Back 2 the 80s

Economic Colonialism

2006-09-18T16:01:00.000+10:00

Ties to GOP Trumped Know-How Among Staff Sent to Rebuild Iraq

Early U.S. Missteps in the Green Zone

By Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, September 17, 2006; A01

Adapted from "Imperial Life in the Emerald City," by Rajiv Chandrasekaran, copyright Knopf 2006

After the fall of Saddam Hussein's government in April 2003, the opportunity to participate in the U.S.-led effort to reconstruct Iraq attracted all manner of Americans -- restless professionals, Arabic-speaking academics, development specialists and war-zone adventurers. But before they could go to Baghdad, they had to get past Jim O'Beirne's office in the Pentagon.

To pass muster with O'Beirne, a political appointee who screens prospective political appointees for Defense Department posts, applicants didn't need to be experts in the Middle East or in post-conflict reconstruction. What seemed most important was loyalty to the Bush administration.

O'Beirne's staff posed blunt questions to some candidates about domestic politics: Did you vote for George W. Bush in 2000? Do you support the way the president is fighting the war on terror? Two people who sought jobs with the U.S. occupation authority said they were even asked their views on Roe v. Wade .

Many of those chosen by O'Beirne's office to work for the Coalition Provisional Authority, which ran Iraq's government from April 2003 to June 2004, lacked vital skills and experience. A 24-year-old who had never worked in finance -- but had applied for a White House job -- was sent to reopen Baghdad's stock exchange. The daughter of a prominent neoconservative commentator and a recent graduate from an evangelical university for home-schooled children were tapped to manage Iraq's $13 billion budget, even though they didn't have a background in accounting.

The decision to send the loyal and the willing instead of the best and the brightest is now regarded by many people involved in the 3 1/2 -year effort to stabilize and rebuild Iraq as one of the Bush administration's gravest errors. Many of those selected because of their political fidelity spent their time trying to impose a conservative agenda on the postwar occupation, which sidetracked more important reconstruction efforts and squandered goodwill among the Iraqi people, according to many people who participated in the reconstruction effort.

The CPA had the power to enact laws, print currency, collect taxes, deploy police and spend Iraq's oil revenue. It had more than 1,500 employees in Baghdad at its height, working under America's viceroy in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, but never released a public roster of its entire staff.

Interviews with scores of former CPA personnel over the past two years depict an organization that was dominated -- and ultimately hobbled -- by administration ideologues.

"We didn't tap -- and it should have started from the White House on down -- just didn't tap the right people to do this job," said Frederick Smith, who served as the deputy director of the CPA's Washington office. "It was a tough, tough job. Instead we got people who went out there because of their political leanings."

Endowed with $18 billion in U.S. reconstruction funds and a comparatively quiescent environment in the immediate aftermath of the U.S. invasion, the CPA was the U.S. government's first and best hope to resuscitate Iraq -- to establish order, promote rebuilding and assemble a viable government, all of which, experts believe, would have constricted the insurgency and mitigated the chances of civil war. Many of the basic tasks Americans struggle to accomplish today in Iraq -- training the army, vetting the police, increasing electricity generation -- could have been performed far more effectively in 2003 by the CPA.

But many CPA staff members were more interested in other things: in instituting a flat tax, in selling off government assets, in ending food rations and otherwise fashioning a new nation that looked a lot like the United States. Many of them spent their days cloistered in the Green Zone, a walled-off enclave in central Baghdad with towering palms, posh villas, well-stocked bars and resort-size swimming pools.

By the time Bremer departed in June 2004, Iraq was in a precarious state. The Iraqi army, which had been dissolved and refashioned by the CPA, was one-third the size he had pledged it would be. Seventy percent of police officers had not been screened or trained. Electricity generation was far below what Bremer had promised to achieve. And Iraq's interim government had been selected not by elections but by Americans. Divisive issues were to be resolved later on, increasing the chances that tension over those matters would fuel civil strife.

To recruit the people he wanted, O'Beirne sought résumés from the offices of Republican congressmen, conservative think tanks and GOP activists. He discarded applications from those his staff deemed ideologically suspect, even if the applicants possessed Arabic language skills or postwar rebuilding experience.

Smith said O'Beirne once pointed to a young man's résumé and pronounced him "an ideal candidate." His chief qualification was that he had worked for the Republican Party in Florida during the presidential election recount in 2000.

O'Beirne, a former Army officer who is married to prominent conservative commentator Kate O'Beirne, did not respond to requests for comment.

He and his staff used an obscure provision in federal law to hire many CPA staffers as temporary political appointees, which exempted the interviewers from employment regulations that prohibit questions about personal political beliefs.

There were a few Democrats who wound up getting jobs with the CPA, but almost all of them were active-duty soldiers or State Department Foreign Service officers. Because they were career government employees, not temporary hires, O'Beirne's office could not query them directly about their political leanings.

One former CPA employee who had an office near O'Beirne's wrote an e-mail to a friend describing the recruitment process: "I watched résumés of immensely talented individuals who had sought out CPA to help the country thrown in the trash because their adherence to 'the President's vision for Iraq' (a frequently heard phrase at CPA) was 'uncertain.' I saw senior civil servants from agencies like Treasury, Energy . . . and Commerce denied advisory positions in Baghdad that were instead handed to prominent RNC (Republican National Committee) contributors."

As more and more of O'Beirne's hires arrived in the Green Zone, the CPA's headquarters in Hussein's marble-walled former Republican Palace felt like a campaign war room. Bumper stickers and mouse pads praising President Bush were standard desk decorations. In addition to military uniforms and "Operation Iraqi Freedom" garb, "Bush-Cheney 2004" T-shirts were among the most common pieces of clothing.

"I'm not here for the Iraqis," one staffer noted to a reporter over lunch. "I'm here for George Bush."

When Gordon Robison, who worked in the Strategic Communications office, opened a care package from his mother to find a book by Paul Krugman, a liberal New York Times columnist, people around him stared. "It was like I had just unwrapped a radioactive brick," he recalled.

Finance Background Not Required

Twenty-four-year-old Jay Hallen was restless. He had graduated from Yale two years earlier, and he didn't much like his job at a commercial real-estate firm. His passion was the Middle East, and although he had never been there, he was intrigued enough to take Arabic classes and read histories of the region in his spare time.

He had mixed feelings about the war in Iraq, but he viewed the American occupation as a ripe opportunity. In the summer of 2003, he sent an e-mail to Reuben Jeffrey III, whom he had met when applying for a White House job a year earlier. Hallen had a simple query for Jeffrey, who was working as an adviser to Bremer: Might there be any job openings in Baghdad?

"Be careful what you wish for," Jeffrey wrote in response. Then he forwarded Hallen's resume to O'Beirne's office.

Three weeks later, Hallen got a call from the Pentagon. The CPA wanted him in Baghdad. Pronto. Could he be ready in three to four weeks?

The day he arrived in Baghdad, he met with Thomas C. Foley, the CPA official in charge of privatizing state-owned enterprises. (Foley, a major Republican Party donor, went to Harvard Business School with President Bush.) Hallen was shocked to learn that Foley wanted him to take charge of reopening the stock exchange.

"Are you sure?" Hallen said to Foley. "I don't have a finance background."

It's fine, Foley replied. He told Hallen that he was to be the project manager. He would rely on other people to get things done. He would be "the main point of contact."

Before the war, Baghdad's stock exchange looked nothing like its counterparts elsewhere in the world. There were no computers, electronic displays or men in colorful coats scurrying around on the trading floor. Trades were scrawled on pieces of paper and noted on large blackboards. If you wanted to buy or sell, you came to the exchange yourself and shouted your order to one of the traders. There was no air-conditioning. It was loud and boisterous. But it worked. Private firms raised hundreds of thousands of dollars by selling stock, and ordinary people learned about free enterprise.

The exchange was gutted by looters after the war. The first wave of American economic reconstruction specialists from the Treasury Department ignored it. They had bigger issues to worry about: paying salaries, reopening the banks, stabilizing the currency. But the brokers wanted to get back to work and investors wanted their money, so the CPA made the reopening a priority.

Quickly absorbing the CPA's ambition during the optimistic days before the insurgency flared, Hallen decided that he didn't just want to reopen the exchange, he wanted to make it the best, most modern stock market in the Arab world. He wanted to promulgate a new securities law that would make the exchange independent of the Finance Ministry, with its own bylaws and board of directors. He wanted to set up a securities and exchange commission to oversee the market. He wanted brokers to be licensed and listed companies to provide financial disclosures. He wanted to install a computerized trading and settlement system.

Iraqis cringed at Hallen's plan. Their top priority was reopening the exchange, not setting up computers or enacting a new securities law. "People are broke and bewildered," broker Talib Tabatabai told Hallen. "Why do you want to create enemies? Let us open the way we were."

Tabatabai, who held a doctorate in political science from Florida State University, believed Hallen's plan was unrealistic. "It was something so fancy, so great, that it couldn't be accomplished," he said.

But Hallen was convinced that major changes had to be enacted. "Their laws and regulations were completely out of step with the modern world," he said. "There was just no transparency in anything. It was more of a place for Saddam and his friends to buy up private companies that they otherwise didn't have a stake in."

Opening the stock exchange without legal and structural changes, Hallen maintained, "would have been irresponsible and short-sighted."

To help rewrite the securities law, train brokers and purchase the necessary computers, Hallen recruited a team of American volunteers. In the spring of 2004, Bremer approved the new law and simultaneously appointed the nine Iraqis selected by Hallen to become the exchange's board of governors.

The exchange's board selected Tabatabai as its chairman. The new securities law that Hallen had nursed into life gave the board control over the exchange's operations, but it didn't say a thing about the role of the CPA adviser. Hallen assumed that he'd have a part in decision-making until the handover of sovereignty. Tabatabai and the board, however, saw themselves in charge.

Tabatabai and the other governors decided to open the market as soon as possible. They didn't want to wait several more months for the computerized trading system to be up and running. They ordered dozens of dry-erase boards to be installed on the trading floor. They used such boards to keep track of buying and selling prices before the war, and that's how they'd do it again.

The exchange opened two days after Hallen's tour in Iraq ended. Brokers barked orders to floor traders, who used their trusty white boards. Transactions were recorded not with computers but with small chits written in ink. CPA staffers stayed away, afraid that their presence would make the stock market a target for insurgents.

When Tabatabai was asked what would have happened if Hallen hadn't been assigned to reopen the exchange, he smiled. "We would have opened months earlier. He had grand ideas, but those ideas did not materialize," Tabatabai said of Hallen. "Those CPA people reminded me of Lawrence of Arabia."

'Loyalist' Replaces Public Health Expert

The hiring of Bremer's most senior advisers was settled upon at the highest levels of the White House and the Pentagon. Some, like Foley, were personally recruited by Bush. Others got their jobs because an influential Republican made a call on behalf of a friend or trusted colleague.

That's what happened with James K. Haveman Jr., who was selected to oversee the rehabilitation of Iraq's health care system.

Haveman, a 60-year-old social worker, was largely unknown among international health experts, but he had connections. He had been the community health director for the former Republican governor of Michigan, John Engler, who recommended him to Paul D. Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense.

Haveman was well-traveled, but most of his overseas trips were in his capacity as a director of International Aid, a faith-based relief organization that provided health care while promoting Christianity in the developing world. Before his stint in government, Haveman ran a large Christian adoption agency in Michigan that urged pregnant women not to have abortions.

Haveman replaced Frederick M. Burkle Jr., a physician with a master's degree in public health and postgraduate degrees from Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth and the University of California at Berkeley. Burkle taught at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, where he specialized in disaster-response issues, and he was a deputy assistant administrator at the U.S. Agency for International Development, which sent him to Baghdad immediately after the war.

He had worked in Kosovo and Somalia and in northern Iraq after the 1991 Persian Gulf War. A USAID colleague called him the "single most talented and experienced post-conflict health specialist working for the United States government."

But a week after Baghdad's liberation, Burkle was informed he was being replaced. A senior official at USAID sent Burkle an e-mail saying the White House wanted a "loyalist" in the job. Burkle had a wall of degrees, but he didn't have a picture with the president.

Haveman arrived in Iraq with his own priorities. He liked to talk about the number of hospitals that had reopened since the war and the pay raises that had been given to doctors instead of the still-decrepit conditions inside the hospitals or the fact that many physicians were leaving for safer, better paying jobs outside Iraq. He approached problems the way a health care administrator in America would: He focused on preventive measures to reduce the need for hospital treatment.

He urged the Health Ministry to mount an anti-smoking campaign, and he assigned an American from the CPA team -- who turned out to be a closet smoker himself -- to lead the public education effort. Several members of Haveman's staff noted wryly that Iraqis faced far greater dangers in their daily lives than tobacco. The CPA's limited resources, they argued, would be better used raising awareness about how to prevent childhood diarrhea and other fatal maladies.

Haveman didn't like the idea that medical care in Iraq was free. He figured Iraqis should pay a small fee every time they saw a doctor. He also decided to allocate almost all of the Health Ministry's $793 million share of U.S. reconstruction funds to renovating maternity hospitals and building new community medical clinics. His intention, he said, was "to shift the mind-set of the Iraqis that you don't get health care unless you go to a hospital."

But his decision meant there were no reconstruction funds set aside to rehabilitate the emergency rooms and operating theaters at Iraqi hospitals, even though injuries from insurgent attacks were the country's single largest public health challenge.

Haveman also wanted to apply American medicine to other parts of the Health Ministry. Instead of trying to restructure the dysfunctional state-owned firm that imported and distributed drugs and medical supplies to hospitals, he decided to try to sell it to a private company.

To prepare it for a sale, he wanted to attempt something he had done in Michigan. When he was the state's director of community health, he sought to slash the huge amount of money Michigan spent on prescription drugs for the poor by limiting the medications doctors could prescribe for Medicaid patients. Unless they received an exemption, physicians could only prescribe drugs that were on an approved list, known as a formulary.

Haveman figured the same strategy could bring down the cost of medicine in Iraq. The country had 4,500 items on its drug formulary. Haveman deemed it too large. If private firms were going to bid for the job of supplying drugs to government hospitals, they needed a smaller, more manageable list. A new formulary would also outline new requirements about where approved drugs could be manufactured, forcing Iraq to stop buying medicines from Syria, Iran and Russia, and start buying from the United States.

He asked the people who had drawn up the formulary in Michigan whether they wanted to come to Baghdad. They declined. So he beseeched the Pentagon for help. His request made its way to the Defense Department's Pharmacoeconomic Center in San Antonio.

A few weeks later, three formulary experts were on their way to Iraq.

The group was led by Theodore Briski, a balding, middle-aged pharmacist who held the rank of lieutenant commander in the U.S. Navy. Haveman's order, as Briski remembered it, was: "Build us a formulary in two weeks and then go home." By his second day in Iraq, Briski came to three conclusions. First, the existing formulary "really wasn't that bad." Second, his mission was really about "redesigning the entire Iraqi pharmaceutical procurement and delivery system, and that was a complete change of scope -- on a grand scale." Third, Haveman and his advisers "really didn't know what they were doing."

Haveman "viewed Iraq as Michigan after a huge attack," said George Guszcza, an Army captain who worked on the CPA's health team. "Somehow if you went into the ghettos and projects of Michigan and just extended it out for the entire state -- that's what he was coming to save."

Haveman's critics, including more than a dozen people who worked for him in Baghdad, contend that rewriting the formulary was a distraction. Instead, they said, the CPA should have focused on restructuring, but not privatizing, the drug-delivery system and on ordering more emergency shipments of medicine to address shortages of essential medicines. The first emergency procurement did not occur until early 2004, after the Americans had been in Iraq for more than eight months.

Haveman insisted that revising the formulary was a crucial first step in improving the distribution of medicines. "It was unwieldy to order 4,500 different drugs, and to test and distribute them," he said.

When Haveman left Iraq, Baghdad's hospitals were as decrepit as the day the Americans arrived. At Yarmouk Hospital, the city's largest, rooms lacked the most basic equipment to monitor a patient's blood pressure and heart rate, operating theaters were without modern surgical tools and sterile implements, and the pharmacy's shelves were bare.

Nationwide, the Health Ministry reported that 40 percent of the 900 drugs it deemed essential were out of stock in hospitals. Of the 32 medicines used in public clinics for the management of chronic diseases, 26 were unavailable.

The new health minister, Aladin Alwan, beseeched the United Nations for help, and he asked neighboring nations to share what they could. He sought to increase production at a state-run manufacturing plant in the city of Samarra. And he put the creation of a new formulary on hold. To him, it was a fool's errand.

"We didn't need a new formulary. We needed drugs," he said. "But the Americans did not understand that."

A 9/11 Hero's Public Relations Blitz

In May 2003, a team of law enforcement experts from the Justice Department concluded that more than 6,600 foreign advisers were needed to help rehabilitate Iraq's police forces.

The White House dispatched just one: Bernie Kerik.

Bernard Kerik had more star power than Bremer and everyone else in the CPA combined. Soldiers stopped him in the halls of the Republican Palace to ask for his autograph or, if they had a camera, a picture. Reporters were more interested in interviewing him than they were the viceroy.

Kerik had been New York City's police commissioner when terrorists attacked the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. His courage (he shouted evacuation orders from a block away as the south tower collapsed), his stamina (he worked around the clock and catnapped in his office for weeks), and his charisma (he was a master of the television interview) turned him into a national hero. When White House officials were casting about for a prominent individual to take charge of Iraq's Interior Ministry and assume the challenge of rebuilding the Iraqi police, Kerik's name came up. Bush pronounced it an excellent idea.

Kerik had worked in the Middle East before, as the security director for a government hospital in Saudi Arabia, but he was expelled from the country amid a government investigation into his surveillance of the medical staff. He lacked postwar policing experience, but the White House viewed that as an asset.

Veteran Middle East hands were regarded as insufficiently committed to the goal of democratizing the region. Post-conflict experts, many of whom worked for the State Department, the United Nations or nongovernmental organizations, were deemed too liberal. Men such as Kerik -- committed Republicans with an accomplished career in business or government -- were ideal. They were loyal, and they shared the Bush administration's goal of rebuilding Iraq in an American image. With Kerik, there were bonuses: The media loved him, and the American public trusted him.

Robert Gifford, a State Department expert in international law enforcement, was one of the first CPA staff members to meet Kerik when he arrived in Baghdad. Gifford was the senior adviser to the Interior Ministry, which oversaw the police. Kerik was to take over Gifford's job.

"I understand you are going to be the man, and we are here to support you," Gifford told Kerik.

"I'm here to bring more media attention to the good work on police because the situation is probably not as bad as people think it is," Kerik replied.

As they entered the Interior Ministry office in the palace, Gifford offered to brief Kerik. "It was during that period I realized he wasn't with me," Gifford recalled. "He didn't listen to anything. He hadn't read anything except his e-mails. I don't think he read a single one of our proposals."

Kerik wasn't a details guy. He was content to let Gifford figure out how to train Iraqi officers to work in a democratic society. Kerik would take care of briefing the viceroy and the media. And he'd be going out for a few missions himself.

Kerik's first order of business, less than a week after he arrived, was to give a slew of interviews saying the situation was improving. He told the Associated Press that security in Baghdad "is not as bad as I thought. Are bad things going on? Yes. But is it out of control? No. Is it getting better? Yes." He went on NBC's "Today" show to pronounce the situation "better than I expected." To Time magazine, he said that "people are starting to feel more confident. They're coming back out. Markets and shops that I saw closed one week ago have opened."

When it came to his own safety, Kerik took no chances. He hired a team of South African bodyguards, and he packed a 9mm handgun under his safari vest.

The first months after liberation were a critical period for Iraq's police. Officers needed to be called back to work and screened for Baath Party connections. They'd have to learn about due process, how to interrogate without torture, how to walk the beat. They required new weapons. New chiefs had to be selected. Tens of thousands more officers would have to be hired to put the genie of anarchy back in the bottle.

Kerik held only two staff meetings while in Iraq, one when he arrived and the other when he was being shadowed by a New York Times reporter, according to Gerald Burke, a former Massachusetts State Police commander who participated in the initial Justice Department assessment mission. Despite his White House connections, Kerik did not secure funding for the desperately needed police advisers. With no help on the way, the task of organizing and training Iraqi officers fell to U.S. military police soldiers, many of whom had no experience in civilian law enforcement.

"He was the wrong guy at the wrong time," Burke said later. "Bernie didn't have the skills. What we needed was a chief executive-level person. . . . Bernie came in with a street-cop mentality."

Kerik authorized the formation of a hundred-man Iraqi police paramilitary unit to pursue criminal syndicates that had formed since the war, and he often joined the group on nighttime raids, departing the Green Zone at midnight and returning at dawn, in time to attend Bremer's senior staff meeting, where he would crack a few jokes, describe the night's adventures and read off the latest crime statistics prepared by an aide. The unit did bust a few kidnapping gangs and car-theft rings, generating a stream of positive news stories that Kerik basked in and Bremer applauded. But the all-nighters meant Kerik wasn't around to supervise the Interior Ministry during the day. He was sleeping.

Several members of the CPA's Interior Ministry team wanted to blow the whistle on Kerik, but they concluded any complaints would be brushed off. "Bremer's staff thought he was the silver bullet," a member of the Justice Department assessment mission said. "Nobody wanted to question the [man who was] police chief during 9/11."

Kerik contended that he did his best in what was, ultimately, an untenable situation. He said he wasn't given sufficient funding to hire foreign police advisers or establish large-scale training programs.

Three months after he arrived, Kerik attended a meeting of local police chiefs in Baghdad's Convention Center. When it was his turn to address the group, he stood and bid everyone farewell. Although he had informed Bremer of his decision a few days earlier, Kerik hadn't told most of the people who worked for him. He flew out of Iraq a few hours later.

"I was in my own world," he said later. "I did my own thing."

Truer words...

2006-09-12T16:11:00.000+10:00

"If a fanatical group of Anglicans or Catholics carried out a terrorist attack and invoked God and the Christian religion to justify it, wouldn't you expect it to be routinely and regularly condemned by religious leaders in this country?""

smh

Yes, yes, you would.

Dear Mr Beazley

2006-09-12T07:45:00.000+10:00

Dear Mr Beazley

It was with some interest that I read your statements about requiring immigrants to pledge allegiance to 'Australian values'. Unfortunately I wasn't able to find out in your statement precisely what these values are. As such, I'd like to ask you a few questions to clarify your point of view.

1) Can you please list these values in full.

2) Is the list subject to change? Not too long ago mistrust and hatred of foreigners was an Aussie value and government policy, since that value changed (multiculturalism) does this mean the list will be updated and applicants required to re-pledge?

3) Will Australian citizens be required to make that pledge or are we supposed to have memorised the list of Aussie values suspended over our cots when we were born?

4) If Catholics pledge to respect women, does that mean they will be required to permit women to become church ministers if they want?

5) How do you prove that someone isn't upholding their pledges? No doubt a gentleman like yourself is well positioned to judge whether another is working hard or not but what about respecting women and mateship? Perhaps we could contract the enforcement of mateship to Bundaberg rum. They already run a delightful competition on mateship and are unafraid to give examples of mateship. I believe this involves dying people pink and lifting jockeys up by the scruff of the neck, you should see the adverts sir, they really are quite good.

I think you have the germ of a good idea here. I'd just like to know more about it so I can discuss it with other people I know. Your help would be appreciated.

Respectfully,

Hello!

2006-09-12T07:06:00.000+10:00

I am Osama. You still have not caught me.

Today's 'Islamic Fascists' Were Yesterday's Friends

2006-08-30T14:53:00.000+10:00

Over the past 80 years, Western governments and their allies have supported radical Islamist groups. However, this was not merely opportunism, a bad case of "my enemy's enemy is my friend." As part of this process, Western governments seriously denigrated popular secular and democratic movements. Indeed, from the founding of the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1920s to Israel's role in the forging of Hamas in the 1980s, the explicit aim of Western support for radical Islamism was to isolate, weaken, and ultimately destroy popular political movements that very often were based on Western ideas of democracy and progress. Thus, many of these radical Islamist groups – the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, al-Qaeda, Hezbollah – have a built-in suspicion of and hostility toward secular democracy.

Brendan O'Neill

Blackadder General Hospital

2006-08-23T17:36:00.000+10:00

Blackadder firing squad

2006-08-23T17:31:00.000+10:00

Ball, or aerosol?

2006-08-23T17:14:00.000+10:00

Remember the Holocaust

2006-08-22T21:39:00.000+10:00

"[A] growing majority of voters in Europe and elsewhere... simply cannot understand how the horrors of the last European war can be invoked to license or condone unacceptable behavior in another time and place. In the eyes of a watching world, the fact that the great-grandmother of an Israeli soldier died in Treblinka is no excuse for his own abusive treatment of a Palestinian woman waiting to cross a checkpoint. "Remember Auschwitz" is not an acceptable response."

US mother & son beaten by Israeli security guard

When I was younger my family used to travel a lot around Africa. To do so we needed to transit through Johannesburg international airport. I won't ever forget how white customs inspectors treated my parents. To say that it made me angry would be an understatement. How do you describe it to someone who has no idea, and will never have any idea, what it feels like to be casually dehumanised? Will you, can you ever understand? It's been over 20 years and it still fills me with rage, imagine what it must feel like for people who have to go through that every single day of every single year.

Hearts and minds

2006-08-21T13:17:00.000+10:00

Make friends and influence people, ask me how!

" Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah ordered Hezbollah militants to canvass damaged neighborhoods and begin repairs at once. Hezbollah gives out "decent and suitable furniture" and a year's free rent to all Lebanese who lost their homes. Unlike the racist government officials who managed the botched response along the Gulf Coast last year, where whites were rescued while blacks were shot, the Shiite terrorist group's offer also applies to Sunnis, Christians and even Jews.

"Hezbollah's reputation as an efficient grass-roots social service network," reported the Times, "was in evidence everywhere. Young men with walkie-talkies and clipboards were in the battered Shiite neighborhoods on the southern edge of Bint Jbail, taking notes on the extent of the damage. Hezbollah men also traveled door to door checking on residents and asking them what help they needed." With terrorists like that, who needs FEMA?

A year after Katrina, officials are still pulling bodies out of the rubble. Dozens of corpses remain unidentified; the president, governor and mayor continue to pass the blame for their willful inaction. George W. Bush still refuses to accept responsibility. Just one day after the Lebanese ceasefire, however, Sheikh Nasrallah had already delivered a thorough accounting of the damage caused by Israel's bombing campaign and launched a comprehensive rebuilding program. "So far," said the Hezbollah leader, "the initial count available to us on completely demolished houses exceeds 15,000 residential units. We cannot of course wait for the government and its heavy vehicles and machinery because they could be a while."

As often occurs during emergencies in the U.S., price gouging for housing, water, gasoline and other essentials was rampant during and after Katrina. Bush did nothing. Nasrallah, by contrast, warned businesses not to exploit the situation: "No one should raise prices due to a surge in demand."

Never argue with a man who buys AK-47s by the boxcar.

Ted Rall

Doomed to repeat it

2006-08-21T11:43:00.000+10:00

Phan Thi Dan’s husband was carrying her wedding ring the day he was slain. One of the soldiers involved was reportedly wearing it later.

Tufts' agents found that military interrogators in the 173rd Airborne repeatedly beat prisoners, tortured them with electric shocks and forced water down their throats to simulate the sensation of drowning, the records show.

Soldiers in one unit told investigators that their captain approved of such methods and was sometimes present during torture sessions.

In one case, a detainee who had been beaten by interrogators suffered convulsions, lost consciousness and later died in his confinement cage.

Investigators identified 29 members of the 173rd Airborne as suspects in confirmed cases of torture. Fifteen of them admitted the acts. Yet only three were punished, records show. They received fines or reductions in rank. None served any prison time.

Deborah Nelson and Nick Turse LA Times

That's from 30 years ago, in Vietnam. The documents were only declassified in 1994. When the US military found out the LA Times was investigating the documents they hastily reclassified them. What do you think we'll learn about Iraq and Afghanistan in 30 years time?

Your mission, should you choose to accept it

2006-08-21T11:34:00.000+10:00

Binary liquid explosives are a sexy staple of Hollywood thrillers. It would be tedious to enumerate the movie terrorists who've employed relatively harmless liquids that, when mixed, immediately rain destruction upon an innocent populace, like the seven angels of God's wrath pouring out their bowls full of pestilence and pain.

The funny thing about these movies is, we never learn just which two chemicals can be handled safely when separate, yet instantly blow us all to kingdom come when combined. Nevertheless, we maintain a great eagerness to believe in these substances, chiefly because action movies wouldn't be as much fun if we didn't.

Now we have news of the recent, supposedly real-world, terrorist plot to destroy commercial airplanes by smuggling onboard the benign precursors to a deadly explosive, and mixing up a batch of liquid death in the lavatories. So, The Register has got to ask, were these guys for real, or have they, and the counterterrorist officials supposedly protecting us, been watching too many action movies?

The Register

MC Riz - Post 911 Blues

2006-08-21T02:32:00.000+10:00

This guy was arrested and questioned for playing an innocent man imprisoned in Guantanamo in a UK doco. He's also quite a good rapper.

Peace Propaganda and the Promised Land

2006-08-20T14:07:00.000+10:00

All you ever wanted to know about Israel Palestine and the rest of the Arab world but were afraid to ask. This (longish) documentary takes a look at various factors influencing media coverage of Israel and the middle east.

An imperfect introduction to Hezbollah

2006-08-20T14:03:00.000+10:00

An interesting comparison

2006-08-20T13:21:00.000+10:00

Dan Halutz

2006-08-16T18:44:00.000+10:00

Senior sources in the Israel Defense Forces General Staff and field officers who took part in the war in Lebanon said on Tuesday that Chief of Staff Dan Halutz, who went to his bank branch and sold an NIS 120,000 investment portfolio only three hours after two soldiers were abducted by Hezbollah on the northern border, cannot escape resignation . . .
As the country's political and military echelons met urgently to discuss the possible declaration of war, Halutz went at 12:00 P.M. to sell an investment portfolio, the Ma'ariv newspaper reported on Tuesday.
In response to the report, Halutz confirmed to Ma'ariv that he sold the portfolio on that date and at that time, but denied it had anything to do with the possibility of an imminent war.

Thief and a warcriminal

Pop Quiz

2006-08-14T22:18:00.000+10:00

IMPORTED Indonesian workers have allegedly been paid as little as $40 a day to dig ditches in the South Australian desert.

Drilling company Halliburton Australia employed a team of Indonesians for labouring jobs at its gas extraction operations in the Cooper Basin late last year. Australians who worked alongside the Indonesians have now told The Advertiser the imported staff worked 80 days straight, were housed in poor work camp accommodation and had some meals laced with pork so they were unfit for the Muslim employees to eat.

Halliburton last week confirmed the global company employs imported workers from Indonesia, Europe and the U.S. for their operations throughout Australia.

CFMEU

This situation:

A) Wouldn't have happened under Howard's new floating prison system.

B) Is an example of just the kind of rampant, job stealing immigrant behaviour John Howard is opposed to.

C) Is an example of a hypocritical attempt to pull the wool over the eyes of a fatted electorate being lead to economic slaughter.

D) Kim Beazley is fat.

E) OHMIGODTERRORISTRIGHTBEHINDYOU!!!111!1!!!ONE!!1

F) C and D only.

Hello Turkmenistan

2006-08-14T17:07:00.000+10:00

Turkmenistan is an interesting place.

If you plan to visit, make sure to shave first.

In the capital, Aşgabat many wonderful sights can be seen. Most of them seem to be of the president, Saparmurat Niyazov. They include:

Gold figure of saviour President Niyazov as a child held high by his mother, Mrs Niyazov, having thrust herself out of a despairing world on the back of a bull - in black granite.

Gold statue of a fully grown President Niyazov revolving 24 hours a day to face the sun.

President Niyazov's portrait sits above the Turkmen Offices of Humanitarian Law.

There's apparently even a melon named after the great Turkmenbashi. Say hello to Turkmenistan, it's good to have their assistance in the war against tyranny and 'islamofacism'.

R-e-s-p-e-c-t don't know what it means to me

2006-08-14T16:49:00.000+10:00

Clueless Sky TV interviewer walks into the whirling propeller that is George Galloway and is distributed into a fine mist. Poor lass, no one told her what to do when your guest won't play by your rules and instead insists on making a case based on equality and a sense of history longer than a month. Unfortunately most TV is aimed at people with the memories of goldfish. Go watch.

Every political system needs a Galloway, someone to stand on the table and yell, "That's crap, and you know it is!" every so often.

Human Shields

2006-08-13T10:23:00.000+10:00

22 April 2004
"A photograph of a Palestinian boy tied to an Israeli police jeep has been handed to justice officials charged with investigating complaints over the use of "human shields" against demonstrators.

The boy, 13-year-old Mohammed Bedwan, and three adult protesters were tied to border police vehicles last week during one of what have become almost daily demonstrations against the routing of the Israeli government's barrier through Palestinian land.

The photograph, taken by human rights activists in the village of Biddo, north-west of Jerusalem, shows Mohammed tied by an arm to a mesh on the jeep windscreen - a mesh intended to protect the vehicle and its driver against stones and rocks. Police said last night that the Justice Ministry's police complaints unit was investigating the case."

Photo: An Israeli soldier leans his hand on the back of a handcuffed unidentified Palestinian resident as he is made to enter before the soldiers inside a building during a search operation in the Old City of the West Bank town of Nablus, in this Sunday, Aug. 24, 2003 file photo.

17 May 2005
Sixteen-year-old Fadi Sharha of Dura, used as a human shield after being arrested by Israeli soldiers during a clash with Palestinian youths in Hebron. Photo: Nayef Hashlamoun, and B'Tselem.

Israelis accused of 'human shields' tactic

The three brothers were blindfolded, says Hazem, and their hands tied behind their backs. He shows me the wounds on his wrists from the plastic handcuffs - still sore and infected, but beginning to heal over.

He shows me where the soldiers positioned them: outside the entrance to his flat on the third floor, in the stairwell, facing down the steps.

"I think they put us here because they were expecting suiciders to come into the flat because none of the soldiers were on the stairs - they were all inside the flat. They put us here so we'll be shot first."

Inside the flat, the soldiers punched holes in the walls of his living room, and bedroom. Through them, snipers exchanged fire with Palestinian militants. Hazem and his brothers heard it all, but could see nothing. Hazem says he had little idea at the time exactly how long he was kept there. All he remembers was listening to the heavy gunfire around him, and counting the calls to prayer as they echoed over the area: one at lunchtime, one at tea-time, and one in the evening as the sun set. Twelve hours in all.

He says he expected to die any second. He still can't understand why, as civilians, they couldn't be kept in a room somewhere inside the house, where they would have been safer. But they put us in the middle of the clashes, he says. "There was no need for that."

25 July 2006

BBC

If Hezbollah are using civilians as human shields, and I can find no substantiated reports that they are, quite the opposite in fact, it would appear that they certainly don't have a monopoly on the tactic.

The death of Harat Hurayk

2006-08-07T18:56:00.000+10:00

This is a satellite image of the Beirut neighbourhood of Harat Hurayk before Israeli bombing.

This is the same place after.

Those were apartment buildings. People's homes. How is bombing an entire neighbourhood flat not deliberately targeting civilians?

The why of Qana

2006-08-01T11:43:00.000+10:00

What the Israelis set out to do, if they intended to "destroy" or even substantially attrite Hizbullah, was completely impractical. What they have done is to convince even Lebanese formerly on the fence about the issue that Hizbullah's leaders were correct in predicting that Lebanon would again be attacked in the most brutal and horrible way by the Israelis and that an even more powerful deterrent is needed. I.e more silkworms, not fewer. . The days when the Israelis could lord it over disconnected unmobilized Arab peasant villagers with their high tech army are coming to a close. The Arabs are still very weak, but are throwing up powerful asymmetrical challenges (e.g. party-militias with silkworm missiles!). Israeli alarm about the new connectedness of their foe explains the orgy of destruction aimed at bridges, roads, television and radio facilities and internet servers. But it is too late to disconnect the south Lebanese, who can easily and quickly rebuild all those connectors.

One hope the Israeli hawks appear to entertain is that they can permanently depopulate strips Lebanon south of the Litani river. Since most Shiites vote Hizbullah and offer political support and cover to it, fewer people means fewer assets for the party-militia. This project would require the total destruction of large numbers of villages and the permanent displacement of their inhabitants north to Beirut.

That is why the massacre at Qana occurred. The Israelis had bombed Qana 80 times. They were destroying all of its buildings. Therefore, of course, they destroyed the building where dozens of children and families were hiding. This tactic is both collective punishment and ethnic cleansing all at once. It is not only a matter, as the Israelis claim, of hitting Hizbullah rocket launchers. They are destroying all of the buildings.

Juan Cole

Defending your Sovereignty

2006-08-01T08:20:00.000+10:00

Interim report of the secretary-general on the UN Interim Force in Lebanon, April 30, 2001:

"Since the resolution was adopted [i.e., since Israel's withdrawal], the situation has remained essentially unchanged, although there were further developments in the dispute over Shab'a farms area. As before, there were frequent minor ground violations of the Blue Line. There were, in addition, almost daily violations of the line by Israeli aircraft which penetrated deeply into Lebanese airspace. I have been in touch with the parties concerned and other interested parties to urge respect for the Blue Line and to avert further escalation."

Report of the secretary-general for the period from July 18, 2000, to Jan. 18, 2001:

"Israeli violations of Lebanese air space, which had resumed after Hizbollah's attack on 7th October, continued on an almost daily basis."

For the period from Jan. 23, 2001, to July 20, 2001:

"As reported in April, Israeli aircraft violated the line on an almost daily basis, penetrating deep into Lebanese airspace. These incursions, particularly those at low level breaking the sound barrier over populated areas, were especially provocative and caused great anxiety to the civilian population. The air violations are ongoing, despite repeated démarches to the Israeli authorities."

For the period from July 21, 2001, to Jan. 16, 2002:

"Israeli air violations of the Blue Line, however, continued on an almost daily basis, penetrating deep into Lebanese airspace. These incursions are not justified and cause great concerns to the civilian population, particularly low-altitude flights that break the sound barrier over populated areas. The air violations are ongoing, although démarches to the Israeli authorities […] have been made repeatedly by me, other senior United Nations officials and a number of interested Governments."

For the period from Jan. 17, 2002, to July 12, 2002:

"Unjustified Israeli air incursions into sovereign Lebanese airspace continued on an almost daily basis throughout most of the reporting period, often penetrating deep into Lebanon and frequently generating sonic booms. In the latter half of April, a pattern emerged whereby the aircraft would fly out to sea and enter Lebanese airspace north of the UNIFIL area of operation, thus avoiding direct observation and verification by UNIFIL. In January Hezbollah began responding to the overflights with anti-aircraft fire. This activity has continued through the present. On a number of occasions […] shells crossed the Blue Line. Calls on Israel to cease the overflights […]"

For the period from July 13, 2002, to Jan. 14, 2003:

"There were sporadic Israeli violations of Lebanese airspace, with periodic lulls in such activity punctuated by abrupt increases over periods of several days. On two occasions in November, Israeli overflights exceeded any recorded number since Israel's withdrawal from southern Lebanon in May 2000. Many of these air violations penetrated deep into Lebanon, often generating sonic booms over populated areas. The pattern identified in my last report continued, whereby the aircraft would fly out to sea and enter Lebanese airspace north of the UNIFIL area of operation, thus avoiding direct observation and verification by UNIFIL."

For the period from Jan. 15, 2003, to July 23, 2003:

"The most significant sources of tension were the persistent Israeli violations of Lebanese airspace and instances of Hezbollah antiaircraft fire directed across the Blue Line towards Israeli villages. […] Israeli air incursions into Lebanon increased overall during the reporting period, though the numbers have declined since early July. UNIFIL recorded almost daily violations across the Blue Line in some weeks. As in the past, Israeli overflights penetrated deep into Lebanon, often generating sonic booms over populated areas."

For the period from July 24, 2003, to Jan. 19, 2004:

"The recurrent Israeli air incursions into Lebanon continued. The numbers abated at times but periods of little or no activity were invariably followed by an intensification of the flights. […] Hezbollah continued to react […]"

For the period from Jan. 21, 2004, to July 21, 2004:

"A cycle of disruptions and armed exchanges across the Blue Line commenced on 5 May. Israel carried out more than 20 air sorties over Lebanon, a number of which generated sonic booms. Hezbollah subsequently fired several antiaircraft rounds […]"

"Israeli air incursions were on the whole less frequent than in the previous period, although they were notable for their intensity and the large number of aircraft involved. Israeli officials maintained that there would be overflights whenever Israel deemed them necessary. As in the past, Israeli aircraft often penetrated deep […] sonic booms over populated areas […] fly out to the sea […] avoiding direct observation […]"

For the period from July 21, 2004, to Jan. 20, 2005:

"Israeli air incursions into Lebanon continued throughout the reporting period. […] Israeli officials maintained the position that there would be overflights whenever they deemed them necessary. […] As in the past […]"

For the period from Jan. 21, 2005, to July 20, 2005:

"Violations of the Blue Line continued throughout the past six months, most often in the form of recurring air violations by Israeli jets, helicopters and drones as well as ground violations, from the Lebanese side, primarily by Lebanese shepherds. […] The Israeli Air Force continued their air incursion […] deep into Lebanon […] sonic booms […] whenever Israel deemed […]"

For the period from July 22, 2005, to Jan. 20, 2006:

"The Israeli Air Force violated Lebanese airspace on many occasions during the reporting period, disturbing the relative calm along the Blue Line. […] [I]n November, overflights by jets, helicopters and unmanned aerial vehicles or drones were numerous and particularly intrusive and provocative. […] There were no instances of Hezbollah antiaircraft fire across the Blue Line […]."

For the period from Jan. 21, 2006, to July 18, 2006:

"Persistent and provocative Israeli air incursions […] remained a matter of serious concern. […] A reduction in the number of air incursions in April contributed to an atmosphere of relative calm along the Blue Line, but this trend was reversed in May."

Antiwar.com

A historical parallel

2006-07-29T22:58:00.000+10:00

PW would be so proud.

“These places are not villages. They are military bases”... “Everyone in southern Lebanon is a terrorist and is connected to Hizbollah.”

Israel’s Justice Minister Haim Ramon.

Ramon is considered a moderate in Israel. This is what happens when a country is shielded from the consequences of its policies. If Israel had to pay to maintain a massive army at a high level of alert while trying to run a crippled, socialist economy at the same time, instead of being propped up by the US, it would have made a lasting peace long ago. 20 years ago the South African government was in a similar position and made a lasting peace because it had to. It simply couldn't afford any more extremism in blood or money, Israel can. Until that changes extremists will be free to poison the political climate of the only party with power to make peace.

Fools go on about how Hamas or whoever need to make peace with Israel. That's crap Hamas has no more power to make peace with Israel than the ANC had with the SA govt. The only card they hold is that they can make the alternative so costly that there's no choice but to negotiate. A force without a single tank or airplane can't 'push Israel into the sea' or whatever nonsense is in vogue right now. Israel on other hand has the chance to miss making an acceptable peace while it has the chance. Nothing lasts for ever, maybe one day they'll wish they'd made better use of their opportunity.

War and Pieces

2006-07-29T22:22:00.000+10:00

This post got me thinking about a few things.

Hezbollah has killed fewer civilians so far than Israel. The captured I"D"F soldiers who started this conflict were also most likely caught in Lebannon. Israel also holds Lebanese and Palestinian women and children in jails as hostages. These are things you don't hear reported on the news. It's a war, you idiots. You never accept the word of either combatant because they will invariably lie to advance their own cause, hence the war bit. Reporting the context behind the events and portraying two diverse sides to the conflict might actually get people to understand what's going on.

I don't understand why we have to support either side. We're Australians, our duty is to our fellow citizens. Anyone who wants to can renounce their citizenship and go fight for whatever side they want. A person who holds Australian citizenship and fights for ANY army or armed force other than Australia (under circumstances where they are not defending Australia) particularly one that has attacked Australian citizens should be guilty of an offence. At the very least they should lose their right to remain an Australian citizen. I don't care what ties you have to whatever country. If you pick up so much as a wet tea towel in its name, tough, you've plumped for them instead of us. If it's what you have to do, it's what you have to do, but we should draw the line somewhere. I'm all for dual citizenship and everything, but not with rifles.

Further our government should not be openly supporting a belligerent in a conflict that has refused to aid us in removing our citizens from their war, that has attacked and killed our citizens and has made clear it's intention to not help us in any way whatsoever to get our people out of Lebannon. It disgusts me to see Howard and Downer licking Israel's balls on TV every night. What do we owe them, or any other country in the ME (except maybe Turkey, for being nice to us even though the Brits made us invade them)? There's a word for supporting people shooting at your countrymen, it's called treason.

More importantly picking a side in a conflict that is none of our fucking business will go some way towards earning the ire of the other side. That would be the side currently angry about us invading Iraq and starting to closely associate us with America. I don't want any part of it. Piss off, the lot of them, I'd rather mini-Mahatma and Shirley Temple stick to improving relations with our regional neighbours rather trying to find more new enemies on the other side of the world.

Joga Bonito my ass

2006-06-28T02:31:00.000+10:00

Can I have my cookie now?

Maybe we could just do away with tackling all together in matches involving Brazil. Their opponents can start off by handing them the ball and clapping politely while a 300lb Ronaldo, flab jiggling like one of those chicks who can spin like 14 hula hoops, lumbers toward goal from his position in a special non offside zone and scores.

Then the opposition get to gamely run the ball at Brazil who are allowed to kick pieces out of them till they get the ball back. Repeat. Add a few Nike ads with a one legged dude on crutches and plaudits for fair play, joga fucking bonito everyone! Isn't it nice when you can start every match with the officials on your side. Include obligatory pillock gary bloom for commentary to make comments on how Brazil are the greatest team ever, the bestest most winningest and the entire team could gangbang him and he'd be oh so proud, surely it'd be no more than they deserved. Oh and how Africans, all 800 million of them in 30 odd nations, are just too primitive to play football, it's a gentleman's game eh what! Rule Britannia, pip pip and tally ho! Dashed blighters need to play more like England.

A Shadow

2006-06-28T00:56:00.000+10:00

In a region racked by violence and animosity, a Palestinian man and an Israeli woman have dared to fall in love. But their life together has had to wait as Israeli laws keep them apart. Osama Zatar, an Arab, and Jasmin Avissar, a Jew, met and fell in love at the animal shelter near Jerusalem where they both worked. But after the two 25-year-olds married in 2004, they found themselves entangled in a web of laws that prevent them from living together as husband and wife. Israelis are legally forbidden to enter Palestinian-controlled areas of the West Bank known as "Areas A", for security reasons. Conversely, the Nationality and Entry into Israel law, introduced in 2003, forbids residency or citizenship to any Palestinian from the occupied territories married to an Israeli. So Avissar could not live in her husband's home in Ramallah and he did not have a permit to visit her in Jerusalem...

link

What makes South Africa's apartheid era different to segregation and racial hatred that have occurred in other countries is the systematic way in which the National Party, which came into power in 1948, formalised it through the law. The main laws are described below.

Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act, Act No 55 of 1949
Prohibited marriages between white people and people of other races. Between 1946 and the enactment of this law, only 75 mixed marriages had been recorded, compared with some 28,000 white marriages.

I lived in the shadow of that law. I knew people who were forced to leave South Africa for committing the crime of loving each other. It doesn't matter how it comes about, when you legislate to separate it is only because the legislators are afraid that any mixing of people, any exchange that doesn't involve shooting or explosives or beatings and supplication, increases the risk of seeing the enemy as a human being. It's because of things like this, things that I've seen and lived as a child that I will never support or temper my criticism of Israel and any other country that legislates racism. Things like this belong in a dark, forgotten age, not the 21st century.

Jihad of the week

2006-06-23T15:16:00.000+10:00

At least Israel didn't make it!

Praise be to Allah who created the creation for his worship and commanded them to be just and permitted the wronged one to retaliate against the oppressor in kind. To proceed: My talk with you this week is on injustice and opression. That one man, incompetent as he is powerful, can hold the destiny of a nation in his hand. To oppress its spirit and destroy its hope. I am talking of course about Graham Poll.

This infidel Englishman made history yesterday for giving a player 3 yellow cards in the same match, disallowing a goal scored before full time and general incompetence which nearly jeopardised our plan to reduce Australia to football driven anarchy. I myself watched the abomination of a match, careful to screen my eyes from the shorts that these men wear to accentuate their muscular legs, believers, shorts are haram, you must not wear them. There were also many decadent western women with their smooth, tanned skin, abundantly revealed by skimpy clothing, part of a plot to corrupt us, do not be distracted by them my brothers.

Back to the match. Graham Poll, whose legs are unremarkable, displayed such incompetence that we thought Australia were going to lose. It was such a shock when they drew that some of our men started dancing and singing for joy. They have since been shot. Singing, dancing, also haram.

This ended a good night for me, having seen the Yankee infidel pigdogs smote by the fiery sword of a vengeful Allah to crumble to a humiliating loss against Ghana. A defeat no doubt representative of our coming victory, God willing. Graham Poll is haram, do not associate with him, certainly do not look at his legs, even a glance.

The War on Language

2006-06-23T13:14:00.000+10:00

AUSTRALIA has been urged to join a global campaign to declare suicide bombings a crime against humanity.

The Simon Wiesenthal Centre says only an international treaty to counter suicide terrorism would give Australia the legal mechanism to extradite and prosecute, on home soil, inciters of terrorism such as Abu Bakir Bashir, the spiritual leader of Jemaah Islamiah.

The centre's director for international relations, Shimon Samuels, met the Federal Attorney-General, Philip Ruddock, yesterday to seek support for international sanctions against those who sponsor, direct or inspire terrorists.

Labor's defence spokesman, Robert McClelland, has pledged to draft a parliamentary motion and seek bipartisan support for Australia's signing of such a convention. Australia is already a backer of a draft comprehensive convention against terrorism, which has stalled because of problems of defining terrorism.

SMH

Oh I just bet they had problems.

"Ok ok, we'll say it's using force to achieve political ends?"

"Nup, how many Palestinians can we kick out of greater Israel with handholding and protests?"

"Ok, bombing to frighten or threaten people into giving you what you want."

"Does that include from 30,000 feet? Can we make some sort of exception for laser guided bombs?"

"I don't think that's quite in the spirit of..."

"Well look you don't expect us to outlaw killing people and bombing civilians, accidentally of course, heheh, do you?"

"No, no, it's just that..."

"Well good, we'd never get anywhere then. I propose we define it as what our enemies do to us but not what we do to them."

"Well wouldn't that seem a little hypocritical?"

"Hypocritical? Just wait till we get it declared a crime against humanity..."

"A crime against what!?"

"A crime against humanity, you know, like forcibly deporting entire populations and deliberately targetting civilians in retaliation, you'll have to get it past the UN though, we have a little issue with them about their resolutions. They resolve, we don't follow, yadda yadda, no big deal."

"Um, well.. I er... how about Nazis, shouldn't we outlaw being a Nazi?"

"What? Why? What for?"

"I just thought it was more important than..."

"Than terrorism!? Are you insane?"

Don't be absurd

2006-06-23T13:04:00.000+10:00

AN animated President George Bush has termed "absurd" the feeling among some Europeans that the US is more of a threat to stability than North Korea and Iran, the two countries he once described as part of an "axis of evil"

SMH

Really? Let's see what the facts say:

USA in the past 50 years has invaded or attacked: Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Cuba, Grenada, Libya, Panama, Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq, Serbia. None of these nations attacked the US first.

Iran has attacked Iraq, after the US gave Saddam chemical weapons and intelligence to attack Iran. They also had a stoush with the Taliban, when they were our allies. In fact in the last 100 years Iran hasn't attacked anyone, driven up world oil prices, started a global scramble for nuclear weapons or threatened to nuke countries without nuclear weapons.

Draw your own conclusions.

Crime and Punishment

2006-06-22T09:20:00.000+10:00

The military has charged seven Marines and a Navy corpsman with premeditated murder and other crimes in the April 26 killing of an Iraqi civilian in a village west of Baghdad, the US Marine Corps says.

All eight men face the possibility of the death penalty if convicted. They were charged with premeditated murder, larceny, conspiracy, housebreaking, making false official statements, assault, kidnapping and obstruction of justice.

Housebreaking? Larceny? So Iraqis have the right to feel secure in their homes, unless the US military decides it has reason to kick down their doors without warrants or oversight. I wonder what they stole, besides Mr Awad's life, dignity and a little piece of our humanity.

Military criminal investigators examined whether the servicemen fatally shot a 52-year-old disabled Iraqi man, Hashim Ibrahim Awad, in the face, then planted an AK-47 assault rifle and a shovel next to his body to make it appear he was an insurgent placing a roadside bomb.

This is different to blowing up an entire house, or bombing a wedding party and then claiming all the victims were insurgents about to plant a roadside bomb, somehow. I guess they must bring stuff with them to plant on anyone they happen to murder.

Joseph Casas, a defence lawyer representing Jodka, said his client was innocent and that military investigators used inappropriate methods to obtain statements from the troops in the case.

Casas said the statements were not "confessions" and that he would seek to have the statements suppressed at the trial.

"I can tell you with regard to my client, he was subjected to at least three interrogations, one of which lasted about eight hours without any food, water, restroom breaks, you name it," Casas said.

"The way that they obtained these statements is something that's going to be under our magnifying glass throughout this trial," he said.

The military held the eight suspects in "maximum" custody for three weeks, officials at the base said.

They were restrained with handcuffs attached to a leather belt and leg cuffs any time they left their mobiles.

Authorities slightly loosened the conditions last week to enable them to have no such restraints while inside jail, the base said.

Jane Siegel, another lawyer representing Jodka, said interrogators used "strong-arm" tactics and threats of life imprisonment to elicit statements from the eight men.

"The techniques that they used to acquire these statements are as close to old-fashioned psychological rubber hoses as you can get," Siegel said.

SMH

This is ironic, given that the US does in fact use actual real old fashioned rubber hoses, waterboarding and "pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death" to extract information from its other "guests" not charged with any crimes.

Glass half full, other half Aboriginal

2006-06-22T08:59:00.000+10:00

The latest report on the nation's health shows that, with the exception of the dramatically poor health of indigenous people, Australians' life expectancy is near the top of the world.

SMH

except for the 400,000 people no one cares about anyway, things are great! See, this is that unity and inclusion thing in action! Aboriginal people have a place in our society, just not where they can mess up our health statistics.

Whoops!

2006-06-22T08:53:00.000+10:00

Iraq's trade minister lashed out at Australia today after escorts guarding an embassy delegation that visited him at his Baghdad office shot dead one of his own guards and wounded several others.
"They are trampling on the dignity and sovereignty of Iraqis," Abdel Falah al-Sudani, a member of parliament's dominant Shi'ite bloc, said on state television.

"We demand an explanation from the Australian government for this intentional and unwarranted criminal aggression against members of our protection force. It should also compensate the family of the martyr and the wounded," Sudani said.

Heh heh, um it was an accident, let's not do anything hasty... surely a tragic accident like this won't jeopardise the relationship between our two great nations right? Right?

"Immediately, the minister called on the Iraqi government to suspend all kinds of trade relations with the Australian government until it gives an explanation and pays compensations for the families of the killed and wounded people," Mohamed Hannon said.

It is not known why the delegation was in Baghdad, but Australia has been working hard to win back one of its most important wheat markets after the AWB kickback scandal saw Iraq suspend dealings with monopoly exporter AWB Ltd in February.

SMH

Ah, crap.

Jihad of the Week

2006-05-28T23:25:00.000+10:00

A jihad on the Inglises of the world

When I was in Tora Bora it was very dangerous. The operation was getting serious. Bush was closing in and I thought he had me for sure. In that time I realised that hide and seek is not my best game in the whole world. Instead it is Bush who is the best at it.

So I said, "George, come on, this is not fair, I have no chance, ya ya I know dead or alive blah blah but how can we have a game if you find me so easily?"

God willing Bush is my friend and he gave me an extra head start. He said to me to hide again and he will look somewhere else for a while. So he went away to look for me somewhere else and by God we have had a great game of hide and seek ever since. If he hadn't been my friend when I was in need I would not be able to have continued. Even now he pretends not to think about me but I know it is because now I am the best and he just doesn't want to admit it. Come on George, just admit it so you can go hide and I look for you.

But anyway, helping people is what decent people do. They don't leave each other on a mountain to die because they have to reach the top. Who needs to climb mountains anyway? Like singing and flying kites and educating women, these are not serious things. Mark Inglis is haram, believers should not associate with him, or expect him to urinate on you if you were on fire and he was on his way home after drinking a whole skin of fermented mare's milk. God is great.

Drivers make fine whine

2006-05-26T09:32:00.000+10:00

Coronation Drive, City of Brisbane

I found a mail petition today, it was from the local Labor party MP some plonker by the name of Ronan Lee. Was it about IR laws, or Stopping the mayor, Campbell Newman, from tossing $2.5 billion in tax money into 5 white elephant road tunnels? No. It's about a fucking toll bridge.

After years of whining about not being able to zip down Coronation drive at a steady 100km/h with no stops and no jams from home to work the City of Brisbane finally does something, they're building another bridge accross the Brisbane river, only they want people who actually use the bridge to pay for it. Waaaah cry motorists, make people who don't even drive (me) pay for my bridge. Fuck that.

I'm writing that punk a letter asking him to explain who should pay for the bridge if not the people who use it. Driving isn't a right and I shouldn't have to subsidise making someone else's lifestyle choices more convenient. Fucking carpool for all I care. From the number of people I see jammed on that road one to a car I reckon a toll for single occupant drivers would do more to ease congestion than any number of bridges.

Defeat into Victory

2006-05-18T01:03:00.000+10:00

I've been meaning to point this out for ages so I might as well while I have a moment. Remember the 'Zarqawi Blooper Tape'? How could you not. It purported to show a master terrorist who couldn't shoot a machine gun, or rather a squad automatic weapon (SAW). Of course the declaration of the footage being a propaganda coup for the occupation meant the loss of some of the tape's context.

First of all have a look at the picture again. The weapon 'Zarqawi' is holding is a M249 SAW. The insurgency counterpart to this weapon is the RPK. The fact that Zarqawi is holding an American soldier's weapon means someone Zarqawi knows killed the soldier it used to belong to and then had enough control of the area immediately after killing him to take his weapon.

The M249

Next they were able to casually drive several vehicles out to someplace in Iraq, park them, shoot off some rounds, shoot some video and then get back into their cars and drive home. All this in a country supposed controlled by the world's greatest military.

Jihad of the Week

2006-05-17T16:32:00.000+10:00

A Jihad on Bono

"For pretending that giving him and his corporate masters more money is the only way to help others. For trying to sell a yuppie circle-jerk as changing the world and for making sucky music, except for the Joshua Tree. In this fatwa I declare Bono to be haram. A jihad against this running dog, lapdog lackey of capitalist yankee pigdogs. Believers should not own his music or have dealings with anyone who does, except for the Joshua Tree. Also his friend, the wrinkly, less famous one, Geldof, he is haram also. Anyone who buys this "Red" should be stoned, slowly, over several days, with small pebbles. God is great!"

New Democracy!

2006-05-17T08:58:00.000+10:00

Now with 80% less democracy for that great fresh taste.

THE normalisation of US-Libya relations is a natural marriage of a US administration desperate for friends and oil in the Middle East and a government that needs to open its economy to the outside world, observers say.

The Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, announced on Monday that the US was restoring full diplomatic relations with Libya and removing it from the list of countries designated as state sponsors of terrorism.

Dr Rice called the moves "tangible results that flow from the historic decisions taken by Libya's leadership in 2003 to renounce terrorism and to abandon its weapons of mass destruction programs".

Observers called the announcement proof that promotion of democracy is no longer a top priority of the Bush Administration, which is grappling to hold Iraq together and has turned its attention towards building alliances against a hostile Iran.

"The timing can be explained by a need for the United States to have a positive breakthrough in the Middle East," said Mohamed Sayed Said, a political analyst at the Egyptian government-run al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies. "With Libya, Washington gets a regime that has converted itself from radicalism to accommodation." It was self-evident that there was a retreat from democracy and that the US was aligning itself with undemocratic regimes, he said.

Libya has been ruled by Muammar Gaddafi since he seized power in 1969. Analysts expressed no surprise about the rapprochement, saying it was inevitable since Colonel Gaddafi gave up Libya's nuclear weapons program three years ago.

The US lifted its economic embargo against Libya in 2004, and since then, at least six US oil companies have resumed drilling and exploration that had been suspended in 1986. Libya possesses the world's eighth-largest oil reserves, but the US embargo had driven down production by keeping new equipment and technology out of the country.

Libya is still regularly listed by human rights groups as having one of the world's most repressive governments. A survey by Freedom House, a US-based organisation that promotes democracy worldwide, placed Libya in the bottom five countries in terms of the free flow of information.

SMH

These would be the WMD he got from Pakistan, America's latest major non Nato ally. So for rolling over and letting Uncle Sam scratch his belly Gaddafi joins Islam "the boiler" Karimov as a dictator the US just can't do without in its war on tyranny. Eastasia? Eastasia has always been our ally...

Do it for Jesus!

2006-02-23T14:36:00.000+10:00

Honorable Member Dana Vale

I too share your concern about Christian Australians aborting their way to an Islamic Republic of Australia. We have 50 years in which to act and act we must if we are to avoid tabbouleh becoming our national dish. I propose that your party use its majority to pass legislation declaring every Christian uterus a strategic area, vital to the nation's interests. In so doing the government will be able to classify abortion as the destruction of state property, which would quickly put a stop to that.

Of course it shall be the duty of every man to attempt to undo the demographic damage caused by decades of unpatriotic abortions. They shall need help, not all ladies have the good fortune to be as comely as yourself, honorable member. Women should be compelled to spend at least 3 hours a day in the gym, an hour beautifying themselves and at least 8 hours performing Kegel excersises while reading the Kama Sutra, which I'm told does wonders for reproductive ability. It is not necessary for women to be aroused for conception to occur so such requirements are redundant for men who shall have to perform the selfless task of impregnation. Of course our need to maintain our demographic advantage of the Crescent peril will require us to put aside quaint notions of monogamy as we know it. Each man may be forced by circumstance to impregnate several women, being Christian men they shall take no joy in it, solemnly discharging their office as guardians of a Christian tomorrow.

We must let nothing stand in the way of reproduction for the motherland. As you are no doubt aware our health minister, Tony Abbott, has failed to take this crisis seriously, even to the point of restricting the number of IVF attempts a woman can make. While this might be a sound strategy for Catholics who get knocked up at 16 as soon as look at you, more refined Christians shouldn't be prevented from taking part in the defence of the character of our nation. Besides, if we don't take action now, in 50 years we could be living in a Papist state.

Close your eyes and think of Australia!

To think I used it rhetorically...

2006-02-23T14:24:00.000+10:00

Lyenko Urbancic, Nazi, Liberal Party member.

An avid anti-Communist who was outed in the 1970s as a former Nazi propagandist, Urbancic died yesterday in Sydney. He was still a member of the party and attended a State Council meeting last year.

The party never succeeded in expelling the Yugoslav-born, right-wing, Slovenian nationalist. Nor did it end the influence of his faction, "the Uglies", which he helped create in the 1970s to restore backbone to the party.

Urbancic's rapid rise in the party ended in 1979, when he was exposed in a radio program as a former Nazi propagandist in Yugoslavia. He was briefly suspended from the party while investigations were conducted, but denied the claims and narrowly avoided expulsion.

In 1986, he told a Sydney newspaper: "I never said 'Heil Hitler', I never put a Nazi uniform on, I never greeted in the Nazi way."

But Urbancic never disguised his efforts to lead a right-wing faction to attack the party's small-l liberal members and influence its policies on drugs, homosexuals and law and order.

SMH

Seriously, you couldn't make this shit up.

Last week

2006-02-17T13:28:00.000+10:00

I went here

We stayed here

Across the road from us...

Then we went here

And here

And we saw stuff like this

Mushrooming

2006-02-06T17:04:00.000+10:00

Given the ease with which one can deflate the ludicrous notion that a nuclear Iran would constitute "the largest threat" facing the world, it is a cause for great concern that this view has so completely taken over rational debate on the subject. It is of even greater concern when we remember that we are only discussing a potential. But note how a central part of the propaganda campaign works: several months ago, the usual estimate for the time Iran would need to develop nuclear weapons was about ten years. Then it got reduced to five years. Now, people speak as if Iran will have nuclear weapons in the next few months. The unavoidable implication of this tactic is the obvious one, the one that Bush used so disastrously with Iraq: we need to act now. We have to do something now. There is only one word to describe this approach: it is not reasoned discourse -- it is hysteria, pure and simple.

Arthur Silber

Selling us down the river

2006-02-01T10:56:00.000+10:00

Crooks

By Michael Gawenda, Herald Correspondent in Washington and Marian Wilkinson
February 1, 2006

THE Australian ambassador to the United States lobbied Congress to drop an investigation into allegations that Australia's wheat exporter paid kickbacks to Saddam Hussein's Iraqi regime.

The Federal Government confirmed last night that the then ambassador, Michael Thawley, met the chairman of a US Senate investigations committee in late 2004 to head off the planned inquiry.

The AWB investigation was ultimately dropped, despite the US Government having information that an AWB wheat contract might have been inflated to cover kickbacks to Iraq. This information included a report, seen by the Herald, from the US Defence Contract Audit Agency.

It is understood a Senate sub-committee did not pursue the AWB investigation in the face of the fierce resistance of AWB.

Mr Thawley met Norm Coleman, chairman of the Senate permanent sub-committee on investigations, in the weeks before the Australian general election on October 9, 2004.

A statement to the Herald last night from the office of the Foreign Minister, Alexander Downer, confirmed Mr Thawley "argued strongly" to Senator Coleman for AWB's case, which was to block a US Senate inquiry.

"The Government was very concerned that because of the strong campaign by American wheat interests, the Senate committee would be used by those interests to damage Australia's wheat interests with Iraq," the statement said.

Mr Thawley had "expressed surprise" to Senator Coleman that his committee was focusing on AWB. The statement said the Government was "very concerned at the time that AWB Ltd would be unfairly treated". It added: "The Government had no reason to believe other than that the AWB Ltd was behaving properly."

Around the time of Mr Thawley's meeting it is understood there was also a meeting involving Australian government officials and the Senate committee staffers during which the US-Australia alliance and Australia's role in the "coalition of the willing" was raised.

The Government knew the AWB was paying bribes to Saddam and reacted by using its influence, haha, to try and make it go away. Incidentally our "role in the 'coalition of the willing' was raised." Not only is the government in this grubby scandal up to its eyeballs, but our foreign policy was used as a bargaining chip to get a crooked company and a crooked government off the hook. How many Australian soldiers did it cost to make all this go away? What else did they promise? This has the makings of a government destroying scandal if the stupid boob in charge of the opposition would get his act together.

When Democracy (TM) goes bad

2006-01-29T01:34:00.000+10:00

Hamas members celebrate their landslide victory over the Fateh party in Palestine, Ariel Sharon begins to rotate in his bed.

As it is, if the U.S. had sat down and tried to formulate a deliberate policy to undermine the credibility of any Palestinian party that promotes a negotiated end to the conflict with Israel – and this means essentially Fatah - it couldn’t have come up with anything more effective than the crooked mediation and the blind eye to Israeli expansionism that Republican and Democratic administrations alike have practised since the Madrid Conference.

Lawrence of Cyberia

What's good for the goose

2006-01-24T22:23:00.000+10:00

"Senior members of the Arabic community need to really have a close look at themselves

and start … identifying these people. The only people that know these people out there are members of the Middle Eastern community …

They need to stand up and …

be held accountable for the actions of people in the community."

SMH

If only

2006-01-21T23:59:00.000+10:00

Wheat exporter AWB knew it was providing hundreds of millions of dollars in kickbacks and deceived the UN about the payments that helped prop up Saddam Hussein's murderous Iraqi regime, an inquiry has heard.

In a damning opening statement, the Commission of Inquiry into the monopoly wheat marketer's deals under the corruption-ridden United Nations oil-for-food program has questioned whether AWB told the truth in claiming it was duped by an elaborate scheme of kickbacks set up by the despot.

Counsel assisting the inquiry, John Agius, SC, said evidence would show that AWB's most senior executives knew they had paid close to $300 million for non-existent trucking services that were funnelled directly to Saddam's government.

Evidence would also be presented that AWB "was prepared to deceive the UN as to the true nature of its contractual arrangement with the IGB [Iraq Grain Board]", Mr Agius said.

AWB, the former Australian Wheat Board which is now a listed company, has consistently denied that it knew the hefty trucking fees paid to a Jordanian company, Alia, were ending up in the dictator's pocket.

Mr Agius rejected AWB's position.

"Evidence will be called to the effect that AWB always knew that Alia was a conduit for the payment of money to Iraq," he told the inquiry.

"These matters were always known to AWB to be in breach of the UN sanctions [imposed on Iraq].

"These matters were known at high levels within AWB."

SMH

Not that you kids care but what irony. A market monopoly aided and abetted by a government clamiming a commitment to free markets in the sigle biggest act of bribery to prop up a regime the same government claimed to oppose. Of course John Howard knew nothing, nothing definately much less than his somnambulist foreign minister or the suddenly and perhaps precipitously departed defence minister. Something tells me that Lord Downer of Baghdad and Mark "Uncle Sam sold me some magic beans" Vaile will definately be 'shuffled' by our Saddam loving PM. I hope in vain but oh to see the Liberal party hoist by its own petard, collapse in scandal brought on by their own hubris. Of course Kim Beazley is nowhere to be found. The man couldn't win an arse kicking contest against a one legged man. And... hey, get off my lawn!

Respecting the Flag

2006-01-21T23:30:00.000+10:00

Race riot flag burner jailed

From: AAP

By Sonya Neufeld

January 12, 2006

A MAN has been jailed for three months for burning the Australian flag, despite apologising to the court for his actions during Sydney's recent spate of racial unrest.
Hadi Khawaja, 24, who has been an Australian citizen since 1986, pleaded guilty to participating in the damaging of an Australian flag at the Brighton-le-Sands RSL, in Sydney's south, on the evening of December 11.
Earlier that day, more than 5000 people had been involved in a race riot at the southern Sydney beach of North Cronulla, during which people of Middle Eastern appearance were chased and attacked.

Khawaja and a 17-year-old boy were alleged to have burnt the flag during the retaliatory violence that spread to other Sydney beaches and suburbs and eventually led to the introduction of anti-riot laws at an emergency sitting of the NSW Parliament.

The teenager, who cannot be named, is alleged to have climbed the flagpole and thrown the flag down to Khawaja, who set it alight amid a crowd of about 150 people.

Khawaja, of Peakhurst, appeared in Sutherland Local Court today on charges of malicious damage and entering enclosed lands with intent to commit an indictable offence during public unrest.

news.com.au

Maybe you think burning our flag is a terrible thing, maybe you think he deserves his sentence and more, just one thing though. If he gets a three month sentence for burning a flag what do we do to people who do this while wearing it?

The more things change

2006-01-17T12:19:00.000+10:00

Then

In the 1920s Britain bombed Kurds and Arabs in Iraq when they rebelled against Britain's attempts to control them. By October 1922 the RAF had principal responsibility for the war, with British ground forces being reduced. In a single aerial sortie, in mid-May 1922, Suleymaniya was bombarded, causing the town's 7,000 residents to evacuate the town for the rest of the conflict. In fact, armed confrontations between Kurdish and Arab nationalists and British imperialism continued until the early 1930s.

Winston Churchill, the colonial secretary at the time, believed that gas could be used effectively against the Kurds and Iraqis (as well as against other peoples in the Empire): 'I do not understand this squeamishness about the use of gas. I am strongly in favour of using poison gas against uncivilised tribes.' Some shared Churchill's enthusiasm for gas as an instrument of colonial control but the British cabinet was reluctant to allow the use of a weapon that had caused such misery and revulsion in the First World War. In the event, gas was used against the Iraqi rebels though gas shells were not dropped from aircraft because of practical difficulties.

Wing-Commander Sir Arthur Harris, later Bomber Harris, head of wartime Bomber Command, was happy to emphasise that 'The Arab and Kurd now know what real bombing means in casualties and damage. Within forty-five minutes a full-size village can be practically wiped out and a third of its inhabitants killed or injured.' It was an easy matter to bomb and machine-gun the tribespeople, because they had no means of defence or retaliation. Iraq and Kurdistan were also used as testing grounds for new weapons; devices specifically developed by the Air Ministry for use against tribal villages.

Now

BAGHDAD, Jan. 3 -- U.S. pilots targeting a house where they believed insurgents had taken shelter killed a family of 12, Iraqi officials said Tuesday. The dead included women and children whose bodies were recovered in the nightclothes and blankets in which they had apparently been sleeping.

A Washington Post special correspondent watched as the corpses of three women and three boys who appeared to be younger than 10 were removed Tuesday from the house outside the town of Baiji, 150 miles north of Baghdad.

A U.S. military spokesman said that American forces take every precaution to prevent civilian casualties and that they were working with Iraqi authorities to determine what happened at the farmhouse in Baiji. "We continue to see terrorists and insurgents using civilians in an attempt to shield themselves," Lt. Col. Barry Johnson, a military spokesman, said in an e-mail.

The Associated Press Television News showed footage of men carrying several bodies wrapped in carpets from the wreckage of the house. The men chanted ritual prayers: "There is no god but God."

The United States has steadily intensified its use of airstrikes against insurgents in Iraq in the past year, increasing the number of attacks from 25 in January 2005 to 120 in November.

Washington Post

Where the hell is my bike!?

2006-01-05T00:03:00.000+10:00

Was supposed to get my new baby on the 3rd, the courier company's drivers didn't show up for work, which was nice of them, on the 4th they said it's on the way, be there by the end of the day, yeah right. They need to ship it from motherfucking EAGLE FARM to ST LUCIA. It's TWO goddamn days late. I could have taken a cab there and ridden the fucker home. First Express "Distribution with a difference" yeah, unlike other companies we just don't deliver your shit, see? That's the difference. If I don't get my bike today unpleasantness will follow.

BANZAIIII!!!

2006-01-02T00:54:00.000+10:00

"Osama? That Pussy won't even get his hands dirty, I'm the real deal."

Remember back in the 70s when one of the most ruthless, most feared terrorist groups was from... Japan? No? Well get a load of the Japanese Red Army, hijackings, mass slaughter of civillians, contract killers, you name it. Funny how no one ever saw the need to tar every Japanese person as a potential terrorist though.

Happy Holidays

2005-12-25T09:01:00.000+10:00

The idea of a Christmas truce is a meaningful but pointless one. However we live in harder times. The business of killing is so important that pausing for a single day might create an intolerable backlog of the living. So the death machine rumbles on into the new year.

Merry Christmas

New Bike

2005-12-24T10:42:00.000+10:00

My new bike, a Merida Matts sport 300 disc

I test-rode a stock frame yesterday, the disc brakes were an absolute dream compared to the v-brakes I'm used to. The bike stops in something like half the distance and slows evenly the whole way and the frame felt generally solid yet quite light. I'm getting a size larger than they had in stock so I'll have to wait till Jan 3 for mine. They'll change the tires to some thinner Continentals, stick on some cow horn bars and change the rear derailleur. That should make it a real goer. If you're in the St Lucia area and you need a bike, you can't go past the Uni Bike Shop.

Weak and cowardly

2005-12-20T23:12:00.000+10:00

"When is it my turn to be Reichskanzler? You promised I'd get to have a go! Can I at least drive?"

~~Jews~~ Jones not to blame: Costello
December 20, 2005 - 12:14PM

Racism in Australia can easily be "whipped up", says Treasurer Peter Costello, but he does not blame the media.

Mr Costello said today gangs of youths had incited racism in Sydney, but said the local media were not responsible for fanning the flames.

"I think racism can be easily whipped up in Australia," Mr Costello said.

"I don't think there's racism on the street, no, I think we're a very accepting country," he told ABC Radio.

Sydney talkback radio personalities, including Macquarie Radio's Alan Jones, have been accused of fuelling racial tensions in the wake of the recent Cronulla riot.

Asked if he thought Jones "went too far", Mr Costello said he did not.

"That's not what I mean by whipping up," Mr Costello said.

"I think it can be fanned if gangs of youths come into a neighbourhood and try and take it over. That can fan racism.

SMH

Racism is the fault of the ethnic group being victimised rather than a hate radio station that reads out incitements to violence on air and eggs on criminals. Well done Pete, 300,000 votes will surely flow your way from Alan "wog basher" Jones. Costello's got a yellow streak down his back a mile wide. He can't face up to John Howard so he's taken a break from begging to have a go at being PM to wiggle his hips at Johnny's electorate.

Radio's mad mullah

2005-12-15T00:28:00.000+10:00

Why isn't Alan Jones being charged with a crime?

Dear Honourable Senator Coonan

Forgive me if my form of address is incorrect. I write you to enquire as to whether your ministry intends to investigate whether Alan Jones of 2GB violated the Broadcasting act in the course of broadcasting statements as follow:

"Come to Cronulla this weekend to take revenge. This Sunday every Aussie in the Shire get down to North Cronulla to support the Leb and wog bashing day …" in the context of choosing to report an incitement to violence by reading the very incitement verbatim on air.

I hope you take this matter seriously, such irresponsible, and quite possibly illegal behaviour undoubtedly contributed to the appalling violence, destruction of property and breakdown of civil order that took place in Cronulla. We should be sending the message that behaviour like this, from a person with influential access to a large audience regulated by yourself, is not acceptable.

I trust you will at least consider making a statement to assure worried Australians like myself that our nation's airwaves are not the playground of extremists and people who nurture violent, antisocial behaviour.

Warmest Regards

Wanker of the Year

2005-12-13T19:59:00.000+10:00

I bring you Gerard Henderson ladies and gentlemen.

Australia is essentially a tolerant and accepting society. It is consistent with the essential Australian empiricism that individuals of ethnic background meet their most sustained opposition in the areas where few of them live. This is in stark contrast to genuinely racist societies where ethnic groups are opposed because they are known.

"I don't like you because you're dark and I've never met a darkie," is different from "I've met darkies before and I don't like them." Only in the nuanced mind of a Howard conservative.

It is unfair to blame the mainstream media for what happened. For example, a re-reading of Sydney's Daily Telegraph indicates that it reported the lead-up to last Sunday's events quite responsibly. Likewise, talkback radio did not spark the violence. Young Australians, of whatever ethnic background, can communicate their messages by mobile phones without using the established media.

Really?

Radio doesn't get much grimmer than Alan Jones' efforts in the days before the Cronulla riot. He was dead keen for a demo at the beach — "a rally, a street march, call it what you will. A community show of force."

He assured his huge audience he "understood" why that famous text message went out and he read it right through again on air. "Come to Cronulla this weekend to take revenge. This Sunday every Aussie in the Shire get down to North Cronulla to support the Leb and wog bashing day …"

Daily he cautioned his listeners not to take the law into their own hands, but he warmed to listeners who had exactly that on their minds.

Last Thursday Charlie rang to suggest all junior footballers in the Shire gather on the beach to support the lifesavers. "Good stuff, good stuff," said Jones.

"I tell you who we want to encourage, Charlie, all the Pacific Island people because, you want to know something, they don't take any nonsense. They are proud to be here — all those Samoans and Fijians. They love being here. And they say, 'Uh huh, uh huh. You step out of line, look out.' And, of course, cowards always run, don't they?"

When John called on Tuesday to bluntly recommend vigilante action — "If the police can't do the job, the next tier is us" — Jones did not dissent. "Yeh. Good on you, John." And when he then offered a maxim his father had picked up during the war — "Shoot one, the rest will run" — the broadcaster roared with laughter. "No, you don't play Queensberry's rules. Good on you, John."

It was horrible stuff, larded with self-congratulation. And pity poor Berta — "not of a Middle Eastern family" — who tried to argue there were two sides to this story. When she reported hearing "really derogatory remarks" aimed at Middle Eastern people on Cronulla beach, Jones cut her off: "Let's not get too carried away, Berta. We don't have Anglo-Saxon kids out there raping women in western Sydney."

SMH

Now where would anyone get that idea Gerard?

It gives me great pleasure to award this beautiful and multipurpose trophy to the hands down winner of 2005. Wank on Gerard, may your lubricant of choice be ever free of sand.

Flaming gasbag

2005-12-13T19:27:00.000+10:00

"I can smell smoke, better put on my strong and resolute face..."

How about some moral leadership Kim? Why don't you come out and call a mob of 5000 violent racists exactly what they are? Kim Beazley is a moral and ethical coward. Plain and simple. He is not fit to lead a bridge team, let alone the ALP.

The dead rodent sketch

2005-12-12T14:21:00.000+10:00

"5000 people rioting and attacking swarthy individuals isn't racism, nudge nudge, wink wink."

Prime Minister John Howard today refused to call Australians racist following the mob violence in Sydney.

But he said attacking people on their basis of their race was totally unacceptable.

He condemned incidents in which up to 5,000 people descended on North Cronulla Beach, chanting racist slogans and attacking people of Middle Eastern appearance.

The violence sparked apparent reprisal attacks late last night, with cars damaged at Maroubra Beach.

"Mob violence is always sickening," Mr Howard told reporters.

"Attacking people on the basis of their race, their appearance, their ethnicity, is totally unacceptable and should be repudiated by all Australians irrespective of their own background and their politics," he said.

"I believe yesterday's behaviour was completely unacceptable but I'm not going to put a general tag (of) racism on the Australian community.

"I think it's a term that is flung around sometimes carelessly and I'm simply not going to do so."

SMH

Message understood.

The return of the shredder

2005-12-06T23:29:00.000+10:00

As cruel, amoral and heartless as the men who put him there

No, not the one in TMNT. Saddam's people/plastic shredder, remember that? It was one of the 'reasons' given by our sycophant in chief for invading Iraq. Along with WMD, Democracy (TM) and the size of his Little House on the Prairie video collection. So far no shredding machines have been found, no doubt they're hidden right next to the piles of WMD. No operators of such machines have been found either and no people actually involved in places where it would have been used have come forward. It's distinct lack of existence was an embarrassment for the pro war crowd, insofar as they have a capacity for embarrassment at all, which made me quite surprised to see this:

"I swear by God, I walked by a room and ... saw a grinder with blood coming out of it and human hair underneath," Hassan told the court. During the testimony, Barzan, sitting behind Saddam in the dock, interrupted Hassan, shouting: "It's a lie!"

SMH

Make no mistake, Saddam is a criminal who has undoubtedly committed crimes against humanity. He's been a crook since he first seized power with American help. He was a criminal when he met Donald Rumsfeld. He was a criminal when he invaded Iran and used chemical and biological weapons on them and Iraqis which were provided by America and Europe.

The resurgence of the shredding/mincing machine is a symptom of what's wrong with Saddam's entire trial. The Americans want him to appear to get a fair trial, to prevent him becoming a martyr. However there's no way they can give him a fair trial. Take a look at the crime he's charged with. A mass murder in Dujail circa 1982. Why not charge him for using chemical weapons and invading Iran? Why not any of his other crimes? the simple reason is this is the only thing they can pin on him that doesn't involve American or European complicity. That's why it's necessary to make up nonsense about shredding machines when talking about a dictator who had no qualms simply hanging people and forcing their relations to pay to get back their bodies. A man who quite happily and openly tortured, murdered and committed crimes against the peace, he did all these things with the help of his current jailors and they know it.

When I was a kid we wrote letters to the Iraqi government to free political prisoners on behalf of Amnesty international. I knew about Abu Ghraib before American soldiers were in charge of the rape and torture there. We were always told that although our letters didn't do much, they did something and I remember feeling that wasn't justice enough for the innocent men who languished in that and many other prisons.

What sort of justice does Saddam Hussein deserve? I don't know, that should be for a legitimate Iraqi government to decide. I do know that justice is not the wicked punishing the wicked.

From the office of infant soul torture

2005-12-01T23:49:00.000+10:00

When I was a kid the idea that unbaptised infants who died would remain in some sort of 'limbo' for all eternity was one of the many things that led me to reject religion as a pastime for the cruel and the cowardly. It seems the Catholic church is set to rewrite that rule to make it sound less like an eternal punishment for the heinous crime of dying an infant. Funny how god's laws can be rewritten at the drop of a hat. I suppose that means god gets a memo to stop torturing the little kiddies who got into limbo prior to the latest corporate policy change. And how about their parents?

"Dear bereaved,

It has come to our attention that you were informed that your child, Johnny, was consigned to suffer for an eternity because you didn't get him baptised quickly enough. Due to a recent change in corporate policy your child died in the hope of eternal salvation as opposed to the the previous policy of damnation between heaven and hell. We regret any distress caused you by the idea of your offspring suffering for ever and ever and ever through no fault of their own. Management has been notified to cease the child's stay in limbo on receipt of your prayers, in triplicate. We thank you for your cooperation in this matter and hope that this unfortunate oversight does not affect your decision to choose Catholicism as your means to communicate with the Almighty.

From the desk of

Panzerfaust I Pontifex Maximus"

Riverside Racist

2005-11-25T23:21:00.000+10:00

"Hmmm... edit... find and replace... Asians... with... Muslims... save!"

This evening Sarah and I were headed into the city, it was too rainy to bike so we took the citycat in. As we get on I notice that the door separating the front deck from the midships enclosed cabin is open and rain is blowing in so I get up and shut it. There's a few people milling around but none seem to notice the rain. Just before our stop a slightly shorter than average man in his late forties in jeans and a white t-shirt with thin blue stripes comes up to me and says something like, "I bet they're from up the river [something] live in tents fucking camels." Of course I'm quite astonished and I ask him what on earth he's going on about. He responds, "Camel fuckers, living in tents, it really pisses me off, they should slide the door shut, camel fuckers."

Given the volume of his voice and his projection it slowly dawns on me that he isn't talking to me at all, he's just pretending to. He hasn't responded to anything I say, even though it's along the lines of nod and smile. I look around and see a man sitting on the left of the row of seats in front of me. Mr camel fuckers nudges me conspiratorially and looks at him, opining, "Those camel fuckers live in tents, not like us, eh? We close doors."

He thinks the man is an Arab, even though he looks Pakistani or Indian to me. He's not talking to me at all, I'm a prop in a racist attack. A white racist is including me, a black man, in his subset of humanity in order to hurl racist slurs against someone he thinks is an Arab. Who says multiculturalism doesn't work? He hasn't met the other guy before in his life, the guy had nothing to do with the door being open. Mr camel fuckers just felt like calling an Arab guy some names. By the time I figure this out he's gone out on to the front deck and I'm still sitting in my seat wondering what the hell I should do. I don't know what I could have done really, I don't know if the other guy heard him or anything and I could hit him for calling me names because he wasn't.

I wonder how many people like that are out there, people who feel safe enough in the current environment of government and talkback radio inspired fear and hatred to attack people like that. I'm glad I've started shaving my beard again.

Didn't we used to be slightly better than Saddam?

2005-11-23T20:13:00.000+10:00

IRAQ HAS POSSIBLY EMPLOYED PHOSPHOROUS CHEMICAL WEAPONS AGAINST THE KURDISH POPULATION IN AREAS ALONG THE IRAQI-TURKISH-IRANIAN BORDERS. […]

IN LATE FEBRUARY 1991, FOLLOWING THE COALITION FORCES’ OVERWHELMING VICTORY OVER IRAQ, KURDISH REBELS STEPPED UP THEIR STRUGGLE AGAINST IRAQI FORCES IN NORTHERN IRAQ. DURING THE BRUTAL CRACKDOWN THAT FOLLOWED THE KURDISH UPRISING, IRAQI FORCES LOYAL TO PRESIDENT SADDAM ((HUSSEIN)) MAY HAVE POSSIBLY USED WHITE PHOSPHOROUS (WP) CHEMICAL WEAPONS AGAINST KURDISH REBELS AND THE POPULACE IN ERBIL (GEOCOORD:3412N/04401E) (VICINITY OF IRANIAN BORDER) AND DOHUK (GEOCOORD:3652N/04301E) (VICINITY OF IRAQI BORDER) PROVINCES, IRAQ.

In other words, the Pentagon does refer to white phosphorus rounds as chemical weapons — at least if they’re used by our enemies.

Via Think Progress

Rape rooms: Check

Secret Prisons: Check

Widespread torture and intimidation: Check

Chemical weapons used against civillian targets: Check

Rampant corruption: Check

At odds with Iran: Check

At odds with Syria: Check

If it weren't for the increased deaths and total anarchy, Iraqis probably wouldn't be able to tell that Saddam isn't in charge anymore. It seems that the only problem we ever had with the way Saddam ran Iraq was that his name was Saddam Hussein.

Conventional Terror...

2005-11-20T15:26:00.000+10:00

Thursday, November 17, 2005

Conventional Terror...

It sat on my PC desktop for five days.

The first day I read about it on the internet, on some site, my heart sank. White phosphorous in Falloojeh. I knew nothing about white phosphorous, of course, and a part of me didn’t want to know the details. I tried downloading the film four times and was almost relieved when I got disconnected all four times.

E. had heard about the film too and one of his friends S. finally brought it by on CD. He and E. shut themselves up in the room with the computer to watch the brief documentary. E. came out half an hour later looking pale- his lips tightened in a straight line, which is the way he looks when he’s pensive... thinking about something he'd rather not discuss.

“Hey- I want to see it too…” I half-heartedly called out after him, as he walked S. to the door.

“It’s on the desktop- but you really don’t want to see it.” E. said.

I avoided the computer for five days because every time I switched it on, the file would catch my eye and call out to me… now plaintively- begging to be watched, now angrily- condemning my indifference.

Except that it was never indifference… it was a sort of dread that sat deep in my stomach, making me feel like I had swallowed a dozen small stones. I didn’t want to see it because I knew it contained the images of the dead civilians I had in my head.

Few Iraqis ever doubted the American use of chemical weapons in Falloojeh. We’ve been hearing the terrifying stories of people burnt to the bone for well over a year now. I just didn’t want it confirmed.

I didn’t want it confirmed because confirming the atrocities that occurred in Falloojeh means verifying how really lost we are as Iraqis under American occupation and how incredibly useless the world is in general- the UN, Kofi Annan, humanitarian organizations, clerics, the Pope, journalists… you name it- we’ve lost faith in it.

I finally worked up enough courage to watch it and it has lived up to my worst fears. Watching it was almost an invasive experience, because I felt like someone had crawled into my mind and brought my nightmares to life. Image after image of men, women and children so burnt and scarred that the only way you could tell the males apart from the females, and the children apart from the adults, was by the clothes they are wearing… the clothes which were eerily intact- like each corpse had been burnt to the bone, and then dressed up lovingly in their everyday attire- the polka dot nightgown with a lace collar… the baby girl in her cotton pajamas- little earrings dangling from little ears.

Some of them look like they died almost peacefully, in their sleep… others look like they suffered a great deal- skin burnt completely black and falling away from scorched bones.

I imagine what it must have been like for some of them. They were probably huddled in their houses- some of them- tens of thousands of them- couldn’t leave the city. They didn’t have transport or they simply didn’t have a place to go. They sat in their homes, hoping that what people said about Americans was actually true- that in spite of their huge machines and endless weapons, they were human too.

And then the rain of bombs would begin… the wooooosh of the missiles as they fell and the sound of the explosion as it hit its target… and no matter how prepared you think you are for that explosion- it always makes you flinch. I imagine their children covering their ears and some of them crying, trying to cover up the mechanical sounds of war with their more human wails. I imagine that as the tanks got closer, and the planes got lower- the fear increased- and parents searched each other’s faces for a solution, for a way out of the horror. Some of them probably decided to wait it out in their homes, and others must have been desperate to get out- fearing the rain of concrete and steel and thinking their chances were better in the open air, than confined in the homes that could at any moment turn into their tombs.

That’s what we were told before the Americans came- it’s safer to be outside of the house during an air strike than it is to be inside of the house. Inside of the house, a missile nearby would turn the windows into millions of little daggers and walls might come crashing down. In the garden, or even the street, you’d only have to worry about shrapnel and debris if the bomb was very close- but what were the chances of that?

That was before 2003… and certainly before Falloojeh.

That was before men, women and children left their homes only to be engulfed in a rain of fire.

Last year I blogged about Falloojeh and said:

“There is talk of the use of cluster bombs and other forbidden weaponry.”

I was immediately attacked with a barrage of emails from Americans telling me I was a liar and that there was no proof and that there was no way Americans would ever do something so appalling! I wonder how those same people justify this now. Are they shocked? Or do they tell themselves that Iraqis aren’t people? Or are they simply in denial?

The Pentagon spokesman recently said:

"It's part of our conventional-weapons inventory and we use it like we use any other conventional weapon,"

This war has redefined ‘conventional’. It has taken atrocity to another level. Everything we learned before has become obsolete. ‘Conventional’ has become synonymous with horrifying. Conventional weapons are those that eat away the skin in a white blaze; conventional interrogation methods are like those practiced in Abu Ghraib and other occupation prisons…

Quite simply… conventional terror.

Baghdad Burning

There are pictures here, if you can bear to look. Pictures of children burned alive or killed by having their lungs oxidised by white phosphorous. WP is not just a harmless illumination round that can kill if a chunk lands on you. It's also used in shells that burst apart to release a fine powder that if breathed will kill you by burning your lungs. If it lands on you it will burn your skin. It's pretty much the same as WWI chlorine/mustard gas. Clearly it's a higly effective round. I know for sure that if someone killed my family like that I'd spend my every waking moment looking for a chance to do the same to them, or their family or maybe even anyone even remotely associated with them, who knows, it'd probably drive me insane. What I wouldn't do is cower meekly in terror.

Thanks John Howard, for forever staining my country with the shame of taking part in this... mass murder. History will judge you and it will not be kind to your precious legacy. God willing, when you finally die, peacefully in your bed after a long and comfortable life no doubt, I will still be able to find your grave and paste 8x10 glossies of your true legacy all over it. It'd be worth being done for sedition.

Y'allah! it ain't like we cut someone's freakin' head off or nuthin!

2005-11-20T12:53:00.000+10:00

Iraq plays down claims of abuse

Iraq's interior minister says reports of prisoners being tortured at an Iraqi-run centre have been exaggerated.
Only a few of the 170 detainees at the Jadiriya centre in Baghdad appeared to have been maltreated, Bayan Jabr said.

But he made clear that no abuse would be tolerated. The prisoners, discovered by US forces on Sunday, had reportedly been tortured and were malnourished.

Mr Jabr spoke as the US warned the Baghdad government not to let sectarian militias take over detention centres.

"I reject torture and I will punish those who perform torture," he said.

By torturing them until they reject torture!

The BBC's Caroline Hawley in Baghdad says that the minister has been politically scarred over the revelations of abuse and went before the press reluctantly.

Mr Jabr acknowledged that several detainees had been mistreated - but despite an investigation now under way, he did not seem to know how many, our correspondent says.

At one point he spoke of five, at another point of seven.

5, 7, 160 like his deputy mentioned the other day, who's counting? You better not be counting Hamid... or else...

'Dangerous'

Mr Jabr also said some of the men found at the Jadiriya centre had been foreign terror suspects, and that he had personally requested they be kept there because they were dangerous.

"These are the most criminal terrorists who were in these cells," he said.

Displaying a unique interpretation of due process

Leaders from Iraq's once-dominant Sunni Arab minority have long complained about alleged human rights violations by the Shia-dominated provisional government.

They neglected to point out the irony of the ethnic group that used to run secret torture prisons being tortured in secret prisons run by the group they used to torture, installed by the country that had endorsed the intial group of torturers in the first place. Whew, international relations, it ain't for everyone.

Sunni groups have also demanded an international inquiry into allegations that Shia militias linked to the interior ministry were responsible for the abuse.

In his news conference, Mr Jabr denied that either militiamen or Iranian intelligence operatives had been working at the facility.

He also played down concerns over an impending sectarian crisis, saying that inmates at the centre included both Shias and Sunnis.

Shortly afterwards, the American embassy in Baghdad issued a statement saying US officials had "made it clear to the Iraqi government that there must not be militia or sectarian control or direction of facilities or ministries".

All your prison are belong to us! Seriously, militias? Freelance torture is so 80s, these days you pay professionals to do it, just like the Americans.

Mr Jabr's deputy, Maj Gen Hussein Kamal, had earlier said he wanted to place all of Iraq's internal security services under his ministry's control in order to prevent future cases of abuse.

"We want to gather all security departments under the wing of the Interior Ministry," he said.

Gen Kamal admitted that the Iraqi government had long feared such activities.

"What we were afraid of has happened when some prisoners were subjected to ill-treatment at the hands of the investigators," he said.

"We strongly condemn such illegal acts. All those responsible will be punished whatever their rank."
However, Gen Kamal also said the alleged abuse had been isolated incidents.

All 160, er 7, no 5... 5! of them.

Cash Money, foo...

2005-11-18T07:08:00.000+10:00

American Faces Charge of Graft for Work in Iraq

In what is expected to be the first of a series of criminal charges against officials and contractors overseeing the rebuilding of Iraq, an American has been charged with paying hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes and kickbacks to American occupation authorities and their spouses to obtain construction contracts, according to a complaint unsealed late yesterday.

The man, Philip H. Bloom, who controlled three companies that did work in Iraq in the multibillion-dollar reconstruction effort, was charged with conspiracy, wire fraud, conspiracy to launder money and interstate transportation of stolen property, all in connection with obtaining up to $3.5 million in reportedly fraudulent contracts.

The complaint, unsealed in the Federal District Court of the District of Columbia, also cites two unnamed co-conspirators who worked in the Coalition Provisional Authority, the American administration that governed Iraq when the contracts were awarded in early 2004. These were the officials who, with their spouses, allegedly received the payments.

[...]

The complaint says that in order to obtain lucrative reconstruction contracts, Mr. Bloom paid at least $200,000 a month to an unspecified number of coalition authority officials, including the two co-conspirators and their spouses. Neither co-conspirator is named in the complaint, although it indicates that one is cooperating with the prosecution.

The other co-conspirator, the complaint says, held the position of comptroller and financing officer for "C.P.A. South Central Region in Iraq," which included Hillah. This person controlled $82 million "to be used for payment of contract services rendered in Al Hillah, Iraq, including contracts awarded to Bloom," the complaint asserts.

A United States government official said this person was named Robert J. Stein.

The complaint says the contracts Mr. Bloom obtained "were purported to be for the rebuilding and stabilization of Iraq" in Hillah and Karbala, a holy city in the south. The work included "the renovation of the Karbala Public Library; demolition work related to, and construction of, the Al Hillah Police Academy; the upgrading of security of the Al Hillah Police Academy, and the construction of the Regional Tribal Democracy Center."

With the assistance of the alleged co-conspirators and others, the document says, Mr. Bloom submitted multiple bids on the same contracts, using the names of different companies that were either controlled by Mr. Bloom or did not exist. Once there were sufficient bids to satisfy United States government regulations, the co-conspirators, including Mr. Stein, would ensure that the contract went to one of the companies, the complaint says.

"The value of these contracts ranged up to $498,900," the complaint says. "Co-conspirator 1's approval authority for awarding contracts was limited to contracts less than $500,000."

In an effort to clear things up for potential investors, we would like to present:

Lil Jon's guide to doing business in Iraq.

"Nope."

"E-yea-uuhhh!!! Heee-yeeeahhh!! Yeeeah!!!!"

That was Lil Jon's guide to doing business in Iraq.

The Penguin from Hell

2005-11-17T10:57:00.000+10:00

Finally got it working

After much downloading and a lot of pain, I've finally got Linux up and running, and connected to the internets, which was no easy feat. Forget about switching over to Linux unless you're prepared to learn entirely too much about how your computer works and willing to invest a fair bit of time getting it going. However if you do, it's not half bad, purty looking, reasonably usable.

My main complaint is the difficulty in finding help. I'm not averse to learning the things i need to but information seems to be hoarded in the Linux community, you have to do a fair bit of googling if you want to find out about something. Other than that, it's great. the distribution I picked, Ubuntu (it's not an ancient "African" word by the way. what is it with white people and an inability to differentiate when talking about Africa, a continent of 800 million people with over 800 languages in 53 nations? Be specific, it's a big place) Anyway Ubuntu is a word in Zulu and Xhosa which translates roughly as an idea of community spirit and mindedness, specifically thinking of the benefit of others. It's an 'ancient' word in the same way that 'hello' is an ancient English greeting. It's a pretty good distribution though.

We Made it!

2005-11-16T22:30:00.000+10:00

Oh yes, we did.

First Ghana, now Australia, this is going to be the best World Cup, ever.

We don't Target Muslims

2005-11-16T09:52:00.000+10:00

Suspect is 'mentally disturbed'

By Matthew Moore
November 16, 2005

Khaled Sharrouf, 24, was diagnosed as a schizophrenic four years ago and suffers mental illness that would probably have influenced his behaviour in making the alleged remarks, according to the author of one of the reports.

Revelations of Sharrouf's mental state come a day after police released a statement describing how he and seven others they allege were planning terrorist attacks had purchased chemicals that could be used to make bombs and had travelled to properties near Bourke to prepare for their assaults.

Apart from his desire to die in an attack, police allege Sharrouf went to a store in Chullora last month with several other members of the group and was caught trying to steal batteries and six digital timers.

Bomb-maker lucky to be alive - and on bail

By Malcolm Brown and Geesche Jacobsen
January 13, 2004

The man who exploded a huge bomb at Doonside is expected to walk free on bail this morning after a magistrate ruled he did not intend to harm anyone and had no motive other than his own gratification in setting off the explosion.

Mark John Avery, a 27-year-old electrician who allegedly detonated the bomb by lighting a sparkler and "running like hell", was lucky not to have killed himself, Blacktown Local Court heard yesterday.

Avery told police he learnt how to make the bomb from the internet and had bought the ingredients from hardware stores, pool shops and agricultural suppliers.

Magistrate Brian Lulham said there was no evidence Avery had an expert knowledge of explosives. "I suppose the worrying aspect of this matter is that any person could acquire these items," he said.

Police ministers are reviewing the way ammonium nitrate, a common fertiliser, is sold.

The Attorney-General, Philip Ruddock, told ABC television last night governments were looking at a variety of ways to limit unlawful use of such chemicals.

The NSW Police Minister, John Watkins, said he wanted a sensible, quick, nationwide solution that would make the community safer.

"But we have to also take into account the needs of law-abiding farmers, gardeners and even people with swimming pools," he said.

Avery's lack of knowledge of explosives was supported by the fact he had used a sparkler to set off the device. Mr Lulham said: "I don't know how you could get away with it and not kill yourself!"

Avery, who wiped away a tear, nodded. Mr Lulham: "That fact more than any other would cause you not to have any more to do with chemicals, do you understand?"

Avery: "Yes."

The explosion blew a hole two metres deep and five metres wide, and spread bits of the car over 350 metres, smashing it so completely that neither its model nor make could be identified from the wreckage, the court heard.

Yesterday a Queensland man was caught with a real stockpile of actual, homemade explosives. He was released on bail. The admiration of your peers to anyone who can actually find the story, I haven't been able to. Bet you he's not a Muslim.

Thorpey for Queen

2005-11-14T22:59:00.000+10:00

VS

No contest.

Workchoices, Australia says No

2005-11-13T19:02:00.000+10:00

'Curtheth! Thwarted again!'

You might have noticed 'workchoices' ads disappearing from their primetime slots lately. The funny thing is that they seem to be replaced with the 'Violence Against Women, Australia says No' ads which are appearing pretty much where the workchoices ads used to. Sarah's bet is that the govt. paid for X amount of broadcasting time and after using $50,000,000+ of it to poison public opinion and turn every man, woman and child in Australia into a labour union supporter, Howard seems to have decided to back off a bit and gnaw away at his problem from a different angle. The public reaction to 50 million public dollars being used to sell them a pile of manure probably helped his decision too. Now it's terror and battered women. You heard it here first.

The question is where to from here? Obviously he hasn't given up on it, watch out for 'substantial changes and consultation' or some other colour of lipstick for the workchoices pig.

Leader of the Free World

2005-11-10T21:52:00.000+10:00

“We do not torture. And, therefore, we’re working with Congress to make sure that as we go forward, we make it possible -- more possible to do our job.” - George W Bush, not torturer.

"They made me stand on a box with a robe on my head and arms flat out in the air. They told me they would electrify me. I did not believe them. Then they took two wires and stuck them into my body. I felt like my eyeball was falling out. Then I fell to the ground." - Haj Ali al-qaysi, not tortured by Americans.

"What U.S. forces did to me, Saddam Hussein himself did not do," al-Radi said through a translator. "During Saddam Hussein's time, we used to be tortured. The scars from the torture I received during the previous regime still mark parts of my body. But I was never forced into nudity. There were never any immoral practices during Saddam Hussein's regime." - Saddam Saleh al-Radi, not tortured by Americans.

"Frederick had come once or twice with a group of dogs," Abbas said. "They would tie us to the doors and then unleash the dogs on us. Graner was a disgrace to all civilized and democratic values every day. Graner enjoyed seeing prisoners tortured and tied up in the cells." ...

"Usually when prisoners are brought in, Graner would be present," Abbas said. "First of all, they would be made naked, with their hands behind their backs. Then, they would put the bag over their heads, using shoes to beat them on sensitive parts of their bodies, pushing them against the walls." ...

"He made me put my hand out in the cell bars and would stomp with his boots on this hand." - Haj Ali Shallal Abbas, not tortured by Americans.

"My son was beaten in front of my eyes," al-Hasani said through a translator. "The hood was over his head. And he was dragged on the floor. And he was pushed into the walls."

Her son was released the same day he was beaten, something that was kept from al-Hasani during her whole three months in prison.

Al-Hasani's family ties were twice exploited - by the beating of her son, and while she was being held in the high-security interrogation center near Baghdad International Airport.

"For six days, the hood was not removed from my head," she said. "Neither were my handcuffs taken off. When they pushed a young girl into my cell, she had a hood on. And I thought it was my daughter. But when I removed the hood, it was someone else. I broke down." - Mithaal Sultan al-Hasani, not tortured by Americans.

Business and the Beast

2005-11-03T10:31:00.000+10:00

Forget the fact that the sanctions against Iraq were overseen by the US and UK who had a veto on every single thing imported into Iraq and who turned a blind eye to smuggling and sanctions rorting so long as it benefitted their friends. Ignore the widespread suffering they caused in Iraq and how utterly ineffective they were on Saddam.

Isn't it precious that the company that accounted for 14% of all kickbacks to Saddam under the oil for food program is our very own Australian Wheat Board. Of course this probably doesn't account for US companies, but alas, most information concerning them is classified. I wonder why? It couldn't have anything to do with the fact that American companies (the mob that wanted the sanctions) were responsible for 52% of kickbacks to Saddam. Anyway right up until the first Australian bomb fell on Iraq an Australian company, one of our biggest exporters, intimately connected with the government, was greasing Saddam's palm. Even as John Howard hopped around like a Punch & Judy puppet, decrying Saddam as an evil the world had never seen, his friends in the corporate sector were handing out money to Saddam Hussein like Shane Warne in a strip club.

In fact the head of the AWB at the time did such a good job of funnelling baksheesh to Saddam that Alexander Downer, Lord of Baghdad, appointed him to a team meant to 'modernise' Iraqi agriculture, nudge nudge, wink wink. Something tells me that the 'problems' regarding wheat imports into Iraq we had recently were just about who got paid and how much. Obviously we just don't have as much clout as we used to.

Thank me later

2005-11-01T23:12:00.000+10:00

Everyone's had this problem, it's a hot day, you want a cold beer so you go get one but 15 minutes later it's hardly ice cold. Let's face it, a stubby holder just won't cut it yet what options does a regular guy have for keeping his bottled beverage chilled? Well, strap yourself in while I show you how to make your own beer cooler out of stuff you've got lying around.

You will need an icepack, I don't know what size it should be, get one that's big enough.

A container that's almost as tall and twice the diameter of your beverage of choice, having a handle helps too, as you'll see.

Crush your (frozen) icepack until it's more or less flat then curl it into a 'C' shape and fit it into the outside of your container like so. If you've used a bag of frozen water, you're an idiot and this won't work, crush the ice, shove it in the cup and rest your bottle on top, pulling it out for every swig like a poofy Frenchman with a champagne bottle, poof.

If you've followed my instructions you should have something that looks like this.

Top view, note the 'C' shape and tight fit of the bottle, this is good:

Side view:

Grab the handle and enjoy your ice cold beer, the adoration of any nearby women and the envy of your mates.

Enjoy.

"You can make a beer cooler? That's sooooo sexy! Take us home now!"

2005-10-30T14:52:00.000+10:00

Iran defiant over Israel threats

By Evelyn Leopold
October 30, 2005

The United Nations Security Council has condemned a call by Iran's president to "wipe Israel off the map" and said all UN members should refrain from threatening or using force against another country.

But the condemnation, endorsed by all 15 council members, was delivered in the form of a press statement rather than at a formal council meeting, which would have given it more weight. Algeria, the only Arab council member, objected to the open meeting.

"The members of the Security Council condemn the remarks about Israel attributed to H.E. Mr Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, president of the Islamic Republic of Iran," said Mihnea Motoc, Romanian ambassador and council president.

"The members of the Security Council support the secretary-general's statement of October 17 noting that under the United Nations Charter, all members have undertaken to refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state," Mr Motoc said.

Unless those threats are made against Iraq.

So what did President Ahmedinejad actually say?

"Once, his eminency Imam [Ruhollah Khomeini] stated that the illegal regime of the Pahlavis must go, and it happened. Then he said the Soviet empire would disappear, and it happened. He also said that this evil man Saddam [Hussein] must be punished, and we see that he is under trial in his country. His eminency also said that the occupation regime of Qods [Jerusalem, or Israel] must be wiped off from the map of the world, and with the help of the Almighty, we shall soon experience a world without America and Zionism, notwithstanding those who doubt."

Hardly friendly, but entirely in keeping with the tone of conversation between Israel and Iran. Prior to this Israel has threatened Iran with a nuclear first strike on numerous occasions without similar widespread condemnation. Israel is a nuclear power which refuses to ratify the NPT or let anyone inspect its arsenal. When Israel threatens Iran it actually does have the ability to 'wipe them off the map'.

Big surprise

2005-10-30T14:46:00.000+10:00

$6bn black market in nannies

By Danielle Teutsch
October 30, 2005
The Sun-Herald

Au pair Jana Borchard with Emma Staats and her mother Jackie Orchard.
Photo: Jacky Ghossein

Working parents desperate for affordable child care are hiring au pairs and unregistered nannies, and fuelling a black market worth an estimated $6 billion.

The unregulated nanny industry is being investigated by the House of Representatives standing committee into balancing work and family.

The committee is concerned parents may be using unqualified and inexperienced staff in a bid to cut costs.

Committee chair Bronwyn Bishop has calculated the black market care industry is worth $6 billion.

Families can pay a nanny $15 an hour by finding one through their local paper and negotiating a fee, instead of $20 an hour if they hire through an agency.

An estimated three in four families who hire a nanny do so under the radar of the tax office, said Trish Noakes, director of Just for Kids.

"When employing a nanny privately, many families try and negotiate the lowest wage and pay no superannuation, sick leave, holiday leave or insurance protection," she wrote in a submission to the inquiry.

Mrs Bishop has backed calls for ABN-registered and qualified nannies to be eligible for the 30 per cent child-care rebate, or be tax deductible for families, as a way of making the black market less attractive.

Opposition spokeswoman on child care Tanya Plibersek said the expense and shortage of child-care centre places was to blame for the growth in the black market in nannying and the surge of interest in au pairs.

Couldn't have seen that one coming.

Oh Dear

2005-10-30T01:01:00.000+10:00

You scored as The Operative. You are dedicated to your job and very good at what you do. You've done some very bad things, but they had to be done. You don't expect to go to heaven, but that is a sacrifice you've made for a better future for all.

The Operative		88%
Simon Tam		81%
River Tam		81%
Capt. Mal Reynolds		75%
Zoe Alleyne Washburne		75%
Inara Serra		75%
Shepherd Derrial Book		75%
Hoban 'Wash' Washburne		56%
Jayne Cobb		56%
Kaylee Frye		56%

Which Serenity character are you?
created with QuizFarm.com

I wasn't expecting that, I mean, I'm hardly amoral, I just acknowledge that reality is cold, hard and unforgiving. And yes, most people are shortsighted, venal and selfish, knowing this isn't always enough to keep onself from succumbing to such weaknesses however. I'm not given to blind faith either but I'm open to new information which sometimes radically changes my opinion on things.

Something I read earlier today has stuck in my mind, it's from a forum I contribute to, written by a gentleman who sometimes pops by here. He said:

Referenda work very well in Swtizerland, but the government structure over there is radically different, based far more around a local council-like structures, so you could argue that the public feel more connected with the decisions they are voting on. They have referenda pretty regularly, less now I think than fifteen years ago.

The two things that wouldn't work for Australia are a) referenda here at least are a seriously expensive business, millions and millions and millions.

b) the public is _incredibly conservative when it comes to referenda. In Australia we have only voted yes on a referendum twice. Once, to federate, and once to give indigenous people a vote. That's it in over a hundred years. Not exactly inspiring, is it?

Would smaller scales - say, state-based change this? I dunno, but I've got strong doubts.

You could also argue that a referendum where the public are voting on an issue they don't really understand (and let's face it, that's a lot; policy is bloody hard stuff, no one understands all of it, or even most I would say), is a form of sham-democracy, because it's an uninformed decision.

patrickgarson

I've struggled with the biggest weakness of democracy for ages and have come to the conclusion that people are stupid sometimes, and there's nothing one can do about it. That just has to be accepted. The only redemption is that sometimes the punishment for making stupid electoral decisions is severe enough to spark political engagement among voters, for a while, and a resulting revival in political ideas and idealistic politicians. However there doesn't seem to be any way to sustain it. What do you think?

Global warming, government snoring

2005-10-27T19:09:00.000+10:00

I've always wanted beachfront property...

PM still won't sign Kyoto Protocol

October 27, 2005 - 5:14PM

Prime Minister John Howard is standing firm against signing the Kyoto Protocol despite growing calls for his government to take more action to counter greenhouse gas emission.

At the same time Environment Minister Ian Campbell acknowledged that the debate on climate change is now over, it is real and represents a very serious threat to Australia.

He urged Australians to accept that humans contributed to global warming and should adapt their behaviour to save the planet, calling for a massive injection of new technology, including wind, solar, nuclear power and clean coal.

Former NSW Labor premier Bob Carr, appointed to a key position with a newly-created lobby group, the Climate Institute, has also called on the government to sign the Kyoto agreement.

"The fundamental challenge is to sign Kyoto and to make us a world leader and not a craven follower of the Bush administration on international climate policy," Mr Carr said.

But Mr Howard said the government would be selling out the interests of Australian industry and jobs if it signed the climate change protocol in its current form.

Australia and the United States are the only developed nations to have refused to sign Kyoto.

"The Kyoto Protocol is anti-Australian jobs, particularly in the resource sector, because it imposes burdens on Australian industry and it doesn't impose on like industries in Indonesia and China," he said.

That's a lie, China and Indonesia, being signatories, are subject to the same restrictions as everyone else Australia on the other hand will be locked out of a potentially lucative carbon credit market and emission control technology market. Why are our industries so lazy and slothful that they can't adapt to life under Kyoto like industry in practically every other country on earth?

"I'm amazed that a former Labor premier should advocate that we should sign up to something that would export the jobs of Australian workers."

Senator Campbell said the government had been a world leader on addressing climate change for several years and the Kyoto Protocol was ineffectual.

"Anyone who's looked closely at the problem, as I have, knows very well that Kyoto won't solve the problem," he said.

Yes, sitting around ignoring the problem while making back room deals with your resource industry mates will.

Racism as economic policy

2005-10-27T18:48:00.000+10:00

"No Jeanette, you can't take one home to help around the house."

The Prime Minister, John Howard, has turned down the request of Pacific island leaders to let their citizens into Australia as seasonal workers.

Mr Howard has, however, offered to set up a new technical college in the South Pacific with funds from Australia's existing aid budget.

He made the offer at the Pacific Islands Forum retreat yesterday in Madang, Papua New Guinea, where the leaders approved the Pacific Plan, which is designed to establish greater co-operation and integration of struggling Pacific island nations.

He said the college would be located in "one of the more populous South Pacific countries" and would offer Australian trade qualifications in a number of areas including nursing and metalwork.

The qualifications would help young Pacific islanders find work in their own countries, but also in Australia, where there is a skills shortage, Mr Howard said.

Cynthia Banham Foreign Affairs Reporter in Madang, PNG
October 27, 2005

An influx of semi-skilled labour would be quite helpful in keeping our economy ticking over, of course it's not popular with the hard core of racists that both main parties pander to in order to win elections so we'll continue to beg Europeans to come over while wasting our aid by pouring it into corrupt breaucracies. We have jobs that need doing, they have people to do them, while they're here they'll spend some of their earnings here too, as well as sending most home to help their countrymen. And yes, practically all of them will go home, it would be ridiculously easy to ensure this, unless of course this is an admission of how truly incompetent Howard's immigration department is. But then, who wants to be known as the PM who let all the blacks in?

ECON1000

2005-10-27T18:43:00.000+10:00

Two-thirds of users addicted to 'ice': report

By Jacqueline Maley, Medical Reporter
October 27, 2005 - 11:55AM

Recreational drug users are turning in droves to the highly addictive form of methamphetamine known as "ice" or "crystal meth", says a new report that provides the most comprehensive snapshot yet into the drug flooding Sydney.

Nearly two-thirds of 310 users of crystal meth interviewed are dependent on the drug, which the report authors say is becoming more socially acceptable.

Since 1999, the market for the more pure forms of ice and base methamphetamine has flourished, according to the study, released today by the National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre.

Worryingly, the advent of ice on the market has been associated with smoking the drug, which yields a rapid and intense effect akin to injection, and in turn makes the drug user more susceptible to addiction.

"Young ecstasy users have taken up smoking crystal meth," said Rebecca McKetin, the report's lead author.

"Otherwise, most of them are pretty well adjusted; they are in regular employment with no criminal record ... but they are becoming dependent on the drug."

Social or recreational drug users saw smoking the drug as an acceptable and fairly harmless way of ingesting the drug, Dr McKetin said. But in fact, those who smoked it were three times more likely to be dependent on it than those who snorted it in its less concentrated powder form, often referred to as "speed".

Rates of psychosis among regular meth users were 11 times that of the general population and half the meth users who had experienced psychotic symptoms in the last year felt hostile or aggressive at the time.

It's no surprise. Just like America we've become really good at restricting the supply of drugs like cocaine and heroin, unfortunately the demand is still there and people who want a fix will simply drift to something more available, in this case something that's easy to smuggle either ready made or in precursor form and can be readily manufactured in Australia. Just further proof that the control method of fighting drug abuse isn't working.

But my choices are all the same...

2005-10-25T22:47:00.000+10:00

A 'worker's market'

Take the job you're offered, says PM

October 25, 2005 - 12:26PM

Job seekers should take the job they are offered rather than hold out for a better salary, Prime Minister John Howard says.

Mr Howard today defended the impact his workplace changes would have on the unemployed.

The changes would force job seekers to accept a job under an Australian Workplace Agreement even if some conditions such as holiday pay and meal breaks were lost.

Job seekers can alreday have their Centrelink payments docked and suspended for refusing a job based on the conditions offered, but they can often successfully appeal to have them reinstated under an industrial relations environment which is seen as more generous than that being proposed under the changes.

Mr Howard said the practice of docking and suspending job seekers' payments had existed for a long time.

"They don't have that [choice to refuse a job] now," Mr Howard told Radio Easy Mix in Cairns.

"If you don't try and get a job now when you're getting the unemployment benefit you run the risk of some penalty. That's been the case for a long time."

Mr Howard said most Australians would support welfare recipients taking a job that was offered to them.

"I believe most Australians think that if somebody is offered a job and, providing the conditions of that job are reasonable and the minimum pay and conditions standard requires that you get paid at the hourly rate prescribed by the award, requires you get four weeks' annual leave, requires maternity leave, requires sick leave, [then you should take it]," he said.

AAP

Yes but everybody can quote a different situation. I accept that. But the overall reality of the Australian economy now is that we do live very much in a workers' market. The greatest complaint I have from employers at the moment is that they can't get enough good staff. That is the complaint that we have. We've had an ongoing debate in this country about a skills shortage. Why don't a lot of young people go into apprenticeships? The reason is that they can get highly paid unskilled jobs as soon as they leave school. We are living in a situation where it is a workers' market, like never before.

John Howard - 10/10/2005

But, I thought it was a worker's market, doesn't that mean I get to hold out for a better job? Or is 'worker's market' Newspeak for 'workhouse'?

I really wonder how people who voted for John Howard feel. Interest rates are going up, medicare is falling apart, your job security's about to vanish and the economy's flattening partly as a result of your man's disastrous policies in the Middle East which are keeping oil prices high and driving inflation. Honestly, what did you vote for and when are you going to get it?

The Book of Job Excerpt II

2005-10-23T12:37:00.000+10:00

'My goodness, it's almost as insubstantial as the real thing!'

Tuesday, 1 June 1999

A Beazley classic in Caucus today. He was waffling on about the sins of the Government's GST package and how there was ample room for the ALP to fix it up. Then Sid Sidebottom, a well intentioned but naive fellow, jumped up and asked, 'How? How are we going to fix it up Kim?' As Gareth would say, it was like farting in church. Beazley stuttered and spluttered for a while before finally replying, 'We don't want to give out too much detail just yet'.
Translation, he has no idea.

At Flinders Street station, where the march ended, federal ALP leader Kim Beazley offered a “rolled gold guarantee” that Labor would oppose the new laws in the parliament, “side by side with the union movement”. But he stopped short of any promise to roll the laws back if elected to government.

He made carefully and vaguely worded promises that a federal ALP government would “not allow any individual contract to undermine any employment conditions” and would “guarantee a fair umpire”, but didn’t promise to abolish AWAs as former leader Mark Latham had.

Beazley said that an ALP government would have an “independent determination of the minimum wage” and “ensure that all Australians feel secure and not at risk of unfair dismissal”. “We will never surrender. We will fight this from Broome to Brisbane”, he assured.

Green Left Weekly, June 30 2005

Not an awful lot's changed over 6 years it seems.

The more things change

2005-10-20T18:28:00.000+10:00

Former governor who oversaw destruction of ancient Buddhas is elected to Afghan parliament

By AMIR SHAH | Associated Press
October 18, 2005

KABUL, Afghanistan - A former regional governor who oversaw the destruction of two giant 1,500-year-old Buddha statues during the Taliban's reign has been elected to parliament, election organizers announced Tuesday as the results from two provinces were finalized.

In the latest fighting, meanwhile, U.S.-led coalition forces killed four police after mistaking them for militants during an operation in southern Afghanistan, a top government official said Tuesday. The coalition said it could not confirm the incident and was investigating.

The Taliban disregarded worldwide protests in March 2001 and used dynamite and artillery to blow up the fifth-century Buddha statues, famed for their size and location along the ancient Silk Road linking Europe and Central Asia. The Taliban considered them idolatrous and anti-Muslim.

At the time, Mawlawi Mohammed Islam Mohammadi was the Taliban's governor of Bamiyan province where the statues are located. After U.S.-led forces ousted the fundamentalist regime in late 2001, he fled to the country's north and was never detained unlike other Taliban officials.

Of course the Buddhas were destroyed because the Taliban were angry at the UN for spending so much money preserving the statues when Afghanistan had so many other pressing problems. Not to worry though, seeing as how Afghanistan is now a paradise, a multi million dollar project to rebuild them as tourist attractions (!) is underway.

Separate, but Equal

2005-10-20T01:14:00.000+10:00

Funny how we never seem to turn away Brits who need to move here to look after their relations. Funny that.

Workchoices

2005-10-20T00:49:00.000+10:00

"10 inch or 12 inch bitch?"

Same job but one gets $4987 less than the other

October 20, 2005

Two people work side by side, doing the same job in the same workplace. One is paid $5000; the other gets $13, after tax.

It's hardly a good advertisement for the Federal Government's allegedly fairer proposed industrial relations regime; which is ironic, because that's exactly what it is: a Government ad for its WorkChoices regime.

Cameron Meadows is one worker who got $13, or two hours' overtime, for appearing in one of the WorkChoices ads. He is one of four people in the ad who is not an actor but a worker at a factory used as a backdrop.

The actors pretending to be happy workers were, according to industry sources, paid about $5000 for their performances.

Quite apart from the matter of pay, there is the matter of choice. The actors got to make an informed choice about whether or not they would appear in the ad; Mr Meadows did not.

He told Channel Nine he had no idea he would be part of the Government's propaganda campaign. No idea, in fact, that he would even be seen on television. As Mr Meadows related it, he was simply told by his boss at the Melbourne company where he worked until recently as a welder to "get the workshop ready because there is a crew coming in to film stuff for WorkSafe".

"But it isn't even, it's not WorkSafe is it?" he said.

Contrast this with conditions under which actors work, conditions nutted out by their union. Under standard contracts, they get told exactly what it is they are being asked to promote. They get a chance to say no if they don't like the sound of it. If the ad gets a bigger run than originally planned, they have residual rights and can get extra money.

The Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance is concerned that these standard contacts could be at risk, but for now actors are doing all right out of pretending to be happy workers, creating the high-wage illusion while genuine workers experience the low-wage reality.

Here's a hint Johnny, if you want to convince people that workchoices are good for them, don't rape the people you hire to be in the ads.

How much for 'extras'?

2005-10-20T00:35:00.000+10:00

Free with any Opera House rental!

Now that the dust has settled after the Forbes conference of business leaders at the Opera House in August and September, it's time to look at the bills. The Greens MP Ian Cohen has been asking some niggling questions at a budget estimates committee, and says expenditure on the event amounts to a scandal.

The Opera House was hired for $100,000 by Forbes Inc. This was offset by rental waivers totalling $31,836 provided to retail outlets that closed during the conference, a loss of revenue of about $40,000 and "other operating costs" of $34,936. On figures so far provided by the State Government, this equals a net loss to the Opera House of $6772 for hosting the shindig.

Spike

Tax payers of NSW I hope you enjoyed giving Forbes Inc. a tender, loving handjob, I bet they did.

Globalising Healthcare

2005-10-18T14:59:00.000+10:00

The way of the Future?

Medicare is expensive and given the questionable efforts of Federal and State governments there's no way you can argue that it's anywhere near universal. There are long waiting lists for surgical procedures and dental care is pretty hard to come by in the public system.

On the other hand in countries like India, Western trained professionals operate world class facilities that provide procedures desperately needed here at up to 80% less than they cost here. The obvious solution is to take the money being wasted on people who aren't getting the procedures we need and outsource them to foreign countries, India and Cuba come to mind.

Calm down, I'm not advocating the destruction of Medicare or anything. All I'm saying is that we have waiting lists of people in desperate need of a product we can't produce enough of. Doesn't it make sense to look elsewhere for the same product at the very least till we can produce enough ourselves? Of course the fact that it's so much cheaper over there would mean that vastly more people could get the healthcare they needed and the burden on our system would be relieved. Even if the government paid for travel costs, the procedure and acommodation the unit cost would be much lower than in Australia.

Some people, probably AMA members would argue that Indians and Cubans can't provide the same healthcare standards as Australians, I mean look at the Indian population. This is a fair point, except we'd be paying them to provide the same standards and relying on the lower cost of living to keep the price low, and incidentally introducing an ongoing stream of foreign currency into their economy. Everybody wins, even Australian doctors aren't out any extra patients because the plan would only apply to a demand they can't meet.

All I'm suggesting is that the government make use of something that already exists in an example of mutually beneficial privatisation.

Six months from now...

2005-10-18T14:54:00.000+10:00

Most people can't write, I know I can barely string a sentence together but I know good prose when I see it and this is good prose. By HarrangueMan who can leave a comment if he objects to his work being reproduced here. If you do object, let me know and I'll just link to it, I thought about that but most people will just look at the link and not click, which is crap.

Six months from now...

Achmed sat alone in the cell and contemplated sleep. Or rather the lack there of. The fluoros had been burning since he'd been thrown in the cell some 12 days ago. At least, he thought it was 12 days. Because he sat without a watch, and without pen, with no idea how much time had passed.

He was so tired, his eyes puffy with fatigue. The light burned into his eyes and, for a second, he thought he was back in Gaza in the high heat of the day.

Gaza, I'm not in Gaza, I'm in Melbourne he reminded himself.

He'd come here as a child, and was now 24. He'd been working 12 day fortnights, having signed an AWA that removed penalties, annual leave, loading, and all manner of rights because that was the same for all the menial jobs he, having poor English, was able to get. They did get marginally more money per hour – well – at first – until the revised AWA had lowered the hourly rate because the companies' profit forecast had come in at only 12%.

'We all have to tighten out belts,' had said the manager, pulling his trousers up over his ample stomach as if to reinforce the point. It was okay for him. His AWA had a performance bonus built in because the manager was tight with the HR people at head office. They'd started together, and kept an eye out for ways of improving their lot without the benefit of collective bargaining to assist them.

The moth battered itself forlornly at the fluoro light. Achmed smiled despite himself and his position.

He'd been over his story a hundred times he thought when the state police turned up in the company of an ASIO officer. They'd showed him a picture of his brother, from back in Gaza. His brother was a member of Hezbollah, as were thousands of other dispossessed, angry young men. He'd gone over there from Australia to participate in the forming Palestinian state. Achmed had begged him not to.

'Don't do it,' he'd said. 'Palestine may be where our people came from, but Australia is your home now.'

But his brother was head strong and off he'd gone. And two weeks ago he'd called asking for money. Achmed had given it. That's what family does.

It turns out his brother gave the money to Hezbollah, to secure himself a ranking position in the organization. And to protect the small gym he ran for the children from being abandoned by the organization. Hezbollah may have twisted the tenements of Islam, and be conducting a stupid war against an implacable enemy, but for many Palestinians, they were the only organization capable of providing any measure of facilities, youth groups, even food, with a hopelessly corrupt Authority trying to protect its monopoly on power. How much money had Arafat secured away in Swiss bank accounts. One billion, two? Money from the US and Europe meant for reconstruction, but siphoned off instead. No wonder he'd not wanted peace. It would have destroyed his money-making enterprise.

So now Achmed sat in his cell, waiting for the interrogators to bring him back in once again. And they who were convinced he'd been supporting a terror group. That was a life sentence if he was convicted. If? Try when, he thought morosely

He had four interrogators now. Two women, two men. All very polite. All asking the same questions about his brother again and again and again. He'd asked to speak to his mother, to let him know he was safe. And they'd let him call her – but he couldn't say where he was, or what was happening. Because that was against the law – punishable by five years jail. Let along the life sentence they said he now faced for giving his brother the money. When the call had been ended by the unsmiling policeman, his mother had been screaming.

He rubbed his eyes and watched the moth batter itself against the light. He knew he didn't have a job any more, even if he got out. The AWA stipulated that more than three days absence without prior agreement resulted in termination. And the boss didn't like Achmed. Not after he'd seen the boss loading his car boot with produce from the market.

The shutter opened. It did so now and then. To see what he was doing. Why wouldn't they just watch him through the camera that recorded his every move? Who knows. They didn't answer any of his questions. They didn't have to.

'Relaxed mate?' said a voice from the shutter. 'Comfortable?'

'Please, I've said all I know,' said Achmed.

'The interrogators are back mate. I'll be down for ya in five minutes.'

'Can you tell me the time?' asked Achmed. 'And the date?'

The shutter closed, the guard not answering.

Achmed sat and watched the moth dance, and thought stupidly for a moment he was watching a bird in the sky, over the brown hills of Palestine.

HarrangueMan

Marlboro Men

2005-10-18T14:15:00.000+10:00

Tobacco giant capitalises on North Korean regime

By Ian Cobain and David Leigh in London
October 18, 2005

the world's second-largest cigarette company, has been secretly operating a factory in North Korea for the past four years.

The company opened the plant in a joint venture with a state-owned corporation shortly before the North Korean regime was denounced by the US President, George Bush, as a member of the "axis of evil", and despite widespread concern over the nation's human rights record.

BAT has never mentioned the factory in its annual accounts.

The discovery of the secret factory comes two years after BAT was forced to pull out of Burma, under pressure from the British Government and human rights campaigners.

The anti-smoking group ASH said: "It seems that there is no regime so awful and no country so repressive that BAT does not want to do business there."

BAT launched its business in North Korea in September 2001 after forming a joint-venture company with a state-owned enterprise called the Korea Sogyong Trading Corporation, whose main interest had previously been exporting carpets.

BAT made an initial investment of $US7.1 million in the enterprise and owns 60 per cent of the company formed, known as Taesong-BAT. BAT has since increased its investment but declines to say by how much.

Taesong-BAT employs 200 people at its factory in Pyongyang, producing up to 2 billion cigarettes a year. Despite its previous involvement in smuggling, BAT denies any of the cigarettes are intended for China, insisting they are all for North Korean consumption.

The company says it has worked to improve the working conditions of its employees in Pyongyang, that it provides workers with free meals, and that they are "well paid".

Questioned about its apparent reluctance to disclose the existence of its North Korean operation, BAT said it listed only its "principal subsidiaries" in its accounts, and added that it was not obliged to inform investors about an investment of that size.

The spokeswoman denied the factory was a secret: "If we are asked about our investment there, we respond appropriately. The investor community know of it."

Asked about North Korea's human rights record, the spokeswoman said: "It is not for us to interfere with the way governments run countries." She said BAT could "lead by example" and assist the country's development by meeting internationally accepted standards of businesses practice and corporate social responsibility.

In launching its North Korean enterprise, however, BAT is doing business in a country regarded by some as having the worst human rights record in the world. Even one of BAT's own public relations officers, in Japan, was astonished when asked about the joint venture. "Business with North Korea?" he asked. "Where there are no human rights?"

Last August, in an excoriating report to the United Nations General Assembly, Vitit Muntarbhorn, special rapporteur on North Korea for the UN Commissioner on Human Rights, pointed to the "myriad publications" detailing violence against detainees. According to human rights observers in South Korea, about 200,000 people are held as political prisoners in the north.

Human Rights Watch describes the Pyongyang regime as being "among the world's most repressive governments".

The Guardian

British American Tobacco PLC's Brown & Williamson unit and R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Holdings Inc. are also well-positioned. Both companies are represented by Barbour, Griffith & Rogers, a lobbying firm stocked with Republican operatives, including former GOP Chairman Haley Barbour and Lanny Griffith, a former White House aide to Mr. Bush's father.

The industry's first objective is to get rid of a massive federal lawsuit, launched by the Clinton administration, that accuses cigarette makers of "racketeering" and lying about the health risks of smoking for 50 years. The case is pending in federal court in Washington.

Tobacco companies are so confident the Bush team will drop the suit that they claim to have no plans even to ask for it to be withdrawn. "We are not lobbying on this at all," says Philip Morris spokeswoman Peggy Roberts. Many in the industry say they think an aggressive push to kill the suit would be counterproductive, causing the Bush administration to worry about the perception that it is eager to do a huge favor for one of its most-generous donors.

Corporate Donors Seek Return On Investment in Bush Campaign

Bush ended with an attack on North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il. 'He's starving his own people,' Bush said, and imprisoning intellectuals in 'a Gulag the size of Houston.' The president called him a 'pygmy' and compared him to 'a spoiled child at a dinner table.'

Newsweek
"I Sniff Some Politics"
May 27, 2002

I'm Sure BAT will become pariahs for doing business with the last Stalinist state on earth.

On Tax

2005-10-17T23:41:00.001+10:00

Click here for a larger image.

Are you more free if your government cuts education and health funding and instead returns your taxes to you in a most literal example of redistribution?

Or are you more free if your government takes your money but instead uses it to provide you with skills that make you competitive in the job market and invests in your earning potential (medicare etc.)?

Of the two compromises I'm inclined to prefer the latter, simply because it enhances the freedom of individuals. I view socialised healthcare and education as individuals pooling resources to accomplish something they wouldn't otherwise be able to and reaping the benefits. More skills + job market clout = higher pay. Higher pay = more disposable income to spend on stuff. More spending by individuals = more jobs.

This addresses the inevitable argument that if someone doesn't use a service, like healthcare for example, why should they pay for it? The obvious answer would be that they pay to keep it accessible. For an individual to pay for their healthcare needs would require prohibitive amounts of personal income (to accumulate as a hedge against future healthcare needs), which could be otherwise directed towards spending to keep the economy going.

Why should rich people pay more tax? Simply because in our society the richer you are the more of use you make of societies provisions. Wealthy individuals work hard for their wealth but what use does a poor person have for guaranteed investments or a government regulated property insurance market? Precious little. A tax system should give people the freedom to improve themselves and you can't do that by taking money from poor people. On the other hand those that make themselves wealthy without private armies and a personal economy and financial system should keep in mind that there ain't no such thing as a free lunch. It might just have looked that way on your way up.

Realistically a person who earns $30,000 and pays $3,000 in tax is far less able to spend their $27,000 in ways that expand a service economy. They have to look after their immediate needs first before eating out or watching a movie. On the other hand a person who earns $300,000 and pays $100,000 in tax is still able to do a great deal of discretionary spending, or saving and investing with the $200,000 left over. Obviously these are extreme examples but they illustrate my point.

Points for civilised discussion I hope.

You Taggin' me?

2005-10-16T12:45:00.000+10:00

'Cos I'm the only one here...

20 facts about me.

1) I'm nerdy, i like computers and starwars.

2) I'm sporty, compete with me over a ball and you might get hurt.

3) I think these lists are preposterously narcissistic and I'm cringing in shame right now.

4) Blogging is narcissistic too, I try and avoid turning my blog into a self indulgent wank.

5) I'm not a leftwinger, sorry if I fooled you.

6) I can best be described as a libertarian with social democrat leanings.

7) Lefties often scare me. A lot of them have less than a passing regard for individual rights.

8) I think individual rights can be collectivised without being diminished however.

9) I think about politics way too much.

10) I should have done political science at uni, but when I meet someone who did, I'm ususally glad I didn't.

11) I know how lucky I am compared to most people, I think some people need to think about that every now and then.

12) I hate discussing or referring to myself in a public manner.

13) The first album I ever owned was Def Leppard's Adrenalize, on tape.

14) The second was The Prodigy's Fat of the land.

15) The last album I bought was the Killers' Hot fuss, which totally kicks Franz Ferdinand's dissapointing ass.

16) The latest Foo Fighters album is a tragic disappointment.

17) I'm convinced that music is dying. Being killed by retarded music company executives.

18) Pretty much all current music sucks ass.

19) I'm amazed I got to 20 things.

20) No, I don't think you need to know more about me, mind your own business.

I'm tagging Mikey, mostly because he reminded me a little of Snell, drummer for The Towers of London (short guy in the middle).

Domestic Terrorism

2005-10-15T15:24:00.000+10:00

Bastard.

Terrorist laws to lock up objectors

By Marian Wilkinson, David Marr and Joseph Kerr
October 15, 2005

Supporting the insurgency in Iraq, Afghanistan or any country where Australian troops are deployed could carry a penalty of seven years' jail under the Prime Minister's new terrorism laws.

The changes also allow for control orders of unlimited duration, secret preventive detention, the monitoring of lawyers, and life imprisonment for funding terrorist organisations.

The draft legislation, disclosed by by Greens yesterday, details the far-reaching security regime proposed by John Howard for "very dangerous and difficult and threatening circumstances" in the wake of the London bombings.

New sedition offences will put big constraints on anti-war protests, familiar since the Vietnam era, and come down hard on those advocating violence against any religious, national or political group.

Those charged with sedition can argue they were acting "in good faith" but it is unclear how the courts will interpret this.

The bill sets out new federal police powers to detain terrorist suspects for up to 24 hours, and up to 48 hours with the approval of a judge or magistrate. Suspects will get access to a lawyer to challenge the detention order in a court or complain of maltreatment.

Police do not need to give suspects or their lawyers reasons for the detentions and can monitor lawyers. All conversations lawyers have with their clients must be in English or translated into English for the police. Police are prohibited from questioning the detainees but that ban does not apply to ASIO officers.

Last month the states agreed to allow extensions of up to 14 days for detentions when a terrorist act is believed imminent. The suspect must then be released if no terrorist act occurs.

Detentions are secret but suspects are allowed to contact a family member or employers to say they are safe but, "not able to be contacted for the time being". If they disclose the detention they can be jailed for up to five years.

Under the bill, the Government can apply to a court for control orders on terrorist suspects who have not been charged. These orders include house arrest, preventing them using the telephone or internet and restricting their social contacts and work opportunities. Suspects can also be fitted with tracking devices.

The suspect's lawyer can be shown the control order but not necessarily the evidence or reasons behind it.

The orders can last up to 12 months and can then be renewed any number of times.

Persons under control orders may be given "counselling or education" if they agree.

The bill does limit to three months control orders on those aged between 16 and 18.

Also contained in the legislation are wide-ranging search powers that will compel the production of any documents relating to "any serious offence", regardless of any laws protecting privacy or legal privilege.,

The new laws are to be debated this month, after the Labor premiers agreed to their broad outline at the recent terrorism summit in Canberra.

The proposed laws have been strongly criticised by human rights lawyers and some Muslim leaders, who have described them as draconian.

The premiers and Mr Howard insist the new laws contain sufficient safeguards to ensure they are not abused.

Because everyone knows the government can be trusted not to abuse its power, right?

These are Apartheid laws. I wish I was being hyperbolic, but they really are. Detention without trial, banning of suspects (the old SA govt. only banned people who were convicted, preventing them from meeting people etc.) Even cops listening in on lawyers is straight from the old SAP playbook. They used to do it to Nelson Mandela for fuck's sake. I'm simply disgusted. I assumed my contempt and loathing for our miserable cockroach of a PM could go no lower, how wrong I was. Imagine crimialising support for people resisting our illegal invasion, something which is their inalienable right, enshrined in the Geneva convention.

The rodent's war is all cost, all cost, and all of it borne by you and I. That's Howard style 'conservativism'. Dickhead.

Spineless

2005-10-13T19:46:00.000+10:00

PM gets personal: Beazley's got no ticker

October 13, 2005 - 4:04PM

John Howard says Kim Beazley has failed to develop a persona.
Photo: Penny Bradfield

Prime Minister John Howard has launched a stinging personal attack on Kim Beazley, saying he doesn't have the ticker to be a leader.

Mr Howard has told Parliament that he once thought Mr Beazley would be an effective opposition leader.

But he says the Labor leader has failed to develop a persona and let the Australian people know what he stands for in 9½ years.

"I thought at one stage he did represent an alternative leader of the Labor movement in this country," Mr Howard told Parliament.

"But I've watched him over 9½ years. He does not, Mr Speaker, have the ticker."

Mr Howard launched his attack after Mr Beazley described the Government's advertising campaign for its industrial relations changes as the "soft soap" covering the twisting knife underneath.

"The Leader of the Opposition's greatest problem is that he doesn't stand for anything," Mr Howard said.

"He will never go out to the Australian community and argue a consistent proposition.

"Stretch back over 9½ years - can you think of one thing that the Leader of the Opposition has put forward?
"He's had 9½ years to devise a persona. He's had 9½ years to tell the Australian people what he stands for.
"The only thing that can be said of the Leader of the Opposition is that if the Coalition is in favour of it, the Leader of the Opposition is against it."

Mr Howard said Mr Beazley had failed to build a case against the Government in the four days since the industrial relations changes had been unveiled.

"He's failed again for the same reason that he's failed over the last 9½ years," he said.

Mr Beazley later described it as an uncharacteristic spasm of hatred from Mr Howard, accusing him of dribbling and spitting as he delivered the insult.

In 1998, Mr Howard publicly questioned whether Mr Beazley had the ticker to be leader.

I don't know which is worse, that it's true, or that I actually agree with Howard. I think I'll go throw up now.

A gold star and the recognition of your peers for anyone who can state, in one sentence exactly what Kim Beazley stands for. Even if it's just for this week. It's just positions of convenience followed by embarrassing climb downs for Beazley.

Shrill me

2005-10-12T10:37:00.000+10:00

Australia's Paul Krugman is so shrill...

Intelligent Design for Economics

2005-10-11T23:58:00.000+10:00

Gerard Henderson,
Executive Director of the Sydney Institute for not Fact Checking and Imaginary Economic Fairy Theory

Making a job of IR reform

October 11, 2005

The Catholic Church is wide of the mark with its criticism of plans for the workplace, writes Gerard Henderson.

It was a pause, replete with meaning. During her interview with John Howard on the ABC Radio AM program yesterday, Catherine McGrath adopted her familiar stance of an advocate rather than a genuine inquirer. She put it to the Prime Minister that "Sweden, Norway, Iceland, Denmark have highly regulated labour markets but have higher productivity and higher wealth per capita than Australia".

Howard responded: "Well, what about jobs?" There was a long pause before McGrath raised the issue of Germany and made an unclear point about the collapse of the Berlin Wall. Certainly Sweden, Norway and Denmark have better employment outcomes than most of the OECD economies in continental Europe. Yet unemployment in all these nations has increased since 2002. This contrasts with the US, Britain, Australia and New Zealand, which have less regulated industrial relations systems and where unemployment has declined over the past three years.

So what are those unemployment rates? Norway, 4.3%, Denmark, 5.7%, Sweden, less than 5.5%. They also manage to have free tertiary education and all employees enjoy a minimum of 5 weeks paid leave anually. There's a dime's worth of difference between the per capita GDP of Sweden and Australia, which has half our population. It's called Google, Gerard, I'm sure the "Sydney Institute" has internet, clicky clicky.

In any event, the stark contrast within the OECD is between the US and Britain on the one hand and Germany and France on the other. Unemployment in Germany is close to 12 per cent and the figure for France is 10 per cent, compared with 5 per cent in the US and under 5 per cent in Britain. The relevant figures for Australia and New Zealand are 5 per cent and about 4 per cent, respectively.

The message is indisputably clear. Less regulated labour markets contribute to employment growth. More regulated labour markets are invariably associated with high unemployment. Even so, the message from the Howard Government's document Workchoices: A New Workplace Relations System, which was released by the Prime Minister and the Workplace Relations Minister, Kevin Andrews, on Sunday, will not be easy to sell within the electorate.

Er, no, there's no clear message. For example, Portugal, the poorest nation in the EU has a 2.5% unemployment rate. Switzerland, which has a typically European economy also has an unemployment rate of less than 3%. Ditto Luxembourg and the Netherlands. To claim to divine some sort of economic truth from a single statistic would be, well talking out of one's ass.

As Peter Costello remarked previously, Australians don't march in the streets for economic reform. A majority of Australians have accepted the necessity for reform over the past two decades, but that's about it. Then there is the fact that opinion leaders and commentators tend to favour more regulated labour markets. This is the case with many employees in the media, academics, schoolteachers and public servants along with religious institutions.

Take the Australian Catholic Commission for Employment Relations, for example. It recently released a critique on the Howard Government's industrial relations reform agenda, which it claims spells out "Catholic social teaching". In the introduction, a distinction is drawn between the "social model" and the "market model" in Europe. The clear implication in this paper is that the former is more in line with Catholic social theory than the latter. Maybe so. What the author of the document fails to point out is that unemployment is twice as high in "social model" nations (for example, France) than in "market model" societies (for example, Britain).

True, but they also have higher levels of illiteracy and higher poverty rates. While full unemployment might be great, there are other factors that make a country livable.

In Online Catholics (issue 58, June 29, 2005) Neil Ormerod declared that "it is difficult to see how Kevin Andrews reconciles his workplace reforms with his Catholic faith". Ormerod is professor of theology at the Australian Catholic University in Sydney. In the same issue, James Macken (a former judge of the NSW Industrial Relations Commission) wrote that the Howard Government's agenda is "contrary to Catholic teaching".

How odd. It is difficult to imagine Online Catholics running two articles in a single issue criticising Catholics for not following traditional Catholic teaching on, say, birth control or divorce. Also, why is it contrary to Catholic social teaching for the likes of Andrews to be advocating outcomes which encourage job creation along with a decline in unemployment?

How odd. Gerard doesn't deign to tell us precisely how these reforms will encourage job creation and reduce unemployment, rather than encourage employers to force existing employees into casual-like status instead of hiring more. Is he seriously suggesting that because people can hire workers for less they'll just hire more of them? Why not just pay the ones you've got less and increase profits? No wonder he runs a think tank, you couldn't trust Henderson to run a lemonade stand. But then this appears to be a man who went straight from university to a life of political hackery before slowly settling to professional toadying for influential business interests.

Interviewed on the ABC Radio National Breakfast program on August 9, the executive officer of the Australian Catholic Commission for Employment Relations, John Ryan, opposed the proposed changes to the unfair dismissal laws. Ryan maintained that "small business employers don't have a problem with recruitment" because they "engage people as casuals or as contractors". In other words, he acknowledged that the existing legislation discourages small businesses from recruiting permanent employees but believes that such a situation is more in line with Catholic social theory than the Howard Government's reform agenda in this area. Quite bizarre, really.

Nonsense, every employer wants to pay as little as possible for labour, just like every consumer wants to pay as little as possible for products. The fact that employers prefer casual arrangements is simply illustrative of the fact that casual arrangements offer far less value for workers than full time arrangements, duh. Really, how stupid. Businesses are driven to maximise profits, not hire full time employees. It's moronic to suggest that allowing businesses to minimise labour costs will lead to more employment. If I have 10 workers meeting my output needs why would I hire 5 more? Out of the goodness of my heart? If I need more workers to increase my volume wouldn't I just, gasp, pay the market price of the labour I wanted? I mean, fuck, I'd love a new Xbox but you don't see me whinging to nanny government to force Microsoft to change its pricing to make the market more attractive to me. If I can't afford it, I just don't buy it, perhaps enough people will feel the same and Microsoft will lower their prices to sell more Xbox. Wow, that must be that invisible hand thing.

The Catholic Church is not alone in its support for a more regulated industrial relations system.

In July, Archbishop Phillip Aspinall, the newly elected Anglican primate, said he might even man a picket line in support of trade union opposition to the Coalition's reform agenda. He was particularly critical of likely changes to the existing unfair dismissal legislation. This despite the fact that such Labor MPs as Kim Beazley, Stephen Smith and Tony Burke have acknowledged that there are some problems with the existing system - as has the ACTU secretary, Greg Combet.

Industrial relations reform has seldom been popular. This was true of the Keating Labor government's legislation in 1993 and of the Howard Government's first attempt at reform in 1996. However, both reform packages contributed significantly to Australia's fine economic performance over the past 15 years.

Paul Keating was able to advance a credible, cogent economic argument for his reforms. John Howard's proposed market distortions have only the support of partisan hacks paid for by the business community, I haven't seen a credible economist evince a mechanism, let alone a theory by which this heavy handed intervention can possibly succeed. Of course it's very easy to advocate the erosion of workers' bargaining power from Henderson's position, lapdogs never have to bargain with their masters.

Told You

2005-10-11T17:18:00.000+10:00

Iraqi violence hits new peak for British troops.

Couldn't have seen that one coming eh?

GHANA QUALIFY!

2005-10-09T12:43:00.000+10:00

Michael Essien

We're in the World Cup! We're in the World Cup! Wahooo!

Now if Australia make it too things'll be perfect, as long as Ghana don't play them.

YAY!!

Insane in the Membrane

2005-10-08T00:24:00.000+10:00

"God told me to strike at al-Qaeda and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did, and now I am determined to solve the problem in the Middle East. If you help me I will act, and if not, the elections will come and I will have to focus on them."

George W Bush to Palestinian PM Mahmoud Abbas

I for one am gratified that American people saw fit to elect someone who's batshit insane as Planetary Emperor. What better place for someone who believes that god speaks to them and directs their actions than in charge of weapons designed to bring about the apocalypse.

$300 Billion to change mullahs

2005-10-06T18:01:00.000+10:00

What do you mean, 'you haven't noticed any difference'!?
Get back in the house before I whip you!

Women's rights were constantly referred to as a justification for bombing women and children in Afghanistan to free them from the strictures of Sharia law. Many years and a pile of corpses later:

Afghan editor arrested for 'unIslamic' articles
Press Trust of India
Kabul, October 4, 2005, 20:56 IST

The editor of an Afghan women's rights magazine has been arrested and thrown in Kabul jail after he was accused by a presidential adviser of publishing unIslamic material, officials said today.

Minority Shiite Muslim clerics in Kabul objected to two articles in the monthly Haqooq-i-Zan, or Women's Rights, edited by Ali Mohaqiq Nasab, that were critical of Islamic law. Police arrested Nasab on Saturday.

Late last week, the clerics approached Mohaiuddin Baluch, religious adviser to President Hamid Karzai, who said he forwarded the magazines to the Supreme Court.
"I took the two magazines and spoke to Supreme Court chief, who wrote to attorney general to investigate," Baluch told The Associated Press.
He said one of articles was critical of the punishment under Shariah, or Islamic law, of 100 lashes for those guilty of adultery. Another article argued that giving up Islam was not a crime. Baluch said that was directly against Quran.

Emphasis mine.

Well, glad to see that was all worth it in the end.

The Book of Job

2005-10-06T17:28:00.000+10:00

Finally bought the book, I was getting sick of being told what was in it by people who obviously hadn't read it. It's a pretty good read, I've decided to to try and excerpt the interesting bits, the insights into the political minds of Labor party leaders, not the junk that's been washing over the news. Here's the first one, feel free to bang on about it in the comments.

Monday, 27 May -1996

Beazley tells the Shadow Ministry that 'Opposition is all about pissing on them and pissing off'-a hit and run style of politics. He sees our political recovery hinging on the exploitation of the Government's failings and public discontent, issue by issue. I've got that sinking feeling that, for all his rhetoric, Kim is not going to deliver a new, modern Labor agenda. That's his philosophy: piss on them and then piss off.
It will never suffice. Even in Opposition, a political party needs a philisophy of government, a set of ideas that inspires our supporters and gives the show some purpose beyond an opportunistic grab for power. At the end of the day, on the big things really count. It's the cause, comrades, it's the cause that matters.
If you listen to the debates and amendments in Federal Parliament, all they are doing is tinkering at the edges with the trademarks established by Keating on economic policy, and by Whitlam and Howe on social policy. The only people who make a difference in this place are the agenda-setters.

Prescient words. Ten years after they were written, the interaction between Beazley and Howard hasn't changed. Howard tinkers with a policy he inherited, Beazley roars in outrage and spews bombast, hoping to capitalise on public discontent. Neither of them have any plans beyond remaining in power or snatching that power from the other. Beazley's like a dog chasing cars, no idea what to do if he ever catches one.

The Sound of Peace

2005-10-04T14:19:00.000+10:00

A pacified Iraqi village.

Operation "Iron Fist", an assault on the Iraqi village of Sadah has been underway for a few days. 1000 marines cut off a village of 2000 people, bombed it and are now sweeping (just like in Vietnam) the village in search of 'insurgents' who, surprisingly, are nowhere to be found, again.

Since there are only 2,000 inhabitants of Sadah on a good day (it is a tiny border settlement near Syria northwest of Baghdad), the Marines have a certain advantage. You figure half of Sadah is women. Some further proportion is boys too young to fight and old men. Could they muster 300 local fighters (would all of them be in the guerrilla movement)? And how many foreign jihadis could live in a town of 2,000? Would you guess 50? So have we thrown 1,000 Marines at between 50 and 300 local fighters, who are poorly armed and lack real organization? Meanwhile entire districts of Baghdad, a city of 5 or 6 million, are controlled by the guerrillas. Wouldn't they be a bigger priority, since 95 percent of the violence in Iraq is plotted out by Iraqis?

This operation strikes me as odd. Perhaps they think a high-value target like Zarqawi is there, and the thousand Marines are to make sure that he does not escape?
Personally, I'm not sure Zarqawi exists, so I'd be reluctant to send a thousand Marines after him and to majorly inconvenience (and from the video on Aljazeerah, partially flatten) poor little Sadah.

Juan Cole

Well of course. The casualty shy US would never actually assault a well defended target with infantry without flattening it first, despite the fact that it would kill fewer Iraqis and probably deny any actual insurgents the many days of warning a sustained bombing campaign provides. Some of them might get killed, what do you think this is, a war?

The New York times reports that in an effort to placate an angry crowd a US colonel said:

"Some of you are concerned about the attack helicopters and mortar fire, I will tell you this: those are the sounds of peace."

The silence of the grave.

Back 2 the 80s

Economic Colonialism

Truer words...

Dear Mr Beazley

Hello!

Today's 'Islamic Fascists' Were Yesterday's Friends

Blackadder General Hospital

Blackadder firing squad

Ball, or aerosol?

Remember the Holocaust

Hearts and minds

Doomed to repeat it

Your mission, should you choose to accept it

MC Riz - Post 911 Blues

Peace Propaganda and the Promised Land

An imperfect introduction to Hezbollah

An interesting comparison

Dan Halutz

Pop Quiz

Hello Turkmenistan

R-e-s-p-e-c-t don't know what it means to me

Human Shields

The death of Harat Hurayk

The why of Qana

Defending your Sovereignty

A historical parallel

War and Pieces

Joga Bonito my ass

A Shadow

Jihad of the week

The War on Language

Don't be absurd

Crime and Punishment

Glass half full, other half Aboriginal

Whoops!

Jihad of the Week

Drivers make fine whine

Defeat into Victory

Jihad of the Week

New Democracy!

Do it for Jesus!

To think I used it rhetorically...

Last week

Mushrooming

Selling us down the river

When Democracy (TM) goes bad

What's good for the goose

If only

Respecting the Flag

Race riot flag burner jailed

The more things change

Where the hell is my bike!?

BANZAIIII!!!

Happy Holidays

New Bike

Weak and cowardly

Jews Jones not to blame: Costello

Radio's mad mullah

Wanker of the Year

Flaming gasbag

The dead rodent sketch

The return of the shredder

From the office of infant soul torture

Riverside Racist

Didn't we used to be slightly better than Saddam?

Conventional Terror...

Y'allah! it ain't like we cut someone's freakin' head off or nuthin!

Cash Money, foo...

The Penguin from Hell

We Made it!

We don't Target Muslims

Suspect is 'mentally disturbed'

Bomb-maker lucky to be alive - and on bail

Thorpey for Queen

Workchoices, Australia says No

Leader of the Free World

Business and the Beast

Thank me later

Iran defiant over Israel threats

Big surprise