US Seeks Israeli advice

Facing a bloody insurgency by guerrillas who label it an 'occupier,' the U.S. military has quietly turned to an ally experienced with occupation and uprisings: Israel.

In the last six months, U.S. Army commanders, Pentagon officials and military trainers have sought advice from Israeli intelligence and security officials on everything from how to set up roadblocks to the best way to bomb suspected guerrilla hide-outs in an urban area.

'Those who have to deal with like problems tend to share information as best they can,' Stephen Cambone, undersecretary of Defense for intelligence, said Friday at a defense writers breakfast here.

The contacts between the two governments on military tactics and strategies in Iraq are mostly classified, and officials are reluctant to give the impression that the U.S. is brainstorming with Israel on the best way to occupy Iraq. Cambone said there is no formal dialogue between the two allies on Iraq, but they are working together.

This is a disaster. Israel's occupation technique has succeeded only in radicalising the resistance to it and in violating the international law of human rights. The failure of Israel as an occupying power has been noted by four former Israeli heads of security. So Israeli advice is not likely to be of high quality.

The second point is that Israel's interests are not the same as the US national interest. Israeli military advice is more likely to serve Israel's interests.

Lastly, it's a disaster to be pushing a forward strategy of freedom to Arabs by methods and tactics recommended by Israel. Gaza on the Tigris used to be a bad joke. Now it's merely the military policy of the occupation.

Game talk a winner

Ellis, for those who like this sort of historical minutiae, went on to become vicar of St Clement Danes, now the RAF church in The Strand in London, near Australia House. This might be useful trivia for dinner parties, whether noodles are served or not. THE Prime Minister will present the Ellis trophy to the victorious Wallabies this evening, and I hope the crowd hoots as rudely as it did when he declared the tournament open.

As I wrote then, this is not a personal shot at John Howard. There is a proud Australian tradition of booing all and any politicians who take the stage at great sporting occasions to hog the limelight where nobody wants them.

Other people might find it puzzling. Nobody boos the American president when he throws out the first ball of the baseball season, for instance. If the president of China whacks the first ping-pong ball over a net in the perfumed Beijing spring, I dare say he is greeted with rapturous applause. But that should not stop us. We are young and free and, better still, girt by sea. Let the jeering echo around the world.

Hear, hear! Oi, oi oi! And stuff like that.

Crean attacks FTA

The federal government must include an exclusion clause in a free trade deal with the US to protect Australia's film and television industry, Opposition Leader Simon Crean said.

'I want a prime minister in this country that actually sticks up for our industry and doesn't roll over to the Americans,' Mr Crean said in Melbourne before the Australian Film Institute (AFI) awards.

'I think it's about time we understood the importance this industry has been to identifying what we are and presenting it in a talented way and in a creative way.'

Mr Crean said the government had sold the industry out in its free trade negotiations.

'It is outrageous that the Howard government is prepared to trade away that industry.

'Prepared to trade it away in the name of a free trade agreement with the United States.'

He warned that the industry was in jeopardy unless the Howard government fought for it in the free trade negotiations.

I can feel an attack on the elites who watch Australian films or television coming on as we speak. Somehow I expect it's not going to be a winner for Howard among ordinary Australians.

Brain Imaging Targets ADHD Differences

Investigators at UCLA used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to compare the brains of 27 children with ADHD to those of 46 children without the disorder. They found that the region of the brain associated with attention and impulse control, located on the bottom of the frontal lobes of the brain, was smaller in the ADHD kids than in the other children.

'We would expect that the abnormalities would be in this region, and this is what we found,' lead investigator Elizabeth Sowell, PhD, tells WebMD.

The researchers also found that children with ADHD had larger areas of the outer layers of the brain.

Previous research has indicated that the differences were limited to the right side of the brain, but Sowell and colleagues found that they occurred on both sides.

ADHD has an image problem, in the media, not the frontal lobes. A disease that gets diagnosed on interviews is easy to debunk and a disease that involves drugs as about the only effective therapy is easy to beat up. If the brain imaging studies lead to an objective way to diagnose the thing, a lot of the controversy will go away.

What was I talking about?

Australia/US JOINT PRESS CONFERENCE

This is the Australian Minister of Defence's transcript of the conference. Note that 'defence' and 'defense' have different spelling sin the US and Australia. Go tool up your search functions and run them through the transcript.

This also gives you the full ext of a journalist asking about the intelligence-sharing problem, Hill not knowing about it, and Rumsfeld confirming it. General Cosgrove, our Chief of Defence Force, has since denied it.

One wonders, if intelligence is not being fully shared according to Rumsfeld, how Hill or Cosgrove would know. At the outset of the Pentagon conference Rumsfeld clearly did and Hill clearly did not.

How US kept Australians in the dark

Mr Rumsfeld told Australian reporters: 'After the war I heard discussions about ways that information could be better exchanged and in some cases it required some administrative actions, and that, in some instances, those administrative actions have been taken.' However, he added, some legal changes might also be needed to overcome the problem.

But Senator Hill appeared unaware of the intelligence problems that have been of serious concern to US, Australian and British military intelligence officers.

When asked to comment on the problems, he said: 'I'm not sure what you're talking about. I don't know of any dissatisfaction in communication of intelligence between our agencies.'

At this point, Mr Rumsfeld explained to Senator Hill the concerns about the blocking of access to intelligence during the war, especially when the material originated from the allies' own sources.

General Crawford, who is head of the US Air Force Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Centre, told his Australian and British counterparts at the conference that there were only two solutions to the problem. The first was for the US 'to change their dog-gone policy'. The second way, he joked, was 'to make the UK, Canada and Australia the 51st, 52nd and 53rd states'.

This is probably (although I am not sure) the same Senator Hill who happily gives the parliament confident assurances about the quality of US intelligence, assurances he is obviously unqualified to give.

Istanbul: The enemy within

The IBDA-C was established in 1975 by a breakaway faction of the youth group of the then Islamic Salvation Party headed by former Turkish prime minister Necmettin Erbakan. It is a strong critic of secularism and Mustafa Kemal Pasha, and advocates the restoration of the Ottoman Empire just as the LET advocates the restoration of the Moghul rule in India.

The IBDA-C's anger over the perceived British role in the break-up of the Ottoman Empire could explain its motive for attacking British personnel and interests, if it is established that it also had a role in Thursday's blasts. Were the blasts timed, at the instance of al-Qaeda, to coincide with President George W Bush's high-profile UK visit to embarrass him and Prime Minister Tony Blair? Difficult to answer. In the past, the IBDA-C had attacked members of the Greek Orthodox community, secular journalists etc, but had not shown till now an inclination to take to suicide terrorism. However, in February 2000, it claimed responsibility for a quadruple bomb attack in Istanbul, not involving suicide bombers.

Sections of the Turkish media have contradicted reports of the involvement of the IBDA-C. They have quoted police sources as saying that the suspects were really members of a little-known group called Beyyiat el-Imam, meaning 'allegiance to the Imam', which, it is claimed, was formed in the al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan and is reportedly led by a Saudi cleric identified as Abu Musab. He is believed to have taken shelter in Iran after the Taliban were driven out of Afghanistan.

According to the media, Ekinci had flirted with a hotch-potch of Islamic groups, including Hezbollah, a violent Turkish Sunni group unrelated to the Shi'ite Lebanese group of the same name. He had travelled to Iran, received jihadi and explosive training in Pakistan between 1997-99, and fought in Chechnya.

The fact that neither the Turks nor the British nor the Americans had the least inkling of the goings-on in the world of jihadi terrorism in Turkey and of the preparations for the terrorist strikes in Istanbul speak disturbingly of the inability of their intelligence agencies to penetrate the IIF either electronically or through human sources. While some electronic penetration has definitely been achieved in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia and Southeast Asia, resulting in some successes, there are other areas such as Iraq and Turkey where they seem to be groping in the dark, as the Mumbai police are doing in India.

Ownership of the War on Terror is interesting. Raman cites 20 000 victims in India. All killed by al-Qa'ida allies rather than al-Qa'ida itself. One way to read the war is that it's about building ever-higher barriers between Us and Them. Raman's numbers do not add up to the status of supreme victim for the US, but if you say that, or argue that the focus on Iraq or al-Qa'ida is wrong, you start encountering arguments about resolve.

Thus far, mere resolve, whether it masquerades as moral clarity or not having a reverse gear, is not doing all that well. The people of Istanbul, like the people of Mumbai, are probably about as attached to the flypaper theories as the coalition forces in Iraq itself.

Get smart or lose the war

Meanwhile, the forces of terror are trying to destabilize those neighbors who are siding with the US. In other words, the US is on the defensive whereas the terrorists are on the offensive, both in and around Iraq. And there is no solution in sight.

Attacks on the US and its allies are growing in number and intensity, not decreasing. More anti-terror forces are being committed to combat this, but their quality is decreasing. The new US troops who are going to Baghdad are from the National Guard. They will live in their barracks, completely separated from the rest of Iraq, feeling more and more besieged, more and more in hostile territory, more and more controlled by the enemy. Besides, it is not clear whether there is an exit strategy.

How can America stabilize this Iraq? The growing number of attacks proves that the US-led forces know less and less about what is going on in Iraq, not more. Iraq, in other words, looks like a trap about which the US and its allies, their soldiers and their people know little. They don't know about the country its rules and customs, its intricacies, its snares. In short, they lack intelligence.

Al-Qaeda managed the September 11 attacks not because of its powerful military but because it beguiled US intelligence. The US failed to preempt September 11 not because of lack of guns, but because of lack of intelligence in the broad sense. In Iraq, the situation grows worse by the day for the same reason: the US certainly has enough guns, but not enough intelligence. North Atlantic Treaty Organization General Fabio Mini, in his latest book, La Guerra dopo la Guerra, stresses that the threat of global terrorism has to be met with much better information networks. John Keegan in his The First World War points out that the armies had enough shells to kill each other many times over, but lacked information on where to direct their shells.

This seems to be happening in Iraq now. Soldiers are busy defending themselves and people are coming from outside to join Saddam's supporters.

Why don't we know? How can we know? How can we use the knowledge to win over the uncertain and isolate the die-hard enemies? These questions have to be addressed very seriously as they are more important than any quarrel about the number of people in the field.

The answer is not stirring speeches in London. The answer is fact- not Feith-based intelligence.

...entire nation of Australia founded on sodomy

The transportation of convicts to Australia was eventually ended in large part because of the loud and bitter complaints from clerics and respectable Australians -- there were some, apparently -- about how widespread the sin of sodomy was among prisoners and how this was lowering the tone of the continent. Perhaps because of an Australian guilty conscience, or ancestral sore arse, today it is a well-known Australian-born media magnate who is most keen to use the 'Carry On up the Valet' scandal to ridicule the British in general and bring down the monarchy in particular by lashing them in his newspapers around the world. The New York Post recently ran the puerile headline 'PRINCESS CHARLES.' I'd like to see him tell those Outback sheep shearers there's something essentially effeminate about a spot of situational sodomy.

Well it's one theory...

On Post-Fascism

We are, then, faced with a new kind of extremism of the center. This new extremism, which I call post-fascism, does not threaten, unlike its predecessor, liberal and democratic rule within the core constituency of 'homogeneous society.' Within the community cut in two, freedom, security, prosperity are on the whole undisturbed, at least within the productive and procreative majority that in some rich countries encompasses nearly all white citizens. 'Heterogeneous,' usually racially alien, minorities are not persecuted, only neglected and marginalized, forced to live a life wholly foreign to the way of life of the majority (which, of course, can sometimes be qualitatively better than the flat workaholism, consumerism, and health obsessions of the majority). Drugs, once supposed to widen and raise consciousness, are now uneasily pacifying the enforced idleness of those society is unwilling to help and to recognize as fellow humans. The 'Dionysiac' subculture of the sub-proletariat further exaggerates the bifurcation of society. Political participation of the have-nots is out of the question, without any need for the restriction of franchise. Apart from the incipient and feeble ('new new') left-wing radicalism, as isolated as anarcho-syndicalism was in the second half of the nineteenth century, nobody seeks to represent them. The conceptual tools once offered by democratic and libertarian socialism are missing; and libertarians are nowadays militant bourgeois extremists of the center, ultra-capitalist cyberpunks hostile to any idea of solidarity beyond the fluxus of the global marketplace.

Post-fascism does not need stormtroopers and dictators. It is perfectly compatible with an anti-Enlightenment liberal democracy that rehabilitates citizenship as a grant from the sovereign instead of a universal human right. I confess I am giving it a rude name here to attract attention to its glaring injustice. Post-fascism is historically continuous with its horrific predecessor only in patches. Certainly, Central and East European anti-Semitism has not changed much, but it is hardly central. Since post-fascism is only rarely a movement, rather simply a state of affairs, managed as often as not by so-called center-left governments, it is hard to identify intuitively. Post-fascists do not speak usually of total obedience and racial purity, but of the information superhighway.

The Web is a wonderful place. The trail to this article led from Oiling a tribal society, to googling for Karl Renner, to The Two Hundred Years War and on to this piece.

The worry, of course, is that this week the High Court is tying itself in knots over the ancient common law of alienage. One judge speculated that an alien can be held in detention for life without committing any crime, merely by virtue of being an alien. That is what the federal government is putting to the court, an argument identical with the government's position in the s 51(xxvi) cases where another group of heterogeneous Australians were treated to a different legal regime from the rest of us...

So even Howard's 'ordinary Australians' might perhaps worry that the joys of the normative state seem to be available only to citizens and residents while the rigours of the prerogative state apply to everyone else.

Healthy debate good for Labor

Not a bad trifecta. Dearer drugs, public hospitals less available and of lower quality, and GPs more expensive for large numbers of Australians. The curious thing is that Howard's obsession with destroying Medicare has such potentially disastrous financial implications for Australia. The Medicare system and the PBS, properly implemented, keep down costs of doctors, drugs and health services generally.

That is why, in 1996, Australia spent only 8.4 per cent of its gross domestic product on health. Now it spends 9.3 per cent, a truly significant increase -- and that before the baby boomer bulge hits old age. These latest changes are going to drive us even more towards the US system, where 14 per cent of GDP is spent on health.

Ideology trumps the facts on the ground yet again.

The Buck House Stops Here

There was a dispiriting contrast between G.W.B. shutting out the world and avoiding the British public, and the black-and-white clips this week of J.F.K. reaching out to the world and being adored by Berliners.

There was also a dispiriting contrast between the Bush administration, hiding the returning coffins of U.S. soldiers and avoiding their funerals, and the moving pictures of the Italian politicians and people, honoring their dead with public ceremonies and a week of mourning.

The bubble in London is just an extension of the bubble the Bush team lives in at home. It superimposes its reality on the evidence for war, the ease of the occupation, the strength of the insurgency and the continuing threat from Saddam and Osama.

Isolationism has been a foreign policy before. But for this administration, it seems to be a way of life.

Apparently loving free speech and subjecting yourself to it are different things.

The Vanishing Case for War

Byrd blamed the emotion of the moment, and that is surely part of it; but for the bigger part I blame the insistence of the President that Iraq threatened America, the willingness of the CIA to create a strong case for war out of weak evidence, and the readiness of Congress to ignore its own doubts and go along. Their faith in the case for war confirms that something has been going on deep in the American psyche since the beginning of the cold war, a progressive withering of the skeptical faculty when 'secret intelligence' is called in to buttress a president's case for whatever he wants. The vote for war on Iraq was not unprecedented; forty years ago Congress voted for war in Vietnam in the Tonkin Gulf resolution, too timid to insist on time to weigh reports of an attack on American ships at sea%u2014reports that were either plain wrong or misleading. Again and again throughout the cold war Congress voted billions for new weapons systems to meet hypothetical, exaggerated, or even imaginary threats - routinely backed up by evidence too secret to reveal.

Years of talk about sources and methods, spies and defectors, classified documents and code-word clearances, spy satellites and intercepted communications, have generated a mystique of secret intelligence that chills doubt and freezes debate. The result is a tiptoeing deference which treats classified information as not only requiring special handling, but deserving special respect. 'As always,' George Tenet told the Senate Intelligence Committee during the war resolution debate last fall, 'our declassification efforts seek a balance between your need for unfettered debate and our need to protect sources and methods.' The committee might have balked and asked for a closer look, but did not. When Congress voted last October it seemed to have lost some fundamental equilibrium - as if caution itself were aid to an enemy. A Congress so easily manipulated has in effect surrendered its role, allowing presidents to do as they will.

'My colleagues,' Colin Powell said at the UN, 'every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources.... What we're giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence.' But now, only six months later, we have ample reason to conclude that the intelligence wasn't solid at all, there was no need for war, Iraq's weapons of mass destruction didn't exist. This discovery ought to put the American people on constructive notice that the functioning of our democracy is threatened by the nexus of the White House and a too-pliant CIA - a closed loop of presidents who know what they want, intelligence chiefs willing to make the argument and classify the evidence, and members of Congress under their spell. The hazard in this mix shows itself early - when the briefers assure Congress that their high confidence rests firmly on evidence too secret to share.

It is worse for a US hyperally which relies on an unquestioned intel feed from the US and Britain and then accepts uncritically the solutions and actions propsoed by the US.

PM urged to bring home Hicks, Habib

But [Mr Howard] said the US had not offered to return the two men.

He said their return was unlikely because it would be difficult to bring a successful prosecution under Australian law.

'The reality is that these people appear to be in breach of laws for which they can be prosecuted in the United States,' he told reporters.

'There is no automatic right to repatriate an Australian to this country who is charged with an offence in another country.

'We are working with the Americans to ensure that any military commission trial of these two people is conducted in a way that guarantees that justice will be done.'

In Adelaide, Mr Hicks's father Terry Hicks said Mr Howard should push to bring the two men home for trial.

'If the British have been offered back, then I should say the Australian prime minister should be saying, hey, get our people back,' Terry Hicks told ABC radio.

Greens Senator Bob Brown said the move to return British detainees proved Mr Howard was content for Australia to be second-rate in its treatment of prisoners held overseas.

'Mr Howard is saying Australian citizens and our laws are subservient to America's,' Senator Brown told reporters.

The Howard government did not arrange a S24AA(5) proclamation under the Crimes Act which would have activated the offence of treachery. That's characteristic bungling, like the Brigitte deportation, for their actual conduct of national security, as opposed to their chest-beating in the parliament.

However, there is a way around the Howard dilemma that would be consistent with human rights. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights does not imply 'any right to engage in any activity or to perform any act aimed at the destruction of any of the rights and freedoms set forth herein'. (Article 30) The Bali bombers were prosecuted under retrospective laws.

The Australian parliament can make retrospective laws. Perhaps a bill from the opposition or one of the minor parties?

A question of Ruddock's discretion

Mr Ruddock told Parliament in May the reason he granted the visa after receiving representations by Mr Kisrwani - having refused his fellow Liberal Mr Cameron's application twice - was because new information that Mr Hbeiche had three sisters already in Australia surfaced.

But it was later revealed Mr Hbeiche had referred to his sisters on his original application for protection submitted to the Immigration Department in 1996.

The tribunal also rejected a number of claims made by Mr Hbeiche, including that he could not find employment in Lebanon, saying he admitted to working up to six days a week and earning $300 a month.

I am looking forward to the Ruddock explanation of his explanation to the parliament.

Government secretive on boatpeople: judge

Justice Mildren today published his reasons for the dismissal, saying he could not issue the writ because it had not been sought to secure the release of the men.

The writ had been sought to enable the NT Legal Commission to obtain instructions as to whether the men wished to apply for refugee visas for Australia, where they would be placed in immigration detention anyway.

However, he also said he was 'far from satisfied' the detention of the men was lawful.

Justice Mildren described the government's handling of the case as secretive.

'The policy of the government was to operate as clandestinely as possible and to provide no access to the (men by the) plaintiff (NT Legal Aid) ... and no information to the plaintiff or to the public through the media to the extent that this could be avoided,' he wrote in his judgment.

'Not only were the plaintiff and her officers deliberately given the run around ... but attempts to prevent the media from coming anywhere near the vessel were made by the imposition of a 3,000 metre exclusion zone over the island and the closing of the airport to prevent the media as well as others from getting to the island.

'Behaviour of this kind usually implies that there is something to hide.

'Even to this court the information provided ... was quite minimal.'

Justice Mildren said he found it 'incredible' that the government's chief witness, John Eyers from the Department of Immigration's legal section, did not know whether any of the 14 had asked for legal assistance or asylum.

The 14 Turkish Kurds and four Indonesian crew briefly landed on Melville Island, north of Darwin, on November 4 before being towed back out to sea by the Australian Navy.

Perhaps the government could introduce a bill excising Darwin from the Australian judicial zone.

We are Australian

Aren't all children born in Australia, 'Australian'? Not necessarily.

This used to be the case. Until 1986 every child born in this country automatically became an Australian citizen at birth%u2014no matter who the parents were. Only children of foreign diplomats and 'enemy aliens' did not become Australian citizens.

The High Court is shortly to hear the case of Plaintiff S441/2003, in which a five year old girl born in Sydney will challenge 1986 laws that restricted the automatic right to citzenship at birth. The girl's parents fled anti-Sikh persecution in India in 1997. She 'speaks with an Australian accent and thinks Brett Lee is the best cricketer in the world'.(1) But if her parents are denied refugee status they will be deported. And as a 'non-citizen', their daughter - despite her birth in Australia - will also have to leave.

Plaintiff S441/2003 involves fundamental issues about Australian identity that the High Court has never had to confront before. Most important is whether there is an Australian 'nationality' protected by the Constitution - separate from 'citizenship' under the Australian Citizenship Act 1948 - which confers rights and freedoms that Parliament cannot touch.

The Citizenship Act was amended in 1986 to remove automatic citizenship at birth from children of 'illegal' immigrants and temporary visa holders, including visitors and refugees. Now such children only become citizens if they are 'ordinarily resident' in Australia for the first ten years of their lives.(2)

The High Court has been asked to declare the 1986 amendment unconstitutional. The outcome is not straightforward.

At the time of the 1986 amendment, there was anxiety in the media about the number of illegal immigrants in Australia.(3) There was also concern about 'contemptible queue jumping' by parents who used the citizenship status of their Australian-born infants to gain permanent residency and avoid deportation. (4)

Excision seems to be the order of the day. Troublesome kids? Excise them! Troublesome islands? Excise them! The 1986 amendment passed under the Hawke government seems like a PR response to immigration anxieties rather than serious policy. How the High Court rules remains to be seen.

Apparently the decision will turn on what meaning of 'alien' to use. If we already have an implied bill of rights why not just go the whole hog and adopt one made by the people instead of implied by the court?

[Israeli] Supreme Court Orders Broadcast of 'Geneva Accord'

Israel's Supreme Court, this morning, overturned the Broadcasting Authority's ban on airing advertisements for the 'Geneva Accords.' The Authority had refused to broadcast advertisements for Yossi Beilin's 'Geneva' initiative due to its controversial political nature and suspicion that the funding for its publicity in Israel was coming from foreign sources.

This morning, however, Israel's Supreme Court, led by Chief Justice Ahron Barak, ordered the broadcasting authority to broadcast the advertisements.

The 'Geneva Understandings' were compiled by Israeli left-wing activists and Arabs from Yesha, to be sent to every home in Israel this week at a cost of 3 million shekels.

Why did this basic free speech issue need to go to the Supreme Court?

CPS plea on hyperactive juveniles

Two Lancashire police officers are establishing a pilot scheme to improve screening for ADHD among young offenders to help reduce juvenile crime.

After a recent facting finding trip to the United States, Inspector Phil Anderton told 5Live: 'This condition exists, it's blighting people's lives and disrupting whole families.

'We need to get on top of ADHD. There are also strong links to addiction, particularly drugs and alchohol as a way of self medication.

'If we can get on top of ADHD we can get on top of a significant amount of juvenile crime.'

In the United States various intervention projects have been established.

Dr Dwaine McCallon used to run a pilot scheme at a US prison.

He said: 'It showed that with intervention only one in 20 former inmates with ADHD went on to reoffend.

'The rate would normally be much highter. One offender told me, 'Dr McCallon I never learned to learn.'

In Britain, the Youth Justice Board has commissioned research based at young offender institutions and youth offending teams to see how prevalent ADHD is.

Somehow, I keep forgetting to blog more about ADHD. More seriously, the overrepresentation in the prison population is massive, both because of the tendency to addiction and to impulsive behaviour. A Norwegian study found a prevalence of 46% in their prison population compared with 3% in the general population. That makes ADHD a serious social problem, not fodder for anti-Ritalin pieces on infonews programs.

Bush's Gated Community

The Bush impulse to shut down the world, I suspect, combines many urges at once. Certainly, there's the urge to stamp an imperial imprint of power on the world, and allied to it, the urge to control. The desire to cut off information, to rule in silence and secrecy, must undoubtedly have allures all its own. And then there's also simple fear (a feeling not much written about since our President and his administration quite literally took flight on September 11, 2001). Underneath the 'bring 'em on' mentality -- frightening in itself -- seems to lie an urge, when 'they' actually come 'on,' to flee. Have you noticed how quickly all that 'we-won't/can't/mustn't-cut-and-run' language cropped up -- and in administration mouths no less, even if projected onto others? Such warnings preceded the first significant mainstream calls for any kind of withdrawal from Iraq.

Only this week, L. Paul Bremer, who has reportedly 'grown deeply pessimistic about his job in Iraq,' snubbed visiting ally, Polish Prime Minister Leszek Miller, a foreign leader who has put his own reputation on the line by sending significant numbers of troops to Iraq. Their meeting in Baghdad was cancelled so that Bremer, who may soon enough go back to selling counter-terror strategies on the free market if rumors prove true, could rush back to Washington in what looked distinctly like panic bordering on flight.

As we live in a hideously over-determined world, god knows what other urges go into the urge to shut the world down, lock it up, and throw away the key. What can be said, however, is that the Bush administration has shown a remarkable across-the board consistency in its lock-down acts.

Take the upcoming Bush visit to London. American presidential trips abroad increasingly remind me of the vast, completely ritualized dynastic processionals by which ancient emperors and potentates once crossed their domains and those of their satraps. Our President's processionals are enormous moving bubbles (even when he visits alien places closer to home like the Big Apple) that shut cities, close down institutions, turn off life itself. Essentially, when the President moves abroad, like some vast turtle, he carries his shell with him.

In Australia, for the first time in its history, Parliament was shut down to the public so that the President could 'address' Australians.

Apart from the gated community, an apt metaphor for the Bush approach, the scary thing is the assault on language itself, a technique not unknown to the Howard government. Back pages has an item on how Medicare, a universal health system, is being transformed into a residual health system called a universal safety net. A little historical revisionism allows Howard (who opposed Medicare at its inception) to annoucne it was never intended to be a universal system. Let's dig a little, the second reading speech on the Income Tax Laws Amendment (Medicare Levy) Bill 1983:

That the Bill be now read a second time.

By this Bill, and the other that I have just introduced, it is proposed to impose a Medicare levy of one per cent of the taxable income, as determined for income tax purposes, of people residing in Australia. The Bills are a finance- raising complement to other measures designed to implement the Government's universal Medicare scheme. Other basic features of the scheme are contained in legislation that has been introduced by my colleague, the Minister for Health, ( Dr Blewett). Introduction of the levy is timed to coincide with the coming into operation of the main Medicare legislation on 1 February 1984.

Apparently the ministers responsible for the creation of Medicare were wrong when they said it was to be a universal system and John Howard (then deputy leader of the opposition )and a vigorous opponent of Medicare, was right.

More and more, the court bulletins are written in a ceremonial language where meanings get reversed on a regular basis. The latest from Howard is defending Australia by altering the meaning of the word "Australia'.