I'm back
After a leave of absence I am back ready to fight the good fight and expose corruption and organised crime (i'm talking about governments). I have some worthy articles to take a look at some a few weeks old, but for starters, this today hot off the wires - well off "The Mirror" actually: MY HELL IN CAMP X-RAY A BRITISH captive freed from Guantanamo Bay today tells the world of its full horror. And some more detail in a seperate article ( same day same paper): TERROR OF TORTURE IN CUBA CAMP Not sure what to make if it - whether it is all true or some truth. Colin Powells response "It is not in the American tradition to treat people in that manner."

George W. Bush's CV
Came across a cool website called Crikey.

Of itself it says:

Crikey is Australia's leading independent online news service....
And our philosophy? What do we do? Why do we do it? Well...

"Crikey will point out theft, corruption, deception and collusion whenever and wherever it can. It is our self-appointed task to take a long thin spike to the bloated egos of political, media and corporate Australia and to take clear black and white snap shots of the men and women who have their fingers in the till or who simply get paid too much for doing shoddy work.

We will at all times try to have fun, respect the laws of our country in as far as they make sense and to fill the gaps the Australian media seem unable or unwilling to fulfil."

I think I will be visiting it more often.

Anyway, on the section called whistle blower they had this entertaining "George Bush C.V."

US troops killing innocent civilains in Iraq and getting away with it
Two interesting stories yesterday in the Guardian regarding US troops killing innocent civilains in Iraq and getting away with it.

American officers are quietly paying out hundreds of thousands of dollars to relatives of those killed or injured in arbitrary shootings by troops

Quotes:

No regrets or culprits, just cash for series of random killings

In the months since America's war in Iraq, an uncounted number of ordinary Iraqis have been killed or maimed by the army that boasts daily of its swift "liberation" victory.

The US military has not punished any soldier for shooting an unarmed civilian and refuses even to keep count of the civilians its soldiers kill. Yet for several months now, American officers have been quietly paying out hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash to relatives of the dead and injured, offering polite but carefully-worded condolences and promising investigations that lead nowhere.

In a report last month, Human Rights Watch concluded that "US soldiers at present operate with virtual impunity in Iraq" and accused them of over-aggressive tactics, indiscriminate shooting and a quick reliance on lethal force.

It found that the US military was not doing enough "to minimise harm to civilians as required by international law". Human Rights Watch collected evidence that the US military killed 94 civilians between May and the end of September in "questionable circumstances. Taken as a whole," it said, "they reveal a pattern of alleged illegal deaths that merit investigation."

It is a largely unreported toll of death and injury, excused by the army's broad and secret rules of engagement, but one that has pushed many once-accepting Iraqi families into disgust at their occupiers.


More than 900 claims have been filed with the brigade, which is responsible for 1.5 million people in the al-Rashid district of Baghdad. Since July, Capt Murphy has paid out an astonishing $106,000 (#62,500) in 176 different cases. Payments are given for damage to cars and houses, injury and death. The money frequently covers little more than the cost of the traditional three-day funeral ceremony. Only rarely does the army admit any liability. As Siham turns to leave, Capt Murphy tells her: "I am sorry for your loss, madam."

Helping Siham with her case is Faiz Alwasity, 41, a former pilot with Iraqi Airways, who now works for the aid group Civic, the Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict, which has won assistance for civilian victims of US military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. He is working on dozens of similar cases and is deeply distressed by what he has seen.

"This hurts a lot. I know the American soldiers are not inhumane because I saw them when they first came and they be haved well," he said. "But now they have changed and I don't know why. They are becoming more aggressive, maybe because they are frightened. I am afraid this is creating more resistance against them."

Privately senior American officers say the rules of engagement are so broad that troops know they will not face punishment even if civilians are accidentally killed as a result of their gunfire. In the face of a mounting guerrilla insurgency, commanders have gone to great lengths to defend their soldiers' aggressive conduct. This week Major General Chuck Swannack, commander of the 82nd Airborne Division, heaped undiluted praise on his men. "At one moment they are a warrior and the next they are the most compassionate individual on the face of the earth," he said.


US pays up for fatal Iraq blunders

In three separate cases, families have described to the Guardian how their relatives had been killed apparently without cause by American soldiers manning observation posts or patrolling through the streets of Baghdad. In one case a couple were killed in front of their three young daughters when an Abrams tank ran over and crushed their car.

The number of civilian deaths caused by the US since the war remains largely uncounted. In a report last month Human Rights Watch said it had believed 94 civilians were killed in "questionable circumstances" by American troops between May and September 30.

Human Rights Watch concluded that US troops were operating "with impunity. The individual cases of civilian deaths... reveal a pattern by US forces of over-aggressive tactics, indiscriminate shooting in residential areas and a quick reliance on lethal force", Human Rights Watch said. "The lack of timely and thorough investigations into many questionable incidents has created an atmosphere of impunity, in which many soldiers feel they can pull the trigger without coming under review."

For the families of the dead, the killings and the lack of legal recourse has provoked a groundswell of opposition to the US military occupation.

Posted by uber-kiwi at 12:51 PM EAST

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The Moral Myth
Superpowers act out of self-interest, not morality, and the US in Iraq is no different

George Monbiot
Tuesday November 25, 2003
The Guardian

Also published on George's website at http://www.monbiot.com/

It is no use telling the hawks that bombing a country in which al-Qaida was not operating was unlikely to rid the world of al-Qaida. It is no use arguing that had the billions spent on the war with Iraq been used instead for intelligence and security, atrocities such as last week's attacks in Istanbul may have been prevented. As soon as one argument for the invasion and occupation of Iraq collapses, they switch to another. Over the past month, almost all the warriors - Bush, Blair and the belligerents in both the conservative and the liberal press - have fallen back on the last line of defence, the argument we know as "the moral case for war".

Challenged in the Commons by Scottish Nationalist MP Pete Wishart last Wednesday over those devilishly uncooperative weapons of mass destruction, for example, Tony Blair dodged the question. "What everyone should realise is that if people like the honourable gentleman had had their way, Saddam Hussein, his sons and his henchmen would still be terrorising people in Iraq. I find it quite extraordinary that he thinks that that would be a preferable state of affairs."

I do believe that there was a moral case for deposing Saddam - who was one of the world's most revolting tyrants - by violent means. I also believe that there was a moral case for not doing so, and that this case was the stronger. That Saddam is no longer president of Iraq is, without question, a good thing. But against this we must weigh the killing or mutilation of thousands of people; the possibility of civil war in Iraq; the anger and resentment the invasion has generated throughout the Muslim world and the creation, as a result, of a more hospitable environment in which terrorists can operate; the reassertion of imperial power; and the vitiation of international law. It seems to me that these costs outweigh the undoubted benefit.

But the key point, overlooked by all those who have made the moral case for war, is this: that a moral case is not the same as a moral reason. Whatever the argument for toppling Saddam on humanitarian grounds may have been, this is not why Bush and Blair went to war.

A superpower does not have moral imperatives. It has strategic imperatives. Its purpose is not to sustain the lives of other people, but to sustain itself. Concern for the rights and feelings of others is an impediment to the pursuit of its objectives. It can make the moral case, but that doesn't mean that it is motivated by the moral case.

Writing in the Observer recently, David Aaronovitch argued in favour of US intervention, while suggesting that it could be improved by means of some policy changes. "Sure, I want them to change. I want more consistency. I want Bush to stop tolerating the nastystans of Central Asia, to tell Ariel where to get off, to treat allies with more respect, to dump the hubristic neo-cons..." So say we all. But the White House is not a branch of Amnesty International. When it suits its purposes to append a moral justification to its actions, it will do so. When it is better served by supporting dictatorships like Uzbekistan's, expansionist governments like Ariel Sharon's and organisations which torture and mutilate and murder, like the Colombian army and (through it) the paramilitary AUC, it will do so.

It armed and funded Saddam when it needed to; it knocked him down when it needed to. In neither case did it act because it cared about the people of his country. It acted because it cared about its own interests. The US, like all superpowers, does have a consistent approach to international affairs. But it is not morally consistent; it is strategically consistent.

It is hard to see why we should expect anything else. All empires work according to the rules of practical advantage, rather than those of kindness and moral decency. In Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon, Rubashov, the fallen hero of the revolution, condemns himself for "having followed sentimental impulses, and in so doing to have been led into contradiction with historical necessity. I have lent my ear to the laments of the sacrificed, and thus became deaf to the arguments which proved the necessity to sacrifice them." "Sympathy, conscience, disgust, despair, repentance and atonement", his interrogator reminds him, "are for us repellent debauchery".

Koestler, of course, was describing a different superpower, but these considerations have always held true. During the cold war, the two empires supported whichever indigenous leaders advanced their interests. They helped them to seize and retain power by massacring their own people, then flung them into conflicts in which millions were killed. One of the reasons why the US triumphed was that it possessed the resources to pursue that strategy with more consistency than the Soviet Union could. Today the necessity for mass murder has diminished. But those who imagine that the strategic calculus has somehow been overturned are deceiving themselves.

There were plenty of hard-headed reasons for the United States to go to war with Iraq. As Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy defence secretary, has admitted, the occupation of that country permits the US to retain its presence in the Middle East while removing "almost all of our forces from Saudi Arabia". The presence of "crusader forces on the holy land" was, he revealed, becoming ever less sustainable. (Their removal, of course, was Osama bin Laden's first demand: whoever said that terrorism does not work?) Retaining troops in the Middle East permits the US to continue to exercise control over its oil supplies, and thus to hold China, its new economic and political rival, to ransom. The bombing of Iraq was used by Bush to show that his war on terror had not lost momentum. And power, as anyone who possesses it appreciates, is something you use or lose. Unless you flex your muscles, they wither away.

We can't say which of these motives was dominant, but we can say that they are realistic reasons for war. The same cannot be said of a concern for the human rights of foreigners. This is merely the cover under which one has to act in a nominal democracy.

But in debating the war, those of us who opposed it find ourselves drawn into this fairytale. We are obliged to argue about the relative moral merits of leaving Saddam in place or deposing him, while we know, though we are seldom brave enough to say it, that the moral issue is a distraction. The genius of the hawks has been to oblige us to accept a fiction as the reference point for debate.

Of course, it is possible for empires to do the right thing for the wrong reasons, and upon this possibility the hawks may hang their last best hopes of justification. But the wrong reasons, consistently applied, lead at the global level to the wrong results. Let us argue about the moral case for war by all means; but let us do so in the knowledge that it had nothing to do with the invasion of Iraq.

? Monbiot.com

War and the Media Again
I came across this interesting article today on MediaLens which is a "media watch" sort of thing.Below is an excerpt. You can read the full article here.

Anyway, the website looks fairly interesting. They have a "what people say about us section" with comments on the site from both the "Left" and the "Right" here.

Not sure if they are a bit too left - I'm reserving my judgement.

Some other "look at the media" sites that are good are:
Media Channel
Media Guardian

The snippet:

Army Of Mothers

On January 29 the front page of the Daily Mirror carried a full-page picture of Tony Blair with dripping red fingers and palms. The title in large letters: 'Blood On His Hands'. On pages 4 and 5, John Pilger's article, 'Bloody Cowards', was illustrated with a large picture of three Iraqi soldiers burned to death during the last Gulf War - arms were incinerated to stumps, skulls ended abruptly above teeth bared in agony, skin was brittle and blackened like carbonised rubber.

We could not help reflecting on the agony these men must have suffered as they burned. And we could not help reflecting that each of them had been someone's son, brother, father, partner. Two of the Media Lens team are parents and we know very well that long days and nights had been spent fretting over these men as children. All had been cherished, adored, painstakingly clothed, washed, taught to walk and speak. With all the nonsense that is talked about war, with all the casual depictions of violence as entertainment in our wretched media, we forget that whole lives of love and hope are centred around these human beings - only for them to be incinerated to nothing by erudite, smiling men in smart suits telling lies.

We can dismiss this as sentimental if we like, or we can accept it as a human reality that is all but impermissible in our famously tough media - a media that always has the stomach for a fight, but rarely for evidence of the consequences. We sometimes wonder that the warriors of this world are not brought to their knees by an outraged Army of Mothers demanding that sons born in such pain and difficulty should be killed so easily.

In his article, Pilger recalled some of his own experiences of war and death in Vietnam:

"I once watched three ladders of bombs curve in the sky, falling from B52s flying in formation, unseen above the clouds.

"They dropped about 70 tons of explosives that day in what was known as the 'long box' pattern, the military term for carpet bombing. Everything inside a 'box' was presumed destroyed.

"When I reached a village within the 'box', the street had been replaced by a crater.

"I slipped on the severed shank of a buffalo and fell hard into a ditch filled with pieces of limbs and the intact bodies of children thrown into the air by the blast. The children's skin had folded back, like parchment, revealing veins and burnt flesh that seeped blood, while the eyes, intact, stared straight ahead. A small leg had been so contorted by the blast that the foot seemed to be growing from a shoulder. I vomited." (Daily Mirror, January 29, 2003)

What on earth does it say about the culture we are living in - about the insidious effects of high-paid corporate compromise - that Pilger is virtually alone in writing like this now, with pictures like this now, in the face of a war of such utterly transparent cynicism?

By contrast - and with the unholy trinity of greed, lies and violence looming around the people of Iraq, to the horror of the entire world - Timothy Garton Ash is able to write: "In defence of the fence - Colin Powell did not convince me. But nor does the peace movement." (The Guardian, February 6, 2003). Garton Ash continues:

"But on Iraq, I would still like to defend a position of tortured liberal ambivalence."

There is nothing tortured about it - media fortunes have long been made by mastering the 'liberal' art of appearing to care while doing nothing to oppose those who clearly do not give a damn. This is what earns the nod from the powers that be. It's the same nod that lets the cruise missiles fly, and that has the skins of children "folded back, like parchment, revealing veins and burnt flesh". It is a shocking truth but there +is+ a causal link between 'tortured liberals' like Garton Ash and horror of this kind - it's why senior commentators are paid so much for doing so little.

In similar vein, on the BBC's Newsnight programme, Oxbridge journalists like Jeremy Paxman laugh and joke with an assortment of white, establishment grandees about the ironies and 'realities' of diplomacy and realpolitik. As American journalist Dennis Hans notes, when it comes to foreign policy, "It's a White, White, White, White Media World."

Children in Detention Links


Per my previous posts, here are some informative links regarding Australia's policy of keeping refugee children in detention.

Firstly, another report on the child suing the government. From Yahoo news (from AFP I believe)

Refugee Websites


Children Out Of Detention (chilout.org)

REFUGEE ACTION COMMITTEE


Oxfam Community Aid Abroad Campaign.
- See links to Other Sites also

Media Release from refugee Council


Amnesty International (Australia) Refugee fact sheet


News Items


"Detention of children challenged - June 20, 2003



Australian government attacks court for ordering detained children released



Released child detainees reunited with mother - Challenge



Outrage over plan to fight child detention ruling

Quote:
The Family Court ruled yesterday that it had the power to order the release of children in detention, declaring indefinite detention illegal.

Immigration Minister Philip Ruddock, says he would be willing to fight the ruling on the indefinite detention of children as far as the High Court.

--Phil Ruddock - what a prick.


Howard a 'hypocrite' over detainee's children

Detainee wants childhood back
I have been so busy at work the past few weeks that I havn't had time for adding anything to this.

Australia is a pretty good place to live, however the current right wing red-neck government is a bit lacking in the "show the love" department. To be expected of course from a government led by George Bush's best mate Johnny Howard.

Today, The Australian ran a story about a young refugee boy who is now suing the government for child abuse - that is, accusing the government of abusing him by keeping him in detention.

Read the full story here:

Australia's treatment of refugees, and the keeping of children in detention is shocking, but it tends to be an old story these days.

I'll try and find some more good info on this.

Phillip Ruddock the then immigration minister is a bit of a shocker.

Media Censorship
Media Censorship That Doesn't Speak Its Name
by Joihn Pilger
New Statesman
September 26, 2003

Reducing journalism to a branch of corporate and government public relations is the hidden agenda of the media deregulators, in Britain and America.

The Australian novelist Richard Flanagan was recently asked by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation to read a favourite piece of fiction on national radio and explain his reasons for the choice.

"I was unsure what fiction to read to you this morning," he said. "If we take the work of our most successful spinner of fictions in recent times, [Prime Minister] John Howard, I could have read from the varied and splendid tall tales he and his fellow storytellers have concocted..." He listed Howard's most famous fictions: that desperate refugees trying to reach Australia had wilfully thrown their children overboard, and that faraway Australia was endangered by Iraq's "weapons of hysterical distraction", as he put it.

He followed this with Molly Bloom's soliloquy from Joyce's Ulysses, "because in our time of lies and hate it seems appropriate to be reminded of the beauty of saying yes to the chaos of truth..." This was duly recorded; but when the programme was broadcast, the entire preface about Howard was missing. Flanagan accused the ABC of rank censorship. No, was the response; they just didn't want "anything political". This was followed, he wrote, by "a moment of high comedy: would I, the producer asked, be interested in coming on a programme to discuss disillusionment in contemporary Australia?"

In a society that once prided itself on its laconic sense of irony, there was not a hint of it, just a managerial silence. "All around me," Flanagan later wrote, "I see avenues for expression closing, an odd collusion of an ever-more cowed media and the way in which the powerful seek to dictate what is and what isn't read and heard."

He may well be speaking for the rest of us. The censorship in Australia that he describes is especially virulent because Australia is a small media pond inhabited by large sharks: a microcosm of what the British might expect if the current assault on free journalism is not challenged. The leader of this assault is, of course, Rupert Murdoch, whose dominance in the land of his birth is now symptomatic of his worldwide grip. Of 12 daily newspapers in the capital cities, Murdoch controls seven. Of the ten Sunday newspapers, Murdoch has seven. In Adelaide, he has a complete monopoly. He owns everything, including all the printing presses. It is almost impossible to escape his augmented team of Pravdas.

Like all his newspapers, they follow the path paved with his "interests" and his extremism. They echo Murdoch's description of Bush and Blair as "heroes" of the Iraq invasion, and his dismissal of the blood they spilt. For good measure, his tabloid the Herald Sun invented an al-Qaeda terrorist training camp near Melbourne; and all his papers promote John Howard's parrot-like obsequiousness to Bush, just as they laud Howard's racist campaign against a few thousand asylum-seekers who are locked away in outback concentration camps.

Murdochism, disguised or not, is standard throughout the media he does not control. The Melbourne Age, once a great liberal newspaper whose journalists produced a pioneering charter of editorial independence, is often just another purveyor of what Orwell called "smelly little orthodoxies", wrapped in lifestyle supplements. Flickering beacons are the visionary Special Broadcasting Service (SBS), which was set up to serve Australia's multi-ethnic society, and the eternally battered ABC.

The ABC is different from the BBC, its model, in one crucial respect. It has no licence fee and must rely on government handouts. In Australia, political intimidation of the national broadcaster makes Downing Street's campaign against the BBC seem almost genteel. Howard's minister for communications, a far-right dullard called Richard Alston, recently demanded that the ABC reply to 68 counts of "anti-Americanism". What the government wants is no less than an oath of loyalty to the foreign power to which it has surrendered sovereignty.

Charges of "left-wing bias", familiar in Britain and just as ridiculous, drone out of both the Murdoch and non-Murdoch press. A Sydney Morning Herald commentator, a local echo of the far right's "monitoring" of the media in America, has attacked the ABC for years. With no guarantee of financial independence, the ABC has bent to the pressure; the censorship experienced by Richard Flanagan is not unusual. More seriously, current affairs investigations that might be construed as "left wing" are not commissioned. As one well-known journalist told me: "We have a state of fear. If you're a dissenter, you're out."

The despair felt by many Australians about this, and the cosmetic democracy in Canberra that it reflects, expresses itself in huge turnouts at public meetings. More than 34,000 attended the recent Melbourne Writers' Festival, where, said the director, "anything political" and "any session that allowed people to express a view" was a sell-out.

The global model for censorship by omission in free societies is America, which constitutionally has the freest press in the world. In Washington, Charles Lewis, the former CBS 60 Minutes producer who runs the Centre for Public Integrity, told me: "Under Bush, the silence among journalists is worse than in the 1950s. Murdoch is the most influential media mogul in America; he sets the standard, and there is no public discussion about it. Why do 70 per cent of the American public believe Saddam Hussein was behind the attacks of 9/11? Because the media's constant echoing of the government guarantees it. Without the complicity of journalists, Bush would never have attacked Iraq."

Harnessing journalism and reducing it to the "spokesman's spokesman", a branch of corporate and government public relations, is the hidden agenda of the new media deregulators. In the US, the Federal Communications Commission (run by Colin Powell's son) is finally to deregulate television so that Murdoch's Fox Channel and four other conglomerates control 90 per cent of the terrestrial and cable audience. That is the spectre in Britain, with a Blairite placeman now overseeing public service broadcasting in the new commercial deregulator, Oftel, which has a remit to follow the American "market" path. The next step is to end the licence fee and diminish the BBC to a version of its Australian prodigy. That is Blair's agenda.

The genesis for this - and for the current Blair/Murdoch campaign against the BBC's independence - can be traced back to 1995, when Murdoch flew the Blairs first class to Hayman Island, off the Queensland coast. In the tropical sunshine and standing at the blue News Corp lectern, the future British prime minister waxed lyrical about his "new moral purpose in politics" and pledged himself to hand over the media to the "enterprise" of those like his host, who applauded him warmly.

The next day, satire died again when Murdoch's Sun commented: "Mr Blair has vision, he has purpose and he speaks our language on morality and family life."

Terrorism, the US, the UN, and Kofi Annan
A number of good articles this week since the Attack on the UN in Iraq, and the UN General assembly meeting.

UN chief hits US on first strikes
By Caroline Overington
New York correspondent
New York
September 24, 2003

United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan has attacked American foreign policy, questioning the resort to first strikes and warning that the use of military force against terrorist groups could encourage more terrorism.

Speaking just hours before President George Bush was due to address the UN General Assembly, Mr Annan lashed out at Mr Bush's "pre-emptive" attack on Iraq, warning that a policy of first strikes could lead to a lawless world in which nations attacked one another "with or without justification".

Although he did not mention the United States by name, Mr Annan told a terrorism conference in New York that any nation that believed that military action alone could solve the problem of terrorism was deluded.

He added that the fact that "a few wicked men or women" committed murder in its name did not make a cause any less just. "Nor does it relieve us of the obligation to deal with legitimate grievance," he said.

Mr Annan said terrorism would be defeated only "if we act to solve the political disputes and longstanding conflicts" which generated support for it.

"Accordingly, there needs to be more on the horizon than simply winning a war against terrorism. There must be the promise of a better and fairer world, and a concrete plan to get there."

Mr Annan said that nations that launched military action against terrorists needed to "respect the limits which international humanitarian law places on the use of force... Terrorist groups may actually be sustained when... governments cross the line and commit outrages themselves, whether it is... indiscriminate bombardment of cities, the torture of prisoners, targeted assassinations, or accepting the death of innocent civilians as collateral damage".

"These acts are not only illegal and unjustifiable. They may also be exploited by terrorists to gain followers, and to generate cycles of violence in which they thrive," Mr Annan said.

President Bush was expected to ask the United Nations to share the burden of occupying and rebuilding Iraq, a year after saying the world body risked becoming irrelevant. Mr Bush returns to the 191-member assembly, which he berated for its failure to back the US-led war on Iraq. American officials said were no plans to apologise for the situation there, nor for the failure to find weapons of mass destruction.

On the eve of debate, Mr Bush, whose job approval ratings have been knocked in part by mounting US casualties in Iraq, denied things were not going well. "I don't think they're going badly. I mean, obviously I think they're going badly for the soldiers who lost their lives, and I weep for that person and their family. But no, I think we're making good progress."

But the release of a UN report warning of chronic malnutrition in Iraq, demands by countries asked to send peacekeepers, and a stark warning from Mr Annan only served to underline how far he had to go.

In an unusually blunt speech to be delivered just before Mr Bush's address, Mr Annan warned that unilateral military action without UN authority risked returning the world to the law of the jungle. "We have come to a fork in the road. This may be a moment no less decisive than 1945 itself, when the United Nations was founded."

- with Reuters

This story was found at: The Age

Related: Annan Challenges U.S. Doctrine of Preventive Action


US has lost the lesson of history
By Bruce Grant
September 23, 2003

Now that the second anniversary of the terrorist attack on the US has passed, the world is taking stock. A conclusion difficult to resist is that the US has been on the wrong track with its military campaign against terrorism.

There is substantial literature on terrorism, with a clear message. Except where the state is a sponsor, and often even then, terrorism is a weapon of the weak. Its strategy is to unbalance its stronger opponent. Its tactic is not to fight but to scare.

The literature on counter-terrorism also has a message. Deny terrorists oxygen. Don't give them publicity.

Declaring war, turning a weak opponent into a fearsome enemy, runs contrary to the lesson of history. Even with advances in technology, especially in weapons of mass destruction, the core of terrorism is unchanged. It avoids confrontation, relying on dramatic effect. Today's terrorism has no hinterland, just cells and elusive leaders. Putting military forces on a war footing, throwing budgets dangerously into deficit, hampering trade and commerce, tampering with long-established legal rights, turning fugitive terrorists into ghostly celebrities is counter-productive.

The present US-led campaign needs a new direction, so that it is not a war but a broadly based form of containment. Its basis should be civil, not military, necessarily enforced at times but in the full knowledge that, like crime, terrorism will always be with us.

What creates a terrorist is a subject too big for a newspaper article to tackle, but it can be said that terrorists exist not because they are inherently bad people but because they are powerless to right some wrong they wish, however improbably, to correct.

Terrorism is a clumsy weapon, reached for in desperation. It antagonises the public and galvanises the powerful. It is rarely successful in achieving its objective. The notion of war, with its contingent outcomes of defeat and victory, is misleading. Terrorists cannot win, but they can wear a society down, fray its spirit.

The highly regarded speech of President Bush to Congress nine days after the attack expressed a view of the world understandably simplified by American grief and anger.

Questions were swept aside by politicians, analysts, commentators and a media trapped in the excitement of action and the dumbing down of patriotism. Now the complexity (not to mention the cost) of the war on terror is becoming real. The Bush people, quick to stamp on what they saw as crackpot idealism, are learning that there can be crackpot realism, too.

The exercise in Iraq always suffered from suspicion of a hidden agenda. The links between September 11 and Saddam Hussein's regime were, at most, tenuous. They were stronger with Saudi Arabia. Even accepting Washington's reasons at face value, admirers of the US, like this writer, have had to accept that they mirror a flaw in America's attitude to the world.

Americans share with the terrorists a high sensitivity to the existence of evil. The terrorists see evil in the expression of American power. Americans see evil in the tyranny of bad government over good people. Although the designated axis of evil - Iraq, Iran and North Korea - combine three vastly different forms of tyranny - a dictatorship, an Islamic autocracy and a communist regime - the core of the evil is the same. The people are not "free" and must be "liberated".

It is a powerful idea. For politicians, not just American, it is almost irresistible. The dreary business of massaging the constituencies, listening to all the public - and private - voices, keeping an eye on the numbers, calibrating the national interest, dodging the snipers in the opinion pages and smiling for the media are replaced by a single stance and a single message, with a pedestal underfoot.

It resonates with the public for a time, but it happens not to be the right statecraft to counter terrorism.

It is useful to contrast the responses to September 11, 2001, and October 12, 2002, when two icons of Kuta beach culture, Paddy's Bar and the Sari Club, were demolished. The American response has been to go to war on all fronts, but especially militarily. The Indonesian - and Australian - response to October 12 has been civil, especially legal. The Indonesian police, with assistance from Australia, have brought to a court in Bali those they suspect of having carried out the bombings, and the trials are continuing.

This is not kill-or-be-killed frontier justice, as it has been in Afghanistan and Iraq, where the crimes of those sought are deemed already to be established beyond reasonable doubt. The men accused of the Bali bombing are being subjected to the normal procedures of Indonesian law.

An alternative strategy is appealing to Mr Bush and his associates as the day of electoral reckoning approaches and the problems mount.

It is difficult for them to acknowledge that the UN rather than the US could be the midwife of liberated Iraq, on the Timor model, but this is the beginning of wisdom. The US has developed lately a suspicion amounting at times to paranoia about the UN, but it used to be good at getting the numbers in New York. It worked the UN system more successfully than the Russians during the Cold War.

The US stands head and shoulders above all other powers. The UN is not a rival state. It is not even an organisation or institution. It is a global system, still evolving, with a half century of valuable experience. It is the driving force behind the development recently of international criminal and humanitarian law.

No nation, even the most powerful, can run a rapidly globalising world. The UN, slow and cumbersome as it can be, nevertheless confers legitimacy on efforts to establish international law and order.

Bruce Grant, a former ambassador and academic, was joint author with Gareth Evans of Australia's Foreign Relations. His latest book is A Furious Hunger: America and the 21st Century.

This story was found at: http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/09/22/1064082925371.html

US farmers are doing very well, thank you, and feeding al-Qaeda
Well, I know I said that I wouldn't put in anything about wprld trade, but I enjoyed this article and I want to keep it, so I post it here for posterity.

US farmers are doing very well, thank you, and feeding al-Qaeda

September 26, 2003

The US war on terrorism suffered a huge blow last week - not in Baghdad or Kabul, but on the beaches of Cancun, the site of the latest world trade talks.

The talks fell apart largely because the US, the European Union and Japan refused to give up the lavish subsidies they bestow on their farmers, making the prices of their cotton and agriculture so cheap that developing countries can't compete.

This is a disaster because exporting food and textiles is the only way for most developing countries to grow.

The Economist quoted a World Bank study that said a Cancun agreement, reducing tariffs and agri-subsidies, could have raised global income by $US500 billion ($735 billion) a year by 2015 - more than 60 per cent of which would go to poor countries and pull 144 million people out of poverty.

Sure, poverty doesn't cause terrorism - no one is killing for a rise. But poverty is great for the terrorism business because it creates humiliation and stifled aspirations, and forces many people to leave their traditional farms to join the alienated poor in the cities - all conditions that spawn terrorists.

I would bet any amount of money, though, that when it came to deciding the Bush team's position at Cancun, no thought was given to its effect on the war on terrorism.

Wouldn't it have been wise for the US to take the initiative at Cancun, and offer to reduce its farm subsidies and textile tariffs, so some of the poorest countries, such as Pakistan and Egypt, could raise their standards of living and sense of dignity, and also become better customers for US goods?

Yes, but that would be bad politics. It would mean asking US farmers to sacrifice the ridiculous subsidies they get from their federal government ($3 billion a year for 25,000 cotton farmers) that make it impossible for foreign farmers to sell there.

And one thing we know about this Bush war on terrorism: sacrifice is only for army reservists and full-time soldiers. For the rest, it's guns and butter.

"If the sons of American janitors can go die in Iraq to keep us safe," says Robert Wright, author of Nonzero, a book on global interdependence, "then American cotton farmers, whose average net worth is nearly $1 million, can give up their subsidies to keep us safe. "

The US and Europe, argues Clyde Prestowitz, the trade expert and author of Rogue Nation, should actually shrink their farm subsidies, even if developing countries don't immediately reciprocate.

If only the Bush team connected the dots, it would see what a nutty war on terrorism it is fighting, explains Prestowitz. Here, he says, is the Bush war on terrorism: preach free trade, but don't deliver on it, so Pakistani farmers become more impoverished. Then ask Congress to give a tax break for any American who wants to buy a petrol-guzzling Humvee for business use and ask Congress to resist any efforts to make Detroit decrease fuel consumption in new cars.

All this means more US oil imports from Saudi Arabia.

So then the Saudis have more dollars to give to their Wahhabi fundamentalist evangelists, who spend it by building religious schools in Pakistan. The Pakistani farmer the US has put out of business with its farm subsidies then sends his sons to the Wahhabi school because it is tuition-free and offers a hot lunch. His sons grow up getting only a Koranic education, so they are totally unprepared for modernity, but they are taught one thing: that America is the source of all their troubles. One of the farmer's sons joins al-Qaeda and is killed in Afghanistan by US Special Forces, and we think we're winning the war on terrorism.

The New York Times

This story was found at: http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/09/25/1064083124513.html