Around the World, Politics of Iraq Occupation Hit Home

'Paul Bremer, the US civilian administrator in Iraq, recently claimed that the country's sensitivities on Turkish troops stemmed from 400 years of 'colonialist' Ottoman Empire rule,' writes columnist Derya Saza in Milliyet, one of the country's biggest circulation newspapers.

In a translation by Turkishpress.com, Saza asks, 'If the Iraqis still feel this way about the Ottoman Empire after almost a century later, I wonder how many years it will take them to forget the current occupation? History will never forget the colonialists of the 21st century who bombed and destroyed a country for weeks, using falsified horror stories about alleged weapons of mass destruction.'

Saza says Turkey should now withdraw its offer to send troops.

'Bremer recently stated that Turkey must solve its problems on the troop deployment issue by negotiating directly with Iraq's Governing Council. The only proper response to this demeaning statement is sending the issue back to our Parliament. It seems that not only Iraqi Kurds and Arabs, but also Washington opposes Turkish troop deployment! So, what's Ankara waiting for to declare that our soldiers won't go there after all?'

Why does the war party believe no-one ever reads their stuff? Does Bremer imagine that Iraqis are incapable of reading the statement about their hatred of the Ottomon occupation and not applying it to the US occupation?

Second solar storm hits

A second solar eruption has caused a massive magnetic storm that should reach Earth later today, hot on the heels of a previous eruption that jangled telecommunications and sparked a burst of the Northern Lights.

Fallout from the second eruption at 2048 GMT (1100 AEDT) were expected to reach Earth's atmosphere late today, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said.

The Japanese space agency yesterday reported losing communication with one of its satellites, Kodama, at the beginning of the magnetic storm, the biggest in some 30 years.

The storm erupted from the sun around 1100 GMT (1100 AEDT) Wednesday, firing electronically charged gas straight towards the Earth.

Scientists said the sun's eruptions were significantly stronger than recent blasts, and that the magnetic storm reached the Earth's atmosphere just about 19 hours later.

I'm off to Mittagong tonight. With luck the the second storm might give us another burst of the aurora australis. More seriously, solar storms generate communications failures and one may have knocked out the Qu�bec power grid in 1989. I myself tried to blame a spectacular example of ADHD bumbling on the solar activity yesterday. I wasn't very successful.

War widow's long wait for PM's apology

Mr Howard did not invite the widow of SAS officer Andrew Russell, the only Australian to die in combat in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, to a wreath laying ceremony by President Bush in honour of her husband last Thursday. He also failed to invite her to watch the Bush speech thanking Australia for its sacrifice, or as a guest at his barbecue for President Bush. She learned of the ceremony after it had taken place while doing her shopping in Perth.

Mr Howard's office said at first that Mr Howard had not known about the wreath laying ceremony for Mr Russell before Mr Bush mentioned it in his speech to Parliament, then claimed that the omission had been 'an oversight'. Mrs Russell has been a public advocate for better entitlements for the families of SAS officer killed in training or combat.

Asked how the letter would be delivered, Mr Howard's most senior spin doctor Mr Tony O'Leary said: 'We just put it in the mail.' Asked why the letter had been sent by standard post, Mr Tony O'Leary replied: 'What do you suggest?' When I suggested express post, Mr O'Leary replied: 'It will be there shortly.'

For sure. I mean it's not as if Australian officials would not have been over the Bush speech and itinerary wth a fine tooth comb or anything. But then Howard might be more believable on this if so many other people, including the opposition leader and the governor-general, had not been excluded from his excellent adventure with the president.

The night's work done: IDS out, Howard ready to take the crown

It must be the silly season. For about 15 nanoseconds I thought the Ever-Victorious Prime Minister had decided to displace the royal family.

Hu visit inquiry

The Senate's Privileges Committee has decided to investigate claims that improper influence was used to exclude critics of the Chinese government from parliament during last week's speech by visiting Chinese President Hu Jintao

The Committee will also examine whether Greens Senator Kerry Nettle was jostled after she interrupted American President George W Bush's speech to parliament a day earlier.

Greens leader, Senator Bob Brown claims China insisted three of the party's invited guests be excluded from the public gallery during the Chinese President's speech.

Privileges Committee chairman Senator Robert Ray says Senator Brown's concerns will be impartially investigated.

I've been amazed that we're hearing so much about how embarrassing the Green stunt in parliament was to Australia, but absolutely nothing that it might affront our basic values that the Speaker apparently put in the boot at the urging of the Australian executive in order to please a couple of visiting presidents. I would have thought freedom to speak in parliament was a fairly basic value.

It's radical, but it might just work: try a bit of decency

Me? On balance, I think I'd still rather live in Australia. It's possible, I suppose, that we'd all be marginally more secure living in a land where our own forces would be free to 'work the dark side of the street' to use the the words of the US Vice-President, Dick Cheney, but would that kind of 'security' be worth it?

At the very least, at the bare, hungry sniffin' minimum, can we acknowledge that there really is some defence in decency?

I refer to a story written by Herald journalist Tom Allard this month, where he quoted a leading South-East Asian terrorism academic, Dr Rohan Gunaratna, speaking at the National Press Club, saying that though there had been sleeper cells of Jemaah Islamiah in Australia in the late 1990s - including around Dee Why - the problem is they had essentially gone troppo and enjoyed their time here too much to go ahead with the dastardly terrorist plans they were meant to execute.

'Australian ethos had dulled their ideological convictions,' Gunaratna said. 'They were sympathetic to the cause but didn't want to die for it.'

Maybe life is a comedy and mercy beats at the heart of the universe.

Bush in Bali: Hello, you must be going

Indonesia is the nation with the world's largest Muslim population, more than 80 percent of its estimated 220 million people classify themselves as followers of Islam. It also exemplifies that rhyming mantra from the Bush presidential campaign: 'I'm a uniter, not a divider.' Thanks to policies put forth by the Bush administration, 85 percent of Indonesians hold unfavorable views of the United States, according to a US-sponsored survey.

In early 2002, 61 percent of Indonesians polled expressed favorable views of the US. Then came the attack on Iraq, which undermined sympathy for the US that had followed the attacks of September 11, 2001, and fueled the belief that the US 'war on terrorism' was really a war on Islam.

Western media presume that Bush's visit was staged to boost Indonesian President Megawati Sukarnoputri's standing in next year's election. The poll numbers, however, suggest Bush's that visit will be anything but helpful to Megawati. Besides, Bush and Megawati were just in Bangkok at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit, where they could have talked and created photo ops with far less trouble.

This gives the lie to the 'who we are not what we do' cacomeme. Similar declines in US standing throughout the Muslim world suggest that Muslims may have roughly the same ability to judge political issues as say, Americans or Australians. They may actually care about policy. About what we do, rather than who we are.

US probing Pak link in 9/11

A US team is here [Pakistan] to investigate a possible link to the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

But according to Dawn newspaper, the visit is being kept under wraps with neither the Pakistan government nor the US embassy here willing to reveal any details about the investigating team.

According to the paper, the members of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the US have reportedly been provided with full access to certain classified information, documents, institutions and individuals in different parts of the country. They have also been granted permission to go to the tribal areas.

The Taliban was, at inception, a creature of ISI, Pakistan's Inter Srvice Intelligence. Where that insight leads is going to be interesting. Permission to visit the Pashtoon tribal areas on the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan is very rare.

A Willful Ignorance

The answer is that in these cases politics takes priority over the war on terror. Moderate Muslims would have more faith in America's good intentions if there were at least the appearance of a distinction between the U.S. and the Sharon government - but the administration seeks votes from those who think that supporting Israel means supporting whatever Mr. Sharon does. It's sheer folly to keep General Boykin in his present position, but as Howard Fineman writes in a Newsweek Web-exclusive column, the administration doesn't want 'to make a martyr of a man who depicts himself as a Christian Soldier, marching off to war.'

Muslims are completely wrong to think that the U.S. is engaged in a war against Islam. But that misperception flourishes in part because the domestic political strategy of the Bush administration - no longer able to claim the Iraq war was a triumph, and with little but red ink to show for its economic plans - looks more and more like a crusade. 'Election Boils Down to a Culture War' was the title of Mr. Fineman's column. But the analysis was all about abortion and euthanasia, and now we hear that opposition to gay marriage will be a major campaign theme. This isn't a culture war - it's a religious war.

Which brings me back to my starting point: we'll lose the fight against terror if we don't make an effort to understand how others think. Yet because of a domestic political struggle that seems ever more centered on religion, such attempts at understanding are shouted down.

Hear John Howard, during his gush to parliament before the Bush address:

George Bush, the 43rd President of the United States, rallied his own people and the people of the world in the fight against terrorism. He reminded us then, as we should be reminded today, that terrorists oppose nations such as the United States and Australia not because of what we have done but because of who we are and because of the values that we hold in common, and that terrorism-and we should remind ourselves of this again and again-is as much the enemy of Islam as it is the enemy of Judaism or
Christianity.

Howard, of course, adduced no evidence in support of his high rhetoric. Why? because even arguing his case would reveal that his rhetoric has a single purpose, to place not just our commitment to the War on Terror, but the tactics we use, beyond question.

Black Box Voting Blues

Unfortunately, the machines have "a fatal disadvantage," says Rep. Rush Holt of New Jersey, who's sponsoring legislation on the issue. "They're unverifiable. When a voter votes, he or she has no way of knowing whether the vote is recorded." After you punch the buttons to choose your candidates, you may get a final screen that reflects your choices - but there's no way to tell that those choices are the ones that ultimately get reported in the final tally. You simply have to trust that the software inside the machine is doing its job.

It gets scarier. The best minds in the computer-security world contend that the voting terminals can't be trusted. Listen, for example, to Avi Rubin, a computer-security expert and professor at Johns Hopkins University who was slipped a copy of Diebold's source code earlier this year. After he and his students examined it, he concluded that the protections against fraud and tampering were strictly amateur hour. "Anyone in my basic security classes would have done better," he says. The cryptography was weak and poorly implemented, and the smart-card system that supposedly increased security actually created new vulnerabilities. Rubin's paper concluded that the Diebold system was "far below even the most minimal security standards." Naturally, Diebold disagrees with Rubin. "We're very confident of accuracy and security in our system," says director of Diebold Election Systems Mark Radke.

Newsweek discovers the chaos in US voting machines. At last.

Attorney-General's: Security Planning

The Attorney-General has provided the following answer to the honourable senator's question:

(1)Beyond broad guidelines, the Australian Government does not disclose specific security planning for Heads of State. In any event, the security preparations for the visit are only at the preliminary planning stage, and it is not yet possible to ascertain the extent or cost of the security requirements.

(2)Beyond broad guidelines, the Australian Government does not disclose specific security planning for Heads of State.

The question was asked on 11 September, the Bush visit happened on 23 October and Justice Minister Ellison provided this less than helpful answer to the Senate on 27 October. Timing is everything.

Forget FTA without agriculture, say farmers

Australia should walk away from a free trade agreement (FTA) with the United States if it fails to comprehensively cover agriculture, the National Farmers' Federation (NFF) said today.

Federation president Peter Corish said unless there was open access for Australian farmers to American markets, an FTA could actually hurt Australian agricultural industries.

'NFF has accepted that the FTA will not address the unfair and inefficient farm subsidies in the US, but at the very least, if it is a genuine free trade arrangement, then we call for unimpeded access for Australian farmers exporting to the US market,' Mr Corish said in a statement.

'Importantly, we seek this access up front and not subject to the long phase-in times which have characterised other FTAs reached by the US.

'These negotiations are not called 'one-tonne more' agreement negotiations or 'partial trade' agreement negotiations.

'They are free trade agreement negotiations and an outcome less than that for agriculture would be unacceptable, and in fact would discriminate against Australian farmers.'

The fourth round of negotiations between Australia and the US are underway in Canberra this week, with agriculture, intellectual property and the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme key sticking points.

Fortunately we have the Man of Steel's Best Friend to protect us from predatory US trade negotiators.

Big stakes for lab to build battle laser

The general then strode into a convention room and told 640 top U.S. directed-energy experts that Livermore's laser -- today, a profusion of wires, crystals and diodes on a tabletop -- was ready to be shoehorned into a Humvee and prove its mettle as a tactical weapon.

'We are no longer technology-limited. We are resource-limited,' Urias said by phoneFriday. 'I think we should charge on.'

If he gets the money for Livermore and its team of defense contractors, the general suggested, the Army would get a prototype weapon that could open the military's imagination to what mobile lasers can do on the battlefield.

'I am convinced personally that the technology is evolving fast enough that we can do this,' he said.

Yikes! Maybe Patrick is right...

Ethanol-blended Fuel policies: when will the cheap tricks end?

So, who is really benefiting from the Howard government's policy? None other than the generous Liberal Party donour and close friend to the Prime Minister, Dick Honan. Honan owns Manildra. Manildra is the dominant market producer of ethanol in Australia, accounting for 90 per cent of market share. Manildra produces ethanol from the by-products of its wheat production. It is in the position to gain the most benefits from the industry subsidies, unlike the smaller sugarcane and wheat farmers do not have the expertise or the resources to establish an ethanol plant and compete against Manildra.

The cost of these industry subsidies is considerable. It costs about 70 cents to produce one litre of ethanol-blended fuel, compared to 35 cents for petrol. The government currently subsidises 16 cents per litre of ethanol until June 2007, or until production capacity reaches 310 million litres. Current total ethanol output is around 135 million litres of which around 50 million litres are used for fuel blending. The Department of Treasury estimates the cost of the subsidy to be $62 million in 2006-07. In addition, the one-year domestic production subsidy, which expired in September this year, has been extended to 2008. This domestic production subsidy imposed an excise of 38.143 cents on imported and domestic ethanol fuel. At the same time, the government introduced a production subsidy of the same amount for domestic producers. The Fuel Taxation Inquiry estimates that the total value of the excise exemptions for petroleum product substitutes over the period 1994-95 to 2004-05 was about $8.7 billion (in 2000-01 prices).

Not only is the cost of subsidising ethanol production from sugarcane and wheat is enormous, the touted environmental benefits are minimal. While there are reduced tailpipe exhaust emissions, for example, carbon monoxide, there is little or no benefit in reduced tailpipe emissions of carbon dioxide compared with unleaded petrol. Further, ethanol produced from wheat and sugarcane does not produce significant full fuel cycle greenhouse gas savings over conventionally produced gasoline. Full fuel cycle emissions take account of all emissions including aspects such as production, refining, distribution and tailpipe emissions.

The Howard government is getting classic at making policy, not to achieve anything, but to retain power.

Never mind the talk, Mahathir's legacy is Muslim democracy

The path of Islamic modernisation is a balancing act that Western nations should encourage. The only alternative is to continue to cultivate pro-Western regimes that don't rely on popular support. That is a short-term solution. All dictators fall on their sword eventually, and the result is usually more turmoil rather than less.

This is a lesson that we should have learnt after the collapse of the Soeharto regime in Indonesia, and again when the pro-Western Saudi Arabia and Egypt produced the bulk of the September 11 terrorists. Moderate Muslim governments, not Western belligerence, will win the war on terrorism.

The prickly relationship that all contemporary Australian prime ministers have endured with Mahathir is curious in light of the 30-year lovefest our leaders enjoyed with Soeharto. He was responsible for the deaths of as many as a million Indonesians and left a legacy of militarism, social division and an economy in smoking ruins. And we wonder why Indonesia's President Megawati Soekarnoputri continually snubs Australia - our once friend Soeharto deposed her father in a coup. Such is the morality of international affairs that our leaders threw barbs at Mahathir while toasting Soeharto.

Putting aside the shocking treatment of Anwar Ibrahim, the Malaysian Government's treatment of its opposition is positively respectful in comparison with its neighbours where torture, exile, repression and civil war have been the norm. Opposition parties do win elections in some states. And it's not a pretty sight. PAS, the Islamic party, is held back from implementing a brutal form of sharia law in the states it controls, Kelantan and Terengganu, by only the strictures of the federal constitution.

Condemn his racist words, by all means, but remember that Mahathir's Malaysia is the most successful model of a modern Muslim nation that the world has to offer.

The most extraordinary part of the Mahathir incident has been that Mahathir and Howard have a great deal in common, including a willingness to troll votes from the alienated by saying outrageous things and a distinct taste for the main chance. Perhaps John Howard is a modernising Occidental leader.

A consistent policy based on human rights (perhaps starting at home with certain detention centres) is going to enhance our standing a lot more than these occasional and inconsistent flurries of finger-wagging. Someone more cynical than I am might even mutter that the finger-wagging plays to a domestic audience, as did the Howard doctrine, the Tampa incident and one or two other things.

Row over US General's comments on Iraq nuclear weapons

Those claims prompted the Federal Opposition to question the Defence Minister in the Senate, today.

[Labor Senator] JOHN FAULKNER: Is the Minister aware of reports in the Australian and US media citing Australian Brigadier General Stephen Meekin who said that the aluminium tubes, which were used as evidence of Iraq's attempts to reconstitute its nuclear weapons programs were quote, 'innocuous' and quote, 'were used for rockets'?

Does the Minister recall statements by the Foreign Minister that, and I quote him, 'Iraq's attempt at acquisition of very specific types of aluminium tubes' - this was said on the 17th of September 2002 - 'maybe part of Iraq's attempts to acquire equipment that could be used in uranium enrichment'.

Given that Brigadier General Meekin is from your department, can you advice the Senate who is right? The Brigadier or the Foreign Minister?

[Defence Minister] ROBERT HILL: Brigadier Meekin is the Commander of the Joint Captured Materiel Exploitation Centre, which has the mission of examining and locating Iraq's conventional weapons, and is only peripherally involved in the investigation of Iraq's WMD programs.

I'm told that Brigadier Meekin spoke only about Iraq's conventional military capabilities. Unfortunately, the journalist inaccurately and wrongly used the comments to make assertions about Iraq's nuclear programs. I'm told that he made no judgment, no judgment on the suitability or otherwise of aluminium tubes for Iraq's nuclear weapons program.

This gets curiouser and curiouser. If Meekin did not make the statement why did Anon say he was not qualified to make it? Wouldn't it have been better to just say Meekin did not say what the Washington Post reported?

41 federal Labor MPs write to George W Bush opposing the war in Iraq

Dear President Bush,

The friendship between our countries is longstanding and deeply felt. We have a great deal in common, particularly our commitment to democracy. We retain our commitment to the ANZUS alliance.

That's why we feel it's important for you to understand why so many Australians opposed the war on Iraq.

Australians have a history of support for international efforts to stop the spread of weapons including weapons of mass destruction and landmines. Weapons inspectors should have been given the time they asked for to peacefully disarm Iraq. No evidence of a massive weapons building program nor capability has emerged since the war. Australia, the US and Britain went to war because of a 'clear and present danger' which just did not exist.

The ALP firmly believes that international conflict should, wherever possible, be dealt with peacefully and through international co-operation under the auspices of the United Nations. When all attempts for a peaceful resolution have been exhausted, United Nations sanction is vital if force is to be used.

What is to prevent other countries from following the example of our attack on Iraq, and arguing the right to preventative self-defence? Why shouldn't North and South Korea attack each other using the template we developed in Iraq? Or India and Pakistan?

The precedent we have set is a very dangerous one, and there is every indication that the world will become less safe, not more, because of our actions. Certainly the British Joint Intelligence Committee believes the risk of terrorism will increase due to the war with Iraq.

Our own government knew of this increased risk before the war and refused to tell the Australian people.

Many Australians have continuing concerns about what will happen in Iraq now. Civil unrest continues. The death toll for Iraqis and US, UK and allied troops mounts. The bombing of the United Nations headquarters shocked the world, and it seems that instead of eradicating terrorism in Iraq the country has become a terrorist magnet.

The United States must now redouble its efforts to enlist the help of the world community to bring peace and rebuild Iraq, and then withdraw as soon as practicable. Iraqis must regain control of their destinies and their resources as soon as possible.

While many of us didn't support the war on Iraq, all Australians welcome the end of Saddam Hussein's brutal regime.

Our hope for Iraq is that there will be a strong, stable, democratic government which represents all the people of Iraq, including the ethnic and religious minorities.

Our hope is that the people of Iraq will have control over the rich resources of their country and be able to use those resources for their collective benefit. Our hope for the world is that this mistake will lead us to renew our commitment to the United Nations and its processes for promoting and maintaining global peace.

Signed by 41 Labor Members

Four Corners: Spinning the Tubes

How Australian intelligence was seized upon on by the CIA, spun and gilded, then presented to the world as the best evidence that Saddam Hussein was building weapons of mass destruction.

The transcript should be up shortly. It is a must-read.

Snub for war widow

Western Australian Labor MP Graham Edwards, a Vietnam War veteran, broke the news to Mrs Russell after Bush's speech. He wrote to the Prime Minister the next day:

Hon John Howard


Prime Minister


Parliament House


Canberra 2600


Dear Prime Minister

I write to urge you to contact the widow of Sgt Andrew Russell and apologise for her not being not invited to attend the wreath-laying ceremony in honour of her husband at the War Memorial.

Mrs Russell was distressed that she had no prior knowledge of this event, until she was advised by media outlets about the mention of her husband in President Bush's address to Parliament.

I am not sure whether Mrs Russell would have wanted to make the trip. I am sure, however, that she would have liked to have been advised and at least invited.

I contrast your dealings with her to your dealings with the victims of Bali. Those who lost loved ones and those who were victims in Bali have been brought to Canberra on two occasions and quite deservedly treated with a great deal of compassion, sympathy and given much support in the process of healing.

Why was Mrs Russell not extended the same comfort and support at this most important time when both you and the President of the United States made much of the sacrifices of our Defence personnel?

Mrs Russell is a constituent of mine and I know she has been very active in seeking a better deal for war widows and that she has at times been critical of you, your Government and your Ministers.

I believe the people of Australia would be affronted if this is the reason she was not invited to attend the ceremony at the War Memorial or the barbeque at The Lodge.

You may not have known that the President was going to mention Sgt Russell, although I would be surprised if you did not. You certainly knew, however, that members of the Australian Defence Forces who have been involved in the war against terrorism were invited to the Australian War Memorial for the wreath-laying ceremony.

Mrs Russell should have been extended the same courtesy and she deserves your apology.

Yours sincerely

Graham Edwards

Join the army. Serve your country. There should be something here about the thanks of a grateful government but I can't write anything.

Free-trade clause would be a dangerous weakening of the law

US corporations are not afraid of using these new rights to protect their investments, particularly from laws designed to protect the environment and public health. For example, in 1997, the Canadian Government imposed a ban on the import and interstate transport of MMT, a fuel additive containing manganese. The ban was imposed because of public health concerns. Ethyl Corporation, a US chemical company which produces MMT, sued the Canadian Government, arguing the ban was an expropriation of its investments and was therefore illegal under NAFTA. The claim was for $US251 million in compensation. The Government eventually settled the case by reversing its ban on MMT and paying $US13 million in legal fees and compensation to Ethyl Corporation.

It is highly likely the Australian-US FTA will include an investment chapter that would permit US companies to bring similar legal actions against the Australian Government. The US Government is pushing for the inclusion of a NAFTA-style investment chapter, and the Australian Government has quietly slipped a similar investment chapter into the recently signed Australian-Singapore FTA.

These new rights for US corporations go far beyond those enjoyed by Australians. In most cases, Australian law recognises the right to compensation only when property is taken by government. The FTA will extend the right to compensation for US companies when an Australian law seeks merely to regulate the use of property.

This is a dramatic departure from a legal principle that was designed to protect private property interests from unjust government acquisitions, while also balancing the need of Australian governments to freely regulate the use of property in the public interest. The FTA rules threaten this balance.

The nasty SAFTA chapters are Chapter 11, especially Article 6 and Chapter 8. It's worth considering what a USFTA might look like. Australia and Singapore negotiated in relative parity. That is not the case with the US.

Will a US free trade agreement be good for us?

A presidential favour to Howard is not necessarily a favour to Australia. That question will only be resolved when the fine detail of AUSFTA is revealed.

In the meantime, it is interesting to look at what the US corporate promoters of AUSFTA have been saying about the proposed agreement, and what was reported about what Bush said in his private meeting with Howard in Canberra last week.

The American-Australian Free Trade Agreement Coalition (AAFTAC) put out a report in July that said: 'It is apparent that the US agricultural subsidies, which Australia wants reduced or eliminated, will most likely be addressed as part of the multilateral process rather than part of an FTA.' (We know what happened at the Cancun trade meeting: the developing countries were told, by the US and the EU, to open up their financial markets and service industries to the developed countries and forget about any liberalisation of agricultural markets. As a consequence, the Third World, led by India and Brazil, walked away from the global trade negotiations.)

The AAFTAC report also said: 'Recent analysis by the Centre for International Economics found that US exports to Australia would increase by $US1.9 billion ($A2.7 billion), compared with an increase in imports from Australia of $US1.2 billion.' (Is this infinitesimal gain worth risking our film and television industry and Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme for?)

The report went on: 'A US-Australia FTA will have some negative impact on other trading partners as US exports displace those of other countries in the Australian market, and Australian exports displace those of third countries in the US market.' (Nobody gets hurt except our other trading partners. Will they passively accept this?)

Of course, the real gains for the US in the AUSFTA lie elsewhere - in opening up Australia's services industries, including public services, to US investors where most of the opportunities lie with the US and most of the risks lie with Australia.

I am getting both alarmed and alert about the whole FTA thing. More later when I've done a little digging, but I doubt the benefits advertised are worth giving away the PBS, the cultural diversity rules, or US access to the services sector.

I also need to do a little research on the treaty-making power. I'll very alarmed and alert indeed if the treaty-making power authorises our Man of Steel to ratify an FTA (as was done with the Thai and Singapore FTAs) by royal, I mean prime ministerial, preorogative.

Iraq Weapons Debate

Powell told the UN that Iraq possessed as many as 500 tons of chemical weapons, was actively producing more and had authorized its field commanders to use them. Kay reports that no such weapons have yet been found; that large-scale Iraqi production of chemical weapons ended in 1991; that the capacity to resume such production had been 'reduced if not entirely destroyed' by subsequent sanctions, inspections and hostile military action; and that his team had found no evidence 'to confirm prewar reporting that Iraqi military units were prepared to use' chemical weapons against U.S. forces.

Powell told the Security Council that Hussein possessed warheads containing biological weapons, was actively producing more and had constructed mobile laboratories to carry out production surreptitiously. Kay reports that no such weapons have been found, that his team has 'not yet been able to corroborate the existence' of a mobile production effort - and that two trailers found by U.S. forces and called bioweapon labs by some U.S. intelligence agencies are not well suited for that purpose or any other.

Powell portrayed Iraq's nuclear weapons development program as a full-scale effort that was ominously close to success, asserting that Hussein 'already possesses two of three key components' to achieve that goal. Kay reports that while Hussein had shown interest in restarting his nuclear weapons development program, no evidence has been found to show that Iraq had in fact done so, nor any indication Hussein took advantage of the absence of UN inspectors between 1998 and 2002 to 'actually build nuclear weapons or produce fissile material.'

Sadly Newsday does not mention the massive terrorist facility, also known as the poison factory, that not only was not a massive terrorist facility but lay in Iraqi Kurdistan outside Saddam's control and was run by Ansar al-Islam who were violently opposed to Saddam.

This stuff needs to be hammered again and again until the lies are exposed to the conventional wisdom.

Cornered

If insults are detected, no words can be too harsh to describe this vile Brown, this deflowerer of our hard-won national dignity, this despoiler of the restraint and courtesy that characterises the Australian parliamentary tradition.

To add injury to insult, one of Brown's foul accomplices had the temerity to brandish a piece of paper at the President. As well as deploring the real physical danger involved (paper-cuts can be very nasty), one can only marvel at the insensitivity of those who would publicly wave printed matter at a man clearly burdened by chronic dyslexia. No wonder alert government members, led by our doughty PM, swiftly formed a barrier around the President's frail form to save him further humiliation.

If only our nation were so spared. These shameful events were broadcast internationally, inviting condemnation from the three people not watching reality television at the time. Mme Lebrun, of Dijon, found herself 'stupefied', Herr Kreis, of Dortmund, sadly averted his gaze from his Grundig and Mr Watanabe, of Kobe, raised his left eyelid, indicating crushing disdain. Thanks to you, Senator Brown, the flicker of interest in Australia kindled during the Sydney Olympics telecast, and tended so carefully since by our fine young sporting ambassadors, has died in three foreign hearts.

What ordinary Australian could possibly disagree?

Thorpedo dives into undies

WORLD champion Ian Thorpe has followed Elle Macpherson and Kylie Minogue into the underwear industry.

Some headlines just cry out to be blogged for posterity.

"

Iraq Survey Fails to Find Nuclear Threat

No evidence mattered more to the nuclear debate than Iraq's attempt to buy aluminum tubes overseas. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, among many others, scorned the Baghdad government's explanation that it sought the tubes as artillery rocket casings. By August, news accounts made clear that the U.S. government's top nuclear centrifuge experts dissented strongly from the claim that the tubes were meant for uranium enrichment.

Meekin, whose remarks were supported by other investigators who said they feared the consequences of being quoted by name, is the first to describe the results of postwar analysis.

'They were rockets,' said Meekin, 48, director general of scientific and technical assessment for Australia's Defence Intelligence Organisation, speaking by satellite telephone from Baghdad. 'The tubes were used for rockets.'

A U.S. government official, who was unwilling to be identified by name or agency, said Meekin is not qualified to make that judgment. The official did not elaborate. Kay's interim report this month said the question remains open.

Does Anon have any evidence to support his claim? Is he saying Brigadier Steve Meekin is a bad officer or a bad investigator? Is Anon, in fact saying anything at all that could lead us to accept his claim? Or is this just another example of Bush people editing the facts to support their own claims?

PM commits to shared values

George Bush, the 43rd President of the United States, rallied his own people and the people of the world in the fight against terrorism. He reminded us then, as we should be reminded today, that terrorists oppose nations such as the United States and Australia not because of what we have done but because of who we are and because of the values that we hold in common, and that terrorism-and we should remind ourselves of this again and again-is as much the enemy of Islam as it is the enemy of Judaism or Christianity.

The boldface is mine, because it's the crux of Howard's justification for the extreme measures in the War on Terror. I have not sought any actual evidence that terrorists think in this way, but it does authorise nations like Australia to concentrate on fighting 'terror' or 'evil' to the exclusion of direction their efforts to the development of peace or human rights in the Middle East.

Administration Faces Supoenas From 9/11 Panel

Mr. Kean's comments on Friday came as another member of the commission, Max Cleland, the former Democratic senator from Georgia, became the first panel member to say publicly that the commission could not complete its work by its May 2004 deadline and the first to accuse the White House of withholding classified information from the panel for purely political reasons.

'It's obvious that the White House wants to run out the clock here,' he said in an interview in Washington. 'It's Halloween, and we're still in negotiations with some assistant White House counsel about getting these documents %u2014 it's disgusting.'

He said that the White House and President Bush's re-election campaign had reason to fear what the commission was uncovering in its investigation of intelligence and law enforcement failures before Sept. 11. 'As each day goes by, we learn that this government knew a whole lot more about these terrorists before Sept. 11 than it has ever admitted.'

This is getting interesting. Of course, it would be unkind to subject the White House to loose forensic standards such as those used in either the kay report or the White House's various claims grossly exaggerating the contents of the Kay report.

Giant bubbles could sink ships, say maths experts

Methane bubbles from the sea floor could be responsible for the mysterious sinking of ships in areas like the Bermuda Triangle and the North Sea, new Australian research confirms.

Computational mathematics honours student David May and supervisor, Professor Joseph Monaghan of Monash University in Melbourne report their research in the American Journal of Physics.

Their modelling suggests that giant bubbles are much more likely to sink ships than previously thought, adding new weight to warnings about ships travelling in areas where bubbles are likely to be.

Huge bubbles can erupt from undersea deposits of solid methane, known as gas hydrates. The methane - found as an odourless gas in swamps and mines - becomes solid under the enormous pressures at the deep sea floor. Under the sea, however, the ice-like methane deposits can break off and become gaseous as they rise, creating bubbles at the surface.

This research is obviously wrong. There is nothing in the Kay report about Saddam working on bubbles of mass destruction. It follows they cannot exist.

In mugsville, where payback beats politeness

The shenanigans by the Greens' Bob Brown and Kerry Nettle were obvious kindergarten stuff when it came to the shameless and arrogant stunting carried out, at your cost, by our Prime Minister. Simon Crean might not be much of a leader, but he displayed more dignity and quiet good manners than all that raucous triumphalism orchestrated by the Government for the Government. This had nothing to do with a goodwill visit to the Australian people. This was as blatant a political exercise as ever you will see on the very grandest of grand scales.

Crean was relegated to two minor bit parts in the 20-hour visit. He was included in the small phalanx of political pooh-bahs who welcomed Bush on his arrival Thursday morning at Parliament House. And he was accorded a meeting with Bush and his people in Crean's office as Opposition Leader that was extended from 10 minutes to 'almost 20 minutes', according to the Government. And Bush, would you believe, wanted to know why Howard wasn't going along to the Crean meeting as well!



Otherwise, the Opposition Leader was left out in mugsville. He was not included in the welcome at Canberra airport, in the farewell, in the ceremony at the War Memorial, or in the barbecue at the Lodge, the only social occasion Bush would agree to. Even the press gallery was represented at the lunch by its president, Malcolm Farr of The Daily Telegraph. But not the Leader of the Australian Opposition. If nothing else, you'd have thought protocol if not manners might have extended an invitation to Crean.



Not a bit. When I asked Howard's office why, I got some smart lines about 'so you want to go in to bat for them do you?' and 'we know his office has been trailing its coat around the gallery'. And, most pertinently, 'we don't forget how John Howard was left standing on the tarmac at Canberra airport' in 1995, at the time of Yitzak Rabin's assassination in Israel and prime minister Paul Keating wouldn't take Howard, then Opposition leader.

Don't ever say Howard isn't motivated by payback. He never forgets a bad turn or who did it to him. Neither does his staff. And in my anger I was moved to tell his office I thought it had behaved towards Crean like 'miserable little turds'. After all, who paid for the cosy 'private' barbecue lunch behind the Lodge walls? Not John Howard, rest assured.

We should just have another republic referendum and make an honest president of John Howard.

A little constitutional nonsense...

The SPEAKER�Order! On behalf of all senators
and members, I extend to the President our thanks for
his address, and wish him and Mrs Bush a very pleasant
and successful time here in Australia.

Before I adjourn the House, all senators and members
will be well aware that under the standing orders
both Senators Brown and Nettle leave me no choice
but to name them, having defied the chair. Senators
Brown and Nettle are therefore named.

Mr ABBOTT (Warringah�Leader of the House)

(11.54 a.m.)�I move:

That Senators Brown and Nettle be suspended from the
service of the House.

Question agreed to.

I think this makes Senators Brown and Nettle the first members of the Senate to be suspended from the service of a strange unicameral body unknown to the constitution.

Thursday's proceedings were not a joint sitting under Section 57 of the Constitution. In fact the two houses have held joint meetings (as opposed to sittings) in this way on 5 occasions, to receive a mace from a House of Commons delegation, and to hear addresses from Presidents Johnson, Bush the Elder, Clinton, Bush the Younger and Hu. There are standing orders for a Section 57 joint sitting and for the opening of parliament. There are none for a joint meeting on other occasions. Just for the record, the arrangements agreed to for the joint meeting are available.

The only body that can suspend a senator is the Senate. A show of hands by members of the two houses is legal and constitutional nonsense, in keeping with much of what happened that day. John Howard is a desperate advocate of the monarchy. Apparently that means an invisible governor-general whose sole function is to disappear whenever the prime minister so directs.

It goes without saying, that a mere simple majority of both houses cannot alter the constitution and confer parliament's power on a body outside the constitution. But then it should also go without saying that the doors of the parliament should not have been shut by the presiding officers on the demand of the executive. That the opposition leader should not have been excluded from the reception. And on and on and on.

US Intelligence Chiefs Facing Broadside over Iraq

The report comes against the backdrop of a blame game in the US, with intelligence sources privately claiming the Bush Administration exaggerated the threat posed by Sadam Hussein, and vice-versa.

It also comes as the CIA-led weapons search team, the Iraq Survey Group, has so far failed to find any stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction.

Senator Roberts told the Washington Post: "I worry about the credibility of the intelligence community.

"If there's stuff on the fan, we have to get the fan cleaned."

At the centre of the row is a 100-page top secret National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) document which was produced in October 2002.

Such reports usually take months to compile, but a senior intelligence expert was quoted by the newspaper claiming that the NIE was a "cut and paste job", completed in just three weeks and reviewed in only one day.

The document analysed the threat posed by Saddam and the risks of staging an invasion.

I would have thought the problem lay in a White House determined to cherrypick the intelligence advice it was given, not the intel itself. And a president determined to cherrypick what his palace staff fed him.

The main game

The pundits' claims that September 11 made terrorism the defining issue of the Bush presidency are completely wrong. The Bush Administration deliberately rejected the counter-terrorism opportunities of post-September 11 to return to its pre-existing agenda of extraordinarily aggressive political and geopolitical activism: an agenda not even remotely connected to terrorism; an agenda squarely devoted to entrenching Republican power at home and US power abroad.

Of course, the administration is also pursuing some genuine counter-terrorism measures. But these are the added extras, not the core agenda. And even the counter-terrorist extras were not enough for Bush's White House chief of counter-terrorism, who resigned in a fury of frustration and went to work for the Democrats.

The full scope of the Bush agenda may also flow in part from the personal convictions of the president himself. In his 1999 pitch for office, a book titled A Charge to Keep (Perennial, 2001), Bush wrote that he learned from his father's experience as president that political capital was not a collectible to hoard but a currency to be used. His father had not spent the political capital he had earned in winning the first Gulf War, and W was determined not to make the same mistake.

and:

"My faith frees me," George W. Bush wrote in his memoir. "Frees me to make the decisions that others might not like." The world, preoccupied with Bush's apparent feeble-mindedness, has failed to grasp the true breadth and boldness of his ambition. Bush is a shrewd and ruthless risk-taker. Not content to be in power, he is using his presidency to make the Republicans the party permanently in power. Not satisfied with America's status as the superpower, he is working to make it an unchallengeable superpower. Bush might not have hit on the precise formulation but he certainly does seem to have reached the right conclusion about the way the world views his presidency: "They misunderestimated me.

We are a strange people. We are unsurprised when politicians behave badly. We seem to have made two senatorial hecklers into national heroes. I suspect much the Bush speech fell on deaf ears because messianic arrogance and blatant partisanship just does not fly in Australia. Howard has, until now always, carefully avoided it, although he did indeed, as one letter to the Canberra Times said, look as if he'd died and gone to heaven.

The alleged security measures, closing the parliament and removing demonstrators out of sight and sound, could perhaps have been justified. But why was it necessary to insist that if any loudspeakers were used they must be turned away from Parliament House?

This was not security, it was propaganda. As Salon reports today:

Since then, Presser charges, the Bush administration has continued the strategy of using the Secret Service and cooperative local police departments to keep protesters at bay, and not incidentally, out of easy range of the media. "People used to say that Ronald Reagan's was the most scripted administration we ever had," the attorney says, "but this Bush administration has gone way beyond that." Presser adds that he was told by William Fisher, a senior Philadelphia police captain and head of the department's Civil Affairs Unit, that the tight restrictions and decision to cordon off protesters during presidential visits have come "at the Secret Service's direction." Fisher declined to be interviewed for this article, but when asked, did not deny Presser's account of their conversation.

But then the entire visit, like the War on Terror, seems to be about politics rather than policy. Once upon a time a visiting chief of state would not have dreamed of offering political support to a domestic political leader. Times have changed. But the Russian for 'Man of Steel' has not, and it does not mean 'fair dinkum'.

Rumsfeld's war-on-terror memo

Today, we lack metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror. Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?

Does the US need to fashion a broad, integrated plan to stop the next generation of terrorists? The US is putting relatively little effort into a long-range plan, but we are putting a great deal of effort into trying to stop terrorists. The cost-benefit ratio is against us! Our cost is billions against the terrorists' costs of millions.

This is a much more important document than a certain speech in Canberra, because it is much more truthful on progress in the War against Terror. I might have been more moved by the Rumsfeld cost/benefit metrics if they had included the human, as well as material costs. I might have been more moved by the Bush address if it took any account of reality. Instead, as Fred Kaplan
writes :

It [the Rumsfeld memo] puts the lie to the Bush administration's PR campaign that postwar Iraq is progressing nicely and that the media are exaggerating the setbacks. (If the media are exaggerating, this memo indicates, then so, too, is Secretary Rumsfeld.) It reads eerily like some internal mid-'60s document from The Pentagon Papers that spelled out how badly things were going in Vietnam (just as President Lyndon B. Johnson and his defense secretary, Robert McNamara, were publicly proclaiming tunnel light and victories). To use a phrase coined during LBJ's tenure to describe the ever-widening fissure between rhetoric and reality, Rumsfeld's memo marks the first unconcealable eruption of a 'credibility gap' in the wartime presidency of George W. Bush.

Notice of Motion 24 October 2003

Mr Bevis to move:

That this House:

(1)notes with grave concern the detention of two Australian citizens, Mr David Hicks and Mr Mamdouh Habib at Guantanamo Bay Cuba by the United States administration;

(2)notes that even the worst war criminals from Nazi Germany were afforded a full court hearing open to public scrutiny;

(3)notes that David Hicks and Mamdouh Habib have received only very limited access to legal advice;

(4)notes that David Hicks and Mamdouh Habib have been denied access to their families;

(5)notes that David Hicks and Mamdouh Habib have been denied natural justice and are being held at the sole discretion of the President of the United States of America in whatever circumstances he deems fit; and

(6)calls on the President of the United States of America either to lay charges immediately against these Australians to be heard in an open court of law or release them for return to Australia where any legal proceedings can be pursued in accordance with Australian law.

I would not hold your breath waiting for Prime Minister Howard's passion for robust democracy to see this one debated.

Why is Bush avoiding the Australian media? Don't ask

George Bush's word is apparently beyond question. At least, by the Australian press.

The US President has declined a customary joint press conference after his address to the Federal Parliament tomorrow.

The media event, which normally allows two or three questions from Australian media and an equal number from the visiting press, would have been the only official opportunity for Australian journalists to quiz Mr Bush on the Iraq war and its aftermath.

It would also be the only opportunity to ask the US President about the two Australian citizens being detained without charge at Guantanamo Bay.

Australian journalists have also been denied any place in a so-called 'close-up media pool' that will follow Mr Bush on all his official stops on the day. All positions in the four-member pool have been allocated to members of the White House press corps.

The US Secret Service rejected an application from the Canberra press gallery for equal access, on the basis that the journalists did not have the required US security clearances. The Secret Service then declined to allow the journalists to apply for those clearances; no reason was given.

A marquee has been set up in the grounds of The Lodge to allow the American journalists to file their stories. No Australian media will be allowed on the grounds.

A member of the team put together by Mr Howard's department to make press arrangements for the visit conceded yesterday that Australian media will learn of events at Government House and The Lodge from news reports filed in the US.

What a gutless wonder! Correction, it is hard to tell whether Bush is more gutless for evading questions or Howard is more gutless for allowing him to do it. When did the US Secret Service acquire the right to close our parliament without asking permission from either house or to decide which journalists are allowed to attend a press conference?

BAD ATTITUDES

How odd of God

To choose to use

Boykin and Bush

To air His Views

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

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.

While John Howard has never said that refugees rule the world by proxy, he has come close to it. Go read Debunking More Myths About Asylum Seekers. (PDF) Most of the government's public claims about refugees have been simply untrue or wildly misleading.

Even the famous: 'We will decide who comes to Australia' is wildly misleading because the refugee convention does not prevent us doing that. What are the real facts?

• 71 countries accept refugees and asylum seekers in some form or other
  
• Of the 71 Australia is ranked 32nd;
  
• On a per capita basis Australia is ranked 38th, slightly behind Kazakhstan, Guinea, Djibouti and Syria;
  
• Of the 29 developed countries that accept refugees and asylum seekers Australia is ranked 14th. Per capita, the US takes twice as many refugees as Australia.
  

The truth will out, eventually. Sometime. I hope.

Organic Farming Yields new Weapon against Global Warming

After 23 years of field studies on organic farming practices, researchers at The Rodale Institute have announced exciting new findings with profound implications in the battle against global warming.

The Rodale Institute's groundbreaking Farming Systems Trial, the world's longest running study of organic farming, has documented that organic soils actually scrub the atmosphere of global warming gases by capturing atmospheric carbon dioxide and converting it into soil material. This is the first study to differentiate organic farming techniques from conventional agricultural practices for their ability to serve as carbon 'sinks.'

'Organic farming is a powerful new tool in the global warming arsenal,' said Anthony Rodale, chairman of The Rodale Institute. 'It puts agriculture into a lead role - in regenerating the environment.'

Through a process called carbon sequestration, plants and soils act as 'sinks' for atmospheric carbon dioxide. Carbon 'sequestered' in vegetation and soil is not readily released as carbon dioxide, providing a significant boost in the efforts to reduce greenhouse gases. While carbon helps stimulate plant growth, scientists estimate carbon dioxide may be responsible for more than 80 percent of global warming.

What organic farming cannot do is churn out large amounts of the homogenised but less value-added mush that corporate agriculture is so good at. So go eat at an organic tomato and help save the planet.

Conspiracy theories

We have uncovered one, incontrovertibly true, conspiracy involving MI6, the Libyans and the royal family. It seems that the Queen [this section has been redacted by the Guardian's legal team]. You read it here first.

I denounce the conspiracy to make 'redact' an everyday English word.

Holding leaders accountable for untruths about war

While the pot continues to boil in Washington and London over the manipulated evidence used to ''justify'' attacking Iraq, an equally passionate debate has been taking place in Australia, where former Australian intelligence analyst Andrew Wilkie resigned before the war and immediately went public about the lying.

That the Australian Senate saw fit, in a rare move on Oct. 7, formally to censure Prime Minister John Howard for misleading the public shows that truth can win out even in a country with a largely apathetic populace and a mainstream press all too eager to parrot the official line. There are lessons for us, of course, but Americans cannot be accused of apathy in this particular instance because the U.S. media have largely ignored the story.

The Australian Senate censured Howard for producing no evidence to support his claims last March that Iraq had stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons, and for suppressing Australian intelligence warnings that war with Iraq would increase the likelihood of terrorist attacks. One senator accused Howard of "unprecedented deceit."

Sadly, the deceit was all too precedented. Tampa. SIEV-X. The Nigerien yellowcake. Abbot's involvement in the destruction of One Nation. The Manildra meeting Howard forgot he had attended. The 14 February JIC report. The qualifications to the US analysis. The whole sorry invention of 'pre-deployment' - the war you've committed the nation to without telling the nation.

I've previously blogged about why Howard is escaping the popular outrage emerging in the US and Britain. We'll see whether you can found a government on fooling all of the people all of the time between now and the next election.

Time for reckoning

Intelligence is meant to inform government decision-making, not to be invoked or discarded selectively to justify predetermined political decisions. The unjustified claims of the Bush administration on Iraq's illicit weapons capabilities have severely damaged the credibility of the U.S. government and the U.S. intelligence community.

The Kay report offers nothing to vindicate or excuse the administration in this matter. Congress, in whom the Constitution has invested the war powers function, has the responsibility to initiate an independent investigation on how and why the administration used discredited and disputed claims to launch a war, which continues to impose a costly and destabilizing burden on this nation.

Greg Thielmann was a senior official in the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research. Daryl G. Kimball is executive director of the Arms Control Association.

We do not really need to look far beyond the Kay report. Comparing the contents of that report (including the botched botulism allegation) with what the coalition governments have claimed it says reveals a leadership that will say or do anything to retain power. They should all get reverse gears installed, and quickly.

The Poor Man: "The Stovepipe"

Fans of cheap irony may wish to read Pollack's "The Threatening Storm", particularly those bits (pgs. 248-280) which discuss how Saddam's unwillingness to accept intelligence he doesn't want to hear, and the willingness of his operatives to furnish him with only the stories he wants to hear, make him a particular danger. Hard-core irony fanatics should focus on page 255, where mention is made of punishments handed out to the bearers of unwanted news, and wonder aloud if these punishments ever included jeapardizing the safety of said bearer's wives by outing them as undercover agents. Those of a more serious mind should content themselves with noting the rather dismissive attitude towards the idea of objective reality implied by such an approach, and, weaving together (oh, for example) the 2001 demotion of the position of national science advisor, and the editing of EPA reports on the scientific consensus on climate change by political officials, and wonder if it wouldn't just save everyone a lot of needless aggrevation by skipping the middleman and just having Ralph Reed and Fred Barnes dictate to everyone how the world works. Most people think conservatives long for the 1950's; some radicals think they may secretly be pining for the days before the New Deal; I'm becoming convinced that their real ideal may be even a bit earlier.

Personally, I love cheap irony. I'd say the Kay report is fast turning into a third example of editing by political officials.

To Some in GOP, Bush's Troubles Become a Liability

Although many Republicans are optimistic that Bush will win reelection next year, all nonretiring House members (and a third of senators) have their own 2004 reelection campaigns to worry about. Some GOP incumbents -- especially those in the several dozen House districts that Democrat Al Gore carried or nearly won in 2000 -- are showing an increasing willingness to vote against key White House initiatives and to reassure constituents that they think and act independently of the president.

Leach was among 21 Republicans who joined most Democrats when the House voted 221 to 203 to bar the administration from implementing the overtime revisions. Scores of Republicans bucked the White House by voting to overturn a Federal Communications Commission rule making media mergers easier, and several also voted, against Bush's wishes, to allow the importation of prescription drugs from Canada and other countries.

Such erosion of GOP solidarity was rarely seen when Bush's approval ratings were higher, but it hardly signals a deep or permanent break between the White House and congressional GOP moderates. Republican lawmakers from swing districts say that Bush generally remains popular with their constituents, and that jobs, not Iraq, are number one on voters' minds. Many GOP House members are taking a cautious line: focusing on the possibility that Bush can't help them at reelection time, yet continuing to support him as much as possible.

Rats. Ship. Sinking. Enough said.

Listening to Mahathir

What became clear watching Mr. Mahathir back then was that his strident rhetoric was actually part of a delicate balancing act aimed at domestic politics. Malaysia has a Muslim, ethnically Malay, majority, but its business drive comes mainly from an ethnic Chinese minority. To keep the economy growing, Mr. Mahathir must allow the Chinese minority to prosper, but to ward off ethnic tensions he must throw favors, real and rhetorical, to the Malays.

Part of that balancing act involves reserving good jobs for Malay workers and giving special business opportunities to Malay entrepreneurs. One reason Mr. Mahathir was so adamantly against I.M.F. austerity plans was that he feared that they would disrupt the carefully managed cronyism that holds his system together. When times are tough, Mr. Mahathir also throws the Muslim majority rhetorical red meat.

And that's what he was doing last week. Not long ago Washington was talking about Malaysia as an important partner in the war on terror. Now Mr. Mahathir thinks that to cover his domestic flank, he must insert hateful words into a speech mainly about Muslim reform. That tells you, more accurately than any poll, just how strong the rising tide of anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism among Muslims in Southeast Asia has become. Thanks to its war in Iraq and its unconditional support for Ariel Sharon, Washington has squandered post-9/11 sympathy and brought relations with the Muslim world to a new low.

Dead right. Reading the whole speech does not excuse, but does explain, Mahathir's use of racist appeals to his electorate,. As I blogged earlier, it's strange how quick Bush was to denounce Mahathir (on whom Bush has no influence) while treating Boykin to faint criticism and retaining him in office.

Instead of taking Mahathir on for his attack on Jews, I would much prefer to see the Australian government affirming the universality of human rights and the wrongness of any form of racism. But wait...

The Peoples' Voice

The Peoples' Voice is a new, broad-based civil initiative whose founders recognise that a way exists to bridge the intolerable impasse between Israelis and Palestinians.

Difficult though it may be to admit, a compromise based�on the�"two states for two peoples" formula is the only way to ensure the continued existence of Israel as a democratic state and Jewish homeland.

Palestinians�are also realising the need for compromise -- that the�abandonment of violence is their only feasible way of achieving�political independence and a stable economy.

The Peoples' Voice is intended to persuade leaders on both sides to end the conflict by means of mass signatures on a joint statement of principles.

In Israel there will be a national petition campaign, with a kindred movement on the Palestinian side. The signatures will then be submitted to the leaders of both nations as a tangible expression of the will�of the majority of both peoples, and with a view to changing diplomatic policy.

The Peoples' Voice will succeed.�Israelis and�Palestinians understand that there is only one solution!

History teaches us that the power to enact change lies with the people as well as with politicians.�Israeli and Palestinian leaders�are at present locked in situations and coalitions that do not allow them to abandon the vicious cycle of hostility. This is the time and�way to begin a sweeping, grassroots initiative�to end the bloodshed,�insecurity and economic problems affecting each and every one of us.

First hopeful sign in this conflict in many years. The remarkable thing about these principles is how obvious they sound the first time you read them. Except to the leadership on each side of the dispute.

name of blog

Sy Hersh's latest, on Iraq, intelligence, WMDs and the like. Wow.

My favourite grafs are:

The point is not that the President and his senior aides were consciously lying. What was taking place was much more systematic�and potentially just as troublesome. Kenneth Pollack, a former National Security Council expert on Iraq, whose book �The Threatening Storm� generally supported the use of force to remove Saddam Hussein, told me that what the Bush people did was �dismantle the existing filtering process that for fifty years had been preventing the policymakers from getting bad information. They created stovepipes to get the information they wanted directly to the top leadership. Their position is that the professional bureaucracy is deliberately and maliciously keeping information from them.

�They always had information to back up their public claims, but it was often very bad information,� Pollack continued. �They were forcing the intelligence community to defend its good information and good analysis so aggressively that the intelligence analysts didn�t have the time or the energy to go after the bad information.

It is terrifying that this president does not read the newspapers. Instead, like a Qing emperor, he relies on palace staff to tell him what happens outside the walls of the Great Within. About the only difference is that Bush does not demand the anatomical sacrifice the Qing dynasty demanded of members of the inner court.

Eunuch domination was always the beginning of the end for a dynasty, because it meant the emperor could no longer make his own decisions.

name of blog

Sy Hersh's latest, on Iraq, intelligence, WMDs and the like. Wow.

My favourite grafs are:

The point is not that the President and his senior aides were consciously lying. What was taking place was much more systematic�and potentially just as troublesome. Kenneth Pollack, a former National Security Council expert on Iraq, whose book �The Threatening Storm� generally supported the use of force to remove Saddam Hussein, told me that what the Bush people did was �dismantle the existing filtering process that for fifty years had been preventing the policymakers from getting bad information. They created stovepipes to get the information they wanted directly to the top leadership. Their position is that the professional bureaucracy is deliberately and maliciously keeping information from them.

�They always had information to back up their public claims, but it was often very bad information,� Pollack continued. �They were forcing the intelligence community to defend its good information and good analysis so aggressively that the intelligence analysts didn�t have the time or the energy to go after the bad information.

It is terifying that this president does not read the newspapers. Instead, like a Qing emperor, he relies on palace staff to tell him what happens outside the walls of the Great Within. About the only difference is that Bush does not demand the anatomical sacrifice the Qing dynasty demanded of members of the inner court.

Eunuch domination was always the beginning of the end for a dynasty, because it meant the emperor could no longer make his own decisions.

The Decembrist: First Draft of History

That's something I suspected. The tightest, most command-and-control administration in the history of democracy is coming apart at every seam, and it does seem like the word is out that there will be no personnel changes until the election. I can see why: ever since President Carter's big cabinet reshuffling in July 1979, changes in the second half of the term have been seen as admissions of failure, or opening the door to new problems that will take time to work out. I haven't done the math, but this administration has probably had less turnover in almost three years than any in recent memory. Other than Karen Hughes, Ari Fleischer (both burnout jobs) and Christie Whitman (who may not have had cabinet status), they're all still there.

One senses that there is also, in this refusal to accept any change, a fearfulness that is not exactly presidential. The refusal to accept a new voice is of a piece with the president's lack of interest in new ideas or alternative viewpoints. Now that the White House has finally devolved into leaks and recriminations, this will be a terrible trap.

I've only just discovered The Decembrist. It's going straight on the blogroll in a couple of minutes.

Mystery of the Vanishing Weapons

The latest and least defensible defense of the CIA has been to flatly deny administration spokesmen ever claimed Iraq had stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons or that such weapons posed any imminent threat. A Wall Street Journal editorial thus claims, 'The Imminence Test and the Stockpile Standard... are postwar inventions, and political transparently political inventions.' That is a remarkable remark, and one that relies entirely on extremely short memories.

On Jan. 23, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz addressed the Council on Foreign Relations. He claimed that 'in 1997, U.N. inspectors found Iraq had produced and weaponized at least 10 liters of ricin. In concentrated form, that quantity of ricin is enough to kill more than 1 million people. Baghdad declared to the U.N. inspectors that it had over 19,000 liters of botulinum toxin, enough to kill tens of millions; and 8,500 liters of anthrax, with the potential to kill hundreds of millions. And consider that the U.N. inspectors believe that much larger quantities of biological agents remained undeclared. Indeed, the inspectors think that Iraq has manufactured 2 to 4 times the amount of biological agents it has admitted to and has failed to explain the whereabouts of more than 2 metric tons of raw material for the growth of biological agents.

Despite 11 years of inspections and sanctions, containment and military response, Baghdad retains chemical and biological weapons and is producing more.' Mr. Wolfowitz was clearly claiming Iraq still 'retains' sufficient biological weaponry to kills 'hundreds of millions' -- a number large enough to wipe out the entire population of North America. To make it even scarier, Mr. Wolfowitz added Iraq 'is producing more,' so the dangers today 'are far greater now than they would have been five or 10 years ago.'

Yet even this very public claim that Iraq has more than enough weapons to kill 'hundreds of millions' failed to meet the Wall Street Journal's 'Imminence Test and Stockpile Standard,' since the Journal now assures us talking about stockpiles and imminent threats is just a transparently political postwar invention.

Go read, as much because it comes from the Cato Institute as for the excellent analysis of the various excuses advanced to justify the furphies of mass destruction. In particular the article rips the invention of imminence excuse apart. The Cato people, until recently, were among Bush's most vigorous supporters.

I have the feeling the wheels are falling off the whole Bush coalition, not just the administration itself.

Whose god is 'real' and 'bigger'?

Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, in an interview on October 19, reiterated her boss' position that the US is not at war with Islam. However, she did not answer the question whether Bush would condemn Boykin's statements made in and out of uniform, in churches and elsewhere. At the same time, there is no anticipated move to remove him from his current sensitive post.

A number of newspapers in Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Kuwait and Iraq reported Boykin's earlier remarks without comment. One can ignore Boykin's lack of knowledge about Islam as a private person. But there is no excuse for using his public position and visibility to spread hatred and disinformation about a great religion, such as describing Islam as an 'idolatrous' religion, which goes against its very grain as a monotheistic faith. Equally important, this certainly is not the time to raise questions about whose god is 'real' or whose god is 'bigger'.

Bush's reaction to the Boykin comments are going to be read in the Muslim world. So are his somewhat different reactions to the Mahathir comments.

I'd blog more, but my head is still spinning on how size can be a relevant characteristic of a transcendent divinity.

Global pushback against 'Titanic' culture

If you were watching television Sunday night in Sydney, Australia, you had a choice between the American sitcom 'Everybody Loves Raymond,' and a couple of US movies: 'Meet the Parents' and 'Coyote Ugly.'

In fact, 76 percent of all new programs launched on Australian TV in the eight months prior to April 2003 were foreign shows, mostly American. Australia's largely Made-in-USA television diet is part of the background to a new round in the global culture war begun here last week.

Talks are starting on a United Nations treaty designed to help countries protect their native cultures in the face of what many characterize as the homogenizing effect of Hollywood. It's the kind of pact that Washington sees as likely to hamper free trade and free expression - as well as hurt profits.

The UN convention on cultural diversity, championed by Canada and France at the head of some 60 European and developing countries, would take cultural goods, such as films, plays, and music, out of the realm of trade negotiations. It would exempt them from free-trade rules, allow governments to protect and support their cultural industries, and enshrine the 'cultural exception' that European nations have defended in international law.

Behind this emerging conflict in UNESCO, the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, lies a debate over whether trade in cultural products should be governed by different rules from those for other commercial products, and what role governments should play in protecting national identities in the face of globalization.

The clash, pitting the United States and a handful of other skeptics against the majority of UNESCO members, comes less than a month after the US rejoined the UN agency after a 19-year absence.

and:

The view from the tarmac, they argue, makes it clear that far from limiting choice, government intervention is the only way to guarantee it in many countries.

In Australia, for example, which is about to finalize a bi- lateral free-trade agreement with the US, negotiators are fighting for the right to extend government policies to support local filmmakers into new delivery systems such as the Internet.

Australian broadcasters must ensure that 55 percent of their daytime and evening programming is locally made, and pay-TV drama channels must spend 10 percent of their program expenditure on Australian drama.

"The market today has failed to deliver a level of choice including a minimum of Australian content, and we can assume the market won't deliver on the Internet either," says Kim Dalton, head of the Australian Film Commission. "It will deliver American products.

The French government offers an outline of a Draft International Convention on Cultural Diversity: French proposals . Culture is more than just the profit motive. Hollywood is a major source of US soft power and that needs to be measured by more than just cash flow. I wish I could read an equally thoughtful analysis about the diversity convention in an Australian paper.

The Texas Constitution - Art 3 - Sec 16

OPEN SESSIONS

The sessions of each House shall be open, except the Senate when in Executive session.

Keeping the parliament's doors open is a fairly basic concept in democratic governance. If we were really as 'like Texas' as President Bush keeps telling us we would be making different security arrangements on Thursday.

Howard's friendship with America does not go as far as China

But any benefits of the Thai deal would be dwarfed by those arising from a free-trade agreement with China or the US, two deals the Government is pursuing with vigour in the face of the World Trade Organisation's lack of progress towards trade liberalisation. Australia has been locked out of a proposed free-trade zone among South-East Asian nations, a failure that has spurred the Government's drive to negotiate bilateral free-trade agreements.

In a rare departure from support for US policies, Mr Howard backed China in its strong resistance to US pressure.

'We don't automatically take sides with the US in relation to the currency levels of other countries,' Mr Howard said here yesterday.

US politicians are blaming competition from cheap Chinese goods for their stalled economy, and unions in Australia are also concerned that jobs are being lost as manufacturers switch their operations to China.

I had thought the onyl disagreement between Howard and Bush would be over US requests for the ADF to go back to Iraq (although 1200 ADF personnel remain in non-combat roles). This is almost a textbook case where security politics (the only kind the Bush administration seems to know about) bumps directly into economics and does not come off very well.

Are you suffering Celebrity Worship Syndrome

At the entry level, one in five people followed celebrities for 'entertainment-social' reasons. Anyone burning to know every detail about a favourite star, such as which Madrid mansion Posh Spice and David Beckham will buy, falls into this category. Such fan worship might seem harmless but even these individuals are more likely to suffer from anxiety, depression and social dysfunction than non-worshippers, say the researchers.

Worshippers who took the next step developed 'intense-personal' attitudes towards an idol. The survey indicated that 10 per cent of people were at this point, where celebrity worship was becoming an addiction.

The 'borderline-pathological' condition was the final, most intense stage of celebrity worship and could be marked by criminal or dangerous behaviour.

Dr Houran said: 'Just worshipping a celebrity does not make you dysfunctional, but it does put you at risk of being so. There is this progression of behaviours, and if you start, we don't know what's going to stop you.'

Houran and McCutcheon suspect that an interest in celebrities may start with a 'search for identity and a sense of fulfillment'.

Worshippers then get so absorbed in the details of the lives of their idols that they start to feel emotional attachment, leading to obsession. The psychologists call this the 'absorption-addiction' model.

I'd ask if the CWS survey produced any strange results in California, but then someone might ask if I really said I'd vote for Legolas.

It's the economy that dispatches governments

The obvious candidate here - the only obvious candidate - is the extraordinarily long boom in house prices and the related rapid growth in household debt. Surely the housing bubble will bust eventually and when it does, the fallout will transform all the presently self-satisfied two-bob capitalists into angry voters looking for a pollie to punish.

Well, you'd imagine so - but the more you think about it, the harder it is to see. It's not hard to see a lot of negatively geared investors in rental apartments getting their fingers burnt, but they'd constitute just a few per cent of households.

When you think about the group that matters from a macro-economic perspective - the owner-occupiers - it's hard to see many of them in serious difficulties without a big rise in interest rates and a jump in unemployment.

And why would the Reserve Bank want to raise rates to recession-precipitating levels without it first having a mighty inflationary breakout it was struggling to control? Do you see that looming on the horizon? I don't. Inflation's set to fall.

All I know is, all good things come to an end. All economic expansions end in recession and all governments eventually get swept away - usually by the first recession that occurs on their watch.

Salon carried an interesting piece on the housing bubble in the US:

Today's families are in financial trouble, because they're spending so much more on big fixed expenses -- mortgage, health insurance, car, preschool, after-school care and college.

What's happened is that the cost of being middle-class has shot out of the reach of ordinary families over the past generation.

It would be good to know if Australian families are suffering from inflated housing prices in the same way. It might be bad news for the government.

Close Enough

I'm not a haiku.

I have too many syllables

In my second line

I've been letting my pedantry quota decline lately almost as fast as I've been letting my poetry quota decline. Both declines can and will be reformed.

The haiku form is not just defined by syllable counting. A haiku must contain a caesura at the end of the second line and a reference to the season.

Draft Wesley Crusher For President

With these words, retired Ensign Wesley Crusher began his address to supporters on Deep Space 10, officially entering the race for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States. Crusher said he resents the idea that he only got where he is because of his family ties; Crusher's mother was a high-ranking official on the USS Enterprise.

In a world where the Terminator can govern California, what else can be a surprise? Personally I'd vote for Legolas...

Link courtesy of The Covenant of the Lost Ark.



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Did the Saudis know about 9/11?

In his book 'Why America Slept: The Failure to Prevent 9/11,' Gerald Posner makes an explosive allegation: Top figures in the Saudi and Pakistani governments had been directly assisting Osama bin Laden for years and knew al-Qaida was going to strike America on Sept. 11. Posner cites two unnamed U.S. government sources, both of whom he asserts are 'in a position to know,' who he said gave him separate, corroborating reports. One source is from the CIA and the other is a senior Bush administration official 'inside the executive branch,' he told Salon in an interview.

According to Posner's account, four Saudi princes and the head of Pakistan's air force were deeply involved with Osama bin Laden for years, some of them meeting with him well after al-Qaida began its terror attacks on U.S. targets overseas in the mid-1990s. The fact that some of the figures were so highly placed makes it hard to dismiss the possibility, if the allegations are true, that the heads of the Saudi and Pakistani governments signed off on the policy.

I suspect this is going to be a huge story if Posner can make his case.

Premier: Turkey will scrap Iraq deployment if unwanted

Turkey (AP) Turkey's prime minister said Saturday that his country would scrap plans to send troops to Iraq if Iraqis continue to oppose the deployment.

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's government supports sending peacekeepers to Iraq, as requested by the United States, and parliament approved a deployment last week.

But the proposed deployment has met vocal opposition from many Iraqis, who fear Turkey will pursue its own agenda. The U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council has come out against having Turkish troops or troops from any neighboring nation on Iraqi soil.

''The demands of the Iraqi people are very important for us,'' Erdogan was quoted as saying in Mallorca, Spain by Turkey's semiofficial Anatolia news agency. ''We aren't longing to send soldiers to Iraq. There was a request from the United States and we're evaluating it.''

''If the Iraqi people say, 'We don't want anybody,' there's nothing else we can do,'' Erdogan was quoted as saying. ''If wanted, we'll go, if not wanted, we won't go. We haven't made a definite decision.''

Erdogan added: ''The requests of the United States are very important us.''

The United States has welcomed a possible deployment by Turkey, hoping the Turks would become the first major contingent from a Muslim country.

But Washington is now proceeding cautiously amid opposition from members of Iraq's Governing Council and Iraqi Kurds. Some Turkish officials have downplayed the council's opposition and have said Iraqis would welcome Turkish troops.

On Thursday, the United Nations Security Council also unanimously passed a resolution authorizing a multinational force in the neighboring nation. That has apparently boosted Washington's hopes that other nations might now contribute to a peacekeeping operation.

The world is complex. Moral clarity does not make it any simpler. The Bush administration seems to think that putting a Muslim face or a UN face on the occupation will make to acceptable in the Muslim world or inside Iraq itself.

I do not think that is the case. Military occupations generate inevitable friction between the people and the occupying troops. Muslim occupation troops will ultimately suffer the same unpopularity as other occupation troops. The antagonistic history that Turks and Iraqis share makes the choice of Turkish troops incredibly foolish.

George Bush launched this war saying the US is not subject to the decisions of others. That was always untrue. Its untruth is proved by the Turkish parliament's refusal to allow the northern attack to happen through Turkish territory.

Now the US has an ambiguous UN resolution that enables it to retain the appearance of all power in Iraq. It will not attract any troops or money but the US does get the right to keep the CPA in power while it can. And the Turkish government is saying the IGC has a say no matter what the UN resolutions and CPA decrees might say.

No amount of public relations is going to change that, the starin on the US army,or the inevitable transfer of power from the CPA to the IGC.

The UN's Big Five supply 88% of all killer arms

Lydia and Cecilia's suffering is repeated in dozens of other countries throughout Africa, Latin America, the Middle East and Asia, which are awash with weapons. Millions of weapons seep through porous and unguarded borders on every continent each year. There are a staggering 639 million small arms in the world, one for every 10 people.

The onus to control the proliferation of weapons lies with all governments that export or re-export arms. Rich governments are constantly urging developing countries to become less reliant on aid and to become accountable for improving their own country and regional security, economies, education and health. Yet, in what can only be seen as enormous hypocrisy, the very countries that are urging self-reliance are helping to fuel the conflicts that destroy people's livelihoods and trap countries in a cycle of violence and poverty.

In the past four years, Britain, France and the US earned more income from arms exports to Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Latin America than they provided in aid.

The hypocrisy cannot go on. Rich governments must admit the role they play in allowing the deadly and global trade in arms to go unchecked. Organisations such as Oxfam Community Aid Abroad and Amnesty International Australia are calling for an arms-trade treaty to stop the flow of arms to abusers. The treaty must be agreed to by governments around the world and provide a universal standard for all arms exporters to comply with.

The argument is unanswerable. I guess that is why the question is never raised. See Control Arms for much more detail.

Jesus' General rises from the dead!

Militia commander Gen. JC Christian provides fair and balanced commentary on the news.

AWOL

I don't really expect to be, but I will be guestblogging at Seeing the Forest this week along with Raena Armitage and a few other members of Dave's Blogging Proliferation Initiative.

I'll crosslink my stuff here. A cowboy comes home is the first of a couple of longer pieces I'll be posting there.