outside experts, that these documents - which formed the basis for the reports of recent uranium transactions between Iraq and Niger - are in fact not authentic."

On 10 June, the Foreign Office minister Mike O'Brien said that "the Government shared all relevant information about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction with the weapons inspection teams from both Unmovic and the IAEA". But less than a month later the Foreign Office minister Denis MacShane said: "The UK Government did not pass to the IAEA any information on Iraqi attempts to procure uranium."

The evidence in question is the separate evidence claimed by Blair before the House of Commons Liaison Committee (Question 194). That evidence has not been published anywhere or shared with the US or Australia. That evidence was not, as required by Resolution 1441, shared with the IAEA. Note that Foreign Secretary Jack Straw claimed it had been passed to the IAEA in his appearance before the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee (Question 1269).

This separate evidence is getting almost as hard to find as the weapons of mass destruction themselves. Even the date on which the separate evidence was briefed to the IAEA during 2003 seems to be very hard to find.

We have three governments trying to maintain a common account of their war claims and they're just not doing a very good job.

The US and Australia continue to argue for the Iraq/al-Qai'da link but can't produce any evidence. The UK disavows the link.

The US and Australia disavow the Niger claim. The UK insists that the Niger claim is real and insists that they hold separate evidence apart from the forged documents.

The 45-minute claim is history and none of the three governments maintain it. The saddest (and funniest) of their communications problems was Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer defending the White House version of the Niger claim after the White House had abandoned it.

You would think 3 close allies with an intel-sharing arrangement going back to the Second World War would be able to do a better job of holding their story together.

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.