Tag Archive for 'war & conflict'

Bilal Abdullah, Mohammed Haneef, and Mick Keelty

Published
by
Robert Merkel
4 months ago
in Crime, International and Terrorism
. 10 Comments

The AFP has claimed it can’t release any part of its submission to the Clarke Inquiry, about its investigation of Mohammed Haneef, because of “ongoing trials in the UK”. Greg Barns asked in Crikey today:

Hang on, what trials? The only connection Dr Haneef had with the UK was that he gave his SIM Card to his cousin Sabeel Ahmed when he was about to leave the UK in 2006 to return to India. Sabeel’s brother Kafeel was involved in unsuccessful terror attacks in London and Glasgow in June last year, driving a Jeep Cherokee into the doors of Glasgow airport and setting himself alight. Kafeel later died from burns to 90% of his body, and Sabeel was charged and sentenced to 18 months imprisonment in April this year for refusing to disclose information about the Glasgow attack and another failed attack in London, and a month later deported to India.

The only ongoing trials from the attempted terror attacks are those of Bilal Abdullah and Mohammed Asha, who are charged with conspiracy to murder. Abdullah was arrested in the immediate aftermath of the Glasgow attack, reportedly jumping out of the burning Jeep to attack a police officer. Asha was arrested at a roadblock some time later. Both are scheduled for trial in October this year.

Continue reading ‘Bilal Abdullah, Mohammed Haneef, and Mick Keelty’

You’re the minister now, Bob

Published
by
Robert Merkel
4 months ago
in Government, Politics, Security and Terrorism
. 15 Comments

The Clarke inquiry into the Haneef affair has revealed several interesting things. Amongst them is the statement in ASIO’s unclassified submission that they participated in “whole of government” discussions of the possible threat posed by Haneef. As the statement says:

ASIO’s consistent advice to these meetings was that, based on available information, ASIO did not assess Dr Haneef as a threat to security and did not have grounds to issue an adverse security assessment. However, in the early days of the investigation, ASIO nevertheless considered that further investigation of Dr Haneef was warranted.

So even ASIO - who presumably had everything the AFP did - didn’t think Haneef was a threat. Given that, the hypothesis that the AFP has further damning, but classified, information on Haneef that justified the continued detention is looking extremely shaky.

But the most controversy, so far, has arisen due to the AFP’s refusal to release its submission to the inquiry - or even parts of it - publicly.

Continue reading ‘You’re the minister now, Bob’

“we can’t take American assurances that they do not torture detainees at face value”

Published
by
tigtog
4 months, 2 weeks ago
in Authoritarianism, Ethics, Foreign policy, Language, Politics, Security and Terrorism
. 8 Comments

Story: British MPs raise torture concerns

So some politicians have finally noticed that when one group of people define torture so that it includes waterboarding and another group defines torture so that it excludes waterboarding, then the word torture itself becomes stripped of substance in terms of the debate over the ethical and humane treatment of prisoners (let alone which techniques are actually effective at intelligence-gathering).

Took them long enough.

Remembering Fromelles

Published
by
Brian
4 months, 2 weeks ago
in Australiana, History and War
. 8 Comments

cobbers.jpg

The battle of Fromelles at the Western Front 92 years ago remains the worst day in Australian history. On 19 July 1916, in a monstrously botched enterprise, no fewer than 5,533 Australians became casualties. This toll is equivalent to the entire Australian casualties in the whole of the Boer, Korean and Vietnam Wars put together. In one night at Fromelles.

Continue reading ‘Remembering Fromelles’

Cheap shopping for war toys

Published
by
Robert Merkel
4 months, 3 weeks ago
in Government, Security and War
. 13 Comments

Oh, the joys of a commodity currency in a commodities super cycle. When you combine a nasty recession, a dilapidated US dollar, and the usual summer sales, a day’s shopping in San Francisco got me some very nice goods at ridiculously low Australian dollar prices. And the Australian government might just get similarly lucky on its biggest ever defence purchase.

Labor has decided to continue with the purchase of the interim “Super Hornet” to allow the early retirement of our elderly F-111 fighters - the one that Brendan Nelson announced to considerable controversy last year. A review into the replacement of the F-18 Hornet continues, with the question of whether the Joint Strike Fighter, the preferred long-term option for the RAAF, would be available in a timely manner, at an affordable price, and have sufficient capabilities. Well, courtesy of the strength of the Australian dollar, the head of the military procurement department, the Defence Materials Organization, says we’ll get the things at an affordable price.

“I would be surprised that we would be paying more than about 75 million Aussie US dollars a copy for the aircraft, measured in 2008 US dollars,” he told a parliamentary committee…Dr Gumley said there was much confusion about the likely JSF price and it all depended on what variant of the aircraft Australia actually purchased in what year and at what foreign exchange rate.

Continue reading ‘Cheap shopping for war toys’

Waterboarding Hitchens

Published
by
tigtog
5 months ago
in Authoritarianism, Ethics, Language, Law, Politics, Security, Sociology and Terrorism
. 34 Comments

Christopher Hitchens actually had himself waterboarded by the US Military to see whether it felt like torture to him. It did.

via Pharyngula, who has links to video.

Disarmament, the Hans Blix way

Published
by
Robert Merkel
5 months ago
in Foreign policy, International, Nuclear, Policy, Terrorism and War
. 7 Comments

You might remember that the government recently gave Gareth Evans a new job - to lead a commission on nuclear disarmament. In that context, I happened to pick up (for the trans-Pacific plane ride) little Quarterly Essay-style book on nuclear disarmament by Hans Blix, the man who spent 2002-3 being conspicuously and inconveniently correct on the topic of Iraq’s supposed weapons of mass destruction.

In 2005-06, Blix headed a commission, supported by the Swedish Parliament, whose final report provides the most recent comprehensive summary of the issues surrounding nuclear disarmament. Given one of the commissioners was none other than Gareth himself, it would be reasonable to expect that the content reflects the general tenor of his own thinking on the topic (and, incidentally, raises the question of what else this new commission will add). It’s quite accessible and well-written, so if you’re interested in the question I’d recommend you download the report - or at least the executive summary - and have a look.

Continue reading ‘Disarmament, the Hans Blix way’

Turkish trade unionist detained as “terrorist”

Published
by
Paul Norton
5 months, 1 week ago
in Activism, Authoritarianism, Industrial Relations, International, Middle East and Terrorism
. 1 Comment

Last year I wrote that Dr. Mohamed Haneef was an Australian Dreyfus. This year, Turkish trade unionist Meryem Özsögüt is a Turkish Mohamed Haneef.

Ms. Özsögut, a member of the management board of a Turkish public sector union, has been detained for six months allegedly in connection with “being a member of a terrorist organisation” and “for making propaganda in favour of the terrorist organisation”.

More on Ms. Ozsogut’s detention can be read here. A petition to request her release can be signed here.

P.S. The PSI, to which I’ve linked, is an international federation of public sector unions whose Australian affiliates include the Community & Public Sector Union, the Australian Services Union and the Communication, Electrical & Plumbing Union.

Beyond the red state-blue state dichotomy

Published
by
Mark
5 months, 1 week ago
in Activism, Books, Writers & Writing, Culture, Economics, Foreign Elections, Foreign policy, History, Politics, Polls, Religion, Sociology, The Web, USA and War
. 13 Comments

I’ve been reading Jerry F. Hough’s Changing Party Coalitions: The Mystery of the Red State-Blue State Alignment on and off over the weekend, after it arrived from Amazon on Friday. I’d been wanting to have a read for a while - after I saw this review. Part of what Hough - a long time Sovietologist and comparative politics scholar - is trying to do is to expose some of the myths that we tend to create about past political patterns and partisan alignments - based on our present understanding of voter motivation and party image. He makes the point - not in itself an unusual one but rarely developed to its full analytical potential - that the Democrats and Republicans have effectively swapped ideological sides several times, though his analysis of the Jacksonian-Jeffersonian mythos of the Democratic Party suggests that the Donkeys were never actually to the left of the GOP before FDR. It’s also highly relevant to note that Adlai Stevenson was the first “New Democrat” - adopting a “suburban strategy” that effectively turned its back on the New Deal’s economic agenda, and that JFK, although his ideas on foreign policy were quite distinct from Adlai’s, shared his economic conservatism and was effectively a do-nothing President in the domestic policy field. The fact that “left” and “right” or “liberal” and conservative” have shifted ground from the New Deal party system to a cultural focus, and that McGovernite cultural liberalism was a big part of that shift, obscures for instance the truth that Richard Nixon was arguably a moderate liberal domestically, while McGovern’s economics had more in common with Goldwater than Johnson.

Hough’s also fascinating on the contingency of racial and national identity, and although some of his own commitments are shaped by a relatively conservative developmentalist political science ideology of modernisation, his injection of a long historical perspective and a sociological toolkit into political analysis of the American scene is a very valuable contribution. Changing Party Coalitions was written in 2005, but his discussion of the dynamics of the recent “Red State-Blue State Alignment” is quite prescient - and very useful for thinking about what Barack Obama’s biggest political challenge might be, and why Hillary Clinton was able to do well as a very unlikely standard bearer of the white working class.

Continue reading ‘Beyond the red state-blue state dichotomy’

Now that Pamela Bone is dead…

Published
by
Kim
5 months, 1 week ago
in Activism, Apocalypse, Crime, Culture, Developing world, Donation challenge, Ethics, Feminism, History, Howardia, Imperialism, International, Iraq, Masculinity, Media, Politics, Polls, Race, Religion, Sexuality, Sociology, USA, War and Women
. 46 Comments

Yeah, you might have noticed already. I’m in a Truthiness mood tonight, as Stephen Colbert might say. Remember all the loud denunciations I copped from Harry Clarke, Tim Blair et al et al etc. - all the feminists of total convenience - for not denouncing the female genital mutilation loudly enough? Coz it’s all about teh Islam and threats to Western Civ, etc., and that mob are all on the side of women’s rights, and that manly man of steel John Howard is taking us to war to free Afghani women from burqas. And George W. Bush is going to hunt those Al-Qaeda evildoers down. (And Islam is not a race, and some of my best friends… oops, hang on?) While Laura and Condi look after the oppressed women. Or something… Oh yeah, it isn’t 2003 any more… Remember that word fistula - you might not have read that on teh Blair blog - being a word of three syllables and all. And in Latin.

But I talked about it at the time. Now that Pamela Bone is dead (and God rest her soul, may she be blessed with eternal rest, and may perpetual light shine upon her), where are the voices with the loud condemn? What’s with that Australian crusade for women’s rights in benighted Islamic Middle Eastern countries? After all, we - Dolly Downer and John Howard and Tim Blair and Andrew Bolt and Planet Janet told us so - are all (post?) feminists now. It’s on the citizenship test, dude - and dudette a la 50s pinup style no doubt. (Ps - don’t use that politically correct, activist judge f-word though…)

Well, never mind. Here’s a post from The Global Sociology Blog for the benefit of anyone who wanted to continue highlighting the horrors perpetrated on women in the developing world even if there’s not a convenient culture wars damn the left angle in it. (And that’s not to say that women in the developed world don’t still cop a lot - but there’s something to celebrate about a very large majority of Australians agreeing - at least in theory when asked by pollsters - that women have rights over their own choices and bodies - even if that masks continued gender inequality in oh, so many ways…).

You can donate to Medicins San Frontieres here.

And you might be interested in the fact that rape has finally been recognised by the UN as a war crime, something I wrote about last year, but something the keyboard warriors seem to… well, gloss over is far too kind. Because the fact that women are overwhelmingly the victims of war seems to be recognised neither by the pro-war Right nor the “humanitarian intervention” so-called Left. Continue reading ‘Now that Pamela Bone is dead…’

Issues and the 2007 election

Published
by
Mark
5 months, 2 weeks ago
in Climate change, Economics, Education, Environment, Federal Elections, Foreign policy, Health, Industrial Relations, Media, Polls, Sociology, Terrorism and War
. 16 Comments

I’ve often said that the best source for public opinion research around is the Australian Election Study. Some preliminary data has been released [link to pdf] by researchers Ian McAllister and Juliet Clark, presented in graphical form. The purpose of the paper is to enable assessments of changes in public opinion over time, with some of the questions forming a time series going back to 1969. I’ve only had a cursory look at the data, but one thing I wanted to focus on was the data from the 2007 election, particularly as it relates to issue importance and party advantage on particular issues. Basically, this is much better quality data than anything you’d get from Newspoll.

A detailed analysis isn’t possible in the absence of the raw data which would enable regressions and cross-tabs, but there are some interesting patterns in the data that are presented. The first point to make, one that’s made in the current political context ably by Possum Comitatus, is that leadership is much less important to voting intention than is usually claimed in the media. Since there have been long term declines in partisanship and therefore more votes up for grabs in any particular electoral cycle, the whole concept of party “ownership” of issues becomes much more important - hence all the attention focused last year on “economic management”. I’ve previously pointed out that the question in Newspoll on that measure was actually the wrong one - at least insofar as 2007 goes - because Labor polling found that “economic management for working families” was much more important, and it’s there that their advantage lay (as the opposition now knows well, because that’s where all their attack is focused). In this context, it’s also very significant to observe the finding that a majority of voters don’t believe anything the government does has much impact on the economy - what we might term the “globalisation effect” - something very poorly understood by political commentators, I’d suggest.

Last year, industrial relations jumped from 2% of respondents nominating it as the most important economic issue in 2004 to 16% and top position. Labor enjoyed a big advantage over the Coalition - 52 to 32, intriguingly reversing a Coalition lead (when the issue was much less important) in 2004 of 37 to 27. Continue reading ‘Issues and the 2007 election’

Howard lies episode #809798?

Published
by
Kim
5 months, 2 weeks ago
in Crime, Howardia, Immigration and Terrorism
. 22 Comments

DOCUMENTS have revealed the department of former prime minister John Howard became involved in the Mohamed Haneef affair less than 48 hours after the Indian doctor was arrested in connection with a British terrorist attack last July.

Lawyers for Dr Haneef said the early involvement of the Prime Minister’s Department raised the possibility that Mr Howard may have colluded with then immigration minister Kevin Andrews to politicise the issue.

“One can have a view whether it was to Howard’s political benefit to whip up a storm like he did with Tampa,” solicitor Rod Hodgson said in Brisbane yesterday.

Indeed one can.

Mr Howard has denied any involvement in the handling of the Haneef investigation.

This highlights the fact that the Clarke enquiry lacks the power to compel witnesses to appear, and in fact that some are being examined without being on oath, and that witnesses will not be cross-examined. Will John Howard be giving evidence? And if he does, will it turn out to have all been Kevin Andrews’ idea? That was never easy to believe, and it’s getting harder.

Test for terror

Published
by
Kim
5 months, 3 weeks ago
in Elections, Europe, Media, Politics and Terrorism
. 23 Comments

There’s an intriguing by-election coming up in Great Britain where former Tory leadership contender and shadow Home Secretary David Davis has resigned his portfolio - and his seat of Haltemprice and Howden - “in order to force a by-election over the 42 day detention issue”. Legislation is currently before the House of Lords enabling terror suspects to be held without charge for that time period. Neither the Labour nor the Liberal Democrat parties are running a candidate, and Davis faces one major opponent - former Sun editor Kelvin MacKenzie, whose candidacy was cooked up at a birthday party for Sun editor Rebekah Wade, though some also see the hand of Downing Street in his crusade. Rupert Murdoch was at the party and MacKenzie has already stated that Murdoch would be personally funding his campaign - which would be illegal because Murdoch is not a UK citizen. British politics has been thrown into turmoil as Davis proclaims that his constituents now have a chance to vote to “save Magna Carta”.

Elsewhere: Analysis from Shiraz Socialist.

Breaking news: Guantanamo Bay prisoners have civil rights

Published
by
Kim
5 months, 3 weeks ago
in Law, Politics, Terrorism, USA and War
. 105 Comments

[Via Crooks & Liars] The US Supreme Court has ruled in a 5-4 decision that detainees in Guantanamo Bay have the right of habeas corpus and can challenge their detention in civil courts.

The decision is here [pdf].

Gordon Brown triangulates like it’s 2001

Published
by
Robert Merkel
5 months, 3 weeks ago
in Europe, Howardia, Law, Security and Terrorism
. 16 Comments

One of the most striking things about the Rudd era is the virtual disappearance of terrorism as a political issue. Aside from a passing reference in his 2020 Summit introductory speech, I have barely heard the words mentioned. While this can be partly attributed to the passing of time, it’s not the only reason. Look at what’s happening in the UK, where Gordon Brown has just bribed and blackmailed a bill authorizing 42 days of detention without charge for terrorism suspects through the Commons, despite widespread rebellion from Labour backbenchers.

The details of this grubby bill, and the tortuous process of getting it through the Commons, can be read at length at the Guardian, for those interested. In short, even the police and intelligence services (who never see an additional power they don’t like) seem remarkably unenthusiastic about the idea; the head of MI5 has even publicly stated that they haven’t requested it. The odds of it actually becoming law are not particularly high, either; the Lords will likely block it, and a court challenge is highly likely (and stands a good chance of succeeding). Regardless of the idea’s merits, however, Gordon Brown thinks he’s going to get a desperately needed win with the wider British public.. The Guardian quotes a poll with 69% of the British public approving the new measures.

It’s a moderately interesting hypothetical whether similar “tough on terrorism” laws would be a political winner in Australia at the moment. I’m very, very glad that Australian Labor don’t seem interested in finding out.