It's neck and neck, but on paper they're still polls apart

Thirteen million Australians are eligible to vote. Therefore, any opinion poll that claims, in a period of just two weeks, the Government went from 390,000 votes behind Labor in primary votes (ALP 44 per cent, Coalition 41 per cent) to 1.3 million votes ahead (Coalition 47, ALP 37), and then, a further three weeks later, to lose 520,000 votes while Labor magically regains 780,000 votes (Coalition 43, ALP 43), is massively kidding.

In other words, the Newspoll of three weeks ago couldn't possibly have been anything but a cock-up somewhere. You don't get huge voting shifts like that, back and forth, in just a matter of a few weeks. Newspapers, though, aren't going to admit it. Thus we get silly stories that get overexcited in the first place and then, when the next poll comes along and voting trends regain credibility, we get equally silly stories that pretend there has suddenly been a huge turnaround in public sentiment.

It is just the most grievous twaddle.

Far more reliable is the long-term trend. And this shows that in each of the past four elections (1993, 1996, 1998 and 2001), newspaper polls invariably, in their research in the months before election day, underestimated the Labor vote and overestimated the Coalition vote, sometimes quite markedly. The political parties know this and so do those analysts who know what they're talking about.

And if you take a line from the last election, then understand Labor's primary vote, say both public polls, has gained between four and five percentage points (between 520,000 and 650,000 votes) since the last election, while the Government has gained nothing.

Think hard about that. You can bet the Prime Minister does.

Ramsey says the election must be between 31 July 2004 and 16 April 2005. That is what the constitution says. I doubt the Man of Steel will want to face waking up one morning and discovering that George Bush is a lame duck. I'd place the chances of the election being held after the first Tuesday in November at zero.

There are a number of election furphies we can expect in the next few weeks:

1. The Senate does not have the most complex system of election in the world

2. The Man of Steel is not putting off the election. Howard is doing what every other prime minister of Australia does and trying to set the election date to his own advantage.

3. Polls are a wholly owned- and -operated device for increasing newspaper sales. Sometimes they're outright wrong. The trend line and the pattern are all that really tell us anything.

4. No matter who wins here and in Washington the US alliance will continue after the election.

Rain tanks, recycling in water pipeline

The report, by the House of Representatives Agriculture Committee, precedes a meeting on Friday to decide on a national approach to water-rights reform.

Deputy Prime Minister John Anderson was reluctant to say yesterday whether he would commit to a plan where farmers, the states and the Commonwealth would each pay one-third of any water-rights buyback dictated by future scientific discoveries.

His spokesman later welcomed the report calling for mandatory rainwater tanks and said the Government was still considering the idea of water bonds. Controversially, the report renews the committee's call to hold back a plan to put another 500 gigalitres into the ailing Murray River until more research on the environmental impacts of extra flows is complete.

'The committee is not swayed by commentators who portray the river as dead or dying,' wrote chairwoman Kay Elson. But South Australian Liberal MP Patrick Secker, representing the Goolwa electorate, said: 'I believe the science in many areas of the Murray-Darling basin is adequate.'

Wow, a newspaper that actually identifies what a parliamentary committee is doing. Water reform is not a sexy issue ad does not often make the floor of the House but a mountain of work is done in the back rooms. I've read the committee's chapter on the Murray-Darling. It's not quite a snow job, but it comes very close. The precautionary principle alone suggests the 500 megalitres cannot harm the river.

Hill won't release abuse dossier for risk of offending US

The Federal Government has refused to make public a detailed 61-page dossier outlining what Australians knew about prisoner abuse in Iraq, with the Minister for Defence, Robert Hill, claiming some details would offend the US.

Senator Hill was yesterday censured in the Senate for his role in misleading Parliament and his failure to take responsibility for the false statements made by him, the Prime Minister and senior Defence officials.

Senator Hill had been asked why he chose to make a 5 page correcting statement when Defence had given him the comprehensive report plus nine large folders of supporting documents.

'The so-called [61-page] report ... was a brief to me,' he said. 'It is not the practice of this Government or previous governments to table its briefs,' he said, adding that Parliament had been 'fully informed'.

Among the material was a scathing assessment of US detention practices, in the form of a situation report, written by Australian military lawyer Lieutenant-Colonel Paul Muggleton, who was stationed with the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad.

Senator Hill said Colonel Muggleton's situation report was not released 'because I did not think it was in the best interests of our relationship with the US'.

A government that is basing its claim for re-election (among other things) on White House support is declining to embarrass its political ally. Diplomatic manoeuvres are not n exception to Australia's obligations under international humanitarian law. The depth of Hill's ingenuousness emerged last week in the Senate estimates hearings.

Moreover no-one in government will say why the Australian government did not make any representaitons to Washington to end the abuses the government knew about. More later.

Torture Didn't Work for the French in Algeria Either:

France won key battles by torturing suspects for intelligence. But the bigger lesson is that it lost the war. The fact that French military leaders resorted to the extensive use of torture shows that they had lost the support of the populace at large. It is a lesson that seems to have been ignored by American leaders as they prosecute a war in Iraq.

The French use of torture in Algeria didn't happen overnight. It was a reaction to a deepening crisis in which the French military, originally looking for suspect Algerians, came to see all Algerians as suspects. A signatory to the Geneva Conventions on war, the French government nonetheless insisted that these conventions weren't applicable to the Algerian situation. Its rejection of Geneva protections, and the consequent acceptance of harsher methods of interrogation of prisoners, proved to be fertile breeding ground for torturers.

Since late 2001, because the attacks against al-Qaida and the Taliban in Afghanistan, the U.S. government has, like the French in Algeria, displayed a clear ambivalence toward the Geneva Conventions. At times it has professed adherence; at others, it has scoffed. Even the reasoning for rejecting these conventions is identical to earlier French arguments: like the United States today, the French military argued that countering terror required harsh methods.

In Algeria, concerned about countering a 'revolutionary war,' French generals increasingly seized authority from civilian leaders. They ran roughshod over legal protections for the population. The main opposition to French rule, the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN), seized the initiative. But the FLN was not simply the virtuous revolutionary force beloved of the left; like many weak revolutionary forces (for example, the Vietnamese Viet Minh at the beginning of its war against the French), it too resorted to terror to achieve its aims.

It's probably trite to say also that the French in Algeria insited that their interrogation methods did not amount to torture because of fine distinctions advanced by the French military. The difference in the US case is that it is the civilian leaders in the White House and the Pentagon who are advocating fine distinctions to exclude themselves from the Geneva Convention and the Torture Convention.

Fighting a War in Name Only

With the third anniversary of the war on terror fast approaching, the administration has not expanded the armed forces and apparently has no plans to do so. It categorically rejects proposals to revive the draft. It has left untouched the rituals of consumption deemed essential to the American economy. It has studiously refrained from curtailing corporate profits or prerogatives. Old-timers will recall when big wars meant rationing and higher taxes. Not this time. Through deficit spending, we will slough off the cost of war onto future generations.

Thus, for most Americans, the global war on terror has become a little like global warming: We sense dimly that we ought to take it seriously, but in practice we go about our daily routine as if it didn't exist.

Pass through a major airport, visit a mall, shop for a new car and look for signs that this nation is engaged in anything approximating a great struggle. There are none.

Which suits Bush just fine. Real wars -- those that engage the passions of the American people -- energize politics and subvert the established order. Change is the last thing this administration wants. For despite the high-sounding talk, the overriding aim of this war is not to march toward freedom but to dissuade Americans from peering too deeply at the events of 9/11. Were they to do so, they just might pose discomfiting questions about the competence of our leaders, the organization and purposes of government and the rationale of U.S. foreign policy.

The contrast with World War II is instructive. To fight that war Franklin D. Roosevelt mobilized the nation. The result was decisive victory. But with victory came other, largely unanticipated consequences. Roosevelt's crusade to liberate enslaved nations raised questions about the meaning of freedom at home. As such, it gave impetus to the embryonic civil rights movement. It undermined old notions of a woman's 'place.' It affirmed workers' rights to organize and bargain collectively. It extinguished old forms of religious bigotry. It created a new class of politically aware and upwardly mobile citizens -- 16 million returning veterans.

Australia is in the same boat. In fact, the Man of Steel announced we had withdrawn from Iraq and were not an occupying power, until Labor said it would withdraw the remaining troops. The Australian presence then suddenly became the central pillar in the occupation of Iraq.

The truth is that Australia never withdrew. We reduced the ADF Iraq commitment from (roughly) 1800 to 850. Essentially we pulled out the SAS. Labor will not withdraw the troops in any real sense and very little apart from symbolism separates the major parties. In Australia, as in the US, the War on Terror and the War in Iraq are being fought with press releases aimed at domestic opinion.

The 'debate; about the US alliance grossly exaggerates the positions of Australia's major parties and also grossly exaggerates the threat to the alliance. Neither party opposes the alliance. Neither party is going to threaten the US bases -- Pine Gap and North West Cape -- we already host. Pine Gap will have crucial role in missile defence. It's unlikely a Labor Government would even refuse the US plans for bases in northern Australia. Equally the US is unlikely to strain the alliance to a point where the existing bases come under question.

Alliances are always a two-way street, under Labor governments as much as Coalition governments.

Australians tell Bush: stay out of it

A majority of Australians say President George Bush was wrong to criticise Labor's pledge to withdraw troops from Iraq by Christmas and the nation is evenly split on whether the relationship with the US is too close, a Herald Poll has found.

In the poll taken last weekend, after Mr Bush and other senior figures in his Administration publicly savaged the stance by the Opposition Leader, Mark Latham, on Iraq as 'disastrous', 56 per cent of those surveyed, and more than one-third of Coalition voters, said the President was wrong to comment on Australia's domestic politics.

The Herald-ACNielsen poll found that only 29 per cent agreed that, as leader of the coalition in Iraq, Mr Bush had the right to comment on policies affecting the coalition. But 41 per cent of voters said the Australian-American alliance would be weakened if Labor won the election, and only one-third believed that it would be unaffected.

This suggests that the public disagreement between the White House and Mr Latham created disquiet in the electorate about the implications for the relationship of a Labor victory.

A couple of things make the alliance issue dangerous for the coalition. The most obvious is that if the alliance between nations becomes a party issue then the alliance is in danger every time a Labor Government is elected. The Bush endorsement did not help the pro-war government in Spain and it looks like it is not going to help the pro-war government in Australia. It's worth recalling the massive swing against the Spanish right was not predicted by any poll taken before the election. Later research has showed the electoral impact of the Madrid bombing was to outrage swinging voters at the manipulation of the issue by the Aznar government. Aznar himself has since admitted this error.

Howard would do well not try and manipulate the issue here. Bush could not be elected to a shire council in Australia and I just cannot see why his endorsement is seen as a good thing by the Man of Steel.

Torture | Because I could...

Torture's dark allure

In fact, as George Browder explains in his powerful book 'Hitler's Enforcers,' 'the Gestapo, like police anywhere, could not do its work without public support.' The Gestapo's enormous success against the resistance, first in Germany and then elsewhere, depended heavily on bureaucratic files, police informants (G-men or V-men) and collaborators in foreign countries. 'Increased reliance on interrogation through torture during the war years reflects the declining professionalism of an overextended staff much watered down with neophytes,' Browder writes.

The priority in America's war on terror should be on developing human intelligence. Working one's way into a terror cell is not unlike working one's way into organized crime in the United States. One has to turn potential terrorists into double agents and to win the confidence and cooperation of the communities that shelter them. Technology is no substitute for this. Nor is torture.

Abu Ghraib should teach us what America's founders would have told us: that we are our own worst enemy. Leaders of dictatorships sign on to the Geneva Conventions only out of prudential fear of what other states might do to their POWs. Leaders of democracies sign on to them because they understand the evil that lurks in the heart of all human beings. Those who choose to abide by the rules do so not simply to restrain others but to restrain themselves.

Unrestrained power leaves behind a legacy of destruction that takes generations to undo. Torture, like incest, is the gift that keeps on giving. Democratic societies that legalized torture or tried to constrain its use have come to two ends. Some, like the Greeks and Romans, created tiered societies where authorities could torture whole classes of people (slaves or lesser citizens) and those who were beyond torture. Others, like the Italian city-states, were unable to prevent the executive branch from torturing more and more citizens and in the end fell to its dictatorial power.

The first result is hardly a model for modern democracies, and the second serves as a warning. In modern times, France routinized torture in Algeria, producing a racist, tiered society and an aggressive military government that almost overthrew French democracy. Proponents of torture would argue that destroying democratic institutions -- and the individuals involved -- is worth it if torture, as for the French in Algeria, succeeds in defeating terrorism.

Bill Clinton was interviewed by CBS on 17 June about his affair with Monica Lewinski.

RATHER The central question, if I may, and I know this is difficult, the central question is why?"

CLINTON I think I did something for the worst possible reason -- just because I could. I think that's the most , just about the most morally indefensible reason that anybody could have for doing anything. When you do something just because you could ... I've thought about it a lot. And there are lots of more sophisticated explanations, more complicated psychological explanations. But none of them are an excuse ... Only a fool does not look to explain his mistakes.

It would be laughable to compare Clinton's affair with Bush's launching an unjust war on untrue premises and with inadequate resources, and then trying to substitute torture for policy failure, but then it's laughable that Clinton faced impeachment and Bush has not. Bush also has a record of projecting himself (somewhat inaccurately) as a strong man in politics.

I'm the commander - see, I don't need to explain - I do not need to explain why I say things. That's the interesting thing about being the president. Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don't feel like I owe anybody an explanation.

911 did not change everything. The law is still the law. The Bush administration may think that everything changed.

There was a before-9/11 and an after-9/11," as Cofer Black, the onetime director of the CIA's counterterrorist unit, put it in testimony to Congress in early 2002. "After 9/11 the gloves came off." Many Americans thrilled to the martial rhetoric at the time, and agreed that Al Qaeda could not be fought according to traditional rules. But it is only now that we are learning what, precisely, it meant to take the gloves off.

As the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment provides:

Article 2
Each State Party shall take effective legislative, administrative, judicial or other measures to prevent acts of torture in any territory under its jurisdiction.

No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat or war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.

An order from a superior officer or a public authority may not be invoked as a justification of torture.

No exceptional circumstances whatever... And if, as Darius Rejali argues, torture is ineffective as well as unlawful, then the real question is why the Bush administration not only thinks it's above the law, but that what failed for the Gestapo and the KGB will work for them.

Railways and the roots of relativity

The young Einstein was not, of course, employed in the academic world but in the Swiss Patent Office. And Switzerland, as we know, was a centre of invention and innovation in clock technologies. The patent office at Bern was a clearing-house for new timing technologies, and Einstein's job afforded him a veritable grandstand seat from which to become acquainted with new electro-technological advances.

Moreover, every day Einstein saw an abundance of public clocks on his way to and from work - on storefronts, on baroque towers, at the train station. How to synchronize such clocks was a widespread concern all over Europe and America. Engineers, scientists and businessmen needed to synchronize clocks effectively in order to solve important problems, ranging from determining longitude at sea to preventing train crashes.

Galison's book is thus about the history of the problem of co-ordinating clocks, from the 1800s to the early 1900s. As he points out, this period was characterized by many efforts to unify, by convention, a plethora of standards of lengths and time. Geographical regions - even within a single country such as Germany - were distinguished by their own 'local times'. Railway lines defined and distributed time, bringing distant times into conflict with local times. Engineers struggled to pinpoint and unite locations and times. Chronometers transported aboard ships failed to keep the time of stationary clocks. Underwater telegraphic cables were laid across the Atlantic Ocean to transmit not only messages, but also time, from observatories in Europe to Africa, Newfoundland, Brazil and beyond. Poincar�? was even a member and sometime president of the French Bureau of Longitude, where he laboured to revise time-keeping conventions.

Local times, synchrony conventions, moving clocks that do not keep proper time, the diversity and unification of lengths and time. Were these remarkable coincidences? Or were there causal connections between breakthroughs in theoretical physics and prior techno-cultural developments? Galison's narrative implies a resounding 'yes', but he cautiously avoids any outright claims of historical causation. His aim is not to reduce the emergence of relativity to such developments, but to place it in a context where the interests of engineers, physicists, philosophers, entrepreneurs and even politicians converged.

Despite Galison's good intentions, his middle-of-the-road outlook does not counterbalance the direction of his research and the drift of his book. While claiming that special relativity emerged from physics, philosophy and technology, his book highlights the technological dimension, seemingly at the expense of the others. Readers who are not well acquainted with the roots of special relativity in optics and electrodynamics might therefore get the exaggerated impression that its crucial origins lay in the techno-culture of clock synchrony.

Be warned, moreover, that the patent offices were not the only possible source of technological imagery. Even before 1900, discussions of kinematics included references to clocks, observers, the measurement of length and time, and even trains. For example, in the 17th century, imagery of ships cruising rectilinearly served to illustrate the equivalence of physical processes on board to those on land, while by the late 19th century imagery of trains had become widespread. Such factors have to be subtracted before injecting Galison's circumstantial findings into a general history of physics. How much weight to give to the techno-cultural aspects will now challenge historians of special relativity.

Fortunately the young Einstein did not have to deal with the complex temporal leakages in the blogosphere where 'I'll just check my newsfeeds for a minute' can turn into several hours of densely (or loosely) argued post. Britain was the first government to make the time run on trains.

Britain was the first country to set the time throughout a region to one standard time. The railways cared most about the inconsistencies of local mean time, and they forced a uniform time on the country. The original idea was credited to Dr. William Hyde Wollaston (1766-1828) and was popularized by Abraham Follett Osler (1808-1903). The first railway to adopt London time was the Great Western Railway in November 1840; other railways followed suit, and by 1847 most (though not all) railways used London time. On September 22, 1847 the Railway Clearing House, an industry standards body, recommended that GMT be adopted at all stations as soon as the General Post Office permitted it. The transition occurred on 12-01 for the L&NW, the Caledonian, and presumably other railways; the January 1848 Bradshaw's lists many railways as using GMT. By 1855 the vast majority of public clocks in Britain were set to GMT (though some, like the great clock on Tom Tower at Christ Church, Oxford, were fitted with two minute hands, one for local time and one for GMT). The last major holdout was the legal system, which stubbornly stuck to local time for many years, leading to oddities like polls opening at 08:13 and closing at 16:13. The legal system finally switched to GMT when the Statutes (Definition of Time) Act took effect; it received the Royal Assent on August, 2, 1880.

At least that was easier than reforming the European calendar, where the retrograde Catholic south went Gregorian 170 years before the scientifically advanced Protestant north.

In an age of intense religious passion, the simple fact that the Pope instituted the reform was enough to make Protestant countries reject the change. The greater part of Protestant Germany did not switch to the Gregorian calendar until 1700, the Protestant Cantons of Switzerland and Protestant Netherlands until 1701. The Swedish dithered. In 1700 they began what was intended to be a gradual switch to the Gregorian calendar. They planned to stop observing leap years until their calendar was in line with the Gregorian one. They did omit the leap year in 1700, but observed the leap year in 1704 and 1708 (apparently they forgot the plan). Thus they were 10 days out of step with the Gregorian calendar and 1 day out from the Julian. Then, in 1712, they changed their minds, and went back to the Julian system by adding two leap days to February. Somewhere in Sweden, there are probably some unique baptismal records of people whose birthday was on a date never to be seen again: February 30. Lithuania and Latvia, which were under Polish rule at the time of the reform (and hence changed in 1582), actually reverted to the Julian calendar, so strong were the feelings. They did not change back again until the 20th century.

Now about that blogospheric temporal leakage...

Amnesty International |Clarification needed on status of prisoners after 30 June

Furthermore, Amnesty International would like to be informed by the drafters of the resolution whether all Iraqi Prisoners of War, currently held in their custody and entitled to protection under the Third Geneva Convention, will be released by 30 June 2004, consistent with the declared end of occupation and end of international conflict. If they are not to be released, Amnesty International requests to be informed where and in whose custody Prisoners of War will be held, and what protective measures are afforded to them under applicable international law.

Finally, Amnesty International wishes to receive clarification about the respective powers of arrest and detention of the Iraqi forces and the multinational force in the course of the exercise of the latter's broad powers granted in the resolution to take 'all necessary measures to contribute to the maintenance of security and stability in Iraq...including by preventing and deterring terrorism'. We would appreciate learning which of these parties will authorize arrests, searches, detentions, or internment, on what legal basis such measures are taken, and at what stage any detainees or internees taken by the multinational force will be handed over to Iraqi authorities.

Recalling reports of torture of Iraqis not only by the occupying powers but also by the Iraqi police, Amnesty International would welcome information about the legal and practical safeguards that will apply to arrest, detention and internment; what access international and Iraqi organizations will have to those held; and whether prisons and detention centres will be placed under Iraqi government or other control. The international community should know what measures are in place to ensure that the absolute prohibition of torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment will be strictly observed by Iraqi, US and other forces. In this respect, we would appreciate knowing your views about our recommendation that the United Nations should have a specific monitoring mandate to supervise all places of detention.

Silly Amnesty. Imagine thinking that the end of occupation means the end of the war, or that the exercise of full sovereignty by the Iraqi transitional government means that anyone can bang on the door of Abu Ghraib with a writ of habeas corpus.

Amnesty is mounting a letter-writing campaign, so click the link and start those cards and letters.

Australia 'party to bugging of UN'

Australia was party to spying on the United Nations, including Secretary-General Kofi Annan, to assist the lobbying campaign for launching the war against Iraq.

Intelligence community sources confirmed that the Howard Government received details of the UN bugging, in response to revelations to be published in a book by a senior Australian intelligence analyst turned whistleblower, Andrew Wilkie.

The book, which has been vetted by the Attorney-General's Department and had some details censored on national security grounds, also states that:

Australian agencies gathered intelligence on the US Administration and reported that allegations of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction and links to terrorists were not the main reasons it wanted to invade Iraq.

The Opposition was deliberately misled during briefings by intelligence agencies in the lead-up to the war, with facts undermining the Government's position omitted.

The Government knowingly presented false intelligence to the public that exaggerated the threat that Saddam Hussein posed.

These are big allegations and very hard to prove. Misbriefing opposition politicians can be tested. Intelligence distortions (sadly) are subject to the Four Steps:

1. Deny everything. 2. Admit it when it becomes unavoidable. 3. Say you didn't get the papers. 4. Blame it all on the troops.

The recent performance over the prison abuses in Iraq is a classic to add to a long list from children that weren't thrown overboard to the Manildra meeting the Man of Steel told parliament he had not attended.

The new Wilkie allegations will receive the same treatment, along with a claim by the Foreign Minister of Kleenex that even discussing these matters threatens the US alliance.

Between a rock lobster and a heartless place

Palmer was prosecuted in March 2000 in the Carnarvon Court of Petty Sessions with breaching a regulation under the WA Fish Resources Management Act. He had laid his lobster pots in an area of the coast where fishing for lobsters is prohibited by the regulations, namely Quobba Point.

Palmer was convicted and ordered to pay penalties of more than $28,000, plus costs of $2000. Which would have been all very well had it not been for the fact that he had gone to the Fremantle office of the Fisheries Department and asked for a copy of the regulations covering the 1998-99 rock lobster fishing season.

The 'office lady' told him that they did not have copies of the regulations available to the public. Still, she photocopied the regulations and piled him up with a lot of brochures and notices. None of the materials mentioned the relevant regulation that forbade commercial lobster fishing at Quobba Point.

The Criminal Code of WA spells out that ignorance of the law does not afford any excuse for an offence. But there is also a provision, which exists in other states as well, that people are not criminally responsible if they labour 'under an honest and reasonable, but mistaken, belief in the existence of any state of things'.

So this was a debate about whether Palmer's mistake was a mistake about facts or about the law.

I had to read this twice before I realsied it was not another speculative piece by the Medium Lobster. While everybody should read Fafblog, clearly not everyone should give the High Court of Australia the same close attention.

more estimates

There was a further estimates hearing of the Senate Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade Committee. The Hnasard is not available, possibly, the Hansard staff are still cleaning their fans. More when the transcript is available. The Sydney Morning Herald reports:

Robert Hill sat on his hands. How apt. As Labor's Senate leader, John Faulkner, meticulously detailed all the Government's failures to act on seven months of warnings about abuses at Abu Ghraib prison, Hill's body language echoed the central charge of his critics.

He sat on his hands. Slumped over, scowling.

He had just delivered a statement to the Senate that purported to "provide further information in relation to questions I was asked on May 11". May 11 was the day, Hill was confident, the Government would have taken immediate action if it had been "aware that something like this was happening".

But his statement yesterday offered no further explanation beyond "nobody told us", an excuse Faulkner noted was uncannily similar to the one used when the Government misled the public about refugees allegedly throwing their children overboard.

In fact, the only new material Hill provided yesterday served to deepen the mystery of how the Government could have remained unaware. This included a table detailing 25 separate instances in which senior Australian military lawyers in Iraq had reported "detainee concerns and/or meetings with international organisations".

These began on June 11, 2003, and included meetings with Amnesty International, the Red Cross, the UN special representative, Sergio Vieira de Mello, who was killed last year, and the US administrator for Iraq, Paul Bremer.

So how could 25 separate reports relating to Abu Ghraib from senior military lawyers become lost in the Defence bureaucracy?

Well, said Hill, sadly his department had "not recognised" the Red Cross's report about abuses in October. He insisted again that he had been misled and had, in turn, misled the Prime Minister, who in turn acted in "good faith" when he misled Parliament on May 27.

Hill gave his statement yesterday.

Faulkner replied today.

I'd be scowling if I were Senator Hill.

Yudhoyono Maintains Lead In Indonesia

The team of former security minister Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono and welfare minister Jusuf Kalla continues to lead all candidates in Indonesia, according to a poll by the Democracy Study Institute (LKaDe). 45.17 per cent of respondents would support Yudhoyono and Kalla of the Democratic Party (PDI) in the country's first-ever direct presidential ballot.

Current president Megawati Sukarnoputri and Muslim leader Hasyim Muzadi of the Struggling Indonesian Democratic Party (PDIP) are second with 18.88 per cent, followed by Amien Rais and Siswono Yudohusodo of the National Mandate Party (PAN) with 15.90 per cent. Former armed forces chief Wiranto and Solahuddin Wahid of the Party of the Functional Groups (Golkar) garner the support of 10.56 per cent of respondents. Hamzah Haz and Agum Gumelar of the United Development Party (PPP) are fifth with 4.70 per cent.

This is completely unexpected, not that SBY would be leading, and in striking distance of the 50% needed for a first round victory, but that Mega has drawn ahead of the Golkar campaign machine. Today's Australian that Golkar is fragmenting between supporters of Wiranto, supporters of Akbar Tandjung, and Golkar members shifting their support to Yudhoyono.

Indonesian politics, even after the reformasi that followed Suharto's falls, remain clientilistic. Leadership flows from your ability to deliver influence and rewards from higher level leaders to your own supporters. The trailing candidates, and this includes Wiranto, can expect to see their people shifting towards higher-placed candidates over the three weeks still to go.

Official verdict: White House misled world over Saddam September attacks

President George Bush 1 May 2003
The liberation of Iraq removed... an ally of al-Qa'ida

Vice-President Cheney 22 January 2004
There's overwhelming evidence... of a connection between al-Qa'ida and Iraq

Donald Rumsfeld 14 November 2002
Within a week, or a month, Saddam could give his WMD to al-Qa'ida

Condoleezza Rice 17 September 2003
Saddam was a danger in the region where the 9/11 threat emerged

The Bush administration's credibility was dealt a devastating blow yesterday when the commission investigating the attacks of 11 September said there was no credible evidence that Saddam Hussein's regime had assisted al-Qa'ida - something repeatedly suggested by the President and his senior officials and held up as a reason for the invasion of Iraq.

A report by the independent commission said while there were contacts between Iraq and al-Qa'ida operatives in the 1990s, it appeared Osama bin Laden's requests for a partnership were rebuffed. 'We have no credible evidence that Iraq and al-Qa'ida co-operated on attacks against the United States,' the commission said. It also discounted widespread claims that Mohamed Atta, the hijackers' ringleader, met an Iraqi intelligence official in Prague.

The report forced the Bush administration on to the defensive, as it appeared to undermine one of its key justifications for the invasion of Iraq.

While Mr Bush has been forced to admit there was no specific evidence to link Saddam to 11 September, his deputy, Dick Cheney, claimed on Monday that the former Iraqi leader was 'a patron of terrorism [with] long-established ties with al-Qa'ida''.

Last autumn Mr Cheney referred to the disputed meeting between Atta and an Iraqi official in the Czech Republic.

Critics of the White House say there was a deliberate policy to manipulate public opinion and create an association between Saddam and the attacks on New York and Washington. If true, such a plan has certainly been successful: a poll taken last September by the Washington Post newspaper found 69 per cent of Americans believed that Saddam was involved in the 11 September attacks.

The Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry seized on the commission's report last night. 'The administration misled America and the administration reached too far,' he told Michigan National Public Radio.

Read the staff report. When Kaye told us in December that no WMDs had been found or were likely to be, Bush's standings began collapsing. Worth watching to see if this revelation does similar damage.

O'Kane warned of prison abuse: US general

Australian military lawyer Major George O'Kane 'aggressively warned' about Geneva Convention violations at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison, a suspended United States general was reported as saying today.

Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, who was suspended from duty as head of the prison near Baghdad after the prisoner abuse scandal broke, said Major O'Kane had urged his US superiors to allow Red Cross inspections of the prison, today's Australian newspaper reported.

She did not believe Major O'Kane knew about the abuses that were photographed by guards from her 800th Military Police Brigade.

'Had Major O'Kane known anything about those photographs or anything close to those photographs, he would have come and told me,' Brig Gen Karpinski told the Australian newspaper.

Major O'Kane and his Australian colleague Colonel Mike Kelly were more knowledgable and supportive of Geneva Conventions than some US military lawyers, she said.

Brigadier General Karpinski called on the federal government to allow Major O'Kane to speak publicly about his knowledge of the scandal.

He has been gagged by the government since the scandal became public.

The government has O'Kane's response to the ICRC allegations. We know that from the Senate estimates hearings. The government's explanations was that they wanted to protect O'Kane from an unfair grilling.

If O'Kane defended the Geneva Conventions vigorously, what protection does he need? The only parties who could need protection from the O'Kane draft are the Australia and American governments.

Threepenny Planet: the Planck units

The present writing is a collection of essays concerned with how Planck quantities are perceived. Certain features of the quantities will be emphasized. One feature is their involvement in everyday experience. Another is the opportunity they provide for a fresh look at physical laws and data. Another is their concreteness: One of the power-of-ten multiples of the Planck length happens to be about a mile and another is the thickness of a penny--if there is a penny in your pocket you have with you a decimal Planck cousin. Their concrete reality can be emphasized in the way we handle the quantities: decimal multiples (such as a penny's thickness) will be identified and used descriptively. Other aspects will be discussed later, after the quantities have been introduced. Much of what I have to say is apt to be familiar to anyone with a background in general physics, though some ramifications may have escaped notice. In any case, the focus here is not on the latest theories and discoveries, but on something which is considerably more modest and which runs in a contrary direction. The concern is with more thorough assimilation of what is long-standing and well known--and with broader awareness of the fundamental proportions in nature.

The Planck quantities form a coherent set including one constant of each physical type: one length, one interval of time, one speed, and so on. Members are interrelated in simple, direct ways and play fundamental roles. The Planck speed, for instance, simply consists of traveling the Planck length during the Planck interval of time--and it is the speed of light.

Just when you'd got used to the metric system, the evil physicists are proposing a different set. Actually, the metric system is almost as abstruse as the Planck quantities. The metre, for instance is defined as:

The meter is the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1/299 792 458 of a second.

The historical definition was French (and therefore probably encourages the terrorists):

The origins of the meter go back to at least the 18th century. At that time, there were two competing approaches to the definition of a standard unit of length. Some suggested defining the meter as the length of a pendulum having a half-period of one second; others suggested defining the meter as one ten-millionth of the length of the earth's meridian along a quadrant (one fourth the circumference of the earth). In 1791, soon after the French Revolution, the French Academy of Sciences chose the meridian definition over the pendulum definition because the force of gravity varies slightly over the surface of the earth, affecting the period of the pendulum.

Jefferson proposed a different metric system, but was pipped at the post by the perfidious French.

Jefferson's system actually resembles the metric system in many ways. Its biggest shortcoming is that Jefferson didn't hit on the idea of using prefixes to create names for multiples of units. Consequently, his system was burdened with a long list of names. For example, he divided his basic distance unit, the foot (it was slightly shorter than the traditional foot) into 10 inches. Each inch was divided into 10 lines, and each line into 10 points. For larger distances, 10 feet equalled a decade, 100 feet was a rood, 1000 feet a furlong, and there were 10 000 feet in a mile (making the Jeffersonian mile about twice as long as the traditional mile). His basic volume unit was the cubic foot, which he proposed to call a bushel (it was about 3/4 the size of a traditional bushel). The basic weight unit was the ounce, defined so that a bushel of water weighed 1000 ounces. (This is very similar to the metric system, in which a liter of water weighs 1000 grams).

Just for completeness, Talleyrand (who starred with Fouch� in the corruption leaning on the arm of vice crack), advocated a pendulum-based measure.

My bet is that Planck will win out of sheer contrariety in a century or so. Until then we are stuck with the light shining in darkness.

SpaceTime Hypersurfing

In some future history, 1994 may be remembered as the year that the warp drive was first conceived to be a physical possibility. Long a cliche' of science- fiction writing, the warp drive has transported countless fictional characters through light-years of interstellar space in the time it takes for you or me to travel to the market. Unfortunately for real-world travelers, the warp drive has always been thought to be inconsistent with the laws of physics.

But all this has changed. In the May issue of Classical and Quantum Gravity, Miguel Alcubierre, a physicist at the University of Wales describes a space-travel scenario that bears an uncanny resemblance to the warp drive of science fiction. With Alcubierre's warp drive, we could reach any place in the universe in as short a time as we please!

The warp drive envisioned by Alcubierre is made possible by the subleties of Einstein's general theory of relativity. According to Einstein, spacetime (the union of the three dimensions of space with the dimension of time) is not an inert substrate, but rather a dynamical entity that twists and distorts under the influence of concentrations of energy. Alcubierre suggests that it might be possible to exploit this phenomenon to travel from one star to another faster than the speed of light. This could be done by creating a disturbance in spacetime such that the region directly in front of a spaceship is contracted while the region directly behind the spaceship is expanded. This distortion of spacetime would, in effect, propel the spaceship forward like a surfer riding the crest of a breaking wave.

No, I am not at the European Cup and taking advantage of lax law enforcement. I'd been meaning to look up the Alcubierre article for awhile, and once I'd linked to the bloater drive it was inevitable.

I Was Promised Flying Cars

At midnight on January 1, 2000, my friends and I stepped out of our apartment to watch the fireworks being fired off on Mount Royal. Despite the millennium hype, the world looked the same -- not just as it did on December 31, but as it had for decades. Where were the paperless offices? The robots to dust the piano? The clean-running flying cars? Movies, books and TV had long been drawing the futurescape for us, but it seemed all that promise had been derailed; innovation was too expensive, too extreme or merely impossible.

Or was the Future just taking longer than expected? The promise, it appears, is still there -- and in keeping with this issue's theme, I set out to discover how close we are to commuting the way they do in those science-fiction shows and movies.

With appearances in Blade Runner, The Jetsons, Star Wars: Episode II and The Fifth Element, flying cars have become the benchmark for determining when our humble race has reached the Future. They are a particularly potent fantasy: should they ever clutter our skies, they�d revolutionize something extremely familiar and quotidian�driving. In fact, attempts to develop flying cars started not long after actual cars hit the road. In 1917, aviation pioneer Glenn Curtiss unveiled his aluminium Autoplane�a car flanked by double-layer wings, lifted by a four-bladed propeller attached to the back. It hopped, but never flew. The forties saw the birth of contraptions such as the ConvAirCar, the Airphibian and the Aerocar (which Ford considered marketing in 1970). All three creations could be driven as well as flown. Alas, they all suffered the same fate: although they managed to get off the ground for significant amounts of time, funding problems eventually cancelled the projects forever.

Yeah, me too, although my all time favourite futuretech item is the bloater drive from Bill, the Galactic Hero.

A Moral Chernobyl - Prepare for the worst of Abu Ghraib

However, this very voyage to the pits may be of some moral use. Nobody has yet even suggested that the disgusting saturnalia in Abu Ghraib produced any 'intelligence' worth the name or switched off any 'ticking bomb.' How could it? It was trashily recreational. But this doesn't relieve the security forces of democratic countries from their sworn responsibility to protect us -- yes us, the very people who demand results but don't especially want to know the full price of our protection.

I have a historical example to offer. In the early 1970s, there was a gigantic scandal in England over the torture of Irish Republican detainees. (Harold Evans, then editor of the Sunday Times, deserves credit for printing the facts in spite of immense government pressure not to do so -- or not to do so without being accused of 'helping the terrorists.') The resulting outrage led to a commission of inquiry chaired by a judge named Sir Edmund Compton. His report took a dim view of some of the methods used but said that these did not amount to 'torture,' at least in most cases, because those inflicting them had not derived any pleasure from doing so. At the time, I thought this must be some kind of a sick joke, perhaps derived from Monty Python or the rigors of English boarding school. ('I didn't really enjoy it, Sir.' 'Oh well, that's all right, then. Carry on, Perkins.') However, the government did tell the army to stop it, and it pretty much did stop, and the terrorists didn't win.

They didn't win because their idea of bombing a large Protestant community into joining a united Catholic Ireland was a bit mad to begin with. And they also didn't win because security methods became tremendously more professional. Skill, in these matters, depends on taking pains and not on inflicting them. You make the chap go through his story several times, preferably on video, and then you ask his friends a huge number of tedious questions, and then you go through it all again to check for discrepancies, and then you watch the first (very boring and sexless) video all over once more, and then you make him answer all the same questions and perhaps a couple of new and clever ones. If you have got the wrong guy -- and it does happen -- you let him go and offer him a ride home and an apology. And you know what? It often works. Only a lazy and incompetent dirtbag looks for brutal shortcuts so that he can get off his shift early. And sometimes, gunmen and bombers even have changes of heart, as well as mind.

Yes, but what about the ticking bomb? Listen: There's always going to be a ticking bomb somewhere. Some of these will go off, and it's just as likely to be in my part of Washington, D.C., as anywhere else. But we shall be fighting a war against jihad for decades to come. And the jihadists will continue to make big mistakes based on their mad theory. And they are not superhuman: They can be infiltrated, bribed, and turned. You don't have to tell them what time of day it is, or where they are, or when the next meal will be served. (Though it must be served.) But you must not bring in that pig or that electrode. That way lies madness and corruption and the extraction of junk confessions. So even if law and principle didn't enter into the question, we sure as hell know what doesn't work. The cranky Puritan voice of Sir Edmund Compton comes back to me down the corridor of the years: If it gives anyone pleasure, then you are doing it wrong and doing wrong into the bargain.

If Christopher Hitchens is abandoning the War on Terror as justification for anything and everything the White House claims needs doing then the war party is in deep doo doo. In fact Abu Ghraib achieved nothing except the shredding of any moral case left to the war party. If you think a dirty war can succeed I suggest you read a little about earlier attempts to fight a dirty war in Latin America, and then consider whether it made those nations more or less secure for the motley crew of tyrants who then ruled there.

Beyond the west

In today's world, more people are more free than ever before. Our possibilities of helping the others out of unfreedom are also larger than ever. But what are the basic terms of engagement that we, in the west, propose to the rest of the world? At the moment, there are two extreme positions, the western triumphalist fundamentalist and the western cultural relativist. The first is well captured in the opening of the Bush administration's 2002 national security strategy. 'The great struggles of the 20th century between liberty and totalitarianism ended with a decisive victory for the forces of freedom,' it begins, with perfect accuracy, but then goes on 'and a single sustainable model for national success: freedom, democracy and free enterprise.' A single sustainable model? What titanic hubris.

The cultural relativist position says: 'These values are peculiar to the west; we cannot expect Muslims or Confucians to share them; therefore we should not expect of them the respect for human rights, free speech, democracy and so forth that we expect among ourselves.' This is equally misguided.

The right way lies between these two extremes. It can be described, without apology, as the path of freedom - not just for us but for all. Freedom is hard to define, let alone achieve, but those who are unfree know exactly what unfreedom is. A Confucian no more enjoys having his nails pulled out than a Christian. To see your daughter raped by a militia gang is as soul-rending for a Muslim as for a Jew. So many people in the world still live, and die, in an unfreedom that we can be quite sure they do not want, simply because they are human and we are human. What is now the most widespread form of basic unfreedom? Sixty years ago, when Franklin Roosevelt spelled out his 'four freedoms', most of us would probably have said dictatorships and the wars they cause. Today, the answer must be poverty. The first freedom towards which we should now work is Roosevelt's 'freedom from want'.

Two large but very simple steps can lift millions of human beings out of this kind of unfreedom. The first step is to practise what we preach: free trade. We should open our markets to their goods and cut our agricultural subsidies. This can only happen if America and Europe do it together. The second step is to increase aid. All rich and free countries should give at least 0.7% of their GDP, and all rich and free individuals should give 1% of our annual income, so as to provide clean water, basic sustenance, shelter and medical care for the poorest of the world's poor.

There are two competing views about how to remake the world. We can assume that everyone except those citizens of coalition countries who support the war on terror are fools or we can assume that they are capable of rational thought. If they are fools what we do does not matter so long as our leaders keep churning out platitudes about globalisation and the war on terror. If they are not fools then we had better start making policies that allow them a place at the table.

Making human rights effective works. Compare the progress the EU has made in the former Warsaw Pact nations with the progress the US has made in the former Baghdad Pact nations. Making human rights effective must have something going for it, because it is the policy the war party claim they are following.

Making human rights effective could be started easily by demolishing the practices, not the bricks, of Abu Ghraib.