snark of the week
From the Sydney Morning Herald

The insults have been visceral. "Many in the Labor Party await with bated breath for Mark Latham to do more damage to the Liberal Party than he does to the Labor Party and taxi drivers with his pronouncements," said Beazley in Perth on Thursday, a sly reference to the feisty Member for Werriwa's notorious punch-up with a wayward cabby.

I put that back to Latham on my radio show. "The taxi driver was stealing my property and Kim Beazley's trying to steal the Labor leadership off Simon Crean. I'm happy to tackle them both," he shot back. Solidarity forever, comrades.

I guess it's been a really snarky week or...

A snark is a long time in politics.

NGOwatch on Human Rights Watch

Human Rights Watch, in a report promoting sexual confusion among students in public schools, recommends groups that promote same-sex marriage, and have been associated with NAMBLA (North American Man Boy Love Association).

Click here here to read more on the Human Rights Watch website.

Human Rights Watch promotes "sexual orientation" rights. "Sexual orientation" encompasses numerous behaviors, including illegal activity.

See Appendix here for a list of sexual orientations from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition.

Human Rights Watch denounces abstinence programs.

Click here here to read more on the Human Rights Watch website.

Human Rights Watch advocates for gays in the military.

Click here here to read more on the Human Rights Watch website.

Human Rights Watch demands release of some detainees at Camp X-Rayin Guant�namo Bay.

Click here here to read more on the Human Rights Watch website.

Note the alleged link to the DSM actually goes to another rightwing thinktank's critique of the DSM.

yet more regime change
The Asia Times reports:

The AEI and another right-wing group, the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies, have announced that they are launching a new website (www.NGOWatch.org) to expose the funding, operations and agendas of international NGOs, and particularly their alleged efforts to constrain US freedom of action in international affairs and influence the behavior of corporations abroad.

The organizations are especially alarmed by what they see as the naivete of the Bush administration and corporations that provide NGOs with funding and other support. "In many cases, naive corporate reformers, within corporations and in government, are welcoming them," complained John Entine, an AEI fellow.

To mark the site's launch, AEI, which is funded mainly by major corporations and right-wing foundations, also held an all-day conference called "NGOs: The Growing Power of an Unelected Few" that featured a series of presentations depicting NGOs as a growing and largely unaccountable threat to the Bush administration's foreign-policy goals and free-market capitalism around the world. The conference was co-sponsored by a right-wing Australian think-tank, the Institute of Public Affairs.

I am calling on all like-minded bloggers to attend a conference called 'Ultraright US Thinktanks: The Growing Power of an Unelected Few'.

US meets Taliban
The Asia Times reports:

According to a Pakistani jihadi leader who played a role in setting up the communication, the meeting took place recently between representatives of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), the US Federal Bureau of Investigation and Taliban leaders at the Pakistan Air Force base of Samungli, near Quetta.

The source told Asia Times Online that four conditions were put to the Taliban before any form of reconciliation can take place that could potentially lead to them having a role in the Kabul government, whose present authority is in essence limited to the capital:

Mullah Omar must be removed as supreme leader of the Taliban.
All Pakistani, Arab and other foreign fighters currently engaged in operations against international troops in Afghanistan must be thrown out of the country.
Any US or allied soldiers held captive must be released.
Afghans currently living abroad, notably in the United States and England, must be given a part in the government - through being allowed to contest elections - even though many do not even speak their mother tongue, such as Dari or Pashtu.

If true, this is insane. Perhaps regime change in 2 countries at the same time is not as easy as Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz claim after all?

I've been some imagining. Of course I'm a hopeless idealist but what if the great powers had restricted their interventions in the Middle East to cases of international humanitarian intervention? What if Mossadegh had not not been deposed by the CIA? What if the US had not armed Saddam with chemical weapons in order to fight Iran? What if the Soviet Union had not imposed its own guy in Afghanistan?

Given the unhappy record of previous interventions why should we expect Iraq to be any better? What have the war party learned from previous interventions that they are applying in this intervention? So far the only possible answer to the last two questions is nothing and nothing.

The Road to Surfdom and Pandagon blog the same story.

UN push for Mid-East peace

Mr Annan said the introduction of US officials next week to monitor the road map was "a beginning, and it may be enough if the parties are able to break the cycle of violence".

"In the interim, I would like to see an armed peacekeeping force act as a buffer between the Israelis and Palestinians," he said in New York.

Mr Annan disputed the decision by the US and Israel to try to sideline Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat from the peace process, saying he had "not been entirely negative".

The Roadmap is going nowhere. Israel's effort to ensure its own security does no more than incite Palestinian retaliation. The Palestinian government does not have the capacity to provide security. A third party needs to do it.

And (just quietly) wasn't the occupation of Iraq going to guarantee a Middle East peace settlement?

constitutional tunnel vision
We all know the Howard model (if it even makes it to a referendum) will get rejected by the people. The speculation on why Howard is pushing it is fun. Speculating on why labor would support it is sad.

What's sadder is the vacuum the debate is happening in. The states have constitutions. New South Wales sends deadlocked bills to a referendum and empowers the legislative assembly to pass supply without consent of the legislative council. Victoria (roughly) follows the Howard model. Victoria treats supply bills the same way as NSW.

Victoria has also enacted a highly declaratory rule:

Section 16A. The principle of Government mandate
(1) It is the intention of the Parliament that regard should be given to the following principle--


The Council as a House of Review will exercise its powers in recognition of the right and obligation of the current Government to implement--


(a) the Government's specific mandate--the policies, promises and initiatives which were publicly released by or on behalf of the Government during the last election campaign; and
(b) the Government's general mandate--to govern for and on behalf of the people of Victoria.
(2) The principle in sub-section (1) is not to be construed as limiting the powers of the Council, the Assembly or the Parliament.".

Queensland, the ACT and the Northern Territory have taken the more drastic option of not having a second chamber. Why does federal constitutional debate always happen in a vacuum?

Great moments in science

Well, it's something I always wanted to know.

Time drags for stoned rats

Cannabis makes rats lose track of time, robbing them of the ability to discriminate between short and long periods.

This may help explain why human users may be less adept at tasks that require sustained concentration.

For some reason it took me forever to blog this story.

snark of the week
From the Sydney Morning Herald:

But it [the Australian government] refused to acknowledge the inevitability of organised carnage, going so far as to mislead the US about Indonesia's intentions. During the Tampa affair, a momentary failure of communication from the military to the Government laid the basis for a sustained and grotesque political abuse of raw intelligence in the children overboard scandal.

The increasing frequency of leaks and unauthorised briefings from the Washington and London intelligence communities are sure signs they know they're being set up. After all, these guys wrote the manual on dirty tricks. That's why the British papers are suddenly full of unnamed MI6 poobahs complaining about interference by Tony Blair's office. And why a lot of CIA guys have been bitching to The Washington Post about the number of times Vice-President Dick Cheney would loom over their shoulders, cracking his knuckles and choking everybody with warm clouds of Old Spice while he rumbled about how much he was looking forward to kicking Saddam's butt.

Wouldn't you massage the raw intel, just a smidge, just to stop the VP massaging your carotid artery with his knuckledusters?

Bear it in mind the next time someone tries to sell you a blurry picture of a secret missile base, or to convince you of a secret plot to smuggle terrorists into the country via leaky fishy boats. Because, you know, international terrorists just love to travel by leaky fishy boat and they always announce their arrival by twirling a few kids in the air over their heads, before tossing them to the fishes.

The intel says so.

The inevitable carnage in Aceh also seems not to be happening or not to require any Australian action.

Kim goes West
I'm amazed. When the Beasley challenge to labor leader Simon Crean was announced I assumed it would be a cakewalk. A week later I'm shaking my head. Having lost 2 federal elections in a row Kim Beasley chose to run on the one single platform guaranteed to lose him the leadership.

Running on your own charisma would seem poor tactics when you've lost 2 elections. When the said charisma campaign is precisely the way you lost the said elections it seems amazingly poor tactics indeed. When your program was to stand for nothing and compromise on everything it takes amazingly bad political judgment to run for leader on a program of standing for nothing and compromising on everything.

Crean has campaigned on policy and he's done it bravely and effectively. If the labor caucus have a brain between them between them they'll stick with Crean. And that is not something I could have imagined saying a week ago.

Carnage
From the ABC:

Hamas vowed revenge for Israel's helicopter gunship attack of just over 24 hours ago and it has delivered in swift and brutal terms. The militant Palestinian group has claimed responsibility for a bombing on a crowded Jerusalem bus during peak hour, which has killed at least 17 people and wounded more than 60.

Within an hour, Israel hit back with a missile attack on a car in Gaza City, which killed seven people including two senior Hamas members and wounded dozens of bystanders. Then a short time later Israeli helicopter gunships fired more missiles in Gaza killing at least two more Palestinians.

It's one of the worst eruptions of violence in this three-year Intifada and it comes exactly one week after the peace summit in Aqaba in which the Israeli and Palestinian leaders agreed to work toward a peace settlement.

The United States President has again condemned the violence and while the Israeli Government has defended its assassination attacks, both the Palestinian Prime Minister Abu Mazen and Yasser Arafat are now calling on all Palestinian factions to stop their attacks against Israel.

When the Roadmap was first published and agreed to by the parties I expressed scepticism here and there. I was partly wrong, Sharon has gone much further than I expected, but the Roadmap leads nowhere as long as the Palestinian side does not control its extremes and the Israeli side maintains the assassinations policy and the settlements.

It seems to me that the Palestinian authority does not have (if it ever had) the capacity to control Hamas and the others. Perhaps destroying the Palestinian authority's security infrastructure was not Israel's brightest policy initiative. How that capacity can be increased enough to satisfy Israel's demand for security is really the only question and the Roadmap does not address that effectively. Transatlantic phone calls will not suffice. International boots on the ground might and those who supported the Iraq invasion on failed state grounds should ask themselves about the situation in the Occupied Territories.

How not to manage a colony

The pro-war people never really bothered to understand the anti-war argument, lost in their fantasies of Churchill and Munich, 1938. A less apt analogy could not have been drawn. What many anti-war people argued was not that the US would lose the Main Force war against Iraqi units, but would find the second war, the guerrilla war, impossible to win. That Iraq would seem to provide a victory, but that Iraqi history indicated that an armed opposition was likely to explode at some point. The reason you didn't want to tip over Saddam, is that you didn't want to see what he was sitting on.

Well, now we do, and we're bungling it. What reason have we given an Iraqi to be loyal to us? At the end of the day, why should Iraqis endorse any of our plans for their country? The Iraqi people may well decide that the best role for the US is in leaving their country. That hasn't happened yet. But, at the end of the day, are we going to provide a reason for Iraqi cooperation without a tank on every corner to ensure it?

While DailyKOS is always worth reading, this piece is outstanding.

Rumsfeld rediscovers state sovereignty!
Speaking in Germany:

Rumsfeld said that the world must strengthen organizations that allow nations to cooperate against a threat, "we must take care to not damage the core principle that undergirds the international system - the principle of state sovereignty," he said.

The secretary said he sees respect for the principle of sovereignty eroding. "We see it ? in my view ? in the International Criminal Courts claim of authority to try the citizens of countries that have not consented to ICC jurisdiction," he said. "We see it in the new Belgian law purporting to give Belgian courts 'universal jurisdiction' over alleged war crimes anywhere in the world."

I am now doing intensive research to discover which nations the International Criminal Court has invaded and occupied without the authority of the United Nations.

Howard speeches on WMDs
From the Sydney Morning Herald:

Four months ago, on February 4, John Howard made a ministerial statement to Parliament lasting an hour. He began: "My purpose today is to explain why Iraq's defiance of the UN and its possession of chemical and biological weapons and its pursuit of a nuclear capability poses a real threat to the stability and security of our world ..."

On March 12, Howard announced, in a national television address: "The Government has decided to commit forces to action to disarm Iraq. We are determined to join other countries to deprive Iraq of its chemical and biological weapons capable of causing death and destruction on a mammoth scale ..."

On March 20, the day of the US-led invasion of Iraq, Howard told Parliament: "We have made a very strong commitment to disarming Iraq. We have done [so] because we believe it is in Australia's long-term national interest. We do worry about the ultimate and fateful coming together of weapons of mass destruction and international terrorism."

On April 10, the day Baghdad fell, Howard told reporters: "I've said all along we wouldn't expect to get hard evidence of chemical and biological weapons until well after hostilities ceased. They've been obviously passed around and hidden."

Howard told Parliament on May 14: "Australia did the right thing. We brought freedom and liberty to an oppressed people. That is something about which we should always be properly and eternally proud." And Iraq's supposed chemical and biological weapon stockpiles? Howard, amid a brief reference well down in a 40-minute speech: "The hunt for these weapons will not be easy ..."

After a six-week recess Parliament resumed on May 13 for the budget. Iraq remained all-but ignored. Three weeks of sittings were dominated by the Hollingworth serial and Labor's leadership pantomime. Labor's Harry Jenkins (Vic) told the House a week ago: "There has been an eerie silence on Iraq since this Parliament reconvened - only two speeches [by Howard and Simon Crean]. If you compare this to the lengthy debates [before the invasion] you will see how ironic the silence is."

Labor's Kevin Rudd asked the Foreign Minister, Alexander Downer, the next day about US and British intelligence failures in the assessment of stockpiled Iraqi chemical and biological weapons, now a major issue in London and Washington. Downer replied, stoically: "[Australian intelligence assessments] remain confident in the judgement that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction materials and capability in the lead-up to the war. Over time - we have to be patient - we will get a comprehensive picture of Saddam Hussein's weapons program."

I am glad the federal opposition could find time to put down one (count it) one question on the issue of WMDs.

Howard on WMDs
From Howard's appearance on the ABC last night:

TONY JONES: This leads us, though, anyway to the rationale for the war on Iraq, for joining it in the first place.

Does it matter if no weapons of mass destruction are found in the end?

JOHN HOWARD: I wouldn't say it doesn't matter.

I wouldn't say that at all.

It's too early to make a judgment.

People should be more patient.

TONY JONES: They should be, but people are asking questions now as to where these weapons are.

If none are found, what are the implications?

JOHN HOWARD: I think, Tony, that question should be asked, and I'd be very happy to answer it if after the elapse of a reasonable amount of time such a conclusion is reached.

But it's too early, there are too many sensitive sites, the international team of 1,300 or 1,400 is only now being assembled.

It is altogether too early for people to say, "There definitely haven't been and won't be any evidence found "that Iraq had a WMD capacity before the war started."

Those are issues that obviously I'll be asked about.

If those things happen, then I'll be --

TONY JONES: When will be the appropriate length of time?

When will we know one way or another?

JOHN HOWARD: Certainly some time from now.

I'm just a poor simple blogger but I could swear I heard John Howard tell parliament that WMDs were a matter of certainty. If we now have to wait 'some time from now' to know about WMDs why the hell did we just fight a war over them?

Accepting responsibility

After the Bay of Pigs disaster when the CIA tried to invade Cuba and failed, President John F. Kennedy took personal responsibility and ordered an independent investigation.

In fact, the incompetent invasion had been planned during the Eisenhower administration, so JFK easily could have blamed the mess on his predecessor.

After the Pearl Harbor attack, Franklin Roosevelt established an investigative commission chaired by Justice Owen D. Roberts, a Republican Supreme Court member who had been the prosecutor for the notorious Teapot Dome scandal.

The War on Terror is not a war. It's a rhetorical device. If a nation at war can survive an independent inquiry into Pearl Harbour in the face of World War II it can probably survive an inquiry into 11 September or the missing WMDs. All 3 coalition nations now face mounting pressure for inquiries.

John Howard raised the beginning of a defence last night - we believed what we were told. George Bush and Tony Blair do not have a similar defence available. It's high time all 3 leaders started accepting responsibility.

neoliberalism and the executive
The Senate debate is rolling out along not unpredictable lines. The proposal is electorally dead so naturally labor is thinking of supporting it. I think it's interesting that neoliberal governments seem to believe in the centralisation of power in the executive at all costs.

Conservatives advocate checks and balances. Neither Howard nor Bush have ever seen checks and balances as anything but a road bump on the path to the enactment of their program. Certainly they do not recognise that scrutiny and deliberation are likely to improve any proposal.

The classic was the security laws we had to have after 11 September which were then left unused for months.

Tinker, tailor, spinner, spy

The irony is that the Prime Minister's reluctance to have the truth of all this investigated by an independent inquiry presided over by a judge stretches him on the same sort of rack that he used against Saddam Hussein. In the prologue to the conflict, Ministers asserted, and none more evangelically than Mr Blair himself, that if the Iraqi dictator had nothing to hide, then he would be fully co-operative with the arms inspectors.

That argument is now turned against Mr Blair. If he has genuinely nothing to fear from the truth, then he should be prepared to establish a comprehensive, independent inquiry.

I am surprised by this development. The antiwar majorities disappeared from the polls in Britain and Australia almost as soon as war began. If those majorities now decide that war was based on a lie, that's grim, sad news for Blair and Howard. Howard is already falling back on the predictable defence that he accepted intelligence given to him by the US and UK governments. I am not sure if that argument will run in Australia. It certainly has no traction in Britain.

My guess is that there will be an inquiry and that its findings will have massive impact in Canberra and Washington as well as London. To survive, Blair needs a good explanation for the total absence of a vast arsenal ready to fire in 45 minutes. A couple of contested trailers of mass destruction are no longer enough.

special Queen's Birthday snark of the week
From the London Times:

We cling to the monarchy as an anchor to the past and to the country that we once were as if that was a positive statement in its favour. Yet it is precisely because it is such an anchor that we need to throw it overboard and set ourselves free. Until we rid ourselves of the feudal mania which fixates on the banal preoccupations of an ordinary 18-year-old boy, who happens to have been born into the Royal Family, we will forever remain the class-ridden, class-anchored, class-obsessed society we have too long been.

In all truth I doubt abolishing the monarchy would achieve much of the author's object. The media would just grow a cinematic mania for Hollywood types.

I did not have sexual relations with that intelligence
All right, no-one's actually said it yet, but I'm sure it's coming.