Grand Ayatollah Sayyid Ali Husaini Sistani - Why we'd better listen to Iraq's influential cleric

But the odds of a peaceful handover depend entirely on Sistani. The United States is not about to see all the blood spilled and money spent by occupation forces go toward the creation of a new hardline Islamic republic. Sistani will have to decide whether or not to endorse a slow, imperfect transition state. What if he skunks the deal? It's nearly unthinkable that he would call for armed revolt, but it could happen without him. 'Sistani may lose control of the masses,' warned Amatzia Baram, an expert on Iraqi politics at the U.S. Institute of Peace. If the Shiites stop following his lead, 'it's anybody's guess what happens.' Alongside Sistani's moderation one must take into account his aggressive young rival, Moqtada al-Sadr, and countless others who would be glad to push the Shiites toward war.

Sistani is a deeply religious man who is also a survivor. Living in Najaf, a holy city and burial place haunted by Shiite passion for martyrdom, he has emerged as a leader through quiet rationalism. When his fatwa summoned thousands into the streets of Baghdad, Sistani crossed the line from scholar to activist. In many ways, we're all lucky that he is the voice of Iraq's Shiites, but by playing politics, he is entering a dangerous arena. A powerful Shiite cleric is calling for a peaceful, internationally moderated democracy in Iraq. Just across the border, Iran's theocracy is wrestling with the same issues, and from Egypt to Malaysia leaders struggle to integrate Islam and democracy. Behind the rhetoric of regime change George Bush added the promise that America would make that integration happen in Afghanistan and Iraq. Sistani has dared him to do it.

We know the public answer from the Bush forward strategy of freedom speech. Clearly Bush had better show much greater seriousness in carrying out the promises of that speech than we have seen thus far.

Today editor 'checked Gilligan's notes'

The Today editor was never called as a witness by Lord Hutton and his written submission was never handed to the inquiry because the BBC legal team mistakenly thought the judge would not rule on those parts of the editorial process about which he didn't hear evidence.

According to his witness statement, Marsh claims he had agreed with Gilligan what he was going to say in his scripted report going out just after 7.30am.

That script should have formed the basis of his two-way report at 6.07am.

Marsh is believed to be furious because he has been savagely criticised by Lord Hutton without having had the chance to defend himself and is consulting lawyers about the possibility of challenging some of the judge's verdict.

Marsh was not called as a witness to the Hutton inquiry, much to the surprise of many including the former editor of Today Rod Liddle.

I've blogged previously about Hutton's odd conclusions about things that cast no light. Now we have a case where Hutton delivers a damning conclusion without hearing a witness.

291.(2) The communication by the media of information (including information obtained by investigative reporters) on matters of public interest and importance is a vital part of life in a democratic society. However the right to communicate such information is subject to the qualification (which itself exists for the benefit of a democratic society) that false accusations of fact impugning the integrity of others, including politicians, should not be made by the media. Where a reporter is intending to broadcast or publish information impugning the integrity of others the management of his broadcasting company or newspaper should ensure that a system is in place whereby his editor or editors give careful consideration to the wording of the report and to whether it is right in all the circumstances to broadcast or publish it. The allegations that Mr Gilligan was intending to broadcast in respect of the Government and the preparation of the dossier were very grave allegations in relation to a subject of great importance and I consider that the editorial system which the BBC permitted was defective in that Mr Gilligan was allowed to broadcast his report at 6.07am without editors having seen a script of what he was going to say and having considered whether it should be approved.

(3) The BBC management was at fault in the following respects in failing to investigate properly the Government's complaints that the report in the 6.07am broadcast was false that the Government probably knew that the 45 minutes claim was wrong even before it decided to put it in the dossier. The BBC management failed, before Mr Sambrook wrote his letter of 27 June 2003 to Mr Campbell, to make an examination of Mr Gilligan's notes on his personal organiser of his meeting with Dr Kelly to see if they supported the allegations which he had reported in his broadcast at 6.07am. When the BBC management did look at Mr Gilligan's notes after 27 June it failed to appreciate that the notes did not fully support the most serious of the allegations which he had reported in the 6.07am broadcast, and it therefore failed to draw the attention of the Governors to the lack of support in the notes for the most serious of the allegations.

According to Marsh the notes were checked before the first broadcast. Hutton (as is standard with these inquiries) notified a number of people that they faced criticism and gave them a chance to answer that criticism. It defies logic that Hutton neither heard from marsh not notified him that he faced criticism.

I boldfaced the principle outlined by Hutton which the media should give contested allegations. That principle is higher than Hutton demands of the government in publishing war dossiers. Hutton cites passages from Reynolds v Irish Newspapers to support his view. I'll turn to unpacking that conclusion (itself contested by a number of eminent lawyers) over the next few days.

Howard dogged by Iraq intelligence doubts

KERRY O'BRIEN: It was about whether he had enough of an arsenal to present a clear and present danger.

JOHN HOWARD: I'm sorry, Kerry.

The argument was about whether in the light of the evidence of Iraq's non-compliance with successive UN resolutions, the correct course of action was the action taken by the coalition or whether we should further persevere with further UN processes.

There was no argument at the time about the existence of WMD.

The debate was whether the UN process should be further utilised rather than taking military action.

KERRY O'BRIEN: In other words, whether the weapons inspectors, under the UN's auspices, should be allowed to continue searching?

JOHN HOWARD: Kerry, that is an argument about process, not about existence.

I am not absolutely convinced that 'Process, not existence!' will fly as a campaign slogan. I am also not clear how it excuses Howard from at least examining the evidence (the evidence he is now beginning, ever so quietly, to gently tiptoe away from) to find out whether it was correct.

I am also very, very unsure that mere belief in WMDs is a sufficient case for war, as opposed to believing in WMDs which actually constitute a clear and present danger. As always, Howard takes a more extreme position on this than Blair and Bush and offers less justification.

There was argument about the existence of WMDs. Hans Blix told the Security Council on 19 March:

Another matter - and one of great significance - is that many proscribed weapons and items are not accounted for. To take an example, a document, which Iraq provided, suggested to us that some 1,000 tonnes of chemical agent were "unaccounted for". One must not jump to the conclusion that they exist. However, that possibility is also not excluded. If they exist, they should be presented for destruction. If they do not exist, credible evidence to that effect should be presented.

We are fully aware that many governmental intelligence organizations are convinced and assert that proscribed weapons, items and programmes continue to exist. The US Secretary of State presented material in support of this conclusion. Governments have many sources of information that are not available to inspectors. Inspectors, for their part, must base their reports only on evidence, which they can, themselves, examine and present publicly. Without evidence, confidence cannot arise.

It's really quite a long way from Howard's claim of 'no argument' to 'without evidence, no confidence can exist.' There is mounting evidence that gives confidence that UNMOVIC's tentative view was correct.

Iraq's WMD: the big lie?

The key points the intelligence community now wants placing on the record are:

Firstly, there was a problem with Iraq, particularly over the interpretation of the WMD issue. Many said they had been openly sceptical about the presence of WMD in Iraq for years. There was a systematic failure, they believe, in the way intelligence was interpreted. This was because they were under pressure to provide the government with what it wanted, namely that Iraq possessed WMD and that it posed a clear and present danger.

Secondly, they say intelligence was 'cherry-picked' about Iraq: that damning intelligence against Iraq was selectively chosen, whilst intelligence assessments, which might have worked against the build-up to war, were sidelined. The government was looking for anything that would cast Iraq in a negative light.

Thirdly, they claim that a political agenda had crept into the work of the intelligence community and they found themselves in the position of taking orders from politicians. When asked if direct lies were told to the British public, the answer was that the intelligence they supplied was one- sided and produced on demand to politicians.

Fourthly, the intelligence community got into the habit of making worst-case scenarios and these were used to make factual claims by politicians. The intelligence community accepts that intelligence was used for political ends. But they also understand that intelligence is not supposed to help politicians justify their actions as that distorts the nature of what intelligence work is about.

While they believe they are not in the firing line over Hutton, they also realise that they are going to have to think long and hard about the future of British intelligence. They stressed that they accepted that there would be changes in the way British intelligence operates, adding that they wanted changes in order to maintain their integrity.

The mail on Sunday published this article on 25 January, before release of the Hutton report. Since then we've had the chief CBW analyst tell us that his views on the 45 minute claim were overruled and we've had Tony Blair tell the House of Commons he was unaware, when the dossier was published, that the 45 minutes claim only covered battelfield weapons.

Meanwhile, back at the inquiry, Lord Hutton heard from Dr Jones and said only:

465.��This matter was considered by the ISC and in the conclusions to its report of September 2003 it stated at page 44:

R. The Agencies and the JIC reported that none of their staff had concerns about the 24 September dossier. Two individuals in the DIS wrote to their line managers to register their concerns. We were told that these concerns were discussed within the DIS in the normal way. CDI agreed the text of the draft dossier, which was informed by intelligence that he, but not the two individuals, had seen. We have seen that intelligence and understand the basis on which CDI and JIC took the view they did. The concerns were not brought to the attention of the Defence Secretary or the JIC Chairman. (Paragraph 114)

S. We regard the initial failure by the MoD to disclose that some staff had put their concerns in writing to their line managers as unhelpful and potentially misleading. This is not excused by the genuine belief within the DIS that the concerns had been expressed as part of the normal lively debate that often surrounds draft JIC Assessments within the DIS. We are disturbed that after the first evidence session, which did not cover all the concerns raised by the DIS staff, the Defence Secretary decided against giving instructions for a letter to be written to us outlining the concerns. (Paragraph 104 and 115).

T. It is important that all DIS staff should be made aware of the current procedures for recording formal concerns on draft JIC Assessments. We recommend that if individuals in the intelligence community formally write to their line managers with concerns about JIC Assessments the concerns are brought to the attention of the JIC Chairman. (Paragraph 105 and 116)

As I have set out Dr Jones' evidence at some length and as this matter has been considered by the ISC I consider that it is unnecessary for me to express an opinion on it.

Truly, an amazing number of things seem either to cast no light on His Lordship's inquiry or to be unnecessary for him to form an opinion. Jones' article is being described as a bombshell. But nothing went bang for Lord Hutton.

Why the UN had it right on Iraq

'We were all wrong,' says weapons inspector David Kay. Actually, no. There was one group whose prewar estimates of Iraqi nuclear, chemical and biological capabilities have turned out to be devastatingly close to reality - the U.N. inspectors. Consider what Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the U.N. nuclear agency, told the Security Council on March 7, 2003, after his team had done 247 inspections at 147 sites: 'no evidence of resumed nuclear activities ... nor any indication of nuclear-related prohibited activities at any related sites.' He went on to say that evidence suggested Iraq had not imported uranium since 1990 and no longer had a centrifuge program. He concluded that Iraq's nuclear capabilities had been effectively dismantled by 1997 and its dual-use industrial plants had decayed. All these claims appear to be dead-on, based on Kay's findings.

Regarding chemical and biological weapons, the U.N. inspectors headed by Hans Blix conducted 731 inspections between November 2002 and March 2003. Despite claims by the U.S. government of the existence of specific stockpiles of weapons and active weapons programs, they found no evidence of either. In his reports to the Security Council, Blix was always judicious. "One must not jump to the conclusion that they exist," he said. "However, that possibility is also not excluded."

The tinfoil brigade who believe that the UN was wrong, no matter what, are now happily claiming that everyone, including the UN, believed in the existence of WMDs. That is simply untrue. UNMOVIC had found nothing beyond the enhanced al-Sammoud rockets.

The war, we were told, had to be fought immediately. In 9 months all the ISG achieved was to confirm UNMOVIC's tentative view. Why then, did the coalition hurry to war? And when will Bush, Blair and Howard apologise to Blix?

More on this when tonight's 7:30 Report is available online.

Hutton Report

411. Some commentators have referred to answers by the Prime Minister to questions from members of the press travelling with him on an aeroplane to Hong Kong on 22 July and I have read the transcript of that press briefing. As I have stated, I am satisfied that there was not a dishonourable or underhand or duplicitous strategy on the part of the Prime Minister and officials to leak Dr Kelly's name covertly, and I am further satisfied that the decision which was taken by the Prime Minister and his officials in 10 Downing Street on 8 July was confined to issuing a statement that an unnamed civil servant had come forward and that the Question and Answer material was prepared and approved in the MoD and not in 10 Downing Street. The series of events and considerations which led to the decision in 10 Downing Street on 8 July to issue a statement was a complex one for the reasons which I have previously set out and I consider that the answers given by the Prime Minister to members of the press in the aeroplane cast no light on the issues about which I have heard a large volume of evidence.

Refusing to look at Blair's 22 July statement is the strangest of all the Hutton conclusions. If you read what Tony Blair said on the aeroplane you find:

Speaking to reporters on the plane en route from Shanghai to Hong Kong, the prime minister stated categorically: "I did not authorise the leaking of the name of David Kelly."

Mr Blair said he "emphatically" did not authorise the leak, but he said the confirmation of Dr Kelly's name was a different matter, adding that the judicial inquiry he had set up would look at all the facts.

Questioned on why the government confirmed Dr Kelly's identity, he replied: "That's a completely different matter once the name is out there. The inquiry can look at these things."

Boldface mine. It defies all logic to say those words: 'I did not authorise the leaking of the name of David Kelly.' 'cast no light on the issues'. Hutton examines the contrast between Blair's evidence and that of the Ministry of Defence permanent under-secretary at some length.

Broadly, a series of officials (including people present at the 8 July meeting where Blair approved issuing a statement) say it was inevitable that David Kelly's name would come out once the government released a statement saying that a civil servant had come forward. Yet Hutton exonerates the government of leaking the name and instead finds it released materials which made finding the name inevitable. Hutton also does not address why the government might not have refused to confirm or deny the name while making David kelly available to private sessions of the ISC and FAC.

A reasonable inquiry would have questioned Blair on how he had not authorised the leaking of David Kelly's name when he approved both release of the 8 July statement and the confirmation of Kelly's name if any journalist identified him. Far from doing that, Hutton merely blandly declares, without explanation, that Blair's 22 July statement casts no light. That is not the mark of fearless inquiry or rigorous logic.

Don't be fooled again

Where do you even start? Perhaps with the comedy of George Bush demanding 'to know the facts' about Iraq's non-existent arsenal of weapons of mass destruction - casting himself as an aggrieved American voter, somehow hoodwinked into the war with Iraq. No doubt we should brace ourselves for Bush pounding his fist on the table, demanding to know 'who ordered this goddamned war anyway?' And to think, he could have known all the facts without firing a single shot - if only he had let Hans Blix and his team of UN inspectors finish their work.

Or perhaps we should begin with the hilarious sight of Colin Powell, who exactly a year ago treated the UN security council to a show-and-tell expos� of Saddam's terrifying arsenal, now admitting that, had he known Baghdad had no WMD, he would have had his doubts about going to war. With rather elegant understatement, he concedes it would have changed 'the political calculus'.

Maybe the right starting point is closer to home, with the alternative comedy of Tony Blair insisting as late as last week there could be no inquiry, no inquiry, no inquiry - until Bush ordered one in Washington and suddenly London saw the entire question in a new light. Now there is to be an inquiry. What was an unnecessary, ludicrous proposal last week when the Tories and Lib Dems demanded it is suddenly a rather good idea now that Mr Bush has smiled upon it.

Indeed. The Hutton Report (Para 9) specifically excludes:

whether the intelligence in relation to weapons of mass destruction set out in the dossier published by the Government on 24 September 2002 was of sufficient strength and reliability to justify the Government in deciding that Iraq under Saddam Hussein posed such a threat to the safety and interests of the United Kingdom that military action should be taken against that country

Now Blair will exclude the same question from the Butler inquiry because it was covered by the Hutton inquiry? Um hello?

We were overruled, says former intelligence chief...

During the course of their own inquiry, the Intelligence and Security Committee was given sight of the relevant intelligence and, despite the fact that they are not expert intelligence analysts, they reported rather enigmatically that they could 'understand the basis on which the CDI and the JIC took the view they did'.

But with all that has and has not happened since, I believe the advice I received in September 2002 about the compartmented intelligence was valid. Now that it is being so widely suggested that Britain went to war on the back of an 'intelligence failure', it is important that the nature of that failure is understood. An intelligence failure can be the result of many things. The absence of significant 'raw' intelligence would be a collection failure. There was a self-inflicted dearth of information on Iraq following the withdrawal of Unscom inspectors before Operation Desert Fox in 1998 and an additional degree of uncertainty once their constraining influence was lost.

A failure can result if the significance of a piece of 'raw' intelligence is not recognised, or its analysis is flawed, or its context misunderstood. This would be an assessment failure. The failure of policy-makers to accept or act on information can also be called an intelligence failure because of the inadequacy of its presentation by the intelligence community.

Whether or not there was a failure of intelligence assessment should be judged, not on the dossier, but on relevant JIC papers. Similarly, whether or not there was a failure in intelligence collection should be judged on the reports the collectors issued. Arguably, the dossier revealed more about the top end of the process and the fashioning of a product that has hitherto been alien to the UK intelligence community.

In my view the expert intelligence analysts of the DIS were overruled in the preparation of the dossier in September 2002 resulting in a presentation that was misleading about Iraq's capabilities.

It would be a travesty if the reputation of the DIS and its dedicated people was besmirched and the organisation as a whole undermined. The DIS includes the only significant body of dedicated professional intelligence analysts in the UK intelligence community and they are a much under-valued and under-resourced national asset. It is the intelligence community leadership at the level of the membership of the JIC and the upper echelons of the DIS - those who had access to and may have misinterpreted the compartmented intelligence - that had the final say on the assessment presented in the dossier.

Lord Hutton describes the JIC as, 'the most senior body in the Intelligence Services charged with the assessment of intelligence'. But this is misleading.

The members of the JIC are mostly extremely busy officials. Some are effectively the chief executives of large organisations with large budgets and all that goes with that responsibility. Others have a wide range of other responsibilities. All will have a limited time to study personally intelligence reports and the related archives in detail. Most will have had quite limited experience of analysing intelligence.

From my perspective the JIC's function is to oversee the assessment of intelligence and question and challenge the experienced and dedicated analysts and intelligence collectors on issues where they, the JIC, might understand the broader relevance and significance of a particular assessment. When they take it upon themselves to overrule experienced experts they should be very sure of their ground, and if a decision to do so is based on additional sensitive intelligence unknown to the experts, it must be incontrovertible.

Events have shown that we in the DIS were right to urge caution. I suggest that now might be a good time to open the box and release from its compartment the intelligence that played such a significant part in formulating a key part of the dossier.

I recognise this could possibly be one of a few exceptional circumstances that means the content of the compartmented intelligence remains sensitive even after the fall of Saddam. If this is the case it should be clearly stated. Otherwise the simple act of opening this box and explaining who had the right to look into it before the war could increase the transparency and hasten the progress of the new inquiry.

Dr Brian Jones was formerly head of the branch within the Scientific and Technical Directorate of Defence Intelligence Staff that was responsible for the analysis of intelligence from all sources on nuclear, biological and chemical warfare. He retired in January 2003.

Boldface mine. The Hutton report must have had the shortest shelf life of any allegedly authoritative report since Denning's Profumo inquiry where he found that the allegations against Profumo must be untrue because no cabinet minister would be attracted to a Christine Keeler. The allegations were later proved true, Profumo resigned in disgrace, as did Harold Macmillan and Labor won the 1964 election.

Immediately after its release Blair rejected any need for a new inquiry, although one has since been appointed. Now we have Potemkin inquiries running in the US and Britain. It is really getting to be time for the opposition parties there and in Australia to announce that if elected they will ensure an open and thorough inquiry into the political use of intelligence by their governments.

Never forget that they lie

Lord Hutton seems unable to grasp a simple truth: all journalism is conducted against a background of official obfuscation and deceit, which does much to explain our blunders and omissions. It seems remarkable not how much journalists get wrong - a great deal - but that we are able to retrieve from the Whitehall swamp fragments of truth, and to present the waterlogged and bedraggled exhibits to readers and listeners.

I say this with regret. I am more instinctively supportive of institutions, less iconoclastic, than most of the people who write for the Guardian, never mind read it. I am a small 'c' conservative, who started out as a newspaper editor 18 years ago much influenced by a remark Robin Day once made to me: 'Even when I am giving politicians a hard time on camera,' he said, 'I try to remember that they are trying to do something very difficult - govern the country.'

The Hutton report is strange. It's been claimed by Blair and (incredibly) the Man of Steel as vindication for their general WMD claims even though Hutton specifically disavows (Paragraph 9) addressing the general WMD claim. Hutton then sets up a legal standard (Paragraph 280) for the media that is higher than the standard he demands of government. The leading case he cites, Reynolds v Irish Newspapers does not, at first reading, appear to support his conclusions.

All of this looks more than faintly silly now that the White House is about to name a commission and the Man of Steel has suddenly gone into fast reverse and started speaking about Australia's war decision as based on the US and UK pre-war intelligence .

Globalisation - lopsided generator of wealth

Second, countries at the centre of the global capitalist system enjoy far too many advantages over countries at the periphery. Perhaps their greatest advantage is that they can borrow in their own currencies. This allows them to engage in counter-cyclical policies, that is, they can lower interest rates and raise government expenditures to fight recessions. The countries at the centre are also in control of the IMF and the international financial system, which gives them much greater influence over their own destiny than peripheral countries, which are in a much more dependent position.

Contrary to the tenets of market fundamentalism, financial markets do not tend toward equilibrium; they are crisis prone. Since 1980, there have been several devastating financial crises but whenever the centre is threatened, the authorities take decisive action in order to protect the system. As a consequence, the devastation is confined to the periphery. This has made countries at the centre not only wealthier but also more stable. It has encouraged capitalists in peripheral countries to hold their accumulated wealth at the centre.

Soros' views should not actually be controversial because they are so obvious, but for some reason admitting that power has anything to do with the way markets work makes people hysterical.

Mistaken aims toward Indonesia

In Singapore and Malaysia, two other countries where Islamic groups linked to al-Qaeda have been active, the governments have detained hundreds of suspected terrorists under security laws introduced by the British in 1948 to counter the rise of communist groups, Bakar said.

However, Indonesia has avoided such draconian practices. Instead, when it captured the ringleaders of the Bali bombing, it placed them on trial.

Over the long term, such actions strengthen the belief in the public mind that 'the rule of law will succeed', Bakar said. Indonesia 'can win the war because of the inner dynamics now being seen'.

Daniel Benjamin, a senior fellow at the Center for International and Strategic Studies in Washington and a former official with president Bill Clinton's National Security Council, said the United States has a strong interest in 'beating back the jihadists' but warned against seeing the conflict in Indonesia in black-and-white terms.

'Too many regimes have used the 'war on terror' to put excessive pressure on groups they view as threatening,' he said. 'We shouldn't make the same mistake we did during the last ideological struggle,' the Cold War. 'If so, it will be the blowback phenomenon again.'

Okay, at one level this is just the customary US strategy of excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the interest of fighting the War on Terror. It is also incredibly shortsighted. Indonesia elects a new president in April. They will be the first Indonesian president chosen by popular vote (unlike the US they've just abolished their electoral college). This is not the time to risk delegitimising the present government by being seen to be involved with its police and military operations.

In Indonesia, as elsewhere, human rights are the best defence against the growth of terrorism. The Megawati government promised to resolve Aceh within 6 months of the declaration of martial law last May. The conflict continues. The mailed fist has failed. This is a bad time to support the military at the expense of human rights.

[Michael] Howard: Blair is odd man out on WMD

Downing Street appeared today to be on the brink of a climbdown over granting an inquiry into the intelligence basis for the war in Iraq.

Following the announcement in Washington last night that the US president, George Bush, had ordered an investigation into evidence of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) allegedly held by Saddam Hussein, No 10 today said it was on the point of making a statement to parliament on the subject.

That could come either later today, or, quite possibly, as Mr Blair is questioned by the heads of select committees tomorrow morning.

No further details were immediately available, but the prime minister's official spokesman did concede that the verdict of Lord Hutton last week had changed the debate.

The spokesman said: 'What's different between last week and this is that the Hutton report, like the Commons foreign affairs committee report and like the intelligence and security committee report, has cleared the government of allegations of having politically interfered with, falsified or hyped the intelligence on WMD.

If the Bush inquiry makes Blair look odd, it makes John (I don't do apologies, I get them) Howard look positively eccentric.

Bush To Form Iraq Intel Probe

President Bush has decided to sign an executive order creating an investigation of intelligence failures in Iraq, a senior White House official says.

The probe comes after two congressional investigations and a CIA internal probe concluded there was no White House pressure to produce pro-war intelligence.

White House sources tell CBS News Chief White House Correspondent John Roberts the commission will have full access to materials they need. The commission will be set up quickly, but is not expected to complete work until next year - after the election.

This is wonderful. Not only are we told we must wait for the Iraq Survey Group before questioning the WMD allegations, now we can be told that we must wait for the White House inquiry before questioning Iraq Survey Group report. Perhaps a further inquiry into the inquiry into the ISG could stretch the process out until after the 2008 presidential election. And no embarrassing facts before Bush has to face the people.

I'm not yet sure if the Man of Steel has despatched our ambassador to demand an apology from George Bush.

China, Korea wrangle over ancient kingdom

The ancient kingdom of Koguryo, famed for its mighty castles and horseback warriors, has sprung back to life in a 'war of history' between South Korea and China that carries alarming modern-day implications.

The dispute has raised diplomatic hackles and symbolizes what many say are rival geopolitical designs on Northeast Asia, a region rich in conflict and currently riled over North Korea's nuclear weapons programs.

The wrangling could also influence the way future borders are drawn between two of Asia's biggest economic powers should the region become unstable.

Koguryo ruled much of Korea and Manchuria, now China, until it vanished from maps 1,300 years ago. It has been dragged into the headlines by a Beijing-backed study that deems the kingdom to be an integral part of China

.

New South Wales should take China's Koguryo approach to heart. All of New Zealand, Victoria, Queensland, South Australia, Tasmania, the Australian Capital Territory and the Northern Territory once lay within the borders of NSW. There is a magnificent opportunity for the small government advocate here. Not only would we get one government in place of 7 but the bloated Senate could be reduced to 12 senators each from Western Australia and NSW. The bloated House would be reduced to 48 with a gigantic NSW majority. And we'd get two UN votes.

US Explanation of Vote [on Resolution 1441]

As we have said on numerous occasions to Council members, this Resolution contains no 'hidden triggers' and no 'automaticity' with respect to the use of force. If there is a further Iraqi breach, reported to the Council by UNMOVIC, the IAEA, or a member state, the matter will return to the Council for discussions as required in paragraph 12. The Resolution makes clear that any Iraqi failure to comply is unacceptable and that Iraq must be disarmed. And one way or another, Mr. President, Iraq will be disarmed. If the Security Council fails to act decisively in the event of a further Iraqi violation, this resolution does not constrain any member state from acting to defend itself against the threat posed by Iraq, or to enforce relevant UN resolutions and protect world peace and security.

What a tangled war we weave...

Scientists Clamor to Save Hubble

Even Mars Society president Robert Zubrin, who's best known for advocating human colonization of the red planet, hammered NASA.

"This was the most important thing the shuttle would do in its remaining lifetime," he said. "Most of its other missions are science-fair stuff. The Hubble is a milestone in human intellectual history, and this decision is a crime against science.

"What's happening is that a bunch of bureaucrats are wanting to feel decisive, to show they can make the tough calls to support the president's moon and Mars program. They'll say: 'Much as it might rend our hearts, we're willing to give this up.' That's all a crock," Zubrin said. "If the first thing this new space policy does is murder Hubble, then it's born with the mark of Cain on it."

Space policy analyst John Pike of GlobalSecurity.org sees dark motivations behind the move. He argues that President Bush has made clear what will be abandoned in the short term, but has scheduled non-military missions like colonizing Mars far over the political horizon so that succeeding administrations can cancel them without controversy.

"I think it is sort of symptomatic of this administration's orderly dismantling of the American space program," he said.

But the greatest outpouring of support for the Hubble and hostility to NASA's decision has come from the grass-roots community of science enthusiasts, Villard said.

Slooh.com, an online service providing live links to telescopes, has taken a leading role in organizing Hubble fans, launching SaveTheHubble.org to petition Congress to provide additional funding to keep the Hubble aloft and in service.

Sign this one as well. And while you're waiting for the petition to load ask yourself about the depth of thought behind the Bush Mars project.

The shadow of Iraq

We have been here before. In April 1972, the former brigadier Lord Widgery published his now notorious report into the killing of 14 unarmed civil rights demonstrators by British paratroopers in Northern Ireland three months earlier on Bloody Sunday. Widgery cleared the soldiers of blame, insisting, in defiance of a mass of evidence, that they had only opened fire after coming under attack. The Widgery report was so widely seen as a flagrant establishment whitewash, and continued to be such a focus of nationalist anger, that a quarter of a century later Tony Blair felt compelled to set up another Bloody Sunday inquiry under Lord Saville, still sitting today.

Lord Hutton - a scion of the Northern Irish protestant ascendancy who himself represented British soldiers at the Widgery inquiry - has, if anything, outdone Widgery in his service to the powers that be. Hutton's embrace of any construction of the evidence surrounding David Kelly's death that might be helpful to the government is breathtaking in its sweep. Instead of a prime minister who took the country to war on the basis of discredited dossiers about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, it is the BBC that now finds itself in the dock - and its chairman who was last night forced to resign. Hutton's report could scarcely have been more favourable if it had been drafted, or even sexed up, by Tony Blair's former spinmeister Alastair Campbell himself. The prime minister certainly knew his man when he appointed the one-time Diplock court judge to head the inquiry into Dr Kelly's death.

Tony Blair cannot quibble with this analysis of the Widgery inquiry, because Blair himself recognised that inquiry's deficiency when he appointed the Saville inquiry to take a fresh look at the events of Bloody Sunday. Hutton's appearance at the Widgery inquiry does not necessarily mean he was incapable of delivering a fair report, but the Hutton report simply does not accord with the evidence Hutton heard.

'Save the Hubble' campaign soars

Mr Ribeiro first heard about Hubble's demise from the internet.

'I sat in front of the monitor and stared at it for several minutes recollecting all the facts I knew about Hubble; its planning, building, the flawed mirror, the device to fix it, the book I had: Gems of the Hubble. I thought about the loss it meant to the whole human race.'

So www.savethehubble.com/ was born.

'I imagined that it could be a good idea to build up a site where people could voice their feelings and ideas about the whole story. My role would be to put together as many references as I could about the struggle to save the telescope.

'There has been an exponential growth of the public outcry in favour of the instrument, and it is just the beginning. Since the matter is obviously political, public pressure will certainly play a big role, especially in an election year.'

The petition will be sent to Nasa and US politicians.

'Let the voters say: 'We don't want to go to the Moon! We want to go to infinity and beyond!',' said Mr Ribeiro.

Go sign up and save the gyroscopes from spin.

Staff Overboard

Now there's nothing wrong with that except that Mr Latham in trying to explain away the leak has said: 'Oh look, these earlier drafts were the enthusiastic work of my staff. In a separate parallel exercise I was handwriting the whole lot which I delivered.' Well, if he was hand writing the whole lot, why was he bothering to correct drafts? This man has a dangerous tendency when something goes wrong that embarrasses him to blame his staff. Some poor staffer got the blame for putting that American flag in the Labor Party room. I think this is a dangerous tendency on his behalf.

I really think John Howard might find that blaming Latham for blaming his staff turns out to be dangerous waters. The kind of dangerous waters that children get thrown in. Or not.

This is almost as rich as Costello condemning the re-election of third term governments with large majorities.

Lord Denning -a tribute

In 1980, Lord Denning quashed a civil suit brought by six men convicted of Irish Republican Army bombings in Birmingham, rejecting their claims that they had been beaten and abused by police.

"If the six men win, it will mean that the police were guilty of perjury, that they were guilty of violence and threats, that the confessions were involuntary and were improperly admitted in evidence and that the convictions were erroneous," Lord Denning said in his judgement. "This is such an appalling vista that every sensible person in the land would say, 'it cannot be right that these actions should go any further.' "

However, the six men were released and their convictions overturned in 1991 after the Court of Appeal ruled that police had fabricated evidence and that scientific tests used by the prosecution were unreliable.

I'm still reading, but that phrase 'appalling vista' keeps troubling me more and more. This would not be the first British judicial whitewash in recent years. Apparently Denning, then Master of the Rolls and head of the Court of Appeal, did not feel that keeping innocent men in jail was an appalling vista, although ultimately the Court of Appeal accepted that Denning's putative appalling vista was no more than simple truth.

Heavy Going

I am reading the Hutton report. It will take a while. More when I'm done. I'm up to page 239 as we speak and I've yet to find a case where Hutton does not prefer the official version of events to any other version.

I am not quite ready to say a dingo sexed up the dossier but I do seem to remember a number of judicial and coronial processes that established beyond any reasonable doubt that Lindy Chamberlain was guilty of an offence for which she was ultimately exonerated.

I have, however decided I should unreservedly apologise to John Howard if I ever implied that he sexed up the September dossier.

Overweight America is Hooked on Sugar

The U.S. secretary of health actually claims, in the face of a mountain of scientific evidence to the contrary, that it's fine to get 25% of one's calories from refined sugar!

The real reason for the administration's preposterous position is that the powerful U.S. sugar industry is one of its biggest financial backers, and a major power in the key electoral state of Florida. The sugar industry is also one of Washington's most successful lobby groups and a huge contributor to congressmen and senators of both parties.

The result: the federal government subsidizes U.S. sugar producers to the tune of $1.4 billion US annually. Import restrictions protect them from foreign competition and keep domestic sugar prices three or four times higher than world prices. Sugar remains the nation's most heavily subsidized crop at almost $500 per acre per annum.

So American consumers pay inflated prices for sugar while tiny West Indian sugar-producing islands, that depend on the crop, are shut out of the U.S. market. Worse, sugar cultivation has damaging environmental effects. In Florida, 500,000 acres of the Everglades wetlands, one of America's natural treasures, have been destroyed to make room for growing sugar.

Joining the sugar industry in opposing the WHO campaign are America's biggest food and drink producers, led by the mighty Coca-Cola Company, and sugar exporting nations.

The WMD debate is shifting fast from whether they existed to why the intelligence was so bad. I suspect part of it is reliance on electronic and satellite intelligence to the exclusion of human intelligence. Another part of it is the Bush administration's enthusiasm for sugaring the pill when it suits.

After hearing the Bush administration on the US deficit, free trade, on global warming, on air safety at Ground Zero, why are we surprised when empirical evidence gets ignored?

War in Iraq: Not a Humanitarian Intervention

However, in extreme situations, Human Rights Watch does not insist on Security Council approval. The council in its current state is simply too imperfect to make it the sole mechanism for legitimizing humanitarian intervention. Its permanent membership is a relic of the post-World War II era, and its veto system allows those members to block the rescue of people facing slaughter for the most parochial of reasons. In light of these faults, one's patience with the council's approval process would understandably diminish if large-scale slaughter were underway. However, because there was no such urgency in early 2003 for Iraq, the failure to win council approval, let alone the endorsement of any other multilateral body, weighs heavily in assessing the intervenors' claim to humanitarianism.

We recognize, of course, that the Security Council was never asked to consider a purely humanitarian intervention in Iraq. The principal case presented to it was built on the Iraqi government's alleged possession of and failure to account for weapons of mass destruction. Even so, approval might have ameliorated at least some of the factors that stood in the way of the invasion being genuinely humanitarian. Most significantly, a council-approved invasion is likely to have yielded more troops to join the predominantly American and British forces, meaning that preparation for the post-war chaos might have been better.

In sum, the invasion of Iraq failed to meet the test for a humanitarian intervention. Most important, the killing in Iraq at the time was not of the exceptional nature that would justify such intervention. In addition, intervention was not the last reasonable option to stop Iraqi atrocities. Intervention was not motivated primarily by humanitarian concerns. It was not conducted in a way that maximized compliance with international humanitarian law. It was not approved by the Security Council. And while at the time it was launched it was reasonable to believe that the Iraqi people would be better off, it was not designed or carried out with the needs of Iraqis foremost in mind.

Go read. I agree with the conclusion, but not with all the report. Especially I do not see why HRW does not concern itself with the the US' previous engagement with Saddam. The report is extremely valuable in setting out how recent, how thin and ultimately how ineffectual the attempt to manufacture a humanitarian argument - an argument specifically disavowed before the war - really is.

Intelligence services 'must answer for Iraq WMD claims

Intelligence chiefs should explain why they believed Iraq possessed banned weapons of mass destruction before the coalition invasion, outgoing US weapons inspector David Kay said.

Mr Kay, who now believes that Saddam Hussein did not have WMD stockpiles, asked: 'Why could we all be so wrong?'

Speaking on US National Public Radio Mr Kay said of the much-vaunted WMDs: 'I don't think they exist. The fact that we found so far the weapons do not exist - we've got to deal with that difference and understand why. It's an issue of the capabilities of one's intelligence service to collect valid, truthful information,' he said.

Asked if President George W Bush owed his nation an explanation Mr Kay said: 'I actually think the intelligence community owes the president, rather than the president owing the American people.'

The White House needs to explain the absence of weapons of mass destruction. Sovereignty returns to Iraq in less than 6 months. Presumably the transfer of sovereignty is the final cut-off when the White House and Number 10 will stop telling us to wait for the ISG report.

If this was a failure of the intelligence agencies they need to start making changes to the intelligence system. If they do nothing they admit that US intelligence was as sexed-up as we now know UK intelligence was.

Latham plans review of 'better parenting' measures

Federal Opposition leader Mark Latham says a Labor government would look at various measures if parents fail to properly supervise their children.

Mr Latham, speaking at a citizenship ceremony in his electorate in Sydney's south-west this morning, said Labor would make a commitment to expand a Western Australian scheme.

He says measures such as parenting court orders could be introduced, as it is evident that good parenting is not an optional extra.

'I believe very strongly that all parents should know where their children are at night, all parents should be ensuring their children go to school every day,' Mr Latham said.

Parenting orders are a good idea and they work fairly well. The NSW Children's Court already makes such orders under S73 and S78 of the Children and Young Persons (Care and Protection) Act 1998. I'd be surprised if other states do not have similar provisions.

Given the flurry of spectacular media ignorance on the subject, you cannot really blame Latham for not knowing about these orders.

Push to keep trade litigation floodgate closed

A briefing paper from rights groups Liberty Victoria and the Catholic Commission for Justice, Development and Peace has claimed that NAFTA's investor-state clauses have interfered with legislative, executive and judicial systems in the treaty's partner countries and have allowed companies to challenge measures aimed at protecting health, safety and the environment.

It says that, while many of the cases will fail, these huge damages claims made by private investors have affected the willingness of governments to legislate in the public interest.

Companies have sought to sue governments after they had been prevented from selling fuel with additives deemed harmful to people's health, while a California water utility has claimed $US10.5 billion for lost profit from Canada after a provincial government banned the export of bulk water from its rivers and lakes.

May I make a small suggestion to the negotiators struggling to find a dispute settlement system? there are these things called courts of law. They make decisions in public. They do not always privilege investors over public policy. They have established rules and procedures. I know it's radical, but it's a thought.

Keep our flag flying: poll

Australians want to keep our flag and national anthem - 2013 but are more determined than ever to have their own head of state.

An exclusive Newspoll conducted to mark Australia Day reveals fewer than one in three Australians want the Queen to be the nation's head of state.

Only 30 per cent believe the Queen should remain in the role while 64 per cent favour an Australian for the job.

The national poll of 1200 people shows that support for removing the Queen has grown significantly since the referendum on the republic in 1999, which was defeated 55 to 45 per cent, and a Newspoll in December 1995, when 56 per cent supported the change.

The 1999 vote was a classic example of John Howard as tactical genius and constitutional dope. At one point then Special Minister of State Nick Minchin wanted the referendum to be 10 questions. To create a republic the Australian people would need to vote No 9 times and Yes on Question 10. Fortunately, saner heads prevailed.

Less fortunately, the Man of Steel, and his allies in the Australian Republican Movement, put to referendum the one model that the Australian people were determined to reject. This clever strategy ensured that the republic was rejected, that the current unsatisfactory form of government would continue a few more years.

Public opinion has caught up with the Man of Steel's constitutional settlement. Shortly he will have to make a choice between his allegiance to the Crown and his standing in the polls. His choice is entirely predictable.

In fact, Australian governance has evolved significantly since the 1999 referendum and we have now become a prime ministerate, not a monarchy. The unexplained disappearance of the governor-general from public life, and his replacement as chief of state by the prime minister on all national occasions, seems like a little issue but I suspect is a very big issue among the Man of Steel's older and more traditionalist voters.

Cook: Blair Must Admit Iraq War Was Mistake

Mr Cook continued: "I have always believed that the difficulty was not that Tony was behaving in a way which was deceiving the world. He was behaving in a way which had a missionary zeal, an evangelical certainty ...

"The reality of course is that No 10 was keen to get into the war, not frankly because they were particularly concerned about WMD - I suspect by March they also knew that the September document had over-egged the case - they were keen to get in to impress President Bush that they were a reliable ally. That is not a good basis on which to run British foreign policy.

Mr Cook said that Mr Blair should use the opportunity of the publication of the Hutton report next Wednesday to set the record straight.

"I believe that Tony Blair has been a very good Prime Minister, and his domestic record is a very good record. I will judge him on the totality of that. But on this he made a wrong call, and frankly in his own interests as well as in the interests of Britain, and to make sure that we never do this again, he really does need to face up to that, and he has got a good opportunity this week to say so.

The Man of Steel should probably take a good hard look at his war policy, the progress of the FTA negotatiations and then follow Cook's advice as well. A fair dinkum Man of Steel would have the spine to do so.

Global warming will plunge Britain into new ice age

Britain is likely to be plunged into an ice age within our lifetime by global warming, new research suggests.

A study, which is being taken seriously by top government scientists, has uncovered a change 'of remarkable amplitude' in the circulation of the waters of the North Atlantic.

Similar events in pre-history are known to have caused sudden 'flips' of the climate, bringing ice ages to northern Europe within a few decades. The development - described as 'the largest and most dramatic oceanic change ever measured in the era of modern instruments', by the US Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, which led the research - threatens to turn off the Gulf Stream, which keeps Europe's weather mild.

If that happens, Britain and northern Europe are expected to switch abruptly to the climate of Labrador - which is on the same latitude - bringing a nightmare scenario where farmland turns to tundra and winter temperatures drop below -20C. The much-heralded cold snap predicted for the coming week would seem balmy by comparison.

This follows from the Woods Hole report on the likely future of the Ocean Conveyor, a worldwide system of ocean currents. Global warming would not bring a uniform increase in temperature across the planet. The clearest global warming result is failure of the Ocean Conveyor. We know that has happened several times within the last 100 000 years. The immediate impact is a little ice age in Western Europe and North America.

Vowel wars heat up

The defense minister of Mvpxilrzv issued a strongly worded statement today after Mvpxilrzvn police arrested Archbishop Vlnitrpqn (The Valiant) of Svpxilrzv yesterday.

Saying that Archbishop Vlnitrpqn was in the country trying to steal its vowel, Defense Minister Mkil (The Archangel) Bviltnkpz said, "We will not have our national treasure stolen by these barbarians."




Conflict between the two countries over the vowel dates back millennia. Mvpxilrzv and Svpxilrzv were particularly hard hit by the Polynesian vowel raids that left much of Eastern Europe and Russia vowel-impoverished and the South Pacific flush with the sounds. By the time the raiders had left their area, Mvpxilrzv and Svpxilrzv had one vowel between them. For centuries, the Kingdom of Svpxilrzv held the vowel, and thus the key to the two countries' common culture, in an underground chapel deep in the Dvpxilrzv Mountains.

I dn't knw wht t mk f this...

For Brazil Voters, Machines Rule

While Diebold's touch-screen voting machines cost an average of $3,000 in the United States, the urnas (which have no touch screen) cost $420 on average, according to Justica Eleitoral, the nation's electoral commission. Buying machines in large quantities lowers their cost, authorities said. The two manufacturers, Unisys and ProComp, won public bids to make the machines, a spokesman said.

Brazil, which has alternated between military dictatorships and democracy since the fall of the imperial monarchy in 1889, has a long history of election fraud. A judge in this state of cows and grains was killed for contesting the results in one local election. Pre-urnas elections were easier to rig, said Daniel Wobeto, chief of technical operations at the electoral commission in Rio Grande do Sul. 'Paper ballots were stuffed in canvas pouches, and people would switch ballots from one candidate's pile and put it in another pile,' he said.

First introduced in some precincts in 1996, urnas were used in all precincts in 2000. Voting officials took them on road shows, setting them up in bus and train stations and banks so Brazilians could have easy access to them.

Voters punch in digits for their candidate of choice (lists with numbers that match candidates' names are available at precincts). The name and a picture of the candidate appear after the number is punched in. Voters confirm their votes by pressing a green button.

There's no turning back once the green button has been pressed -- one of the system's drawbacks, said Wobeto.

Before elections, machine software is posted on the Internet, Wobeto said. Voting data on machines is stored on a floppy disk inserted at the back of each machine box and sealed inside with tamper-evident tape.

Brazil can do it. The Australian Capital Territory can do it. Why can't sophisticated corporations with the most advanced technology in the world do it?

Halliburton tells U.S. of suspected kickbacks

Halliburton Co. workers may have taken kickbacks from a Kuwaiti subcontractor aiding U.S. troops in Iraq, causing a potential $6 million overcharge to U.S. taxpayers, the company said on Friday.

Auditors at the Houston-based company found the questionable payments and potential overbilling and alerted Pentagon Inspector General Joseph Schmitz, said a company spokeswoman, Wendy Hall.

Halliburton, once headed by Vice President Dick Cheney, is the largest contractor in Iraq with over $8 billion in potential work doing everything from laundry to repairing damaged oil fields.

If Halliburton now admits the overcharges, what does that do to the weeks of vigorous denials they've issued? Or the Pentagon's waiver of the overcharges?

German trial hears how Iranian agent warned US of al-Qaida attack

The United States was warned of impending September 11 terrorist attacks by an Iranian spy, but ignored him, German secret service agents testified yesterday in the trial of an alleged al-Qaida terrorist.

The spy, identified as Hamid Reza Zakeri, tried to warn the CIA after leaving Iran in 2001, but was not believed, two German officers who interviewed him told the Hamburg court.

Zakeri worked in the department of the Iranian secret services responsible for 'carrying out terrorist attacks globally', one of the officers said.

Ouch!

Eggheads unravel chopstick secrets

'Most of the formula is serious physics,' says Dr Al-Khalili. 'Mass of the food, the size of the food; how slippery it is between the sticks. Then we had to put in the texture of the food, how crumbly it is and so on.'

They also found that if your fear of using chopsticks runs deep, you might have some serious practising to do. 'If you wanted to pick up a piece of chicken of appropriate size ... it would take you 20 years eating one Chinese meal with chopsticks per week for the comfort factor to be the same as picking the bloody thing up with your fingers,' said Dr Al-Khalili.

Fortunately, Southerly Buster has no trouble with sticks of mass consumption program related activities, apart from a pathetic incident in a Belgian restaurant when his scant vocabulary forced him to ask him for les batons de chop.

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

When a small number of terrified people seek our help, we are told it is a threat to our borders; when 60,000 backpackers from Europe stay on for years, there is no mention of border protection. Australia's human rights record has been damaged by our treatment of refugees. It will not be repaired by the cinematic simplicities of Russell Crowe.

Utilitarianism was used in the 18th century to justify slavery, in the 19th century to justify child labour and in the 20th century to justify the Nazi's treatment of the Jews. Abbott shows that it can be used in the 21st century to justify the Howard Government's record.

Julian Burnside

Melbourne, Victoria

Apart from the special case that Abbot argues I would have thought a government so focussed on 'values' would have thought through its approach to certain universal values like telling the truth before trying to conflate the Aubrey dilemma with fairly marginal policy issues. All Abbot really is doing is recycling the ancient 'There is no alternative' argument that dates back to Margaret Thatcher. Perhaps unconsciously, Abbot is actually speaking in defence of the same relativism his leader fears is rife in the public schools.

Political correctness on the right is just as PC as political correctness on the left.

Interview with David Kay

Q: What happened to the stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons that everyone expected to be there?

A: 'I don't think they existed.

'I think there were stockpiles at the end of the first Gulf War and those were a combination of U.N. inspectors and unilateral Iraqi action got rid of them. I think the best evidence is that they did not resume large-scale production, and that's what we're really talking about, is large stockpiles, not the small. Large stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons in the period after '95.'

Q. After '95?

A. 'We're really talking about from the mid-90s, when people thought they had resumed production.'

Q. What about the nuclear program?

A. 'The nuclear program was as we said in the interim report, I think that will be a final conclusion. There had been some restart of activities, but they were rudimentary.

'It really wasn't dormant because there were a few little things going on, but it had not resumed in anything meaningful.'

Q: You came away from the hunt that you have done believing that they did not have any large stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons in the country?

A: 'That is correct.'

Q. Is that from the interviews and documentation?

A. 'Well the interviews, the documentation, and the physical evidence of looking at, as hard as it was because they were dealing with looted sites, but you just could not find any physical evidence that supported a larger program.'

Q: Do you think they destroyed it?

A: 'No, I don't think they existed.'

Q. Even though in the mid-1980s people said they used it on Halabja?

A. 'They had stockpiles, they fought the Iranians with it, and they certainly did use it on the Kurds. But what everyone was talking about is stockpiles produced after the end of the last (1991) Gulf War and I don't think there was a large-scale production program in the '90s.'

Boldface mine. What a long way from the smoking gun in the form of a mushroom cloud. It's even qute a long way from dozens of weapons of mass destruction program related activities.

Howard may pay for misjudging US free-trade mood

After three years of talking free trade, the Bush Administration now faces its moment of truth. Will it commit to removing its own trade barriers to Australian farm exports? Or, when the chips are down, is its priority to protect jobs in United States industries, whether competitive or not?

With a year of intense negotiations for a US-Australia free-trade agreement to end on Friday, the answer now seems clear. And John Howard's Government is in a dilemma after seriously misjudging the Bush team's commitment to free trade.

US negotiators have offered only modest openings for Australian exports of beef and dairy products and none at all for sugar. Washington seems to be angling for an agreement for freer, not free, trade.

Australian negotiators expect US trade representative Robert Zoellick to raise the stakes in his final offer next week - although yesterday he was reported as confirming that the US would give nothing on sugar - but they are perplexed and concerned.

Washington's mood has changed. The Bush Administration is under heavy attack for agreeing to even a modest expansion of sugar imports in a trade deal with Central America. It seems in no mood to risk it again.

For three years, Trade Minister Mark Vaile and his team have been fending off criticisms that the deal would mean radical changes to the pharmaceutical benefits scheme, film and television production and the rest. Now they are staring at the opposite problem: this agreement might not change much at all.

Perhaps the congaline approach to foreign relations does not work so well after all, or perhaps the Man of Steel is about to get a Dear John letter.

Aboard Air Force One, En Route Roswell, New Mexico

9:18 A.M. MST

MR. McCLELLAN: Now, when we land today there are certain things that we may ask you not to report, that you may see. (Laughter.)

Q I'm not playing that game. If there's a flying saucer, it's going on the wire, man. (Laughter.)

But did they find any unidentified flying object program related activities?

I believe in conspiracies

Similarly, it is a matter of public record that the Americans pumped at least $100 million into Serbia in order to get rid of Slobodan Milosevic in 2000, and huge sums in the years before. (An election in Britain, whose population is eight times bigger than Yugoslavia's, costs about two thirds of this.) This money was used to fund and equip the Kosovo Liberation Army; to stuff international observer missions in Kosovo with hundreds of military intelligence officers; to pay off the opposition and the so-called 'independent' media; and to buy heavily-armed Mafia gangsters to come and smash up central Belgrade, so that the world's cameras could show a 'people's revolution'.

At every stage, the covert aid and organisation provided by the US and British intelligence agencies were decisive, as they had been on many occasions before and since, all over the world. Yet for some reason, it is acceptable to say, 'The CIA organised the overthrow of Prime Minister Mossadeq in Iran in 1953', but not that it did it again in Belgrade in 2000 or Tbilisi in 2003. And in spite of the well-known subterfuge and deception practised, for instance, in the Iran-Contra scandal in the mid-1980s, people experience an enormous psychological reluctance to accept that the British and American governments knowingly lied us into war in 2002 and 2003. To be sure, some conspiracy theories may be outlandish or wrong. But it seems to me that anyone who refuses to make simple empirical deductions ought to have his head examined.

Conspiracy theories make me nervous and I'm broadly prepared to accept that the choice between a conspiracy and a cock-up should always favour the cock-up, but there are limits.

Bush's Iraq: An Appointocracy

Mr. Bremer wants his Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) to appoint the members of 18 regional organizing committees. The committees will then select delegates to form 18 selection caucuses. These selected delegates will then further select representatives to a transitional national assembly. The assembly will have an internal vote to select an executive and ministers who will form the new government of Iraq. That, Bush said in his address, constitutes 'a transition to full Iraqi sovereignty.'

Got that? Iraqi sovereignty will be established by appointees appointing appointees to select appointees to select appointees. Add to that the fact that Mr. Bremer was appointed to his post by President Bush and that Mr. Bush was appointed to his by the U.S. Supreme Court, and you have the glorious new democratic tradition of the appointocracy: rule by appointee's appointee's appointees' appointees' appointees' selectees.

The White House insists that its aversion to elections is purely practical: there just isn't time to pull them off before the June 30 deadline. So why have the deadline? The most common explanation is that Bush needs 'a braggable' on the campaign trail: When his Democratic rival raises the specter of Vietnam, Mr. Bush will reply that the occupation is over, we're on our way out.

Except that the United States has absolutely no intention of actually getting out of Iraq. It wants its troops to remain, and it wants Bechtel, MCI and Halliburton to stay behind and run the water system, the phones and the oil fields. It was with this goal in mind that, on Sept. 19, Mr. Bremer pushed through a package of sweeping economic reforms that The Economist described as a 'capitalist dream.'

But the dream, though still alive, is now in peril. A growing number of legal experts are challenging the legitimacy of Mr. Bremer's reforms, arguing that under the international laws that govern occupying powers -- the Hague Regulations of 1907 and the 1949 Geneva Conventions -- the CPA can only act as a caretaker of Iraq's economic assets, not as its auctioneer. Radical changes such as Mr. Bremer's Order 39, which opened up Iraqi industry to 100 per cent foreign ownership, violate these laws and could therefore be easily overturned by a sovereign Iraqi government.

That prospect has foreign investors seriously spooked, and many are opting not to go into Iraq. The major private insurance brokers are also sitting it out, having assessed Iraq as too great an expropriation risk. Mr. Bremer has responded by quietly canceling his announced plan to privatize Iraq's 200 state firms, instead putting up 35 companies for lease (with a later option to buy). For the White House, the only way for its grand economic plan to continue is for its military occupation to end: only a sovereign Iraqi government, unbound by the Hague and Geneva Regulations, can legally sell off Iraq's assets.

But will it? Given the widespread perception that the United States is not out to rebuild Iraq but to loot it, if Iraqis were given the chance to vote tomorrow, they could well immediately decide to expel U.S. troops and to reverse Mr. Bremer's privatization project, opting instead to protect local jobs. And that frightening prospect -- far more than the absence of a census -- explains why the White House is fighting so hard for its appointocracy.

Under the current U.S. plan for Iraq, the transitional national assembly would hold onto power from June 30 until general elections are held no later than Dec. 31, 2005. That's 17 leisurely months for a non-elected government to do what the CPA could not legally do on its own: invite U.S. troops to stay indefinitely and turn Mr. Bremer's capitalist dream into binding law. Only after these key decisions have been made will Iraqis be invited to have their say. The White House calls this self-rule. It is, in fact, the very definition of outside-rule, occupation through outsourcing.

The joke in all this, although the saddest of jokes, is that George Bush is getting very close to making himself Iraq's new man with a moustache. Saddam was a deeply evil man, but the structure of his government was created by Iraqi history and geography, not the state of Saddam's conscience. manipulating language by calling an appointment an election is not going to fly. Neither is governing Iraq by force while claiming to govern by consent of the people.

The long string of US interventions in Latin America from Panama in 1903 to Panama in 1989 did not democracies. Why is Iraq different? Democracy is hard. Democracy also cannot be imposed by force.

WMD sceptic will head search team

A former senior member of the United Nations weapons inspection team has been appointed by the US government to lead more than 1,000 scientists combing Iraq for evidence that Saddam Hussein produced illegal weapons.

The choice of Charles Duelfer, reported last night by ABC television, appears surprising. Earlier this month, he asserted that the claims about weapons of mass destruction used to justify the war in Iraq would never be substantiated. 'I think it's pretty clear right now that they're not going to find existing weapons in Iraq of either a biological or chemical nature,' he said.

Mr Duelfer, 51, was picked by George Tenet, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency. He will replace David Kay as head of the Iraq Survey Group, charged with finding evidence of such weapons. Mr Kay had already indicated that he intended giving up the position in February.

The Vice-President Dick Cheney said two days ago that he still believed some evidence would be found. 'It's going to take some additional considerable period of time in order to look in all of the cubby holes and ammo dumps in Iraq, where you might expect to find something like that,' he commented.

Well, it's a surprise, as are Cheney's continuing claims about WMDs, the Saddam/al-Qa'ida linkage, and a number of other things.

The Advocate interviews Wesley Clark

In a testament to how much has changed in the decade since "don't ask, don't tell" was born, all nine of the Democratic presidential candidates who are currently elbowing their way across the country say the policy is discriminatory. But the 59-year-old Clark, a retired four-star general and former NATO commander, could be the only one with enough brass to make a difference. As Steve Rawls of the military watchdog group Servicemembers Legal Defense Fund explains, "Military leaders will have a lot of sway in convincing Congress to change the policy, and General Clark obviously has a lot of stature within the military community."

The cover photo is pretty interesting, as well. The times, I guess, are a-changing.

Archbishop Tutu Calls on Blair, Bush to Admit Iraq War Was Wrong

Archbishop Desmond Tutu says Tony Blair and George Bush should admit the war in Iraq was wrong.

He said such a move would help persuade the people of Iraq the coalition is serious about the future of the country.

Archbishop Tutu, now visiting professor on post-conflict societies at Kings College London, has told the BBC: 'I think the coalition would show considerable magnanimity if it was, in fact, to acknowledge that in the first place the assault on Iraq was wrong.

'If they were able to bring themselves to do that, it would go a very long way to making people say these people are, in fact, serious, they are not merely concerned about face-saving.

'The fact that the coalition has returned to the UN underscores precisely what people kept saying: that if the war was going to be legitimate, it needed to be declared by a legitimate authority, in this case the UN.'

I've always suspected the archbishop of being a secret al-Qa'ida sympathiser. Proof at last!

Military trial only option for Hicks, says Ruddock

But Mr Ruddock yesterday dismissed criticisms of the military tribunals, saying Major Mori was merely doing his job as a defence lawyer.
But legal experts said it was unusual for a defence lawyer to criticise the system in which an accused was being tried.

"Mr Ruddock clearly does not understand the immense pressure from the Pentagon to prosecute defendants at these military tribunals," said the chairman of the International Commission of Jurists' Australian section, Steve Mark.

"Major Mori is in the US Army and would not have spoken out unless he was speaking from conviction rather than expediency.

Boldface mine. Philip Ruddock once practiced as a solictor. I wonder how many cases he opened by saying this court is not competent to try this case because of its inherent unfairness? Ruddock's claim is nonsense. As a lawyer he knows it's nonsense.

Hicks lawyer unimpressed with legal process

MAXINE McKEW: The immediate response, Major, from our Attorney-General, Philip Ruddock, to your comments today really is it see them in the context of pre-trial jockeying, the normal things that one would hear from a defence advocate in the run-up to a trial.

MAJOR MICHAEL MORI: That's criticism that's very hard to address in this sense because I am a defence counsel and that's usually what the government says whenever the defence counsel points out that something's wrong.

But let me go back to -- first, to the rule that I cited to you, the rule where the appointing authority decides motions raised by the defence.

Can anybody sit back and objectively say that that is an independent system -- to have the person who initiated the charges and approved the prosecution be the one to rule just on specific defence motions?

Everyone out there, your viewers, can make their own determination.

They don't need to believe me.

Look at that situation and think that it's fair.

Second -- I'm not asking that David Hicks not go to trial.

I'm saying, if we're going to send him to trial, send him to a court martial that has the type of protections and established rules that -- for the past 50 years -- the current military court martial system has been around and it's got years of appellate review.

MAXINE McKEW: So are you surprised somewhat that the Australian Government has not made stronger representation about this to the American authorities?

MAJOR MICHAEL MORI: I really don't want to speculate on the reasons that the Australian Government did or did not do anything.

All I can say is the assurances between the Australian Government and the United States Government -- I have not seen those.

MAXINE McKEW: You should have a copy of those guarantees?

MAJOR MICHAEL MORI: I think I should have if they are supposed to provide guarantees for my client.

MAXINE McKEW: And you've requested them?

MAJOR MICHAEL MORI: Yes, I did.

MAXINE McKEW: From whom?

MAJOR MICHAEL MORI: I requested them from the chain of command within the commission process and I was provided, basically, the news releases.

I'll check if a transcript's already posted before I mutter about it next time. I am in awe of Mori's courage in raising these matters in public. Four points:

• Mori's right to say that giving the Appointing Authority (the Defence Secretary or his designee under Military Commission Order No. 1, S2 21 March 2003) the right to rule on every defence motion (Military Commission Order No. 1, S4(5)(d)) is just wrong. It means the court itself is window-dressing.
• The order defining offences is dated 30 April 2003, long after Hick's December 2001 arrest.
• Foreign Minister Downer himself prevented release, for diplomatic reasons, of the Australia/US agreement on Guant�namo.
• The US defence secretary can changes these rules at any time during trial. (Military Commission Order No. 1, S1)

To summarise, Grand Inquisitor Ruddock apparently thinks it's normal for the prosecution to rule on defence motions. Ruddock opposes retrospectivity in prosecutions, even though the various military commission orders are themselves retrospective and can be altered at any time. If the agreement guarantees fairness, why not just publish it? The government has simply been deceitful in characterising these rules as fair and then citing retrospectivity as the reason these offences cannot be tried in Australia.

Why does the phrase 'congaline of suckholes' spring to mind?

US military lawyer labels Hicks trial process unfair

MICHAEL MORI: Are we going to be given the time to prepare? Don't forget, the Government's had this for, you know, two years. Who knows how many investigative agencies have been working on this - unlimited resource - as they should. But what assets will the defence get? What resources? What experts will be allowed? How freely we're going to be able to move and obtain evidence?

LEIGH SALES: Despite his concerns, Major Mori intends to remain with the Hicks case.

MICHAEL MORI: I'm not going to abandon David Hicks.

LEIGH SALES: Major Mori has now been to Guantanamo Bay to see David Hicks three times, and offered this assessment of his client's condition.

MICHAEL MORI: Physically, he's fair as to be expected when you don't, you know, the conditions he's being held at. Mentally, he is probably - best way to describe it is degenerated to the point where his main concerns are the basic human instincts, desires - what he needs.

LEIGH SALES: He sees no reason David Hicks shouldn't be tried in Australia under Australian law.

MICHAEL MORI: In fairness, if David Hicks has violated a law of war, an international law, there's no reason why it would not apply in Australia - that's universal jurisdiction, and so he should be tried in his country.

LEIGH SALES: The military lawyer says he wishes the Australian Government had spoken to defence counsel before it agreed to the US Government's proposals for trying David Hicks. He says it will be worth noting what the British Government secures for its nationals at Guantanamo Bay, a matter still under discussion between Downing Street and the White House.

More on this when the transcript of Mori's appearance on the 7:30 report tonight is available.

Bush leaves no bride behind

Signaling that the Pander Countdown to Election Day 2004 has begun in earnest, President Bush spiced up Tuesday's State of the Union speech by tossing a bone, if not a garter belt and a Bible, to his conservative base, which is up in arms over the thought that gay people may soon have the right to legally tie and untie the knot -- and thus make a mockery of the sacred institution that Britney and Jason are such big fans of. He did this by tiptoeing up to the edge of saying 'I do' to supporting a constitutional amendment defining marriage as the exclusive province of heterosexual couples.

'Our nation must defend the sanctity of marriage,' he declared to ringing applause from Tom DeLay and the 'Amen' chorus on the right.

The Bush speech must be deeply worrying to the government of Canada which allows samesex marriage. They should beef up their border defences immediately and prove to the UN that they are not engaged in marriages of mass same-sex related programme activities.

Costello joins in Qld campaign

Federal Treasurer Peter Costello joined the Queensland election fight today, warning that Labor would lack accountability if it won a third term.

Mr Costello visited a shopping centre in the inner northern Brisbane seat of Clayfield, a one-time blue ribbon Liberal seat snared by the ALP in Premier Peter Beattie's landslide win in 2001.

The treasurer urged Queenslanders to hold Labor accountable on February 7.

'If you miss it in this state election, if Mr Beattie gets another thumping big majority, there won't be too much accountability coming out of the government,' he told reporters.

I guess this means Costello will not be seeking re-election when the Howard government runs for a fourth term of office with a thumping big majority at the end of the year.

CIA warns of Iraq civil war

'The discussion, which has been stimulated by Ayatollah Sistani, is whether there could be an element of elections injected into the earlier part of the process,' Straw said at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

'We have to work with great respect for him and similar leaders,' he said. 'We want elections as soon as it is feasible to hold them.'

Shiite clerics have become more forceful in their denunciation of the caucus plan and have organized increasingly large, albeit peaceful, demonstrations demanding elections.

State Department officials said no changes to the Bremer plan are being formally considered. They said much depends on the findings of a U.N. assessment team that the Bush administration has asked U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan to send to examine the feasibility of elections.

One option being informally discussed is to delay the transfer of power until later in 2004, which might give the United Nations time to organize some sort of elections, said one official.

But that is almost certain to be opposed by White House political aides who want the occupation over and many U.S. troops gone by this summer to bolster Bush's re-election chances, the official said.

'It's all politics right now,' he said.

Other options are to go ahead with the June 30 turnover as planned, whatever the fallout, or to accelerate it by handing over power to the Iraqi Governing Council in March or April, he said.

The option of transferring power to the IGC ( a wholly-owned -appointed and -operated subsidiary of the CPA) reads as a threat to the Shi'ites to go along or be forced to negotiate with the IGC without the CPA as honest broker. It is petulance dressed up as policy.

Does democratising Iraq really mean transferring sovereignty to an unelected body chosen entirely by the US despite the wishes of the Iraqi people? Is there a better recipe for civil war?

What's Bush Hiding From 9/11 Commission?

But the President's political advisers, concerned about the political impact of the commission's report, are unsympathetic to its requests for additional time - and House Speaker Dennis Hastert, who would have to approve an extension, is perfectly obedient to his masters in the White House. According to Newsweek, the administration offered Mr. Kean a choice: Either keep to the May deadline, or postpone release of the report until December, when its findings cannot affect the election.

Mr. Bush doesn't want his re-election subject to any informed judgment about the disaster that reshaped the nation and his Presidency. But why should such crucial facts be withheld from the voters? What does the President fear?

Perhaps inadvertently, Mr. Kean provided a clue to the answers in his Times interview. Asked whether he thinks the disaster 'did not have to happen,' he replied, 'Yes, there is a good chance that 9/11 could have been prevented by any number of people along the way. Everybody pretty well agrees our intelligence agencies were not set up to deal with domestic terrorism %u2026. They were not ready for an internal attack.' Then, asked whether 'anyone in the Bush administration [had] any idea that an attack was being planned,' he replied: 'That is why we are looking at the internal papers. I can't talk about what's classified. [The] President's daily briefings are classified. If I told you what was in them, I would go to jail.'

But the commission's final report may well indicate what the President was told in his daily briefing of Aug. 6, 2001, when he was sunning himself in Crawford, Tex - as well as the many warnings he and his associates were given by the previous administration. That kind of information could send him back to Crawford for a permanent vacation.

Go read, and bear in mind that we know there were multiple warnings of both an imminent attack and of weaponsied jetliners. Then ask yourself how say, Clinton, might have been treated if he'd tried to stonewall an inquiry into a certain White House intern.

Ruddock rejects Hicks' lawyer unfair trial claim

"Our view has always been that if we were to return Mr Hicks and Mr Habib to Australia there are no charges that we would be able to bring against them under our law as it was at that time," Mr Ruddock told ABC radio.

"There would be under our law as it is now, but there wasn't in terms of our law at that time."

Mr Ruddock said Major Mori was just doing his job as Hicks's lawyer by criticising the American military tribunal system.

"It says that he is giving Mr Hicks the best defence that he can and one of the ways in which defence lawyers often put their case on behalf of their clients is to advocate about the nature of the system which is dealing with them," he said.

Mr Ruddock said it was appropriate for the US to use military commissions to try suspects who had committed crimes during the War on Terrorism.

"Military commissions have been the normal way in which matters that require a trial (are) addressed," he said.

"They are part of the American system, they have certainly been used in an Australian context where we are trying people who have committed offences in a war situation."

Hicks is yet to be charged with any offence.

Major Mori later told Sydney radio 2UE that he did not understand Mr Ruddock's reasoning.

"David Hicks has never injured any US citizen or service member. Why is the US holding him to try him?" Major Mori said.

"If he hasn't violated his country's laws, to the country he owes allegiance, if he hasn't violated any of their laws, why is he being criminally held responsible for anything?"

He said if Hicks had to be tried, he should be tried in a military commission in Australia.

"I know Australia has done those types of military commissions in the past," he said.

The executive order by which George Bush created the military commissions is dated 13 November 2001. It is retrospective with respect to offences committed before that date. In any case, the Australian parliament has power to make retrospective laws and could easily authorise trial by military commission or otherwise in Australia.

What the Australian parliament could not do is oust the power of the High Court to review any military commission's decisions for jurisdictional error. The US Supreme Court has not yet decided the jurisdiction issue in the USA. In any case, Australian law already provided for the offence of treachery. Sadly the Australian government did not bother to activate that offence with respect to the Taliban or al-Qa'ida.

Ruddock's position on retrospectivity is as ingenuous as his earlier claims that the military commission process is fair. And why are the British Guant�namo detainees to get different treatment from the Australian detainees?

Lastly, it's simply untrue (Ruddock, himself a lawyer, knows this) to say that lawyers frequently question the process by which a defendant is tried. In most jurisdictions that is known as contempt of court.

School study contradicts PM's stance

A study commissioned by the Federal Government last year found that state schools were doing a good job teaching 'values' - contradicting Prime Minister John Howard's claims that they are 'too values-neutral'.

The study found that schools in all sectors, including state and private, had good systems to promote and foster values such as tolerance and understanding, social justice and respect.

While the report found some improvement was needed in all sectors, it said there were 'a broad range of varied and excellent practices and approaches to values education in Australian government and non-government schools'.

The findings are in apparent conflict with the Prime Minister's recent criticism of the state school system. Mr Howard came under fire from private and public school teachers and the Opposition this week after commenting that parents were moving their children out of the state system because the schools were 'too politically correct and too values-neutral'.

Mr Howard's position was endorsed yesterday by his two most senior Liberal cabinet ministers, Peter Costello and Tony Abbott, with both agreeing that political correctness in government schools had gone too far.

The study contradicting Mr Howard's view was commissioned by Education Minister Brendan Nelson and backed by all state education ministers.

Whoops! Now we'll hear that the study was wrong because it was prepared by black armband sociologists or something.

Update The full report, (861 k PDF) with its glowing endorsement by Federal Education Science and Technology Minister Brendan Nelson is available.

Open-Source E-Voting Heads West

Unlike U.S. voting systems, which use proprietary, secret software written by private companies, the Aussie system was created by Software Improvements in conjunction with an independent government body. The government placed draft and final versions of the source code on the Internet so the public could review it and provide comments.

The system took only six months to create and runs on Linux, an open-source operating system that also is in the public domain for anyone to use.

Ritchie plans to modify eVACS to include a voter-verified paper audit trail, or VVPAT, which California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley mandated must be included with all e-voting machines by July 2006.

The VVPAT would let voters independently verify that the machine cast their ballot correctly before the paper receipt goes into a secure ballot box to serve as a backup of the e-votes.

Ritchie's group plans to build the system for California first and then offer it to vendors to modify it for use in other states. He said several computer experts have expressed interest in helping to write and review the code. He also expects vendors, in keeping with the open-source ideology, will let the public see any modifications they make to the code.

'The goal of the foundation is to oversee the project and tell the programmers what they need to do according to California law, and then to build a prototype machine,' he said.

I'd be a lot happier with eVACS if it included a paper trail, but the weird part of this story is that writing software to count elections just should not be so complex as to require large corporations. The use of proprietary and unauditable software is an abomination.