U.S. rejected plan for quick Iraq census

'This could have changed things,' said T. Hamid al-Bayati, a senior aide to Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the Governing Council member who announced last week that Shiite religious leaders opposed the indirect elections. Perhaps, he and others suggested, some council members would have argued last month that the vote on self-government should be delayed until September when the voter roll became available.

Some Iraqis have said they wonder why U.S. officials called for caucus elections in June, in part because a census could not be completed in less than a year, while at the same time rejecting a plan to produce a census more quickly.

Louay Hagi, who oversees the Census Bureau in the Planning Ministry, said the plan was not rushed. In an interview, he said his staff had prepared a detailed timetable for a census that was stripped down from the 73 questions asked in the last census six years ago, to 12 basic demographic queries, enabling the work to be done much faster than the normal two-year time frame.

As it had in the past, the bureau would use 400,000 school teachers to visit every household in Iraq on one day, June 30, said Yousef, the census director. The plan would cost $75 million, Hagi said, in part to buy 2,500 computers. 'We sent the plan to the Governing Council on Nov. 1 and asked for an answer by Nov. 15,' he said. 'We are still waiting for a response.'

Just a necessary reminder that there is an alternative to the caucuses - a free and direct election in September. The Bremer excuse that the census bureau's advice got 'lost in the bureaucracy' passes belief and, in any case, does not explain current US opposition to a free and direct election. Their plan could have been revised once they discovered their error.

America stirs up a sugar rebellion

'After we produced the 916 report, the lobbying was quite extraordinary, particularly when they threatened to withdraw US financial support to WHO,' recalled Puska.

'We had done everything possible to be transparent, to be fair and rigorous, and we held meetings around the world on it. Ours was a balanced road-map to help individual nations decide how they could combat this trend. Every third person in the world has cardiovascular disease - how can we stand by and not try to do something?'

The decision by the US government to fight the global strategy has come as a major shock to many experts in the field. Bruce Silverglade, of the US health campaign group Centre for Science in the Public Interest, said that the influence of 'Big Sugar' in the about-turn was obvious.

First global warming is not happening despite the international scientific consensus. Now global guzzling is not happening either. Sugar apparently does not cause any weight gain at all. Once upon a time, tobacco, we were told by the same people for much the same reasons, did not cause lung cancer. Before we get any cute lectures about dinosaurs or the nanny state, all we we are really talking about is fair notice to the public.

Australia has significantly reduced smoking by an effective public education campaign and bans on smoking in restaurants and offices. A similar public campaign gained us the lowest HIV infection rates in the world. A similar campaign could drastically reduce growing obesity rates.

US stars hail Iraq war whistleblower

Legal experts believe that her case is potentially more explosive for the Government than the Hutton inquiry because it could allow her defence team to raise questions about the legality of military intervention in Iraq. The Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, is likely to come under pressure to disclose the legal advice he gave on military intervention - something he has so far refused to do.

At a hearing last November, Gun's legal team indicated that she would use a defence of 'necessity' to argue that she acted to save the lives of British soldiers and Iraqi civilians.

At the time Gun, who was sacked after her arrest and whose case is funded by legal aid, said in a statement: 'Any disclosures that may have been made were justified on the following grounds: because they exposed serious illegality and wrongdoing on the part of the US government who attempted to subvert our own security services; and to prevent wide-scale death and casualties among ordinary Iraqi people and UK forces in the course of an illegal war.'

She added: 'I have only ever followed my conscience.'

This is going to be worth watching...

War of Ideas, Part 4

In sum, Israel should withdraw from the territories, not because it is weak, but because it must remain strong; not because Israel is wrong, but because Zionism is a just cause that the occupation is undermining; not because the Arabs would warmly embrace a smaller Israel, but because a smaller Israel, in internationally recognized boundaries, will be much more defensible; not because it will eliminate Islamic or European anti-Semitism, but because it will reduce it by reducing the daily friction; not because it would mean giving into an American whim, but because nothing would strengthen America's influence in the Muslim world, help win the war of ideas and therefore better protect Israel than this.

As it happens I agree with each of Friedman's points. I have one small problem. Why hasn't he written:

In sum, America should withdraw from Iraq, not because it is weak, but because it must remain strong; not because America is wrong, but because the War on Terror is a just cause that the occupation is undermining; not because the Arabs would warmly embrace a smaller America, but because a smaller America, in internationally recognised boundaries, will be much more defensible; not because it will eliminate Islamic or European anti-Americanism, but because it will reduce it by reducing the daily friction; not because it would mean giving into an American whim, but because nothing would strengthen America's influence in the Muslim world, help win the war of ideas and therefore better protect the United States than this.

Seriously, the Iraq exit is getting to be a mess. The occupation has succeeded this far because of the Kurdish alliance and Shi'ite acquiescence. The second factor is about to run out if Bush continues to ignore the al-Sistani demand for fair elections.

Instead of serious dialogue with the Shi'ite leadership we are getting pabulum like:

Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.), who serves on the Armed Services Committee, said he is optimistic the current plan can work, though it could require modification.

"We're going to have to tweak this thing for years," he said. "It's not going to be us walking away July 2, thinking that everything is fine and that the elections are going to be called for and the constitution's going to be drafted and America's going to have no more involvement in this."

How, precisely, will the US continue its electoral tweaking once Iraq is again a sovereign state? By enacting a Platt Amendment?

Hotter summers, fewer frosts for Australia

Up to 15% less rainfall is expected in the south and east by 2030, especially in winter and spring. In the southwest, rainfall may decline by up to 20%. This is likely to be associated with more droughts.

'With likely increases in evaporation this means drier conditions in future, with reduced water supply and greater water demand. In the southwest, rainfall has already decreased by about 20% since the mid-1970s,' he says.

Australia has already warmed by about 0.8% since 1950. 'This doesn't sound like much but it has been associated with an increase in extremely hot days and hot nights, and a decrease in extremely cold days and cold nights,' says Mr Hennessy.

The Bureau of Meteorology recently announced that 2003 was Australia's 6th warmest year since 1910, with the global average temperature being the 3rd warmest since 1861. The hottest year, both globally and in Australia, was 1998.

The impacts of changes in climate are widespread, says Mr Hennessy. 'Hotter and drier conditions would lead to greater fire risk, more heat stress for humans, crops and livestock, greater energy demand for air conditioning. But there will also be less energy demand for winter heating and less frost damage, so there will be winners and losers.'

He says strategies to adapt to climate change include water demand management (for example, restrictions and recycling), breeding and selection of heat-tolerant and drought-tolerant crops, adjusting cropping calendars to take advantage of a longer frost-free period, more shade and water for livestock, and heat-smart buildings.

'However, some animals and plants may be highly vulnerable to climate change, with limited options for adaptation. For example, coral reefs are likely to experience more bleaching, and some Western Australian frogs and east Australian alpine mammals will find their habitats shrinking as the temperature rises.'

Gee, I'm glad the earth isn't warming.

He cannot tell a lie

O'Neill's revelations have not been met by any factual rebuttal. Instead, they have been greeted with anonymous character assassination from a 'senior official': 'Nobody listened to him when he was in office. Why should anybody now?' Then the White House announced that O'Neill was under investigation for abusing classified documents, though he claimed they were not and the White House had eagerly shoveled carefully edited NSC documents to Woodward.

Quietly, O'Neill and his publisher have prepared an irrefutable response. Soon they will post every one of the 19,000 documents underlying the book on the Internet. The story will not be calmed.

Wow, it seems O'Neill is determined not just to spill his guts but to make the result accessible to the whole world.

Bush's self-serving Iraqi timetable

The difficult challenge facing the CPA is to help the Iraqis create a constitution that fairly and democratically balances the role of the Shi'ite majority with the Sunni and Kurdish minorities. The agreed on solution must be acceptable to Iraq's neighbors and be granted legitimacy by the United Nations if it is to endure. The design of the fundamental law and the method chosen to form the transitional national assembly are critically important to this total process because they will establish precedents for representative government in Iraq.

The Bush administration, wrongly focused on a speedy transfer of sovereignty to a friendly Iraqi government, has its priorities upside down. The real priority in Iraq today is an electoral process that ensures a legitimate government, valid in the eyes of Iraqis and the rest of the world.

The White House is concerned a summer of electioneering in Iraq, followed by elections in the weeks before the US presidential election, could reinforce the American public's image of conflict and confusion in Iraq, making it difficult for President George W Bush to declare victory in what has become the central issue of his presidency. On the contrary, Washington 's real concern should be that a hasty turnover of power next July to whatever slapdash body is formed could result in civil war by November.

What needs to be done? The declared goal of the Bush administration is to create in Iraq the most democratic government in the Arab world. To achieve this goal, the occupation authorities need to listen to all Iraqis, involving as many as possible in the creation of a durable democratic system. This means forming alliances with moderate Shi'ite groups, reconstituting Iraqi army units, involving the international community, and organizing elections for a provisional government.

The sooner the IGC is replaced by a more representative, independent and legitimate government, the better. If the Bush administration takes the time to do the job right, Bush might just end up with the victory in Iraq he so desperately wants - and needs, in spite of himself.

The article is out of date because the IGC has already issued a decree revoking Saddam's secular legislation and giving legal control of personal status to the different confessional groups in Iraq, so in a sense al-Sistani's Shari'a demand has already been met. My guess is that the transitional constitution will follow the Afghan precedent and further enhance the status of Shari'a.

The caucus system is not an election and will produce a government very like the feeble RVN governments which shattered US efforts in Vietnam. The first line of this extract is wrong. The new Iraqi constitution is not a CPA problem but a challenge for the Iraqi people. Smoke-and-mirrors may persuade the American electorate but the constitution will be a piece of paper unless it enjoys popular support.

The risk in the caucus plan is obvious to anyone, especially when the Iraqi interior ministry says it could produce a national electoral roll by September. There can be only one explanation for its adoption - the moral obscurity of the Bush administration.

Change of mind

Senator Jan McLucas, chairwoman of the Senate select committee inquiry into Medicare which is due to report when Parliament resumes this year, says she has had submissions from several allied health professions seeking access to the Medicare Benefits Schedule.

'The [psychologist's] submission was compelling ... but it was the view of the committee that it was extremely difficult to identify which service could be included [in Medicare], in the knowledge that all couldn't, due to funding restraints,' McLucas told the Herald. 'The difficulty ... is trying to pick where you apply scarce health dollars.'

Also in the 'no' camp is the Australian Medical Association, which in November last year decided to maintain its position of not supporting the extension of Medicare to any 'non-medical' group such as psychologists.

The two big gaps in Medicare coverage are dentists and clinical psychologists.

Oral health, as we know from recent research, is critical to general health, especially to preventing cardiovascular disease. The Senate committee argues that the health of the nation is crucial to economic performance and that this is the underlying principle of Medicare. It should follow that it is better to cover dental and clinical psychological services, if only for their preventive value. Australia is unusual in the pattern of psychological services because expensive psychiatrists can bill Medicare, but cheaper clinical psychologists cannot.

I am chasing down some information about exercise therapists and I'll add that when I can. The ADA put in a submission arguing for at least concessional coverage. The APA asked for clinical psychs to be given access to the Medicare billing system. The AMA put in its customary closed shop submission.

The Senate committee could do worse than going with the ADA/APA position.

Plan 3 From Outer Space: The Bush Budget Switch

There is essentially no possibility of squeezing this kind of money out of the existing manned programs. There can't be any significant scale back in Shuttle or Station in the FY05-09 time frame, because we will still be assembling the Station. Possibly there will be some small reduction in the Shuttle flight rate from the former 5/yr. But as NASA never tires of mentioning, cutting back the flight rate of Shuttle doesn't save a lot because the marching army of support people have to be kept on salary anyway. Implementing the CAIB recommendations will increase cost and staffing levels, not reduce them. Maybe they can save some money by letting VAB and the rest of LC-39 decay away, but not very much.

So there is really no alternative to cutting over $2B/yr out of the non-manned-space half of NASA's budget. That's a ~%35 cut if you assume it is equally distributed over the five years 2005-2009!! If it is ramped in like most big budget cuts, the final cut by 2009 would be much larger. Goodbye aeronautical research, goodbye Webb Space Telescope, goodbye planetary probes to boring places like asteroids.

Do we really want to trade all this in for Apollo Mark II? A lot of people will say no. Even a lot of Space Cadets will say no. We lost ten years of solar system exploration to pay for the Shuttle and it left a bloody wound that still drips. A lot of influential people will fight this proposal to the last round, and then fix bayonets and keep on fighting until it is defeated.

The Shuttle was cut to the bone throughout its development and the tragedies that followed reflect that. Cutting it further is literally impossible if any shuttle is ever to fly again. Abandoning the Shuttle would mean abandoning the International Space Station as well. Bush I proposed a similar plan at a cost of US500 billion. I have not been tracking US inflation since 1989 but I doubt it has deflated half a trillion dollars to just over one hundredth of a trillion dollars.

The Bush plan, then, is (surprise!) a severe budget cut to the unmanned space program, far the most productive NASA activity, in favour of a goal that can only succeed at least 7 years after Bush leaves office (if he is re-elected next year). I hesitate to call a space program so much air, but what choice do I have?

Ocean Floor Reveals Clues To Global Warming

Scientists at the University of Wyoming may have discovered how massive amounts of carbon enter the atmosphere during periods of global warming.

In a paper published Jan. 8 in the journal Nature, UW Department of Geology and Geophysics graduate student Matthew Hornbach and professors Demian Saffer and Steve Holbrook propose that the source of the carbon is methane gas found beneath methane hydrate -- an ice-like substance consisting of frozen methane and water. Methane hydrate exists in vast quantities beneath the ocean floor and is believed to constitute the largest reservoir of organic carbon on Earth.

As far as I know no cute dinosaurs were harmed in the course of this study, but others might have better information.

next to of course god america i... (III) - Poem by e. e. cummings

'next to of course god america i

love you land of the pilgrims' and so forth oh

say can you see by the dawn's early my

country tis of centuries come and go

and are no more what of it we should worry

in every language even deafanddumb

thy sons acclaim your glorious name by gorry

by jingo by gee by gosh by gum

why talk of beauty what could be more beaut-

iful than these heroic happy dead

who rushed like lions to the roaring slaughter

they did not stop to think they died instead

then shall the voice of liberty be mute?'

He spoke. And drank rapidly a glass of water

Dead comments society

BlogSpeak will be back up by this weekend, maybe. Tino has set me up with hosting, however I don't know if it will work the way I need it to. HaloScan has offered to pick up the hosting, and transfer everyone's comments to their system.

Commenting will be back up as soon as BlogSpeak is. It's an excellent service and I'd prefer to stay with it. Thanks to the people who emailed me about the missing comments.

NSW electoral distribution under the microscope

The independent body set up to draw the new boundaries is the Electoral Districts Commission. The current review is chaired by retired judge the Honourable Jerrold Cripps QC and by statute the commission also includes the NSW Electoral Commissioner John Wasson, and the State's surveyor-general Warwick Watkins.

The overriding task of the commissioners is to ensure equality of enrolment between electorates. Enrolment in all new electorates must be within a 10 per cent of the state average. A second tighter restriction also applies to projected enrolments. Boundaries must be drawn so that at the time of the next election, all new electorates will have predicted enrolment within 3 per cent of the average.

After meeting these numerical restrictions, the commissioners must take into account community of interests arguments, including economic, social and regional interests; means of communication and travel within the electoral district; the physical features and area of the electoral district; mountain and other natural boundaries; and the boundaries of the existing electoral districts.

In New South Wales, the state's electoral geography offers huge scope for parties to gain political advantage. No other state has industrial centres the size of Newcastle and Wollongong. Probably no other city has the clear class voting lines of Sydney, where the hilly and leafy Liberal voting North Shore contrasts markedly with the generally flat and Labor voting seats south of the harbour. The state also has significant mining towns like Lithgow, Broken Hill and Cessnock that lie in the middle of territory that would otherwise be tough for Labor to win.

Indeed, both sides have their gallows humour about the state's electoral geography. Labor people quip their job is always made easier by the tendency of Liberal voters in Sydney to all want to live together on the North Shore. Liberal and National Party officials sometimes wistfully ponder how much easier life would be if they could just get rid of Broken Hill, Lithgow and Queanbeyan.

Redistributions are always fun to watch. The NSW constitution requires a redistribution whenever it is needed to ensure voting equality. The tight rules mean that the Labor and Coalition submissions are actually only 1 seat apart, but I doubt that will prevent the usual catfight and eventually the supreme court may have to resolve the matter.

Tasmania has a fairer system where each federal electorate returns 5 members elected by STV, but that reform is not going to happen in NSW any time soon.

2004 Queensland Election Home. ABC Online

The Opposition admits it is facing an uphill battle, with the Coalition holding just 15 seats compared with Labor's 66. Queensland Opposition leader Lawrence Springborg is trying to limit the impact of minor parties and independent candidates. The Opposition needs to win 30 seats to form government but says it is not impossible.

With a two-party preferred vote at the last election of 60%, I would think the Beattie government's chance of losing is roughly equivalent to the chance of discovering that Mars is really Barsoom.

So, why did we kick out Saddam?

It may have been different had the military campaign been prolonged or if Australian troops had been arriving home in body bags. But as it is, Hussein is gone, Australia's commitment in Iraq is substantially limited and many like the idea of Howard endearing Australia to the US.

But this, too, is a simplistic notion, given that Howard's support is geared to a particular US administration; should a Democrat be elected later this year, things could become very different. And it is surprising the number of times commentators in the US, when discussing international support for the war, ignore our role - Britain and Spain get mentioned, but not Australia.

As for the free trade agreement with the US, its benefits will only become clear after the fine print is settled.

Does any of this make any difference? What matters is what the future holds for the people of Iraq. The means justified the end. But if that's the case, if it was all about removing Hussein for the benefit of the people of Iraq, it would have been nice if that case was properly made, to the exclusion of all this nonsense about WMD and the like.

Everyone knows that if Howard had put the case to parliament that the enterprise of Iraq was designed to remove Saddam Hussein whether or not he possessed WMDs the motion would have failed. Indeed Howard explicitly recognised this before the war.

An equally important point is that there was no need for Howard to put any case before the parliament because the extraordinary weakness of the Australian parliament and the extraordinary strength of the Australian prime ministership.

I'd happily live under the House of Windsor or the House of Jerilderie forever if it meant vesting the warmaking power where it belongs, in parliament. Or if parliament had to approve treaties like the FTA with the US. Or if we had a bill of rights.

Truth About Iraq Known; Fallout Isn't

In another sense, though, it matters a great deal. A nation that holds itself up to the world as the exemplar of representative democracy cannot blithely ignore the fact that its elected representatives were led into war under false pretenses.

In October 2002, there was no way on earth that Congress would have voted to authorize war had it known the truth. 'The possibility of a link' between Iraq and al-Qaida would not have been considered sufficient cause for invasion. Nor would Congress have voted to spend hundreds of billions of dollars and the lives of 500 American soldiers and counting because Iraq possessed the intention to someday create programs that might someday in the future be used to create weapons of mass destruction.

In fact, as I recall, those who had dared to suggest that there must be some other reason for the war, because this talk of Iraqi WMD and alleged ties to al-Qaida made no sense, were accused of spouting wild theories unsupported by fact. As it turns out, the wild theories unsupported by fact were coming from the most powerful people in the U.S. government.

Do we not care how this happened? Are Americans not curious to know how much of this was an honest mistake, and how much of it was official deception? To ignore such questions -- to leave undisturbed the intelligence systems and personnel that created the problem -- is to increase the likelihood of being deceived again in the future.

It is time, past time, to put this controversy behind us and move on. But that won't be possible until we acknowledge the truth and deal with its consequences. The first half of that task -- acknowledging the truth -- is all but accomplished. Now, what will its consequence be?

And do we, as Australians, not care that our canny prime minister relied on a mess of potage served up by the Bush administration? And do we, not care that the same canny prime minister is about to sign a missile defence MOU without any shred of parliamentary debate, let alone consent, on the same flawed premises that he signed up to an unjust and unnecessary war?

The Awful Truth

The point is that the credentials of the critics just keep getting better. How can Howard Dean's assertion that the capture of Saddam hasn't made us safer be dismissed as bizarre, when a report published by the Army War College says that the war in Iraq was a 'detour' that undermined the fight against terror? How can charges by Wesley Clark and others that the administration was looking for an excuse to invade Iraq be dismissed as paranoid in the light of Mr. O'Neill's revelations?

So far administration officials have attacked Mr. O'Neill's character but haven't refuted any of his facts. They have, however, already opened an investigation into how a picture of a possibly classified document appeared during Mr. O'Neill's TV interview. This alacrity stands in sharp contrast with their evident lack of concern when a senior administration official, still unknown, blew the cover of a C.I.A. operative because her husband had revealed some politically inconvenient facts.

Some will say that none of this matters because Saddam is in custody, and the economy is growing. Even in the short run, however, these successes may not be all they're cracked up to be. More Americans were killed and wounded in the four weeks after Saddam's capture than in the four weeks before. The drop in the unemployment rate since its peak last summer doesn't reflect a greater availability of jobs, but rather a decline in the share of the population that is even looking for work.

More important, having a few months of good news doesn't excuse a consistent pattern of dishonest, irresponsible leadership. And that pattern keeps getting harder to deny.

My favourite White House critique of O'Neill was the claim that he lacked sufficient access to make those judgements.

A top U.S. administration official told Time that O'Neill was not in a position to have seen the intelligence on weapons of mass destruction because access to it was limited.

The top US official did not mention that he was a member of the National Security Council. It follows that NSC members do not get adequate intelligence to perform their function or that the White House source was simply lying. And if they are prepared to lie about a matter of public record what are they prepared to do about matters that are not on the public record?

Now O'Neil is to face a leaks inquiry. The White House took 74 days to investigate the Plame leak and less than 24 hours to investigate O'Neil. The Plame leak threatened national security. The O'Neil leak threatens only Bush's job security.

Lastly, the president himself has chosen untruth as a means of defence. He is quoted in the Washington Post as follows:

I appreciate former secretary O'Neill's service to our country," Bush said, rejecting O'Neill's description of the Iraq chronology. "In the initial stages of the administration, as you might remember, we were dealing with Desert Badger or flyovers and fly-betweens and looks, and so we were fashioning policy along those lines. And then all of a sudden September the 11th hit.

We now know that the White House was given warning of an al-Qai'da attack and (despite their denials) were also warned of the possible use of weaponised jetliners. September 11th did not 'all of a sudden, hit'. September 11th happened after an astonishing period of White House complacency.

Spies, Lies, and Weapons: What Went Wrong

Another step worth considering is forbidding the CIA or anyone else in government from making any intelligence estimates public for five or ten years. As someone firmly committed to the concept of open government, who believes that the CIA has benefited from its efforts in the past decade to be more open to the public, I dislike the idea of greater secrecy. However, when intelligence estimates become public, they have a huge impact on the course of foreign-policy debates, and administrations therefore find themselves with a great incentive to make sure the Agency's estimates support the Administration's preferred policy. If such estimates were not made public, an administration would have little reason to try to influence them. The government could still produce white papers, but they should come from the State Department - the agency that is, after all, officially charged with public diplomacy.

Finally, the U.S. government must admit to the world that it was wrong about Iraq's WMD and show that it is taking far-reaching action to correct the problems that led to this error. Iraq is not going to be the last foreign-policy challenge in which we must make choices based on ambiguous evidence. When the United States confronts future challenges, the exaggerated estimates of Iraq's WMD will loom like an ugly shadow over the diplomatic discussions. Fairly or not, no foreigner trusts U.S. intelligence to get it right anymore, or trusts the Bush Administration to tell the truth. The only way that we can regain the world's trust is to demonstrate that we understand our mistakes and have changed our ways.

Much of Pollack's article is self-serving and excuses his own advocacy for removing Saddam before the war. These last 2 paragraphs do raise some useful ideas. Intelligence was published, in Britain, America and Australia, as a way of authorising political judgements already made by those governments. Questioning the intelligence was impossible without access to the raw intelligence and that just made the war drums louder. A public admisison that the intelligence was wrong might be costly in political terms but it is inescapable if the US is ever to restore its diplomatic position.

Beattie opts for short election campaign

'We've had enough delays, we've had enough agony, we've had enough pain for Queensland children,' Mr Beattie said.

'We need a new government in place to implement the recommendations and make them happen and that's the reason why I've taken the decision to call the election today for the 7th of February.'

Political analyst Dr Paul Williams from Griffith University says he is not surprised the Premier has called the election this soon.

'Given that the Premier has in the last six months of last year probably weathered the toughest six months of his second term, with certain problems with the ambulance levy, problems with misuse of ministerial vehicles and of course the children in care inquiry,' he said.

'I'm not surprised that the Premier would be very keen to go to the polls in order to maximise his own political appeal.'

Mr Beattie cut short his summer holiday and went to Government House this morning to ask for an election.

There will be a 26 day campaign leading up to the poll.

Mr Beattie is looking for a third term in office and goes to the polls with a huge majority.

Labor holds 66 seats compared with the Coalition's 15.

This year Oz faces elections in Queensland and the ACT. If Beattie is re-elected (and it's hard to see how he won't be) Labor will say it helps them federally and the Coalition will say it was decided on state issues. Poll junkies will be watching closely to see how One Nation performs after the Pauline Hanson story last year. One Nation's performance will be read by some as a proxy for the size of the national security vote in the federale lection, although I think Abbot's involvement in Hanson's demise (but not her resurrection) makes that dubious.

The Man of Steel will almost certainly call a federal election before the end of the year. The double dissolution triggers expire on 11 August.

Latham reignites Iraq debate

Mr Latham said the government had claimed Australia had to go to war to find and destroy Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

'It was a war justified primarily to find and eliminate weapons of mass destruction. None were used in the conflict, none have been found since,' Mr Latham told Sydney radio 2UE.

'I think they made a mistake in going to a war on Iraq, whatever the reason or motivation was, I think it was a mistake.

'And on that basis it is a worry it was a war that was sustained on a premise that hasn't been proven and hasn't been justified.

'And for that reason you'd have to be worried about the conduct of Australian foreign policy.'

Mr Latham said Australia had to have very good reasons to go to war.

'We shouldn't be getting into overseas conflicts unless we've got the very best reason to do so,' he said.

In a rebuff to the close links between the government and the Bush administration, Mr Latham said a Labor government would act independently on issues ranging from Iraq to the proposed free trade agreement.

'We value the American alliance, but we value more the Australian national interest, and if there is a point of disagreement, of course we will stand up for what's best for this country,' he said.

The comments were immediately attacked by Acting Prime Minister John Anderson, who accused Mr Latham of defending the regime of Saddam Hussein and of other rogue states.

Howard is running for re-election without any real program by talking about national security and (so far) not much else. The increasing holes in the WMD story cannot be good news for him, especially after Blair's weekend admissions (blogged below) and now the O'Neill allegations. A Man of Steel who was sold a pup badly needs something else to talk about.

The attacks on Latham right after his election died away on the release of polling that all states except Queensland and all age groups agreed with his characterisation of Bush as the 'worst and most incompetent president'. The new information about Bush's governance cannot add much to Howard's own reputation as a shrewd operator. And shrewdness is all he has ever really offered.

Extreme heat on the rise: Climate model predicts more stifling summers.

The heatwave that paralysed Europe last summer was hailed as a harbinger of global warming by many, including climatologists who predicted wilder extremes in floods, droughts and storms thanks to climate change. Results from a climate model now add evidence to the idea that extreme temperature events are set to rise - for Europe at least.

More than 20,000 people are thought to have died as a result of Europe's heatwave last year.During June and July, temperatures across much of the continent
topped 40 �C.

Gee, it's a good thing the Earth is not warming.

One hour in 'The Den' that may seal Blair's fate

In the skies above Shanghai, at the centre of a scrum of reporters - some standing on seats to hold tape recorders in his face - Mr Blair was asked the crucial question: 'Why did you authorise the naming of David Kelly?'

'That is completely untrue,' snapped Mr Blair.

'Did you authorise anyone in Downing Street or in the Ministry of Defence to release David Kelly's name?' the reporter, Paul Eastham from the Daily Mail, persisted.

'Emphatically not,' Mr Blair said. 'I did not authorise the leaking of the name of David Kelly.'

It was, by any standards, a strong denial and one that kept the pack at bay. The search for how Dr Kelly's name entered the public domain moved from Mr Blair himself and towards the MoD, particularly Geoff Hoon, Secretary of State for Defence.

Last week, however, six months after that mid-air briefing, Mr Blair began to pay for his denial.

With the precision of the QC he is, Michael Howard has zeroed in on the evidence given to the Hutton inquiry by Sir Kevin Tebbit, the most senior civil servant in the MoD, in particular Sir Kevin's claim that the 'policy decision on the handling ... had not been taken until the PM's meeting of Tuesday [8 July]'.

Fairly soon, whether he wants to or not, Gordon Brown is going to find himself in Paul Keating's position in Hawke's last days - wondering if the government is about to bleed to death in parliament if he does not act.

Niue may return to New Zealand rule

Niue's status as a nation is under question after the cyclone that hit the tiny Pacific nation, causing more than $50 million damage.

In the aftermath of the storm, some island leaders are calling for a return to New Zealand governance, and expect the population to fall from about 1200 native Niueans to an unsustainable 500 people.

Such a drop would likely render the nation unviable. Niue currently receives $8m in aid a year from New Zealand, the equivalent of a cash hand-out of around $16,000 per head should the population fall to the predicted 500.

Fears for Niue's political survival come amid the declaration of a major health crisis over asbestos in the air, accusations of looting among destroyed villages and claims that early plans to alert the island's population to the cyclone were called off.

If Cyclone Heta is classified as an extreme weather event, then Niue could become the first nation extinguished by global warming. The Pacific has several other candidate nations, including Kiribati and Nauru. These are microstates, but their abandonment would make the world a poorer place.

'I will not hide' from Hutton

TONY BLAIR: I can say, but let me put it this way, I believe that we will but I agree, you know, we, there were many people who thought we were going to find this during the course of the actual operation.

Now we've got to see what the Iraq survey group come up with and, what is interesting, is that if you actually talk to experts in this field. I mean, someone said to me the other day for example, that if take it that we were looking for Saddam Hussein who is an individual on the move about whom we had reasonable intelligence.

We knew it was within an area of Tikrit, one particular city, and yet it took us six months to find him. In a land mass twice the size of the UK it may well not be surprising that you don't find where this stuff is hidden because part of the intelligence was that it was hidden and concealed. But you know we just have to wait and see.

The one thing I do think and hope people understand is that I received this intelligence and I believe it would have been irresponsible not to have acted upon it. And you can only imagine what would have happened if I ignored the intelligence and then something terrible had happened.

This is dishonest in 3 ways.

Blair is refusing to say he will even participate in the debate when Hutton releases his report. As is becoming customary he claims the browny point s of 'not hiding' while refusing to say he will lead the Commons debate.

Blair picks up the Rumsfeld line about the relative difficulties of finding WMDs and Saddam. As far as I know, no-one has claimed Iraq had mastered artificial intelligence to the extent that the alleged WMDs are capable of seeing an ISG search team coming and moving out of the way. The claim is a joke.

Lastly we have the apocalypse otherwise argument. It is pure and unadulterated hot air that marks rhetorical desperation rather than anything else. A responsible leader, who cared about the bloodshed on both sides, would have acted responsibly by questioning and analysing intelligence rather than sexing it up.

Maher Arar

Of course I thank all of the journalists for covering my story.

The past year has been a nightmare, and I have spent the past few weeks at home trying to learn how to live with what happened to me. I know that the only way I will ever be able to move on in my life and have a future is if I can find out why this happened to me.

I want to know why this happened to me. I believe the only way I can ever know why this happened is to have all the truth come out in a public inquiry.

My priority right now is to clear my name, get to the bottom of the case and make sure this does not happen to any other Canadian citizens in the future. I believe the best way to go about achieving this goal is to put pressure on the government to call for a public inquiry.

What is at stake here is the future of our country, the interests of Canadian citizens, and most importantly Canada's international reputation for being a leader in human rights where citizens from different ethnic groups are treated no different than other Canadians.

Thank you for your patience.

Maher Arar was detained by the US, deported to Syria under protest despite being a Canadian citizen, and there tortured for months before being returned to Canada. This practice is common enough to have generated its own CIA jargon - extraordinary rendition.

Candada's new prime minister has promised to pursue the issue with George Bush:

Mr. Martin has also promised to take up the issue of "respect for the Canadian passport," a reference to the case of Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen deported from New York to Syria and tortured there.

A couple of things have worried me about this incident, apart form the obvious and disgusting violation of human rights. Arar describes being delivered to the Syrian Mukhabarat and tortured for information related to the War on Terror. What is the relationship between the US and Syrian intelligence? Why was Syria ready to torture someone for information required by the US?

Herbal medicine boom threatens plants

The multimillion-pound boom in herbal medicine is threatening to wipe out up to a fifth of the plant species on which it depends, wrecking their natural habitats and jeopardising the health of millions of people in developing countries. And yet the herbal medicines industry has been accused of doing nothing about it.

Most people around the globe use herbal medicine for everyday healthcare, with as many as 80 per cent relying on it in some countries. But two-thirds of the 50,000 medicinal plants in use are still harvested from the wild, and research to be published later in 2004 suggests that between 4000 and 10,000 of them may now be endangered.

A study by Alan Hamilton, a plant specialist from the global environment network WWF, will point out that the market for herbal remedies in North America and Europe has been expanding by about 10 per cent a year for the last decade and the world market is now thought to be worth at least �11 billion. Many of the plants are harvested by poor communities in India and China whose livelihoods will suffer if the plants die out.

'It's an extremely serious problem,' Hamilton told New Scientist. He is a member of the World Conservation Union's Medicinal Plants Specialist Group, and has drawn his estimates of the number of species at risk from expert analyses of the IUCN's Red List of threatened plants. His study is due to be published in Biodiversity and Conservation.

Wow. I predict dramatic scenes in Newtown and Glebe as the news spreads.

Fornicating with Mr Darcy

Not long after her extraordinary discovery of the lost sex scenes of Jane Austen, Arielle Eckstut went on radio to discuss her find. She was joined by the president of the Jane Austen Society of North America, and a mysterious academic called Dr Elfrida Drummond. Both listened, enthralled, as Eckstut recounted the moment when, in a 'grand manor' in Britain, she was battling to open an old window and accidentally dislodged a small wooden box that had been hidden there for almost two centuries.

Inside was something beyond imagining: pages and pages covered in an exacting hand, detailing sex scenes between Elizabeth and Mr Darcy, Charlotte and Mr Collins, a not entirely successful encounter between Knightley and Churchill from Emma, and more. Austen, an author famed for her control over the unsaid, had apparently said it all, in explicit detail, but the scenes had been excised by a hidebound editor. Austen's heated correspondence with him was in the box, too.

A devotee of Austen's books, Eckstut was astonished and delighted by her discovery, and published a book, Pride and Promiscuity: The Lost Sex Scenes of Jane Austen. It was introduced by 'the most conservative of all modern Austen scholars', the Oxford-based Drummond, who announced that Eckstut had taken the accepted picture of the great author and turned it on its head. The radio station was inundated with calls from people wanting to find out more, and Eckstut was contacted by a doctoral student at Oxford University, who said he couldn't find Dr Drummond listed on the faculty records. Could Eckstut please supply him with contact details?

Very gently - though with some satisfaction - Eckstut pointed out to the young man that the radio program was broadcast on April 1. Dr Elfrida Drummond was, she explained, a fictitious character played by Eckstut's husband. Eckstut has indeed published a book of sex scenes between the most famous of Austen's characters, but it is a parody, 'a loving homage'.

Mr Darcy hadn't really 'put his hands on Elizabeth's breasts and pushed up each soft globe so that both were near escaping the rim of her chemise'. And Austen certainly didn't write about Charlotte dressing up in one of Lady Catherine de Bourgh's old dresses, giving Mr Collins a sound whipping while he crouched on all fours barking 'I have been very, very bad! May I please have another!'

Is nothing sacred anymore?

I killed people. I did it for my country

SAADI YACEF: Now, for the Arab population, there's really no reason for them to use terrorism. The real terrorism would be to go into the schools and begin to educate people and begin to bring them to a level of more scientific knowledge. You fight for something like this. They want to really apply a religion that's different from the religion of Muhammad. For example, in Algeria in certain places, if you're sitting in a chair and you're eating with a fork, what you're doing is considered to be against Islam. You're the enemy of Islam. Because the Prophet Muhammad didn't eat with a fork -- you have to eat with your fingers! And now there's terrorism in Algeria -- a little -- it's been going on for about 10 years. And children of a few years old are being killed. Why? Why? For what reason? They are free, in a country that's free. We shouldn't have pity for these kinds of people, because these people are really destroyers. What they're doing is not to defend a cause or the truth. If it was for a just cause, then yes. But just to go out and kill, to bring down two towers in New York, what's the result?

SALON: In Iraq, are the bombings of the American soldiers just?

SAADI YACEF: Yes. [Hesitates.] I would've given a lot of money and done a lot to get rid of Saddam. But where is the democracy? Arabs have never been democratic, only in a few countries.

[The allotted interview time ends, and Yacef and his entourage prepare to leave.]

SALON: But is that a problem of the Arabs or a problem of the West?

SAADI YACEF: It's a problem of the whole world. You have to learn to be democratic, developed over time. Somebody can't just come over to you and say, 'Now you have to be democratic.' It must be learned.

Yacef produced, and starred in, The battle of Algiers. He's now an Algerian senator. The interview is disturbing, but fascinating, especially his point that the French kept making the same errors in one colony after another and always insisted they were there for the good of the colonised people. What he does not address is why there was so little Arab opposition to Saddam or the other Arab dictators.

What we don't address is why the governments of the West deal with tyrants.

Deal for Camp X-ray Britons

Some of the British detainees at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba could be sent back to Britain without a guarantee they will face trial, it emerged yesterday.

Seven of the nine detainees - those deemed medium-risk by the US authorities - could be repatriated if the US is satisfied they would be managed in such a way that the Americans could be certain they posed no threat, Pierre Prosper, the US ambassador at large on war crimes issues said.

US officials suggested that this could include constant monitoring or surveillance by law enforcement agencies.

The softening of the US line could remove what was perceived to be the main stum bling block to repatriation - the inability of the British government to promise that the Guantanamo Britons would be prosecuted on their return to this country. The independent Crown Prosecution Service cannot be ordered to take on a case, while even if it did, equally independent judges have the power to throw cases out on human rights grounds.

What a tragedy for the Bush administration that Britain does not share the Australian government's passion for achieving a preferred judicial outcome.

Is Mars Ours? - The logistics and ethics of colonizing the red planet

But the future peopling of Mars is much more than a scientific endeavor. It is a step of historic and spiritual importance for the human race. Any group that seeks to garner support for human journeys to Mars must reassure people that this goal is broadly humanistic and environmentally conscientious. There is no reason why this can't be the case. The fanatical comments quoted above do not represent the majority view of Mars Society members; some are credible, thoughtful activists with an inclusive vision more likely to win wide support for continued Mars exploration. I hope they succeed in burying the 'pioneering the West' analogy before it does any more damage to the cause. While we're at it, let's retire the word 'colonization,' which carries a permanent stain, and talk instead about the 'cultivation' or 'animation' or 'peopling' of Mars. I know that some of you Mars hounds will dismiss the above as a bunch of PC nonsense. Fine, but it's your movement that is not yet taking the world by storm.

Grinspoon's article beat (but only just) the trial balloon being floated by the White House. As it happens I am enough of a space cadet to think a Mars mission is a fantastic idea. The Bush coterie almost certainly see this as a way to emphasise their boy's vision and not much more (there is after all, not much to emphasise) but even a seed planted for bad reasons can grow into a good thing.

Powell Admits No Hard Proof in Linking Iraq to Al Qaeda

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell conceded Thursday that despite his assertions to the United Nations last year, he had no 'smoking gun' proof of a link between the government of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and terrorists of Al Qaeda.

'I have not seen smoking-gun, concrete evidence about the connection,' Mr. Powell said, in response to a question at a news conference. 'But I think the possibility of such connections did exist, and it was prudent to consider them at the time that we did.'

Mr. Powell's remarks on Thursday were a stark admission that there is no definitive evidence to back up administration statements and insinuations that Saddam Hussein had ties to Al Qaeda, the acknowledged authors of the Sept. 11 attacks. Although President Bush finally acknowledged in September that there was no known connection between Mr. Hussein and the attacks, the impression of a link in the public mind has become widely accepted %u2014 and something administration officials have done little to discourage.

Mr. Powell offered a vigorous defense of his Feb. 5 presentation before the Security Council, in which he voiced the administration's most detailed case to date for war with Iraq. After studying intelligence data, he said that a 'sinister nexus' existed 'between Iraq and the Al Qaeda terrorist network, a nexus that combines classic terrorist organizations and modern methods of murder.'

Without any additional qualifiers, Mr. Powell continued, 'Iraq today harbors a deadly terrorist network, headed by Abu Musaab al-Zarqawi, an associate and collaborator of Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda lieutenants.'

This is contemptible. If Powell had told the UN he had no hard proof, or if Bush had told Congress he had no hard proof, there would have been no war. Even Howard and Blair might have been reluctant to join the enterprise of Iraq if they had been told there was no hard proof.

US climate policy bigger threat to world than terrorism

Tony Blair's chief scientist has launched a withering attack on President George Bush for failing to tackle climate change, which he says is more serious than terrorism.

Sir David King, the Government's chief scientific adviser, says in an article today in the journal Science that America, the world's greatest polluter, must take the threat of global warming more seriously.

'In my view, climate change is the most severe problem that we are facing today, more serious even than the threat of terrorism,' Sir David says.

The Bush administration was wrong to pull out of the Kyoto protocol, the international effort to limit the emission of greenhouse gases, and wrong to imply the protocol could adversely affect the US economy, Sir David says. 'As the world's only remaining superpower, the United States is accustomed to leading internationally co-ordinated action. But the US government is failing to take up the challenge of global warming.

A war on global warming would be difficult. It would require leadership of a lazy elite that's more used to chest-thumping than thinking.

Opera House to undergo $9m security upgrade

People who climb, damage or deface the Sydney Opera House could face up to six months jail and hefty fines under new security measures announced by the NSW government today.

NSW Premier Bob Carr today said an additional $9 million in state government funding would be used to upgrade security at Australia's most recognised international icon.

'Sydney is an open city and we are very conscious the Sydney Opera House needs optimal security,' Mr Carr told reporters in Sydney.

The money would be used to improve vehicle security at the building, provide new in-house cameras, and change the locks, which have not been touched since 1973.

The state government will also create a specific offence this year for those contemplating a so-called 'attack' on the building.

The security boost follows the actions of peace activists David Burgess, 33, and Will Saunders, 42, who were convicted of malicious damage after painting 'No War' on the tallest sail of the Sydney Opera House on March 18.

This a bad idea. It's an exact analogy to US proposals for a flagburning amendment. There's an existing offence of malicious damage. Is malicious damage to the Opera House to carry heavier penalties or is it just to be shadow legislation that restates an existing offence in different terms?

Just for the record I do not endorse painting slogans on the Opera House. I also do not endorse bad law made as a campaign tactic.

Iraq and WMDs

SILVER SPRING, MD.: If there were no WMDs, why was Saddam's regime so defiant toward the U.N. weapons inspection process? Did they really not believe that the U.N. or U.S. would eventually take action if Iraq did not comply with U.N. resolutions about their weapons programs?

BARTON GELLMAN: There are all kinds of things that could explain defiance. Most of them are speculative, and I don't spend a lot of time on speculation in my piece. Here are some things we know to be true:

Iraq really was hiding some documents, records and intentions;

Saddam Hussein resented the extraordinary intrusion of UN inspectors into his most sensitive national security institutions.

Saddam Hussein ruled through the perception of invulnerability and strength, and aspired to pan-Arab leadership, and weakness before the UN and the West did not help him there.

Another possibility is suggested by Hans Blix in today's story: You don't have to have a dog to post a 'beware of the dog' sign. With powerful enemies in Israel and Iran, Saddam Hussein may not have minded looking more dangerous than perhaps he was in fact.

The Carnegie Endowment is about to publish a report that confirms Gellman's article Iraq's Arsenal Was Only on Paper on the failure to find WMDs. More when that happens.

I would quit if I lied, Blair tells MPs

Tony Blair was forced on to the defensive yesterday when he admitted that he would have to resign as prime minister if he lied to parliament over his role in the outing of the government scientist, Dr David Kelly.

As Lord Hutton warned Britain's political classes against jumping to conclusions ahead of the publication of his report, the prime minister said he 'of course' accepted that ministers who misled MPs had to quit.

Mr Blair's remarks came after Michael Howard all but accused the prime minister of lying days after the death of Dr Kelly. In their first Commons clash of the new year, Mr Howard asked Mr Blair whether he stood by his statement of July 22, made on board a flight from Shanghai to Hong Kong, that he had 'emphatically' not leaked the name of Dr Kelly.

Mr Howard believes the prime minister's declaration may be highly damaging after Sir Kevin Tebbit, the permanent secretary at the Ministry of Defence, told the inquiry in October that Mr Blair chaired the key meetings during the 'naming strategy' - the convoluted process which led to the confirmation of the scientist's name. 'Either the permanent secretary or the prime minister is not telling the truth,' Mr Howard said.

Before everyone races to congratulate Tony Blair for this principled stand, I have to say I'll believe it when I see it. My guess is that this means only that Blair will continue to insist he told the truth no matter what evidence is piled up against him.

The Iraq Survey Group is being wound down. It has produced nothing except the interesting theory that ambitions, not weapons, of mass destruction, justify war. Blair's statements to parliament are already exposed as untrue. Expect lots of 'I believed at the time' or 'I don't have a reverse gear'. Do not expect 'Your majesty, I must resign my commission'.

The only thing that will change this is a clear and unambiguous finding by the Hutton inquiry. The Blair government has always denied an al-Qaiida/Saddam link so that issue is not in play. Note the standard of proof for whether the prime minister misled the house seems to be a lot more rigorous than the standard of proof for the actual existence of WMDs.

US orders airline toilet-training

The Chief Executive of the Board of Airline Representatives of Australia, Warren Bennett, says the directive is impossible to monitor and appears to be US paranoia.

He also says it could restrict passengers from exercising to avoid blood clots and deep-vein thrombosis on the 14 hour flight to the United States.

'It's often the case that passengers, particularly in economy class, where it is not always easy to get up and move about the cabin, they combine the two activities, and walk around the cabin and queue at the toilet, and move their legs, jiggle their feet, stamp their feet and move their arms around a bit to get the exercises that are necessary to ward off the possibility of DVT.'

I am blogging this SBS report purely because of the additional information about DVT. I would never blog something just for its spectacular headline. Promise. Really.

[US] Toilet queuing ban requires tact

A US demand for airline passengers to be banned from queuing for the toilet would need to be handled tactfully by Qantas, acting Prime Minister John Anderson said today.

Mr Anderson, who is also transport minister, said the government had no plans to similarly ban toilet crowding on incoming flights to Australia.

Qantas began informing passengers last night about the toilet queue ban but said it was too early yet to gauge customer reaction.

'The US Transport Security Administration are now requiring that passengers on flights to the US are not to congregate in groups in any areas of the aircraft, especially around the lavatories,' a Qantas spokeswoman said.

If the new counter-terrorism measure became an international industry standard, it would probably curtail airlines' plans to make bars and duty-free shops new features of in-flight service.

Mr Anderson said the directive seemed hard to handle.

'I guess what the US authorities are looking for is any kind of suspicious congregation of behaviour that might be in some way related to, you know, preparing for something nasty to launch an attack on a plane or something like that,' he said.

'This is going to require a bit of commonsense and a bit of tact.

'I wouldn't want to overreact, but I'd have to say, as the reports at the moment, I have to say do sound a little bit hard to handle.'

Qantas is advising passengers during the safety instructions and the pilot's first public address of the toilet restrictions.

God help anyone who reads an almanac to pass the time while they queue for the toilet. Stupid security measures happen for a lot of reasons. One reason is sanitary imperialism where the US starts issuing peremptory commands about how to use a toilet. If it had been handled in the usual way by government-to-government negotiations half the world might not be laughing so hard.

One hopes the next US diktat will not call for the shooting of any queuers. It's a 14 to 16 hours by air from Oz to the US west coast. A bladder can last only so long. Is jumping up and down with your legs crossed a permissible behaviour? Does the diktat tell us how many people define a queue? Is it hands up or else if you reach the toilet and discover you're not the first arrival?

Perhaps aircrew should just make frequent announcements that anyone who wants to use the toilet should raise their hand and wait for a flight attendant to give them permission.

Anderson was right that this order requires tact. He's a competent acting PM so I trust he'll use it when he discusses this idiocy with the US.

How the 'neo-cons' are taking over the world

There's something else going on, too. The proliferation of media outlets and the segmentation of society have meant that it's much easier for people to hive themselves off into like-minded cliques. Some people live in towns where nobody likes Bush. Others listen to radio networks where nobody likes Bill Clinton.

In these communities, half-truths get circulated and exaggerated. Dark accusations are believed because it is delicious to believe them. The White House aide Vince Foster was murdered. The Saudis warned the Bush Administration before the September 11 attacks.

You get to choose your own reality. You get to believe what makes you feel good. You can ignore inconvenient facts so rigorously your picture of the world is one big distortion.

I am disappointed in the Sydney Morning Herald for carrying Brooks' drivel that opposing neoconservatism makes you an antisemite. However he does make a useful point that the scattered tribes of the blogosphere and elsewhere get to select news that supports their own view of the world.

Brooks could contribute to ending this unhappy situation by not trying to squelch all critique of the Bush foreign policy as recycled antisemitism.

More on this here, here here, and here.

A great country is being propelled by the wrong forces

SALON: There are two ways that those critical of the war have described the motivations behind it. One interpretation is completely mercenary: It's just about oil. But some of these people -- however much we may disagree with them -- are also motivated by ideals that are, as you put it, often religious in nature. That's what's confusing about it. The left is used to thinking that it has idealism on its side. These people have these ideals that may seem crackpot to us, but they believe they're going to change the world for the better.

LE CARRE: They do. That's what's really terrifying. In order to carry out their campaigns, they have to reduce the world to black and white. They have to arrogate to themselves the right to determine what is a bad state and what is a good state. They also arrogate to themselves not just the right to take preemptive action, but to take preventative action. There's a difference in international law. The effect is that the superpower can say, 'We don't like the look of that country. It has bad intentions, and we will attack it.' It doesn't have to say that the country is threatening us.

The attack on Iraq was planned, we now know, about three or four years before it took place. It was 9/11 that legitimized it. Through an extraordinary trick of public persuasion in which they were greatly assisted by the corporate media, the neoconservative ideologues persuaded the U.S. to a great extent -- one's told seven out of 10 people -- that somehow Saddam was mixed up in the destruction of the twin towers and the attack on the Pentagon. He wasn't. They admit they have no evidence of this. Anyone who's taken even one bus ride through the Middle East would surely know that between the secular Baathists of Iraq and the infuriated fundamentalists that follow Osama bin Laden there is no conceivable bond possible. The religious extremists loathed Saddam because Saddam and the Baath Party were secular and anti-clerical.

I've got a serious weakness for spy novels, and really I expected a review of Le Carr�'s new novel. Instead I got a review of a different kind of fiction. On 24 December the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board is reported to have found:

After reviewing the matter for several months, the intelligence board -- chaired by former national security adviser Brent Scowcroft -- has determined that there was "no deliberate effort to fabricate" a story, the source said.

Instead, the source said, the board believes the White House was so eager "to grab onto something affirmative" about Hussein's nuclear ambitions that it disregarded warnings from the intelligence community that the claim was questionable.

The source said that at the time of the State of the Union speech, there was no organized system at the White House to vet intelligence, and the informal system that was followed did not work in the case of that speech. The White House has since established procedures for handling intelligence in presidential speeches by including a CIA officer in the speechwriting process.

The PFIAB finding was leaked on 24 December.

Lies can be defined in two ways. The world is not flat. If I say the world is flat, that statement is untrue. On one view my subjective belief is all that matters and my statement is not a lie. On another view my subjective belief is not sufficient to ground a defence against lying, and I'd need to establish that I arrived at my statement by some valid process.

When a president tells congress about Nigerien uranium, as part of a case for war, there is a clear duty to arrive at any conclusions about Nigerien uranium by some valid process. That did not happen.

John Dean has written:

To put it bluntly, if Bush has taken Congress and the nation into war based on bogus information, he is cooked. Manipulation or deliberate misuse of national security intelligence data, if proven, could be "a high crime" under the Constitution's impeachment clause. It would also be a violation of federal criminal law, including the broad federal anti-conspiracy statute, which renders it a felony "to defraud the United States, or any agency thereof in any manner or for any purpose."

The Scowcroft defence might work for a private citizen. George Bush is not a private citizen.

Trade talks focus on better deal for farmers

Acting Prime Minister John Anderson today met with a US Congress delegation to discuss a free trade agreement with America.

Federal Health Minister Tony Abbott also attended the meeting.

Mr Anderson says the discussions were been fruitful and worthwhile.

He says he made it plain that it's important for Australia to have more access for beef, dairy and sugar in the US markets.

He says he also indicated that the benefits of the Pharmaceutical Benefit Scheme to Australian consumers should not be diminished.

It's good news that the PBS is off the table. Whether we make any progress on access to the US farm market is another story. Anderson is dead right that an FTA without agriculture is not worth having.

When Canada reported a case of mad cow disease the US immediately banned the import of Canadian beef. That ban stands, while the US delegations travel the world asking for the ban on the import of US beef to be lifted. American exceptionalism seems to have a lot to do with pork as well as beef.

Protest by Nauru

I read with concern Senator Amanda Vanstone's comments (4/1) that 'asylum seekers on Nauru who refused to eat are not the responsibility of the Australian Government.'

Our Memorandum of Understanding obliges Australia to ensure the day-to-day management of asylum seeker facilities, including medical treatment.

Nauru has provided medical attention to the hunger strikers for humanitarian reasons. Australia has not discussed the hunger strike with us, let alone formally seek our assistance.

We have called on Australia for the urgent provision of medical and nursing staff, supplies and equipment.

Not only are the lives of hunger strikers at stake, but also the medical needs of Nauruans, owing to the pressure on our health system.

The Australian Government must act now to recognise its MOU with Nauru as well as its humanitarian obligation by providing adequate care and treatment for the asylum seekers.

K. Clodumar MP, Minister for Finance, Republic of Nauru

The Pacific solution was always an absurdity. What is the advantage of processing refugees outside Australia at greater cost and in worse conditions than processing them within our borders? We should not be surprised we are breaching our own MOU. We are, after all, already breaching the Geneva Convention on Refugees.

Vice-Regal News

On Friday 2 January 2004, at Cairns International Airport, the Governor-General, His Excellency Major General Michael Jeffery AC, CVO, MC was represented at the arrival in Australia of His Excellency Mr France Albert Rene, President of the Republic of the Seychelles, by Commander N J Wark, RAN, an Honorary Aide-de-Camp.

How on earth did this vital public ceremony escape the notice of the Man of Steel? And why was the governor-general allowed to be represented when the Man of Steel could have graced the occasion?

Seriously, what was the last major public occasion the governor-general was allowed to attend?

Of crocodiles and Steve Irwin

When Steve 'A croc spared my baby' Irwin was heard waxing lyrical about George Bush at John Howard's garden party, we should have realised then that he had absolutely no idea about the world's most dangerous predators.

Who Is More Reliable, NASA or NIMA?

I have no idea who is right, but I'm curious now, and look forward to the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's HiRISE (High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment) which might decide the dispute. If NIMA was really taken in by 'noise' it will definitely shake my faith in the part of the intelligence apparatus I always ranked miles above the CIA. [#INCLUDE joke about finding WMD's on Mars here.]

NIMA handles satellite based geographical intelligence for the US government.

The policy-maker as automaton has dominated a lot of the Iraq war story. A submeme running through that story has been the superiority of signal intelligence to human intelligence. I think that superiority is signally exaggerated and it's interesting that NASA (an empire of technique if ever there was one) agrees.

The West has poor human intelligence in the Middle East because we have invested so little in understanding the people of the Middle East. We have massive (not good) signal intelligence in the Middle East because there's a lot of money to be had in the manufacture and deployment of satellites, much more than by investing in quintessentially public goods like university Mideast schools or trained and competent analysts employed by (horror!) the government.

'Star suburb' is des res for aliens

Astronomers have identified a habitable zone in the Milky Way galaxy, a kind of suburb of stars with the elements needed for life, and old enough for sophisticated civilisations to have developed.

The good news for those seeking extraterrestrial intelligence is that 10% of our galaxy - perhaps 10bn stars - could be ringed by rocky planets big enough to hold on to their atmosphere and water. The bad news is that they are on average a billion years older than the sun.

'This should be a sobering result,' Charles Lineweaver, of the University of New South Wales, says today in Science. 'A billion years is a long, long time.'

As we speak our culture is blasting outward in radio and television signals at the speed of light. Assuming anyone still uses radio after a billion years, they'll be judging us by the quality of our broadcasting.

We started transmission in 1921 which means the volume where our stuff can be received is now a sphere 164 lightyears in diameter. That is not a totally encouraging thought.

Professor unearths 8,000-year-old wine

Scientists have discovered the world's oldest wine - a vintage produced by Stone Age people 8,000 years ago. The find pushes back the history of wine by several hundred years.

New discoveries show how Neolithic man was busy 'bottling' and deliberately ageing red wine in Georgia, the former Soviet republic. Although no liquid wine from the period has survived, scientists have now found and tested wine residues discovered on the inner surfaces of 8,000-year-old ceramic storage jars.

Biochemical tests on the ancient pottery wine jars from Georgia are showing that at this early period humans were deliberately adding anti-bacterial preservatives to grape juice so that the resulting wine could be kept for longer periods after fermentation. The preservative used was tree resin, which contains several bactericidal compounds, says Professor Patrick McGovern of the University of Pennsylvania Museum, the scientist leading the study of ceramics from the 6th and 5th millennia BC. The wine may have tasted something like retsina, the resin-preserved wine still popular in Greece.

I guess this is more seasonal (grog-related) blogging. The silly season will pass and I will finish my opus on odious debt and perhaps slip in a few thoughts on what might happen this year. Meanwhile, the archaeology of wine is a good way to pass the blog.

Australian Politics

Well, it's live. I'll be adding more dates over the next week or so. I am beginning to feel like a public service announcement. Any volunteers who want to help maintain the beast are welcome to email me.

A Yank in Oz

If you're an American citizen living abroad (like me), it's time to mail in your 2004 request for an absentee ballot - don't wait until the week before the polls open, because it'll be too late by then. Visit the Federal Voting Assistance Program (FVAP) web site, download the instructions for the U.S. state you last lived in, and mail in the forms with your signature. It takes all of ten minutes and a stamp.

Yeah, what he said. You owe it to the rest of us.

Anderson prepared to get hands dirty

DEPUTY Prime Minister John Anderson, who slipped quietly into the top job yesterday, will divide his time over the next few days between running the country and cleaning out the cattle troughs on the family property at Gunnedah in northern NSW.

The National Party leader will be acting Prime Minister until January 25, while John Howard takes time off to watch the Sydney Test match, play the occasional round of golf and catch up on some reading.

Mr Anderson also plans some time at his family's beach hideaway on the NSW north coast - but he will take work with him and take the opportunity to campaign in marginal National Party seats.

You have to love January, when life's a beach and the seat of government moves to somewhere outside Gunnedah, the koala capital of the planet. In the 1970s Doug Anthony used to announce he was running the country by flying an Australian flag from his caravan and go surfing between looking after the affairs of state.

I've been fiddling with iCal lately and I'm putting together a calendar for election days and parliamentary sittings. There's no fixed date for the federal election, but it must be within 3 years of the first meeting of each House of Representatives. This House was elected on 10 November 2001 and first met on 12 February 2002. While that makes 12 May 2005 the last date the Man of Steel will almost certainly go to the country before the end of this year. Leaving it until next May might look too much like the Man of Steel is scared of Iron Mark.

Why Australia must join the US missile plan

We would be reckless not to help and co-operate with America's defence plan, writes Colin Rubenstein.

You don't need to read the whole article. The rest of the article adds nothing to the first graf. Except for forgetting to list Israel as one of the nuclear powers.

Happy New Year

Ah Xmash, which you spend with your family, and New Year which you shpend with people you actually like. And Xmash New Year blogging when people attribute your shilence to falling into a vat of brandy. I didn't. It'sh jusht not true. There'sh no truth in Gianna'sh shpecious allegationsh at all.

And if the fireworksh and pyrotechnicsh in my shkull shtop long enough I'll go shee the real thing over Shydney Harbour. Enjoy your New Year feshtivities ash mush ash I mean to enjoy mine.

burp

The resht is shilence...

...at leasht until next year.

Air traffic controllers in the dark on Sept. 11

At La Guardia, the tapes make clear, officials in the tower knew very little. Just after 9 a.m., shortly before the second plane hit the trade center, an unidentified woman in the La Guardia control tower spoke by phone with a Port Authority police officer, also unidentified on these transcripts.

'Do you know what happened at the World Trade Center?' the woman in the tower asked the policeman. 'Yeah, we ... we just got it from what we are getting on the news,' he responded. 'We are sending a whole bunch of people down there, just so you guys know. We think a plane crashed into it.'

'A plane crashed into it?' she asked.

'A plane crashed into the World Trade Center, yeah,' the officer said. The trade center's twin towers could be seen from the tower at La Guardia, and as smoke billowed from the north tower, one supervisor looked at Lower Manhattan through binoculars and saw the second plane circling around the towers, according to an aviation official.

At that moment, fighter jets from Otis Air Force Base in Massachusetts were racing toward the city and were about 71 miles, or 114 kilometers, from the trade center, eight minutes' flying time, according to testimony at a 9-11 Commission hearing.

Nothing on the tapes shows that the La Guardia controllers knew that the planes flying into their airspace had been seized by terrorists, or that military aircraft were screaming in pursuit over the Hudson River. Commercial airliners continued to line up at La Guardia for takeoff, the transcripts show, as the second hijacked plane plunged into the south tower of the trade center at 9:02 a.m. Four minutes later, the air traffic in the area was grounded.

At 9:07 a.m., a Federal Aviation Administration ground dispatcher contacted planes getting ready for departure. 'There's nobody that's going to be leaving La Guardia,' the dispatcher said. 'Everybody just stand by.'

The US response on 9/11 shows a pattern of isolated agencies which were neither communicating with each other nor getting any central direction from the president. The traditional no-one could have imagined defence has been proved untrue. The choices remain incompetence or negligence.

How the British Spy Agency MI6 Secretly Misled A Nation Into War With Iraq

SCOTT RITTER: Well, it's absurd in the extreme. The allegation that I was using MI-6 material. First of all: what allegation that I was using MI-6? In regards to Mass Appeal, the statement of fact that I put forward is that UNSCOM provided data to MI-6, which then MI-6 used in the press. That's no longer unfounded. The British Government has acknowledged this. They have acknowledged the existence of Operation Mass Appeal and its role in, you know, serving as a conduit of propaganda information to the media.

So, I believe that what we're talking about here is that the British Government needs to be careful here, because, remember, there was an inquiry by Lord Hutton into the death of David Kelly, the former British scientist, who tragically took his own life after he was exposed by the British Government as a source of information to the BBC. During this inquiry, MI-6 was called to testify, and MI-6 stated on record that it played no role in shaping public opinion, that all it did was provide, you know, intelligence assessment to the British Government, and that was all its job was: collecting intelligence data and then providing assessments on this data and giving it to the British Government. Now, you know, after being summoned to testify under oath for an official committee, the British Government has to acknowledge that: "No, wait a minute, there was an intelligence operation run by MI-6, which did involve, you know, passing intelligence to media outlets for propaganda purposes." The revelation of Mass Appeal has totally contradicted, you know, sworn testimony of British intelligence services, and this should cause great consternation not only for Lord Hutton and his inquiry, which it appears now they were misled or lied to, but also the British Parliament, which needs to take a closer look, in my opinion, at how public opinion was shaped by the British Government in regards to, you know, alleged threats coming from Iraq in the form of weapons of mass destruction. Let's keep this all in focus, by noting that Tony Blair said that there were massive stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. His government published a dossier which backed up these unfounded allegations.

Now, we are almost ten months into an occupation of Iraq, and no such weaponry has been found. That should be everyone's focus. Where are the weapons? Why did the British Government say these weapons existed before the war, and if the British Government didn't have the data necessary to sustain these allegations, were they lying when they made their assessments or were they simply manipulating the public? This is something that should be looked into. The existence of operations like Mass Appeal run by British intelligence services designed to manipulate public opinion should be examined in great detail.

Witnesses denied anything like Operation Mass Appeal before Lord Hutton and now its existence has been confirmed. We have a documented case of the British intelligence agencies lying about the political preparation for the Iraq war. The whole case for that war was built on intelligence reports by the same agencies.

Both the Blair and Bush governments have devoted a lot of energy to destroying traditional checks and balances. When questioned they have tended to come up only with further passionate avowals to try and make true what is untrue.

W B Yeats said it much better than I ever could:

The best lack all convictions, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Goodbye sunshine

It turns out that Ohmura was the first to document a dramatic effect that scientists are now calling 'global dimming'. Records show that over the past 50 years the average amount of sunlight reaching the ground has gone down by almost 3% a decade. It's too small an effect to see with the naked eye, but it has implications for everything from climate change to solar power and even the future sustainability of plant photosynthesis. In fact, global dimming seems to be so important that you're probably wondering why you've never heard of it before. Well don't worry, you're in good company. Many climate experts haven't heard of it either, the media has not picked up on it, and it doesn't even appear in the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

I will blog more on global dimming (the reduction in sunhsine not the dominance of George Bush) just as soon as I find a way to blame someone for it. I am thinking especially of people who break their eggs at the wrong end.

Re-insurer counts cost of global warming

The [Munich Re] report says the natural disasters have also claimed at least 50,000 lives worldwide.

A senior research analyst for Australia's AMP capital sustainable funds team, Ian Woods, says the insurance industry is recognising the impact of global warming.

'I think Munich Re, like other re-insurance companies, are really starting to realise the extra costs of global warming on the insurance industry due to natural disasters such as floods, hurricanes, hailstorms and drought,' Mr Woods said.

Mr Woods has analysed the methodology Munich Re used to reach its conclusions about the dangers of global warming and he says it is well founded.

'Munich Re have done some really interesting studies on this particular issue and looked at the occurrence of major natural disasters over the years and they've seen the frequency of these disasters increasing over the last couple of years and they said it's strictly related to climate change,' he said.

If Munich Re is correct, the world can expect a sharp increase in insurance costs and the toll of human misery unless governments and industry take steps to reduce reliance on fossil fuels.

That is a view contested by some scientists and companies in the mining and resources sector.

Swiss Re seems to agree.

Bremer contradicts Blair on mass destruction weapons in Iraq

The US civil adminstrator for Iraq has denied the existence of laboratories in Iraq making weapons of mass destruction for which British Prime Minister Tony Blair says US-led teams have massive evidence.

But in a pre-taped interview scheduled for transmission on Sunday, Paul Bremer retreated when he learned that it was Blair who had made the claim.

Asked about the claim without being told first of the source, Bremer said: 'I don't know where those words come from but that is not what (Iraq Survey Group chief) David Kay has said.'

The US-led Iraq Survey Group is hunting for weapons of mass destruction.

'I have read (Kay's) reports so I don't know who said that,' Bremer said in an interview on the British ITV1 channel with Jonathan Dimbleby.

'It sounds like a bit of a red herring to me,' the American continued. 'It sounds like someone who doesn't agree with the policy sets up a red herring then knocks it down.'

But Bremer retreated when told the claims were made by none other than President George W. Bush's staunchest ally Blair.

'There is actually a lot of evidence that had been made public,' he said.

Amazing. Apparently the massive laboratories network is a red herring and is supported by a lot of evidence.

The real herring, for which there is an amazing amount of evidence, is the continuing inflation and fabrication of the WMD claims.

The Very Secret Journals of the Fellowship of the Ring

I am happy to announce (over much coffee after spending 23:30 to 03:13 watching the Return of the King that the The Very Secret Diaries of the Fellowship of the Ring are to be continued by a different writer as The Very Secret Journals of the Fellowship of the Ring...

Anyone know a good way to get some sleep after raving about the film over way too much coffee at 03:30 in the morning?

Happy Christmas

Thanks for reading my stuff, thanks for commenting. I hope everyone survives the relatives you only see at Christmas and the season brings you everything you want.

D�clarations, Mises au point, Messages, Lettres de Sa Majest� Norodom Sihanouk

The king of Cambodia has a blog (you'll need to read French) but the governor-general of Australia is silent. Why is this?

PM asked if he could borrow plumed hat. Told him to get a grip.

PM asked if he could open parliament. Told him to get a grip.

PM suggested he get an official uniform including an ornamental circlet or head covering, made of precious metal set with jewels. Told him to get a grip.

PM suggested that next time he gets sworn in by several archbishops in a cathedral with an ecstatic crowd yelling: 'Vivat primum ministrem!' at the top of their voices. Told him to get a grip.

The viceregal blog is perhaps not such a great idea after all...

Heat is on in the great 600-metre dog paddle

It's a unique variation on the traditional Christmas Eve get-together, a chance for the spectators to catch up with friends and family.

Today Roger Harvey is hoping his affectionate mongrel, Teddy, can swim to his third successive win in the small-dog category.

'Before it starts, they all start to scrap and sniff each other,' said Mr Harvey, 47, a cartoonist from Bangalow, on the far North Coast.

'But then they all become very focused and bark hysterically. Teddy didn't know he could swim until three years ago when he chased another dog.'

When Mr Harvey first entered the contest a few years ago, his mother-in-law, Madeleine Gilmour, gave him 'a withering stare' - upset that a dog swim had taken priority over a family gathering. But these days, with Teddy's success a source of pride, and given the popularity of the competition, the family drinks and dinner have been postponed - if only for a few hours.

Watching Teddy go through his paces yesterday was Ben King, a Scotland Island local and wharf builder whose legendary black kelpie, Diesel, is a repeat winner in the big-dog category.

Mr King, 28, said he was not keen to enter this year's competition, but cited no particular reason. 'Who knows, though? I might have change of heart,' he said, eyeing off a smaller rival.

The Great Scotland Island Dog Paddle is one of Sydney's sillier institutions. That's why it's important. Legend has it that some years ago a famous champion died before the race, was fibreglassed by his owner and then towed to victory on a long rope. And I had to blog something in case anybody thought I'd been taken by a shark.

Xmas is strange in this part of the world. We sing endless songs about snow, which most of us have never seen, and fantasise about a white Christmas when the thermometer is registering around 35 Celsius. You used to be able to buy spray cans of artificial snow to apply to your windows...

After that, competitive dog paddling even by deceased dogs, seems less surreal.

US Saddam claims being challenged

US intelligence officers have concluded that Saddam was directing the postwar insurgency inside Iraq, playing a far more active role than thought.

Despite his bewildered appearance when he was hauled from his hiding hole last weekend, he is believed to have been issuing regular instructions on targets and tactics through five trusted lieutenants.

Documents found in Saddam's briefcase indicated that he had been kept informed of the progress of the insurgency, but did not suggest he had overall control of operations by former Baath Party loyalists. But since the arrest and interrogation of guerilla leaders named in the paperwork, US investigators now believe Saddam headed an elaborate network of rebel cells.

The investigators have put together a picture of Saddam's support structure, enabling him to issue commands without using satellite phones, which monitoring devices can hear.

McGeough stayed in Baghdad throughout the war as an independent journalist. His analysis has generally been reliable. It's another question that will play out over the next few weeks. My first impulse is to ask how Saddam, a strategic and tactical moron who had alienated most of his armed forces by privileging the SRG, somehow turned into a competent guerilla commander with the loyalty of his irregulars.