The US just isn't paying attention

There are those who worry about the fate of society in a nation of wilful non-readers, but I worry about the fate of democracy. The consequences of not paying attention are wide-ranging. In corporate America, it's become a problem that workers do not fully read the key corporate documents employers issue for their benefit. Think 'Enron ethics code'. And in public life, details get missed, wrong impressions formed. Headlines substitute for reading past page one.

Total ignorance, one might argue, is in fact better for democracy than a partial ignorance that masquerades as knowledge. At least the totally ignorant sense their limitations. Skimmers, on the other hand, may well occupy the ranks of power and feel a mastery of the information around them. But in truth they have faulty intelligence. After listening to the 'executive summary' on their drive in to work or on the treadmill, they have a false confidence that they know what they need to know.

Little wonder that there is a call to declassify the one-page summary of Iraq intelligence prepared for President George Bush before the invasion. The sheet reportedly omits qualifiers and nuance, creating a much starker sense of the world situation. The Administration's refusal to release the brief document is based on the grounds that it's irrelevant because the full National Intelligence Estimate was released and, according to one official, 'we expect people to read beyond one page'. But most people at home know that they themselves might have read only the cover sheet. They wonder: did the President or his advisers flip past it, or did they stop after glancing at the Cliffs Notes?

Indeed, even the President's chief opponent, John Kerry, acknowledges that he did not read the admittedly lengthy NIE before voting on whether to grant authority to invade Iraq. Skimming, clearly, is a nonpartisan issue.

Sadly, sometimes it seems we are forced to wonder whether any of our leaders ever read their briefing materials at all. Before we blame them, though, let us look at our own habits, and ask whether we are really reading what is before us.

When Nick Greiner replaced Neville Wran as premier of New South Wales in 1988 he came in with a Harvard MBA and a passion for administrative tinkering. A friend worked in 6 different departments during the Greiner premiership without ever changing his actual job.

Greiner inherited a small equal opportunity unit in the Premier's Office. They drafted regulations, the premier approved them and the public service was bound by the premier's directives. Greiner out-posted EEO to agencies. Everyone suddenly had an EEO co-ordinator who drafted an EEO plan that the agency itself promulgated and theoretically followed. The focus shifted from carrying out the centralised EEo directive to having the best plan. Now 1988 was the techn dark ages so EEO plans only circulated among co-ordinators by sneakernet.

Yesterday I had a long talk with my favourite cousin. They've just been promoted from a Sydney job to policy stuff in Canberra. I muttered about the great sneakernet EEO plan binge of 1988. She muttered about the email driven action plan binge of 2004.

I really wonder if the flood of documentation moving through various public and private bureaucracies ever gets read or acted on.

Australia and its allies have just fought a war over weapons of mass destruction which do not exist and human rights abuses which have been grossly exaggerated in order to defeat an enemy who was not there and who was actually strengthened, not weakened, by the war.

Perhaps if we read things a little more slowly the combined intelligence agencies of the coalition of the willing might have been able to out-perform the blogosphere in deciding what was likely to be happening in Iraq. We are now arguing if the failure of intelligence was getting the state of the world wrong or just skimming the papers. The state of the world matters. Who read or failed to read which footnotes does not.

We need a movement for slow government.

World trade talks reach agreement

"It's good news for the world economy, it's good news for developing countries and it is very good news for Europe because we have always prioritised WTO and multilateral rules- based trade openings as a major objective of EU trade policy," said the European Union's trade commissioner, Pascal Lamy, before the final vote.

Talks had been extended into Saturday after WTO negotiators failed to reach a previous deadline of midnight on Friday.

Developed countries have recognised that agricultural trade with a heavy subsidy component is not free trade.

But even with the latest agreement, the details will still have to be hammered out, and that could take at least another couple of years, says the BBC's John Moylan in Geneva.

"Developed countries have recognised that agricultural trade with a heavy subsidy component is not free trade," said Indian Trade Minister Kamal Nath.

A small group of African countries also claimed a major breakthrough on their key agricultural product of cotton, said our reporter.

After hours of talks, key WTO nations, including the US, the EU, Brazil and Japan, agreed to eliminate export subsidies at a date to be set, to limit other subsidies and lower tariff barriers.

In return, wealthier nations, among them the EU's members, are insisting on better access to markets in developing nations.

The US FTA could suddenly become a good deal less important. Australia's real trade needs are access for primary products and that's precisely what the FTA does not give. On the other hand, if the WTO process suddenly comes alive the FTA looks a lot less like a safe harbour and a lot more like a Free Tampa agreement.

Iron Mark will be making a terrible error if he ratifies the FTA. Rightly or wrongly it will be seen as another small target exercise, but one that permanently trades off cultural sovereignty and the PBS in return for SFA. The FTA is less generous on cultural matters than the Canada/US agreement. The FTa also ties us into a US economy that sooner or later has to start contracting.

From superpower to dinosaur: America's destiny

To stabilise its debt at this level by 2013, US imports from the rest of the world will have to decline by $US90 billion to $US375 billion in today's dollars, depending on various assumptions about future US exports and the value of the American dollar.


The report argues that "it is not possible to construct a plausible scenario in which the US can even sustain s its current levels of imports. Measured in real terms, the extraordinary growth in US imports over the past 12 years clearly will not be repeated".

What this means is that if Australia is banking on expanding its exports to make up for the concessions it has made in areas such as intellectual property rights, rules governing investment and government procurement, it will have to be at the expense of other exporters to the US, such as Canada, Japan and China.

While the Centre for Economic and Policy Research doesn't single out Australia, it states that "for most countries, the costs of such concessions can be expected to exceed any gain they might anticipate from increased access to a shrinking US market for their exports".

The contraction in US imports is unlikely to be smooth or without great cost to the world, especially those tied to the US through free trade agreements.

The Bush Administration has turned Bill Clinton's $US5.6 billion surplus into an unsustainable deficit - before counting the $150 billion a year cost of its unsuccessful occupation of Iraq. And there is a mulish determination to avoid developing an Iraq exit strategy, higher taxes and the other policies necessary to avoid another global recession that could see the US transformed from superpower to dinosaur.

Trade policy really needs to have a hard edge. It does not need to be built on the nebulous desire of the Man of Steel to make himself one with the Great Dubya.

Update
Kick AAS has (as usual) done the hard work of ploughing through the WTO Draft General Council Decision of 31 July 2004, and says:

Great! But hang, on, there is no date set. Does that mean it could take 20, 30 or 50 years? Agreeing to end subsidies without a date is a bit like rich nations deploring subsidies in general (because they offend free trade) but doing nothing about it in practice (ie the situation before these talks started). It is the same problem with the end of cotton subsidies over which African nations claimed a late victory. The end has been agreed but with no date attached. It�s as bit like writing a will with the amount of the legacy left blank.

W are told Augustine of Hippo used to pray: 'Lord, make me chaste, but not yet.

UN resolution on Darfur

The Security Council,

Recalling its Presidential Statement of 25 May 2004 (S/PRST/2004/16) and its resolution 1547 (2004) of 11 June 2004 and its resolution 1502 (2003) of 26 August 2003 on the access of humanitarian workers to populations in need,

Welcoming the leadership role and the engagement of the African Union to address the situation in Darfur and expressing its readiness to support fully these efforts,

Further welcoming the communique of the African Union Peace and Security Council issued 27 July 2004 (S/2004/603),

Reaffirming its commitment to the sovereignty, unity, territorial integrity, and independence of Sudan as consistent with the Machakos Protocol of 20 July 2002 and subsequent agreements based on this protocol as agreed to by the government of Sudan,

Welcoming the joint communique issued by the government of Sudan and the secretary general of the United Nations on 3 July 2004, including the creation of the Joint Implementation Mechanism, and acknowledging steps taken towards improved humanitarian access,

Taking note of the report of the secretary general on Sudan issued 3 June 2004 and welcoming the secretary general's appointment of a special representative for Sudan and his efforts to date,

'Grave concern'

Reiterating its grave concern at the ongoing humanitarian crisis and widespread human rights violations, including continued attacks on civilians that are placing the lives of hundreds of thousands at risk,

Condemning all acts of violence and violations of human rights and international humanitarian law by all parties to the crisis, in particular by the Janjaweed, including indiscriminate attacks on civilians, rapes, forced displacements, and acts of violence especially those with an ethnic dimension, and expressing its utmost concern at the consequences of the conflict in Darfur on the civilian population, including women, children, internally displaced persons, and refugees,

Recalling in this regard that the government of Sudan bears the primary responsibility to respect human rights while maintaining law and order and protecting its population within its territory and that all parties are obliged to respect international humanitarian law,

Urging all the parties to take the necessary steps to prevent and put an end to violations of human rights and international humanitarian law and underlining that there will be no impunity for violators,

Welcoming the commitment by the government of Sudan to investigate the atrocities and prosecute those responsible,

Emphasising the commitment of the government of Sudan to mobilise the armed forces of Sudan immediately to disarm the Janjaweed militias,

Recalling also in this regard its resolutions 1325 (2000) of 31 October 2000 on women, peace and security, 1379 (2001) of 20 November 2001, 1460 (2003) of 30 January 2003, and 1539 (2004) of 22 April 2004 on children in armed conflict, and 1265 (1999) of 17 September 1999 and 1296 (2000) of 19 April 2000 on the protection of civilians in armed conflict,

Expressing concern at reports of violations of the ceasefire agreement signed in N'Djamena on 8 April 2004, and reiterating that all parties to the ceasefire must comply with all of the terms contained therein,

Welcoming the donor consultation held in Geneva in June 2004 as well as subsequent briefings highlighting urgent humanitarian needs in Sudan and Chad and reminding donors of the need to fulfil commitments that have been made,

'Lives at risk'

Recalling that over one million persons are in need of urgent humanitarian assistance, that with the onset of the rainy season the provision of assistance has become increasingly difficult, and that without urgent action to address the security, access, logistics, capacity and funding requirements the lives of hundreds of thousands of persons will be at risk,

Expressing its determination to do everything possible to halt a humanitarian catastrophe, including by taking further action if required,

Welcoming the ongoing international diplomatic efforts to address the situation in Darfur,

Stressing that any return of refugees and displaced persons to their homes must take place voluntarily with adequate assistance and with sufficient security,

Noting with grave concern that up to 200,000 refugees have fled to the neighbouring state of Chad, which constitutes a serious burden upon that country, and expressing grave concern at reported cross-border incursions by Janjaweed militias of the Darfur region of Sudan into Chad and also taking note of the agreement between the government of Sudan and Chad to establish a joint mechanism to secure the borders,

Determining that the situation in Sudan constitutes a threat to international peace and security and to stability in the region,

Acting under Chapter VII of the Charter of the United Nations,

DEMANDS

1. Calls on the government of Sudan to fulfil immediately all of the commitments it made in the 3 July 2004 communique, including particularly by facilitating international relief for the humanitarian disaster by means of a moratorium on all restrictions that might hinder the provision of humanitarian assistance and access to the affected populations, by advancing independent investigation in co-operation with the United Nations of violations of human rights and international humanitarian law, by the establishment of credible security conditions for the protection of the civilian population and humanitarian actors, and by the resumption of political talks with dissident groups from the Darfur region, specifically the Justice and Equality Movement (Jem) and the Sudan Liberation Movement and Sudan Liberation Army (SLM/A) on Darfur;

2. Endorses the deployment of international monitors, including the protection force envisioned by the African Union, to the Darfur region of Sudan under the leadership of the African Union and urges the international community to continue to support these efforts, welcomes the progress made in deploying monitors, including the offers to provide forces by members of the African Union, and stresses the need for the government of Sudan and all involved parties to facilitate the work of the monitors in accordance with the N'Djamena ceasefire agreement and with the Addis Ababa agreement of 28 May 2004 on the modalities of establishing an observer mission to monitor the ceasefire;

3. Urges member states to reinforce the international monitoring team, led by the African Union, including the protection force, by providing personnel and other assistance including financing, supplies, transport, vehicles, command support, communications and headquarters support as needed for the monitoring operation, and welcomes the contributions already made by the European Union and the United States to support the African Union-led operation;

4. Welcomes the work done by the high commissioner for human rights to send human rights observers to Sudan and calls upon the government of Sudan to co-operate with the high commissioner in the deployment of those observers;

5. Urges the parties to the N'Djamena ceasefire agreement of 8 April 2004 to conclude a political agreement without delay, notes with regret the failure of senior rebel leaders to participate in the 15 July talks in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia as unhelpful to the process and calls for renewed talks under the sponsorship of the African Union, and its chief mediator Hamid Algabid, to reach a political solution to the tensions in Darfur and strongly urges rebel groups to respect the ceasefire, end the violence immediately, engage in peace talks without preconditions, and act in a positive and constructive manner to resolve the conflict;

'Measures'

6. Demands that the government of Sudan fulfil its commitments to disarm the Janjaweed militias and apprehend and bring to justice Janjaweed leaders and their associates who have incited and carried out human rights and international humanitarian law violations and other atrocities, and further requests the secretary general to report in 30 days, and monthly thereafter, to the Council on the progress or lack thereof by the government of Sudan on this matter and expresses its intention to consider further actions, including measures as provided for in Article 41 of the Charter of the United Nations on the government of Sudan, in the event of non-compliance;

7. Decides that all states shall take the necessary measures to prevent the sale or supply, to all non-governmental entities and individuals, including the Janjaweed, operating in the states of North Darfur, South Darfur and West Darfur, by their nationals or from their territories or using their flag vessels or aircraft, of arms and related materiel of all types, including weapons and ammunition, military vehicles and equipment, paramilitary equipment, and spare parts for the aforementioned, whether or not originating in their territories;

8. Decides that all states shall take the necessary measures to prevent any provision to the non-governmental entities and individuals identified in paragraph 7 operating in the states of North Darfur, South Darfur and West Darfur by their nationals or from their territories of technical training or assistance related to the provision, manufacture, maintenance or use of the items listed in paragraph 7 above;

9. Decides that the measures imposed by paragraphs 7 and 8 above shall not apply to:

- supplies and related technical training and assistance to monitoring, verification or peace support operations, including such operations led by regional organisations, that are authorised by the United Nations or are operating with the consent of the relevant parties;

- supplies of non-lethal military equipment intended solely for humanitarian, human rights monitoring or protective use, and related technical training and assistance; and

- supplies of protective clothing, including flak jackets and military helmets, for the personal use of United Nations personnel, human rights monitors, representatives of the media and humanitarian and development workers and associated personnel;

10. Expresses its intention to consider the modification or termination of the measures imposed under paragraphs 7 and 8 when it determines that the government of Sudan has fulfilled its commitments described in paragraph 6;

'Constant engagement'

11. Reiterates its support for the Naivasha agreement signed by the government of Sudan and the Sudan People's Liberation Movement, and looks forward to effective implementation of the agreement and a peaceful, unified Sudan working in harmony with all other states for the development of Sudan, and calls on the international community to be prepared for constant engagement including necessary funding in support of peace and economic development in Sudan;

12. Urges the international community to make available much needed assistance to mitigate the humanitarian catastrophe now unfolding in the Darfur region and calls upon member states to honour pledges that have been made against needs in Darfur and Chad and underscoring the need to contribute generously towards fulfilling the unmet portion of the United Nations consolidated appeals;

13. Requests the secretary general to activate inter-agency humanitarian mechanisms to consider what additional measures may be needed to avoid a humanitarian catastrophe and to report regularly to the Council on progress made;

14. Encourages the secretary general's special representative for Sudan and the independent expert of the Commission on Human Rights to work closely with the government of Sudan in supporting independent investigation of violations of human rights and international humanitarian law in the Darfur region;

15. Extends the special political mission set out in resolution 1547 for an additional 90 days to 10 December 2004 and requests the secretary general to incorporate into the mission contingency planning for the Darfur region;

16. Expresses its full support for the African Union-led ceasefire commission and monitoring mission in Darfur, and requests the secretary general to assist the African Union with planning and assessments for its mission in Darfur, and in accordance with the joint communique to prepare to support implementation of a future agreement in Darfur in close co-operation with the African Union and requests the secretary general to report to the Security Council on progress;

17. Decides to remain seized of the matter.

Somehow it just doesn't read as all that imminent. If the crude mortality rate in Darfur is 10 000 each day then 30 days is a long time to give the Sudanese government, especially when their complicity with the Janjaweed is now beyond doubt.

Pity the pawns in this paella

Australia has become embroiled in a major diplomatic crisis after the foreign minister, Lord Downer of Baghdad, attacked the governments of Spain and the Philippines for what he described as treachery and cowardice in the war on terrorism.

Commenting on the decision by both countries to withdraw their troops from Iraq, Lord Downer said they had left the way open for Islamic terrorist groups to kill and maim Australians.

'If a bomb goes off in our country it will be Madrid and Manila we can blame,' he said.

'Frankly, the Spaniards have never been worth a pot of burnt paella since Sir Francis Drake sent the Armada packing in 1588. The only time they were a halfway decent lot was when General Franco got them by the scruff of the neck, but sadly that didn't last.'

Employing unusually blunt language, the Foreign Minister was equally critical of the Philippines Government of President Gloria Arroyo, claiming that her unprincipled refusal to allow a Filipino hostage to be beheaded by insurgents in Iraq was 'disappointing, and a grave and dangerous setback to hopes of world peace'.

'What is the life of one truck driver against the imminent victory of the coalition in Iraq?' he asked.

'I don't have to point out to you that there are a lot of people in the Philippines with Spanish-sounding names,' he added. 'I'm afraid that is more than a coincidence.'

Lord Downer said if it came to a choice between an Australian being executed in Iraq or 'cutting and running', then the decision was clear.

'We may lose heads, but we will not lose face with our good friends in Washington,' he said.

It's more than faintly weird that His Lordship seems to feel that the Spanish and Philippine governments should pay more attention to him than to the Spanish and Philippine peoples. Maybe if he worked a little harder at developing a sense of proportion. On a more serious note, go read The Terror Web for what actually happened in Spain.

In Darfur, help is not on the way

Darfur Mortality Update: July 15, 2004

So high are current mortality rates in Darfur, so great is previous human destruction, that the current (and static) UN figure of 10,000 deaths for the entire duration of this massive catastrophe must be regarded as both statistically irrelevant and morally slovenly (it was proffered by the UN in March 2004, without explanation or context). We certainly have no means of ascertaining with any precision what the number is; nor will we ever have a precise figure. But too much extant data and evidence suggest that a reasonable figure is already well in excess of 100,000 dead.

According to data authoritatively assembled by the US Agency for International Development, the present Crude Mortality Rate (CMR) is 7 per day per 10,000 for the affected population. Using as the basis for calculations the most recent UN figure of up to 2 million people "in need of emergency relief" (UN News Centre, July 13, 2004), the daily death toll is now approximately 1,400 human beings---or approximately 10,000 per week ("Projected Mortality Rates in Darfur, 2004-2005, at http://www.usaid.gov/locations/sub-saharan_africa/sudan/cmr_darfur.pdf ).

[The figure here of 2 million is at once lower than the total number of "war-affected" persons (now greater than 2.3 million if we use as a base figure the June 3, 2004 estimate contained in joint UN, US, and European Union communiqu� in Geneva) and higher than the number of Internally Displaced Persons (1.2. million) and the UN World Food Program estimate of Darfur's food-dependent population in June 2004 (1.2 million, though climbing to 2 million for October). The relation of these figures is discussed in a first appendix to this analysis.]

In other words, the current mortality figure offered by the UN for the past 17 months of extreme violence and displacement in Darfur is the equivalent of what US AID data suggest is the death toll for the past week. Such a gross disparity should be the occasion for serious and urgent re-thinking of a reasonable mortality figure for Darfur. Nongovernmental organizations concerned with Darfur should commit the resources necessary to synthesize all data and evidence available. To date there has been no such effort.

PM admits graves claim 'untrue'

Downing Street has admitted to The Observer that repeated claims by Tony Blair that '400,000 bodies had been found in Iraqi mass graves' is untrue, and only about 5,000 corpses have so far been uncovered.

The claims by Blair in November and December of last year, were given widespread credence, quoted by MPs and widely published, including in the introduction to a US government pamphlet on Iraq's mass graves.

In that publication - Iraq's Legacy of Terror: Mass Graves produced by USAID, the US government aid distribution agency, Blair is quoted from 20 November last year: 'We've already discovered, just so far, the remains of 400,000 people in mass graves.'

On 14 December Blair repeated the claim in a statement issued by Downing Street in response to the arrest of Saddam Hussein and posted on the Labour party website that: 'The remains of 400,000 human beings [have] already [been] found in mass graves.'

The admission that the figure has been hugely inflated follows a week in which Blair accepted responsibility for charges in the Butler report over the way in which Downing Street pushed intelligence reports 'to the outer limits' in the case for the threat posed by Iraq.

The missing people-shredder:

Nobody doubts that Saddam was a cruel and ruthless tyrant who murdered many thousands of his own people and that most Iraqis are glad he's gone. But did his regime have a machine that made mincemeat of men? The evidence is far from compelling.

The shredding machine was first mentioned in public by James Mahon, then head of research at Indict, at a meeting in the House of Commons on March 12. Mahon had just returned from northern Iraq, where Indict researchers, along with Clwyd, interviewed Iraqis who had suffered under Saddam. One of them said Iraqis had been fed into a shredder. 'Sometimes they were put in feet first and died screaming. It was horrible. I saw 30 die like this ...' In subsequent interviews and articles, Clwyd said this shredding machine was in Abu Ghraib prison, Saddam's most notorious jail. Indict refuses to tell me the names of the researchers who were in Iraq with Mahon and Clwyd; and, I am told, Mahon, who no longer works at Indict, 'does not want to speak to journalists about his work with us'. But Clwyd tells me: 'We heard it from a victim; we heard it and we believed it.'

The coalition has occupied Abu Ghraib prison since the collapse of the Saddam tyranny. A human shredding machine cannot be a small object and should be easy to identify. Somehow I missed the press conference where coaltion generals showed the thing to a shocked world. Where is it? And if it hasn't been produced did it ever exist?

Darfur: The case for intervention

We often, quite rightly, call the US to account for its expedient abuse of principles, and there are indeed very solid reasons, from Central America to East Timor and Iraq, why we should examine very critically any intervention that the US even hints at. It is indeed a good rule of thumb to doubt Washington's intentions, but sometimes finer measurements, and indeed nuances, are called for.

In this case, Iraq notwithstanding, US Secretary of State Colin Powell does indeed have a point, even if one could suspect that some of the US lobby groups pushing for action are more zealous in the case of Sudan than they would be if they could not characterize the perpetrators as "Arabs".

On the other hand, sadly, there is no shortage of countries that will support a rogue state for reasons of shortsighted or expedient "national interest". Security Council members Algeria and Pakistan, as representatives of Arab and Muslim states, not to mention their own state interests and domestic politics, would find it almost impossible to agree to US-led action against an Arab League member such as Sudan.

We should not be reassured just because some of the members opposing action against Sudan also opposed the war in Iraq. France springs to mind, as the patron of the former Rwandan regime, protector almost up to last moment of the Serbian ethnic cleansers in Bosnia, the defender of Morocco's occupation and repression in Western Sahara - and even if former French foreign minister (now Interior Minister) Dominique de Villepin did make an excellent case against attacking Iraq - previously a thoroughly expedient defender of French oil interests in Iraq. As we said, China and Russia all too often try to armor their domestic behavior behind a cloak of sovereign principle.

As a result of this objective alliance of the expediently supportive and the expediently opposed, it is sadly almost inconceivable that the Security Council or the General Assembly would authorize the robust military operation that would be necessary - or perhaps more usefully, the credible threat of a military operations, which in many such cases, from the Balkans to Rwanda, is all that it would have taken to preempt genocide.

Instead, the US's draft resolution is a tokenistic one reminiscent of the worst days of the Bosnian tragedy in that it pretends to be doing something, but in reality does nothing. It would mandate sanctions and travel restrictions against a motley paramilitary band of Sudanese brigands and militia who are unlikely to have many cosmopolitan world travelers in their ranks. One cannot help suspecting a gesture designed to cover the Bush administration's backside against the "if Iraq, why not Sudan" argument that is denting its already shredded ethical credibility.

So the question of support or opposition for intervention is a genuine quandary, but it is surely important that we do not let people die in Sudan just so we can feel vindicated in our stand against interventions. A credible threat of intervention has to be made soon - but kept within those "precautionary principles".

The United Nations itself is not designed to conduct robust operations that could involve serious fighting, which is why it often "franchises" them. Ideally, the Arab League should act, but it will not. The African Union has made a start, but it is hopelessly under-resourced, and similar regional operations in Sierra Leone and Liberia were much-mitigated successes.

It would be good if some of the stronger Asian powers, even if it involved North Atlantic Treaty Organization and US backup, could get involved, but Pakistan being Muslim - and India not being Muslim - could complicate that. Indeed, Japan and South Korea, not having any dog in the fight at all, as former US secretary of state James Baker once put it, would be ethically preferable, if their militaries were up to it.

Failing that, perhaps in this case, this is a matter on which the European Union could be given the blue-flag franchise, and especially Germany, whose clean credentials on the Iraq war clear it of the Crusader connotations.

But one thing is very clear: the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia and other active "coalition" partners should stay in the background, at best offering logistics and funding and the most discreet diplomatic support. And in a few years, maybe they will emerge from probation as good global citizens and be listened to once again.

Statement by the President on 1994 Rwanda Genocide

Ten years ago today, the world witnessed the beginning of one of the most horrific episodes of the twentieth century, the 1994 Rwanda Genocide. A 100-day campaign waged by Hutu extremists tore Rwanda apart and resulted in the murder of at least 800,000 Tutsi men, women, and children, as well as many moderate Hutus. This genocide also included systematic rape and sexual violence against countless Tutsi women and the orphaning of thousands of children.

The United States supports the people of Rwanda as they commemorate this horrific chapter in history. We urge all states, particularly those in the region, to work with Rwanda and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda to bring to justice those responsible for the genocide and to repatriate the thousands of displaced Rwandans. We also urge the international community to assist the survivors of that great crime as they continue to heal. The United States will continue to assist Rwanda in the unification of families, the providing of scholarships, the combating of HIV/AIDS, and the promotion of the rule of law.

The United States joins Rwanda and members of the global community in this day of reflection.

Secretary-General Observes International Day of Reflection on 1994 Rwanda Genocide

It is good that we have observed those minutes of silence together.

We must never forget our collective failure to protect at least eight hundred thousand defenceless men, women and children who perished in Rwanda ten years ago.

Such crimes cannot be reversed.

Such failures cannot be repaired.

The dead cannot be brought back to life.

So what can we do?

First, we must all acknowledge our responsibility for not having done more to prevent or stop the genocide.

Neither the United Nations Secretariat, nor the Security Council, nor Member States in general, nor the international media, paid enough attention to the gathering signs of disaster. Still less did we take timely action.

When we recall such events and ask 'why did no one intervene?', we should address the question not only to the United Nations, or even to its Member States. No one can claim ignorance. All who were playing any part in world affairs at that time should ask, 'what more could I have done? How would I react next time -- and what am I doing now to make it less likely there will be a next time?'

Perhaps more than any others, those questions have dominated my thoughts, since I became Secretary-General. If there is one legacy I would most wish to leave to my successors, it is an Organization both better equipped to prevent genocide, and able to act decisively to stop it when prevention fails.

The Darfur genocide began in February 2003. Each and every day that the coalition fought in Iraq on the basis of unfound WMDs, trailers of mass destruction, inflated figures and missing shredders, 10 000 people were dying in Darfur. The next time is now. The people of Darfur do not need a minute of silence any more than they need the year of silence maintained by the United Nations Secretariat, the Security Council, the Member States in general, the international media since the onset of genocide. Why Iraq and not Sudan?

The Poll Bludger - Federal Election Calendar

A House of Representatives election must be held on a Saturday prior to April 16, 2005. However the Prime Minister has strongly indicated it will be held during 2004 and he would be heavily criticised for breaking convention if the Government's term were to extend more than a few weeks beyond its three-year anniversary on November 10. The earliest date on which a normal half-Senate election may be held is August 7. A double dissolution election may be called at any time before August 11 for a date no later than October 16, but this is not anticipated. A House of Representatives election before August 7 and a separate half-Senate election at a later date deserves mention merely as a technical possibility. The announcement of the election must be between 33 and 67 days before it is held, but governments have kept campaign periods short since the Hawke Government performed disappointingly after a seven-week campaign in 1984.

I doubt there'll be a double dissolution. About the only thing I don't doubt is that the general election will be held before the US presidential election.

The Poll Bludger lays it all out, including various trigger dates. Assuming the Man of Steel does not indulge his taste for the crass with a 911 election the most likely dates remain 23 and 30 October.

We really, really need to move to fixed dates for federal elections.

Bone-devouring worms discovered

Two worm species discovered in the dark recesses of the deep sea could rival the macabre beasts of your childhood nightmares. Scientists have named a new genus, Osedax, which is Latin for 'bone devourer', for worms that thrive by excavating the bones of fallen whale carcasses.

The worms contain bacteria that help them digest the fats and oils of the whale skeletons. This type of symbiotic relationship has never been seen before, and may represent a completely new type of metabolism.

Researchers from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) in Moss Landing, California, discovered a whale skull that was 'carpeted with worms' while searching for clam beds in the trough of Monterey Canyon, some 3,000 metres deep.

But the worms were like nothing they had ever seen before. The females - roughly the thickness of a pencil and a few centimetres in length - lack eyes, mouths or stomachs. Instead they consist of a balloon-like egg sac, which branches into a greenish root system.

These branching roots grow into the whalebone to extract fats and oils from the marrow. Symbiotic bacteria that live inside the roots break down the lipids, but how nutrients are transferred from the bones to the bacteria and then to the worms is not yet known.

Where's Jerry Bruckheimer when you need him. Actually, considering the mess Bruckheimer invariably makes of the science underlying his flicks, let's feed him to the bone devourers.

Independence of the judiciary at stake, not the Bali bombers' fate

But the implications are more dire for the fragile rule of law that has begun to emerge in Indonesia since Soeharto's fall in 1998. It is easy to imagine a legislature dominated by another dictator issuing, for example, a law for the arrest and imprisonment of political opponents in clear breach of the human rights guarantees in the new Chapter XA of the constitution.

Even if the court later strikes out that law, innocent detainees would still be behind bars, serving out unconstitutional sentences, even for life. Asshiddiqie's position would leave Indonesia without the protection of a judicial check on government. In any case, neutering the Constitutional Court to keep Bashir and the Bali bombers in jail is unnecessary.

First, some of the anti-terrorism charges he now faces apparently relate to events after the introduction of the legislation. These should still be valid.

Second, he and the bombers should immediately be charged with the range of conventional Criminal Code offences they should have faced at the outset - murder, arson, conspiracy, etc. These would not be effected by the ban on retrospectivity, as the code existed at the time of the Bali blasts.

Suyitno Landung, head of police criminal investigations, says they are considering this in respect of Bashir but they should do the same for all the bombers. At the trial they could all raise double jeopardy arguments but they would be weak, and the prosecution would almost certainly prevail.

Bashir and the Bali terrorists would never leave jail and the constitution would not need to be mangled to keep them there. The dilemma Indonesia now faces is that in a frantic effort to keep the Bali bombers behind bars, it risks needlessly jeopardising the introduction of constitutional review.

The Bali bombings were a tragedy. It would be another tragedy if Indonesia's fledgling judicial independence - and thus its hard-won reform process - was destroyed so quickly.

The Coalition and Labor need to make a decision. They support the rule of law in Indonesia or they don't. If they do, they should stop pressing the Constitutional Court to reverse or subvert its own decision. If they don't, they should think about the unintended consequences of supporting the Suharto regime through thick and thin from 1965 to 1997.

No-one wants the Bali bombers released and according to this article they can be prosecuted for regular offences under the Criminal Code.

Yudhoyono Would Win Indonesia�s Run-off

In the Jun. 5 election -- the first ever direct presidential ballot in Indonesia -- Yudhoyono finished in first place with 33.57 per cent of all cast ballots, followed by Megawati with 26.60 per cent. Since no candidate received more than 50 per cent of all votes, a run-off was scheduled for Sept. 20.

Before final first round tallies were published on Jul. 26, Yudhoyono and Megawati were already in talks with other political organizations to secure backing for the run-off. Megawati has reportedly offered eight cabinet posts to members of the Party of the Functional Groups (Golkar) in case she is re-elected.

Polling Data

What candidate would you support in the presidential run-off?

• Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (PDI) 68%
  
• Megawati Sukarnoputri (PDIP) 23%
  
• Undecided / No opinion 9%
  

Source: Indonesian Survey Institute (LSI)
Methodology: Face-to-face interviews with 1,190 Indonesian adults, conducted from Jul. 17 to Jul. 19, 2004. Margin of error is 2.9 per cent.

LSI consistently overrated Yudhoyono before the first round, as did most other polls. Voters in Indonesia do not stick to the party line at all. The Asia Times reported on 16 July that:

However, according to a survey by the Institute for Research, Education, Economic and Social Affairs (LP3ES), a well-respected research company, voters in the July 5 election ignored party lines to vote for candidates of their own choice. According to the survey, conducted on voting day, only 55% of people who voted for Golkar in the legislative election endorsed the party's candidate Wiranto in the July 5 presidential election; the others went to Yudhoyono (31%) and Megawati (8%). Supporters of the PDI-P were divided as well - 74% chose to vote for Megawati, while 13% supported Yudhoyono and 7% backed Wiranto.

Megawati, despite her reformasi credentials, is a very traditional Indonesian politico. Whether Golkar can actually deliver enough votes for seats to stop the Yudhoyono juggernaut is an open question.

This Is Rumor Control | Howard Gets Reward (8)

1=Total Fiction

10=Metaphysical Certainty

The Bush Administration says it rewarded Australian Prime Minister John Howard with a free-trade agreement last week because of his unstinting support for the war on terrorism, but the real reason was to bolster his sagging reelection chances. (8)

I am just shocked, shocked, I tell you.

El ministro australiano de Exteriores rechaza disculparse ante Espa�a

Las pol�micas declaraciones de Downer se produjeron despu�s de que el s�bado pasado un grupo que afirma ser el brazo armado de Al Qaeda en Europa, el Grupo Isl�mico Tawid, amenazara a Australia e Italia con atentados si no retiran sus tropas de Irak.

Downer subray� la importancia de que los pa�ses env�en un fuerte mensaje a los terroristas en el que afirmen que no se dejaran intimidar por ellos. 'Tienes que hacer frente a esta gente, si no, les har�s m�s fuertes', asegur�.

El Ministerio espa�ol de Exteriores convoc� ayer a la embajadora de Australia en Espa�a, Susan Tanner, para expresar el 'firme rechazo del Gobierno espa�ol' a las palabras de Downer, quien ha afirmado que no existe una crisis diplom�tica con Madrid.

'El Gobierno espa�ol, que ha establecido la lucha contra el terrorismo como una clara prioridad de su pol�tica exterior, considera inaceptables estas declaraciones, especialmente viniendo de un pa�s amigo como Australia', a�adi� Exteriores en un comunicado.

Downer dijo que el encuentro entre la embajadora y los funcionarios espa�oles fue �til porque permiti� a Canberra expresar su posici�n. El ministro reconoci� la 'complejidad evidente en lo que ocurri� en realidad en Espa�a en torno' a las elecciones legislativas del 14 de marzo, pero al final (...) los terroristas est�n usando constantemente el ejemplo espa�ol' para intimidar a otros pa�ses.

Por otra parte, el embajador espa�ol en Canberra, Jos� Ram�n Bara�ano Fern�ndez, traslad� ayer, lunes, a las autoridades australianas el malestar por las declaraciones del ministro y les explic� que Madrid 'nunca ha sucumbido' ante los violentos, indic� a Europa Press en una conversaci�n telef�nica.

or:

The inflammatory statements by Downer came out last Saturday after a group which claims to be the armed branch of Al Qaeda in Europe, the Islamic group Tawid, threatened Australia and Italy with attack unless they withdraw their troops from Irak.

Downer underlined the importance of countries sending a strong message to the terrorists that affirms they will not let themselves be intimidated. 'You have to challenge these people, if not, they harass you more strongly', he said.

The Spanish foreign ministry yesterday called in Australia's ambassador in Spain, Susan Tanner, to express the 'firm rejection of the Spanish government' to Downer's words. Downer has affirmed there is no diplomatic crisis with Madrid.

'The government of Spain, which has made the struggle against terror a clear priority of its foreign policy, considers these statements unacceptable, especially coming from a friendly country such as Australia', the ministry noted in a communiqu�.

Downer said the meeting between the ambassador and Spanish officials was useful because it allowed Canberra to express its position. The minister recognised the 'complexity evident in what happened in Spain during' the parliamentary elections of 14 March, but in the end (...) the terrorists are constantly using the Spanish example' to intimidate other countries.

For his part, the Spanish ambassador in Canberra, Jos� Ram�n Bara�ano Fern�ndez, conveyed yesterday, Tuesday, to the Australian authorities the unhappiness of the minister's statements and informed them Madrid 'never has succumbed to violence,' the ambassador told Europa Press by telephone.

Downer's cafuffle is really about domestic politics rather than getting the Spanish or Philippine governments to change their policies. It's also a really bad way to do foreign policy. If Howard is re-elected and finds himself dealing with a Kerry administration Australia is going to find itself needing a new foreign policy fast.

HM Department of Vague Paranoia

In an effort to worry the public and convince them to vote for us again next year, and because George Bush asked us to, this website includes the common sense advice found in the Preparing for Emergencies booklet, and information on what the government is doing to protect the country as a whole. (Hint: we're praying really, really hard.) National editions of the booklet will be available here when we can be arsed to get translators to put them into your crazy moon languages.

From 2nd August, translations of the booklet into 16 languages will be available on this website. They will be in : Arabic, Bengali, Chinese, English, Farsi, French, Greek, Gujarati, Hindi, Kurdish, Punjabi, Somali, Turkish, Urdu, Vietnamese and Welsh. In the meantime, just assume that we don't care about you.

You will also be able to order copies of the booklet in audio tape, large print, and Braille formats. We wouldn't have bothered, but Blunkett insisted.

An alert, but not alarmed Boing Boing managed to register this name in the co.uk domain. HM Government are presumably less alert but more alarmed, because they only secured the name in the .com domain.

Fortunately HM Britannic Government has not adopted HM Australian Government's devastating tactic of issuing fridge magnets of mass protection

Coming soon, The Pillow Book of John Winston Howard or How to entertain really disturbing fantasies about the person of the President of the United States. I'd recommend getting in a good supply of ship's biscuit.

The Pillow Book of Sei SHonagon

A blogger named Simon Cozens is translating the classic Japanese text The Pillow Book (Makura no Soshi) by Sei Shonagon into English and republishing it as a blog. It's easy to forget the fact that these words were written in the tenth century, because the results in this format read -- well, rather like a blog. Some dates are fictitous, and some liberties have been taken to produce a coherent narrative stream in blog format -- but the content is purported to be a faithful translation of the original. Since I speak neither contemporary nor classical Japanese, I'll have to take this blogger (or someone wiser)'s word for it. And no, I'm sorry -- Ewan McGregor has nothing to do with this one. Link (Thanks, Andrew)

I'm still ploughing through the Butler report. Meanwhile we get a blog version (blersion? reblogging? blelease?) of the Pillow Book. Japanese literature in the Heian period is written almost exclusively by women, most famously the Genji Monogatari by Lady Murasaki Shikibu. Women were thought too stupid to ever learn Chinese, the language of 'serious' Heian writing. Sadly for the forgotten male authors they wrote either bad Chinese or Sino-Japanese. No-one reads the male authors.

Contact with China was intermittent. Even when regular it ran only to one embassy ship every five years. When China fell into one its periodic disunions, or the Japanese offended the Chinese court the ships would stop for a while. One embassy appeared at Qangan with a letter from the (ahem) Son of Heaven in the Land of the Rising Sun to the Son of Heaven in the Land of the Setting Sun. Yang Di, the second Sui emperor, was more than mildly unimpressed with these pretensions and stopped the embassies. The Japanese state of that time occupied about a third of its current territory and the court language (along with the origins of the ruling dynasty) may have been Korean.

The Heian elite was too small, too remote and too dependent to sustain a literature written in a foreign language. Someone should email the URL to Alexander Downer.

Darfur Destroyed

The government of Sudan is responsible for "ethnic cleansing" and crimes against humanity in Darfur, one of the world's poorest and most inaccessible regions, on Sudan's western border with Chad. The Sudanese government and the Arab "Janjaweed" militias it arms and supports have committed numerous attacks on the civilian populations of the African Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa ethnic groups. Government forces oversaw and directly participated in massacres, summary executions of civilians -- including women and children -- burnings of towns and villages, and the forcible depopulation of wide swathes of land long inhabited by the Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa. The Janjaweed militias, Muslim like the African groups they attack, have destroyed mosques, killed Muslim religious leaders, and desecrated Qorans belonging to their enemies.

The government and its Janjaweed allies have killed thousands of Fur, Masalit, and Zaghawa-- often in cold blood, raped women, and destroyed villages, food stocks and other supplies essential to the civilian population. They have driven more than one million civilians, mostly farmers, into camps and settlements in Darfur where they live on the very edge of survival, hostage to Janjaweed abuses. More than 110,000 others have fled to neighbouring Chad but the vast majority of war victims remain trapped in Darfur.

This conflict has historical roots but escalated in February 2003, when two rebel groups, the Sudan Liberation Army/Movement (SLA/M) and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) drawn from members of the Fur, Masalit, and Zaghawa ethnic groups, demanded an end to chronic economic marginalization and sought power-sharing within the Arab-ruled Sudanese state. They also sought government action to end the abuses of their rivals, Arab pastoralists who were driven onto African farmlands by drought and desertification -- and who had a nomadic tradition of armed militias.

The government has responded to this armed and political threat by targeting the civilian populations from which the rebels were drawn. It brazenly engaged in ethnic manipulation by organizing a military and political partnership with some Arab nomads comprising the Janjaweed; armed, trained, and organized them; and provided effective impunity for all crimes committed.

The government-Janjaweed partnership is characterized by joint attacks on civilians rather than on the rebel forces. These attacks are carried out by members of the Sudanese military and by Janjaweed wearing uniforms that are virtually indistinguishable from those of the army.

Although Janjaweed always outnumber regular soldiers, during attacks the government forces usually arrive first and leave last. In the words of one displaced villager, "They [the soldiers] see everything that the Janjaweed are doing. "They come with them, they fight with them and they leave with them."

The government-Janjaweed attacks are frequently supported by the Sudanese air force. Many assaults have decimated small farming communities, with death tolls sometimes approaching one hundred people. Most are unrecorded.

Darfur is a classic human rights crisis and it will not go away any time soon. The UNSC is debating a resolution to impose sanctions if the Sudanese government does not take action against the Janjaweed shortly. Ultimately, I suspect there will need to be military intervention, preferably by the AU rather than a coalition of the willing. A CoW intervention in another Muslim state is probably impossible after Iraq.

'Cool' Fuel Cells Could Revolutionize Earth's Energy Resources

Originating from research at UH's Texas Center for Superconductivity and Advanced Materials (TcSAM), these SOFCs of the 'thin film' variety are both efficient and compact. With potential ranging from use in the government in matters of defense and space travel to driving forces in the consumer market that include computers and electricity, this breakthrough carries tremendous impact.

'By using materials science concepts developed in our superconductivity research and materials processing concepts in our semiconductor research, we are able to reduce operating temperatures, eliminate steps and use less expensive materials that will potentially revolutionize from where we derive electrical energy,' said Alex Ignatiev, director of TcSAM and distinguished university professor of physics, chemistry and electrical and computer engineering at UH. 'While there are a number of fuel cell research programs at the university, ours focuses on the application of thin film science and technology to gain the benefits of efficiency and low cost.'

Compared to the macroscopic size of traditional fuel cells that can take up an entire room, thin film SOFCs are one micron thick -- the equivalent of about one-hundredth of a human hair. Putting this into perspective, the size equivalent of four sugar cubes would produce 80 watts -- more than enough to operate a laptop computer, eliminating clunky batteries and giving you hours more juice in your laptop. By the same token, approximately two cans' worth of soda would produce more than five kilowatts, enough to power a typical household.

This could be really bad news for the Saudi dynasty and few others.

Channeling Flood

The Flood report is really a lot less interesting than the Butler report or the 911 report. Butler closely argues each case, sometimes going right down to discussion of particular sources in relation particular findings. Flood sweeps through with a broad brush. The famous phrase 'thin, ambiguous and incomplete' actually runs counter to the tenor of most of the report.

Flood makes some useful recommendations. He wants ONA, DIO and DIGO oversighted by the PJCAAD and by IGIS and he wants DIGO brought under the Intelligence Services Act 2001 (Recommendations 1 and 2). The rest of his report is significant for the case studies in Chapter 3 where the famous phrase occurs but he really only offers very mild criticism of ONA's performance over Iraq. He is also critical that no national assessment was ever prepared for the Iraq WMD issue.

The Man of Steel's claim that the government is exonerated by the report is just a tad weird when you consider the Flood inquiry did not have that issue within its terms of reference. It's even weirder when you consider the Jull report issued by the PJCAAD in March found:

5.20 The statements by the Prime Minister and Ministers are more strongly worded than most of the AIC judgements. This is in part because they quote directly from the findings of the British and American intelligence agencies. In particular, in the 4 February 2003 speech to the House of Representatives, the Prime Minister quoted the findings of Joint Intelligence Committee of the UK and the key judgements of the National Intelligence Estimate of the CIA. In both of these documents the uncertainties had been removed36 and they relied heavily on the surge of new and largely untested intelligence, coming, in the US at least, from Iraqi defectors.37 These dossiers comprised stronger, more emphatic statements than Australian agencies had been prepared to make. See paragraph 5.13 above for details of the statements. 38

That discrepancy was absent from Flood's terms of reference:

Without seeking to limit your examination, I ask that you provide advice on the following matters:

- the effectiveness of the intelligence community's current oversight and accountability mechanisms as they relate to such matters as the setting of priorities, the assigning to the priorities of appropriate resources, and the delivery of high quality and independent intelligence advice to the government;

- the suitability of the current division of labour among the intelligence agencies and communication between them;

- the maintenance of contestability in the provision to government of intelligence assessments; and

- the adequacy of current resourcing of intelligence agencies and in particular ONA.

Your inquiry is to focus primarily on the intelligence agencies in relation to foreign intelligence collection and assessment. As such, your deliberations should encompass the activities of ONA, DIO, ASIS, DSD and DIGO. Should you find it necessary, you should feel free also to include consideration of linkages to other agencies as appropriate, including ASIO.

Next, what the Butler saw.

George does not play dice with the universe

Mark A. R. Kleiman | Hawking's flip-flop

And instead of being properly ashamed of having been wrong, and listening respectfully to those who were right, he's bragging about having changed his mind, as if that were somehow an accomplishment or a mark of intelligence. 'I want to report that I think I have solved a major problem in theoretical physics.' I mean, how pompous -- how utterly French -- can you get?

Professor Hawking has a lot to learn both from George W. Bush, who can't remember ever having been wrong, and from the anti-war bloggers who keep chanting 'I told you so I told you so I told you so.' Changing your mind in the face of new facts and new analysis is a sign of weakness, and being right now is unimportant compared to having always been right.

Indeed. I always suspected quantum physics of being a leftwing plot. Any group that claim: 'God does not play dice with the universe with the universe.' have got to be treated with suspicion and preferably kept off planes.

It also worth noting that a 'quantum leap' should cover an insignificant distance:

Philip Adams: Let�s admit that the word �quantum� doesn�t make sense to most people and they get it utterly wrong. When people talk of a �quantum leap� they imagine it to be something big. But the opposite is true.

Paul Davies: The word quantum literally means �package� or �discrete packet� in Latin, and it was first coined by the German theoretical physicist Max Plank in 1900. Planck discovered that electromagnetic radiation like heat and light doesn�t come in continuous amounts of energy, but in little packets, or quanta. Those particular quanta we now call photons.

Phillip Adams: So a quantum leap is in fact what?

Paul Davies: A quantum leap in the case of heat radiation or light is a very tiny discontinuous jump in energy, for example when a photon of light is emitted or absorbed by an atom

Inquiring minds

weapons intelligence 'thin

An inquiry into Australia's spy agencies has found that intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction was "thin, ambiguous and incomplete".

Prime Minister John Howard says the report finds Australia's spy agencies are performing well but the Opposition says it proves the Government took Australia to war in Iraq on faulty intelligence.

Mr Howard has released the unclassified version of the report by former diplomat and intelligence chief Philip Flood.

The report raises concerns about intelligence on weapons of mass destruction before the Iraq war and says the agencies failed to rigorously assess them.

Mr Flood partly blames systemic weaknesses in spy agencies.

Cabinet considered the report on Monday and has agreed to all of its key recommendations.

The Government cited weapons of mass destruction as a major reason for Australia going to war in Iraq and Mr Howard says he does not regret his decision to go to war.

"The world and the Middle East and Iraq are better places because Saddam Hussein has gone," he said.

The Man of Steel is of course contradicted by his own words out of his own mouth:

Well I would have to accept that if Iraq had genuinely disarmed, I couldn't justify on its own a military invasion of Iraq to change the regime. I've never advocated that. Much in all as I despise the regime. But what I was really trying to say today and perhaps it has had some effect is that I get a bit tired of the humaritian argument all being on the one side. It's about time that the humanitarian argument was put into a better balance and people understand what a monstrous regime we are dealing with.

That one is now apparently a noncore statement of deeply held principle (something he doesn't believe anymore). The Man of Steel has finally uttered the real justification for Australia's participation in the enterprise of Iraq:

: "The decision we took was justified both on the assessments we received from our intelligence agencies and the other policy considerations including our alliance with the United States that I outlined at the time. I do not retreat in any way from the Government's decision. If I had my time again I would take the same decisions, the World, and the Middle East, and Iraq are better places because Saddam Hussein has gone.

The Flood report actually does nothing of the kind the Man of Steel proclaims. What it does say is:

There has been a failure of intelligence on Iraq WMD. Intelligence was thin, ambiguous and incomplete. Australia shared in the allied intelligence failure on the key question of WMD stockpiles, with ONA more exposed and DIO more cautious on the subject. But many of the agencies' other judgments have proved correct. Overall, assessments produced by ONA and DIO on Iraq WMD up to the commencement of combat operations reflected reasonably the limited available information and used intelligence sources with appropriate caution.

The lack of comprehensive assessment, which might have been achieved by production of a National Assessment or an Intelligence Estimate to support ADF deployment considerations, was regrettable. Such comprehensive reporting may have helped to clarify a complex and fragmented picture. The limited analysis of the significance of Iraq's WMD in terms of the threat that Iraq posed also impacted on the utility of the assessments.

The two agencies' key judgments were largely consistent until late January 2003, when ONA assessed that Iraq must have WMD, while DIO continued to assess that the intelligence on the issue was inconclusive. But differences in style, including ONA's lesser use of detail and qualification, led to an implicit difference in assessments from late December 2002. On the key points of Iraq's possession of WMD, and the significance of its concealment and deception activities, ONA judgments were expressed with fewer qualifications and greater certainty than those of DIO.

Meanwhile the Butler Report in the Uk has managed to totally exonerate everyone except for the interesting fact that Blair now claims he didn't get the memo telling him key intelligence findings had been withdrawn.

No respite for Blair as MPs reopen intelligence inquiry

The inquiry into the flawed intelligence which led Britain to war in Iraq on false claims that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction is to be reopened by a Labour-led select committee.

The Commons Select Committee on Foreign Affairs (FAC) agreed at a meeting behind closed doors to write to Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, with a series of questions, including whether he told the Prime Minister that the intelligence had been withdrawn in July last year, because it was no longer judged to be credible.

The Independent also learnt that the Prime Minister's Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) agreed at a separate private meeting yesterday to look into the revelations in the Butler report that MI6 had withdrawn the intelligence underpinning the WMD claims.

The decision by the two committees to pursue the unravelling of the evidence surrounding the Government's Iraq dossiers was a fresh blow to Mr Blair after surviving Tuesday's Commons debate on Iraq. He was hoping to draw a line under the row for the summer, but it is now certain to continue rumbling until the party conferences in the autumn.

The Government also will be alarmed to discover that Donald Anderson, the Labour chairman of the FAC, may also have lost the Labour majority on the committee after two Labour MPs who have been highly critical of the Government - Eric Illsley and Andrew Mackinlay - refused to vote with the Labour majority.

The Labour MPs on the committee tried to stop it pursuing the inquiry beyond writing to Mr Straw. However, in a split vote, it was agreed to use an expert to investigate the disparities in the evidence to Hutton and that taken by the committee in private session from Mr Straw. Mr Illsley and Mr Mackinlay abstained in the vote, allowing the opposition MPs on the committee, including the Liberal Democrat David Chidgey, and Andrew Mackay, a former Tory whip, to inflict a four-three defeat.

The US 911 commission will report shortly. It will be interesting to see if that report proves equally thin, ambiguous and incomplete. More lots later when I've done a mountain of reading.

Troppo Armadillo | The Naive and Sentimental Politics Lover is a deal pithier than I am.

Rumoured Conjectures: Strike 2

Reuters is reporting:

Israeli estimates of when Iran will be able to build a nuclear bomb have been shifted two more years to 2007, an intelligence report said Wednesday and analysts credited the delay to international scrutiny of Tehran.

Security sources quoted the report -- delivered to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in private and leaked in part to the media -- as saying that within three years Iran would have the means to produce an atomic bomb by itself.

Iran vehemently denies pursuing nuclear weapons, arguing its atomic ambitions are limited to generating electricity.

Tehran officials have also accused Israel of trying to distract the international community from its own assumed nuclear arsenal and stoking world opinion against the last Middle East foe which could challenge it militarily.

In 2000, Israeli security sources told Reuters that Iran would be nuclear-capable within five years and was developing long-range missiles with which to lob warheads at Tel Aviv.

The regional picture has since changed, with a U.S.-led invasion of Iraq bringing neighboring Iran under closer watch by the West -- especially after Tehran admitted in November to buying centrifuges used to enrich uranium from a black market set up by Pakistani nuclear weapons expert Abdul Qadeer Khan.

The BOP conjectures are starting to look a tad, well, unconjectural.

Or maybe the blasphemy president

Boniface VIII | Unam Sanctam 1302

This authority, however, (though it has been given to man and is exercised by man), is not human but rather divine, granted to Peter by a divine word and reaffirmed to him (Peter) and his successors by the One Whom Peter confessed, the Lord saying to Peter himself, 'Whatsoever you shall bind on earth, shall be bound also in Heaven' etc., [Mt 16:19]. Therefore whoever resists this power thus ordained by God, resists the ordinance of God [Rom 13:2], unless he invent like Manicheus two beginnings, which is false and judged by us heretical, since according to the testimony of Moses, it is not in the beginnings but in the beginning that God created heaven and earth [Gen 1:1]. Furthermore, we declare, we proclaim, we define that it is absolutely necessary for salvation that every human creature be subject to the Roman Pontiff.

George II Bush | Unam Busham 2003

At the end of the session, Bush reportedly told the group, �I trust God speaks through me. Without that, I couldn�t do my job."

Perhaps George Bush really wants to be remembered as the sodomy president

Excerpt from statement provided by Kasim Mehaddi Hilas, Detainee #151108, on January 18 2004:
I saw [name deleted] fucking a kid, his age would be about 15 - 18 years. The kid was hurting very bad and they covered all the doors with sheets. Then when I heard the screaming I climbed the door because on top it wasn't covered and I saw [name deleted] who was wearing the military uniform putting his dick in the little kid's ass. I couldn't see the face of the kid because his face wasn't in front of the door. And the female soldier was taking pictures. [name deleted], I think he is [deleted] because of his accent, and he was not skinny or short, and he acted like a homosexual (gay). And that was in cell #23 as best as I remember.

The link is at the Washington Post (pdf).

Tip via Boing Boing

Why McGauchie is a brave, brave man

Telstra has estimated the cost of connecting fibre to every home in the country at $30 billion. This is beyond the company's capital resources unless it can get a long access holiday - that is, unless it is removed from the ACCC access regime until Telstra makes a return on capital from it.

An informal conversation has already started about this, along with a couple of fibre network pilots in Queensland.

The issue collides potently with privatisation.

The most efficient builder of a $30 billion national fibre network is the Government, just as it was the most efficient builder of the copper network. It is clearly essential infrastructure, to be used by future generations and should be funded by government debt - not the far more expensive private capital that Telstra can raise.

In fact, it would be a national scandal if Telstra funded this new network using expensive capital and then received an access holiday (that is, monopoly pricing) to pay for it, when the Government could do it for half the capital cost and make it available to all-comers.

But a new government network would destroy Telstra's existing infrastructure business. The Government owns half of Telstra and is a seller, motivated to preserve its value in the face of collapsing phone call prices. It has a huge conflict of interest.

This discussion is vastly complicated and important for the nation and for Telstra, and now leading it is Donald McGauchie - farmer, Reserve Bank board member and professional director. Let's all wish him luck.

Let's not. Let's ask instead why Telstra should not be split into a public network provider and a private access retailer. Especially when it is clearly abusing it's effective monopoly in a rent-seeking binge by raising retail phone costs and wholesale network access costs.

The Blogging of the President | Rumored Conjectures

I heard a high level former general speak a week and a half ago, and here are the two interesting things he said:

1) Prior to the election, there will be a crisis with Iran. Ariel Sharon knows that neither Kerry nor Bush will contradict him before an election, so he will foment a crisis with Iran to deal with their nuclear weapons program.

2) There will be a peace deal with North Korea. The deal should have happened two years ago, but wasn't because of diplomatic blunders. A deal will now happen because it is necessary to showcase Bush as a peacemaker.

N.Korea Ready to Negotiate Nuclear Program -Official:

A senior North Korean representative said on Tuesday his government was ready to end its nuclear weapons program if the United States changes its 'hostile policy' toward Pyongyang.

Reflecting recent progress in talks with the reclusive Stalinist state, North Korea's representative to the United Nations, making his first visit to Capitol Hill, said Pyongyang would not only freeze its nuclear weapons program but also refrain from transferring or testing nuclear devices.

'The Democratic People's Republic of Korea will give up its nuclear weapons program if conditions are met to end the U.S. hostile policy,' Gil Yon Park told a forum sponsored by the Korea Society and other groups in a U.S. Senate office building.

I guess it's all part of being a peace president. Apparently that's the same as being a war president. Because after all, Peace=War and George Bush is doubleplusgood.

Not the first 'closed' case for Negroponte

Q: 'Is it enough to allow the Iraqi Minister for Human Rights to investigate [the executions of six prisoners] allegedly done by his own Prime Minister?'

Downer: 'Iraq is a sovereign country now. Who else is supposed to investigate wrongdoing in Iraq? I think Mr McGeough should present his material to the Iraqi police so they can fully investigate these matters ... I would have thought, knowing what I know about Mr Allawi - and I've met him - it would be, on the whole, rather surprising if he has done this.'

Dear me, Alexander, does your office, on the whole, still have to tell you when to come in out of the rain?

Prime Minister Allawi, formerly a Saddam Hussein associate before he fled into exile to team up with the CIA, denied, before publication, the entirety of McGeough's two witness accounts.

For the sake of his health, McGeough had by then already felt it prudent to leave Iraq. John Negroponte's office responded to him by email: 'If we attempted to refute each [rumour], we would have no time for other business. As far as this embassy's press office is concerned, the case is closed.'

Of course. One only has to consider Negroponte's record as US ambassador in Honduras to know he is a loyal servant of Republican Washington who sees and knows nothing. An estimated 10,000 Nicaraguans and Honduran political opponents died at a time when, as The New York Times reported in September 2001: 'The diplomat who presided over that embassy from 1981 to 1985 was a great fabulist.

'John Negroponte saw, or professed to see, a Honduras almost Scandinavian in its tranquillity, a place where there were no murderous generals, no death squads, no political prisoners, no clandestine jails or cemeteries. [He] exercised US power in ways that still reverberate throughout that small country. His most striking legacy, though, is the Honduras of his imagination.

'Most people who lived or worked in Honduras during the 1980s saw a nation spiralling into violence and infested by paramilitary gangs that kidnapped and killed with impugnity. Negroponte would not acknowledge this. He realised the Reagan policy in Central America would lose support if truths about Honduras were known, so he refused to accept them.'

This same man, with an embassy regime of more than 1000 American 'foreign service officers', plus American advisers 'salted throughout Iraqi ministries' as well as 140,000 US military personnel, now has absolute covert power in Iraq.

Of course 'the case is closed'.

Perhaps we should be grateful the Foreign Minister of Kleenex did not see into Allawi's soul. This business of replacing investigations with soul-searching is dangerous.

How to catch the tube

Neville de Mestre was eight years old when he started bodysurfing. That was in 1946, 10 years before surfboards started to make a splash in Australia. Today, he is the world Iron Man champion in the 60-64 age group as well as professor of mathematics at Bond University in Queensland.

This month, de Mestre published the world's first scientific paper on the sport he loves. 'It got to a stage where I thought it was about time that someone who's a fluid dynamicist actually tried to put together the mathematics and physics of bodysurfing,' he says.

This is a profound evil. It is against all the laws of nature to reduce catching a wave to a matter of metrics and equations.

Clinton minds the Gap

What was Bill Clinton saying about the US Administration not getting involved in Australian politics?

Following Denton's interview with Clinton, to be screened on the ABC tonight, the pair chatted about East Timor's Foreign Minister, Jose Ramos Horta, and his appearance on Enough Rope . Despite the cameras still rolling, the intriguing portion of the interview can't be shown because the pair were standing out of frame. However, Spike has a transcript, which certainly makes for interesting reading:

Clinton: "I'm glad you liked Horta. I liked him, too."

Denton : "Oh, he was very, very impressive."

Clinton: "Yeah, he's good. Very supportive. That whole crowd, all those guys are, you know, the top two or three guys are interested people."

Denton: "They are and ... you know they're such a fragile nation."

Clinton: "Um, if they resolve that [Timor Gap oil and gas] dispute."

Denton: "It certainly would. I'm not sure if this administration."

Clinton: "Yeah. You guys can cut them a little slack and, you know, a little bit of money will go a long way there and if we could get enough money through that to give them some infrastructure, I have talked to hotels over the world I think you could make it sort of, like, the middle-class vacation destination for a lot of South-East Asia because you could keep the costs down so low."

The whole interview is online now. Cutting them a little slack is precisely what the Australian government refuses to do. In the short term this means East Timor continues as the largest aid donor to Australia. In the long term, it means the Timorese are condemned to be a client state just like the others we're developing in the South Pacific.

Iraqi PM executed six insurgents: witnesses

MAXINE McKEW: Paul McGeough, thanks for joining us.

Paul, as you've also made clear in your article, Prime Minister Allawi has flatly denied this story.

Why then is the Herald so confident about publishing it?

PAUL McGEOUGH, 'SYDNEY MORNING HERALD' AND 'AGE' FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT: Well it's a very contentious issue.

What you have is two very solid eyewitness accounts of what happened at a police security complex in a south-west Baghdad suburb.

They are very detailed.

They were done separately.

Each witness is not aware that the other spoke.

They were contacted through personal channels rather than through the many political, religious or military organisations working in Baghdad that might be trying to spin a tale.

And they've laid it out very carefully and very clearly as to what they saw.

MAXINE McKEW: You haven't identified these witnesses but why have they felt free to talk about such an extraordinary story?

PAUL McGEOUGH: Well, they were approached through personal connections and as a result of that, they accepted assurances.

They were guaranteed anonymity, they were told that no identifying material would be published on them and they told what they saw.

Both the Herald and McGeough are sticking to their guns, if you'll forgive the expression.

Hawking cracks black hole paradox

After nearly 30 years of arguing that a black hole destroys everything that falls into it, Stephen Hawking is saying he was wrong. It seems that black holes may after all allow information within them to escape. Hawking will present his latest finding at a conference in Ireland next week.

The about-turn might cost Hawking, a physicist at the University of Cambridge, an encyclopaedia because of a bet he made in 1997. More importantly, it might solve one of the long-standing puzzles in modern physics, known as the black hole information paradox.

It was Hawking's own work that created the paradox. In 1976, he calculated that once a black hole forms, it starts losing mass by radiating energy. This 'Hawking radiation' contains no information about the matter inside the black hole and once the black hole evaporates, all information is lost.

But this conflicts with the laws of quantum physics, which say that such information can never be completely wiped out. Hawking's argument was that the intense gravitational fields of black holes somehow unravel the laws of quantum physics.

Other physicists have tried to chip away at this paradox. Earlier in 2004, Samir Mathur of Ohio State University in Columbus and his colleagues showed that if a black hole is modelled according to string theory - in which the universe is made of tiny, vibrating strings rather than point-like particles - then the black hole becomes a giant tangle of strings. And the Hawking radiation emitted by this 'fuzzball' does contain information about the insides of a black hole.

The Man of Steel may have to abandon the black hole in his private office and go back to using plain old shredders to deal with children overboard, SIEX-X, the dangerous Tampa refugees he's admitted to Australia, the Manildra meeting he as sure his advisers had told him he did not attend, the qualifications to prewar Iraqi intelligence and a number of quantum politics anomalies.

Allawi shot inmates in cold blood, say witnesses

Iyad Allawi, the new Prime Minister of Iraq, pulled a pistol and executed as many as six suspected insurgents at a Baghdad police station, just days before Washington handed control of the country to his interim government, according to two people who allege they witnessed the killings.

They say the prisoners - handcuffed and blindfolded - were lined up against a wall in a courtyard adjacent to the maximum-security cell block in which they were held at the Al-Amariyah security centre, in the city's south-western suburbs.

They say Dr Allawi told onlookers the victims had each killed as many as 50 Iraqis and they 'deserved worse than death'.

The Prime Minister's office has denied the entirety of the witness accounts in a written statement to the Herald, saying Dr Allawi had never visited the centre and he did not carry a gun.

This bears watching. The journo, Paul McGeough, has always been reiable.

The crane is still my neighbour

On the off-chance you have a passion for slightly obscure Australian poets, you can get the complete works of John Shaw Neilson in a variorum edition here. I still think ripples are thoughts that go out to the edge of a dream.

Lord Butler delivers Iraq verdict

The quality of the intelligence used to make the case for Britain going to war with Iraq has now been thrown into doubt, the Butler inquiry has said.

The 196 page report says MI6 did not check its sources well enough, and sometimes relied on third hand reports.

Lord Butler was asked by No 10 to look at the accuracy of Britain's pre-war intelligence after the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

He is now outlining his report, before Tony Blair faces MPs at 1330 BST.

The whole report is now available for download.

U.S. News obtains all classified annexes to the Taguba report on Abu Ghraib

Among the more shocking exchanges revealed in the Taguba classified annexes are a series of E-mails sent by Major David Dinenna of the 320th MP Battalion. The E-mails, sent in October and November to Major William Green of the 800th MP Brigade, and copied to the higher chain of command, show a quixotic attempt to simply get the detainees at Abu Graib edible food. Dinenna pressed repeatedly for food that wouldnt make prisoners vomit. He criticized the private food contractor for shorting the facility on hundreds of meals a day, and for providing food containing bugs, rats, and dirt.

"As each day goes by tension within the prison population increases," Dinenna wrote. "...Simple fixes, food, would help tremendously." Instead of getting help, Major Green scolded him. "Who is making the charges that there is dirt, bugs or what ever in the food?," Major Green replied in an E-mail. "If it is the prisoners I would take it with a grain of salt." Dinenna shot back: "Our MPs, Medics and field surgeon can easily identify bugs, rats, and dirt, and they did." Ultimately, the food contract was not renewed, an Army spokeswoman says, although the contractor holds other contracts with the military.

Interesting that the upper reaches of the US military command were just not interested in anything more than making a problem go away by ignoring it. It's also interesting that, for all the scare stories about the need for intelligence justifying anything and everything, Taguba found so many prisoners were simply never interrogated and political pressure from Washington for actionable intelligence was driving the chaos and violence at Abu Ghraib.

It's almost as though this one prison served as a metaphor for the whole of Iraq.

agressively not apologising

British PM Blair 'Considered Resigning

Blair, who has seen his ratings tumble in opinion polls since last year's war in Iraq, had been 'seriously considering his position' following a series of attacks on his leadership, the broadcaster said in an unsourced report.

Three cabinet colleagues, Health Secretary John Reid, Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell and Education Secretary Charles Clarke met Blair, urged him not to quit and sought to assure him he had wide government support, it said.

'I'm not going to speculate on what I see as Westminster gossip,' Jowell told BBC radio Saturday. 'Tony Blair is our prime minister -- the most successful prime minister of modern times. He will continue to lead our government.'

US findings turn up heat on Blair as he awaits the Butler report

The United States Senate committee�s damning findings last night piled more pressure on Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, as he and his ministers braced themselves for criticism from Lord Butler�s inquiry into intelligence on Iraq next week.

Lord Butler, a former Cabinet secretary, will report on Wednesday and will cast serious doubt on the quality of British intelligence reports that the Prime Minister said made military action in Iraq a matter of urgent national interest.

While Mr Blair is likely to avoid a direct rebuke, his September 2002 dossier on Iraq may be targeted by Lord Butler, as may Sir Richard Dearlove and John Scarlett, the current and future heads of MI6.

In the face of controversy over the MI6 role, Mr Blair decided earlier this year to promote Mr Scarlett to replace Sir Richard at the end of this month. Dame Pauline Neville-Jones, a former head of the joint intelligence committee, last night told the BBC that the Butler report could make it impossible for Mr Scarlett to take over as head of the Secret Intelligence Service.

"You do have to ask the question whether somebody who�s been deeply involved and possibly criticised in the findings of the Butler report is regarded as a suitable person to head [MI6]," Dame Pauline said.

Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, yesterday emerged as another possible target for Lord Butler, who is expected to reveal that he over-ruled Foreign Office lawyers who said military action could not be justified in international law.

Meanwhile, back at the fort:
Now say sorry for war, PM told

The Labor Party yesterday called on the Prime Minister to apologise for taking Australians to war under false pretences, after an American inquiry's damning findings about US intelligence failures over Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

Opposition foreign affairs spokesman Kevin Rudd said John Howard talked a lot about character these days.

But, he said: "A core part of character is telling the truth. It's time John Howard at last told the Australian people the truth - that the reasons he gave them for going to war were wrong."

The US Senate committee has said most key judgements in the intelligence community's major October 2002 report on Iraq's WMD programs were overstated or not supported by the underlying intelligence reporting. The intelligence community suffered from a "collective presumption" that Iraq had an active and growing WMD program. "Group think" led to ambiguities being put aside or ignored, and usual mechanisms for challenging assumptions not being used.

Senator Jay Rockefeller, a Democrat member of the committee, said the lapses "rank among the most devastating... intelligence failures" in American history. "We in Congress would not have authorised that war... if we knew what we know now," he said.

Really, it's weird how the party of personal responsibility seems to think a war for WMD's that don't exist is not even a case for an apology.

The crane is my neighbour

The bird is my neighbour, a whimsical fellow and dim:
There is in the lake a nobility falling on him.

The bird is a noble, he turns to the sky for a theme,
And ripples are thoughts coming out to the edge of a dream.

He bleats no instruction, he is not an arrogant drummer:
His gown is simplicity � blue as the smoke of the Summer.

The bird is both ancient and excellent, sober and wise,
But he never could spend all the love that is sent for his eyes.

How patient he is as he puts out his wings for the blue:
He is an old guest of the sunlight � a child of the dew.

I always liked John Shaw Neilson. There's a furious textual argument over whther Line 3 reads this way or:

And waves are as thoughts coming out to the edge of a dream

Old People May Hold Key to Human Success

'What we looked at is differences in the proportion of people who were living to be older,' Caspari said. Some individuals may have lived to great age, but at some point humans as a species began living longer on average than other primates and Caspari and Lee wanted to find out when and why.

They divided the fossils into two groups -- adults of reproductive age, which they settled on as 15 years, and adults that lived to be twice as old, 30, based on tooth wear.

In primitive societies, people are often grandparents at 30, Caspari pointed out.

'We found this proportion of older to young adults in the fossil record increased over time,' Caspari said.
'In the Upper Paleolithic that proportion just skyrocketed. It was just unbelievable. It increased five-fold. We didn't expect that.'

Caspari and Lee rechecked their numbers and analysis.

'But then we started to think about it and thought we really shouldn't be surprised, because there is a behavioral change that took place over time at the same time,' Caspari said.

'You start to see a change in symbolic behavior. You see art. You see a large number of people being buried with jewelry, with body ornaments.'

Perhaps around this time people started to value and take care of the weak and the old, and in turn benefited from their help and experience, Caspari sad.

This could be when the uniquely human condition of menopause evolved and started to have an effect, Caspari said. Women not burdened by childbearing could focus on their grandchildren and other kin.

'We live in a society that is so geared toward younger people. It is nice to realize that it might be older people that make us human after all,' Caspari said.

Now if only the economic rationalists had a decent grip on politics in the Upper Paleocene we could have avoided centuires of economic inefficiency in caring about the weak and the old. Damn!