Webdiary - Founded and Inspired by Margo Kingston

"I had no idea how this story would end or what I would discover when I finally sat down at the computer and started to type. I now know that torture not only permanently scars the torture victim, but it also leaves its mark on everyone who comes in contact with that person."  - Jason Leopold

 An absolute prohibition against experiments on prisoners of war is contained in the Geneva Conventions, but President George W. Bush stripped war on terror detainees of those protections. Some of the "enhanced interrogation techniques" also had an experimental quality.

You get the whiff, reading the January reports in theOz about the matter, that the Australian Government might be interceding not so much out of concern for the ex-soldier than a need to minimise the negative publicity of an Afghan Murdering Aussie Mercenary.

I’ve got no idea what the future has in stall but it appears that bit by bit we are going to find that our government and corporate suppliers are going to know (and share) a lot more about us whether we like it or not.

Between the counterterrorists’s Achilles Heel exposed at Sydney Airport last week by the biker brawl, and the failure of the communications system installed at Sydney's most-ever likely time to face a terrorist attack, is it possible to maintain faith that other counterterrorism systems and practices are going to work as and when they're supposed to?

Shouldn’t we be using the anti terror laws to control these thugs? We should make their clubs illegal and destroy the club houses. Anyone known to belong to an outlaw bikie gang should face the same penalties as those belonging to terrorist organisations. There is no difference – both use violence and terror to intimidate the rest of the population.

The only trouble is that these people, to the casual observer, probably couldn't organise a fart in a baked bean factory! Surely the fact that an ASIO officer found himself with more knowledge than they about exploding a tree stump suggests to anyone that there was bugger-all likelihood of the MCG ever going up in smoke, no matter how much the evidence of a witness found by the court to be a liar and a cheat had been previously publicised.

One of the lessons, if we need lessons, from all of this is that lawyers can always be recruited to sanctify just about any illegality the state deems appropriate. There was the chief lawyer at the Pentagon, "Jim" Haynes, Cheney's legal advisor, David Addington, John Yoo, from the Justice Department and now at Berkeley, and Jay Bybee, who is currently a federal appeals judge.

In doing so, they've shown the control order as unnecessary.  The idea of asking the AFP for the order was passed to the South Australian Government by our Foreign Minister, Bush sycophant Alexander Downer.  There are two perceivable useful political purposes for such an order.  One is that it showed the South Australian public that Hicks was a bad man that needed watching.  The other is that it showed the world that another government was prepared to participate in the Guantanamo military tribunal system by honouring its findings. 

Downer's attempt at diplomacy, through an email from one of his senior DFAT officials, was carried out four days before Immigration Minister Kevin Andrews cancelled Haneef's visa and had him sent to the Wolston Correctional Centre.

Sir Gerard pointed out, as did others, that it may be that when we say we are willing to compromise our freedoms, we may mean that we are "willing to compromise the human rights of others, believing that the laws and practices we have accepted will have no impact on ourselves".

So the jury deliberated, over 21 days, working its way through the evidence, and in the end arriving at a set of verdicts that are, probably, about right. Benbrika, the mastermind, convicted on all charges. Some convicted, some not. Some convicted on some charges and not on others. One they couldn't decide on.

Meanwhile, in London,various unidentified government and defence folk are apparently leaking like anonymous sieves to the Tele in order to warn Britons of the suddenly increased likelihood of a "dirty bomb" attack

Here's where it gets interesting: picked up in Afghanistan in 2001 by the Northern Alliance, what's the most Hicks has done? Shot at an enemy soldier. If that's not a crime, then David has been jailed both in Guantanamo and here for something not regarded as criminal. So, since "material support" is a crime introduced retrospectively by the U.S., should his innocence be as retrospective as the charge?

The only way to win the “war on terror” is to be less willing ourselves to use terror to win a political victory. The war on terror will be won when all terrorists – including those financed by democratic governments – are brought to justice in the International Criminal Court.

"If the discovery order is upheld, my legal team will be able to apply for access to the adverse security assessment and other documents. This could mean that I finally find out what I am alleged to have said or done to warrant my detention and forced removal from Australia in September 2005. "-  Scott Parkin UPDATE: Scott won.

The thin, fragile, wavery line that distinguishes democracy from something akin to Pol Pot or Pinochet is, at the eleventh hour, reaffirmed by the court.   There are certain positions that are just not negotiable. 

The threat of terrorism is now part of the landscape of daily lives all over the world, yet we have hardly begun to think properly about it. In his new book Terror and Consent  and in this lecture Professor Bobbitt argues that we are fighting these wars with weapons and concepts which though useful to us in previous conflicts have now been superseded.

Colonel Davis' testimony could well herald an annulment of the powers of the military tribunal and negate the only conviction it has produced...

The case against members of ABC TV's The Chaser's War on Everything has been dropped. Here's why.

As computers become more powerful and more and more information is gathered about individuals it will be very easy to track people simply by their buying habits. We will not need to know their names, just a profile will be enough to identify them. Human being are extremely predictable.

The Afghanistan action is commonly viewed as a "clean" conflict ... that didn't bring the kind of international opprobrium onto the United States that the invasion of Iraq would lead to a year later. ...  But ... [e]verything that followed ... flowed inevitably from the failure to challenge Bush's claim that an act of terror required a military response.

In 2005 the Australian government dramatically expanded the security powers of many state agencies as part of the “war on terror”. The new sedition laws, control orders, and secret pre-emptive detention all seem major threats to civil liberties, dissent, and (dare I say it?) democracy in this country.

"The ministers that presided over the fiascos have been booted from thecorridors of power to the back-alleys of Liberal Party HQ.  Keelty, onthe other hand, remains aloof from calls that such as him should beaccountable for their mistakes."

In Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic, Chalmers Johnson compares  the US’s present military behaviour with that of the Roman Empire, and warns that financial bankruptcy could herald the breakdown of constitutional government in America.

David Hicks' journey from the backroads of Afghanistan to the streets of Adelaide has ended.  Has justice been served, or only the political interests of John Howard and Dick Cheney?  I've written a few verses to commemorate the day.

MARGO UPDATE: What does it take for Labor to have the guts to try to clean up our mess of a justice system under John Howard? Before Parliament ended, the Democrats moved a motion in the Senate calling for an independent inquiry into the Haneef debacle. Labor voted against it, despite Rudd's call for an inquiry.But today it's all different, thanks to The Australian's Hedley Thomas.

Hello. Here is the Australian Law Council's statement yesterday on the death penalty debate. The recent history of this issue is very interesting, as is its prominence now. I'll try to write something later. 

The APEC thuggery results from a Labor and Liberal conspiracy to destroy our civil liberties and give police untrammelled power to serve political ends. I've been warning of this on Webdiary for many years. We saw with Haneef that now, police and/or government lawyers are prepared to lie under oath to the Courts to get their way. And the NSW Labor Government's disgrace started long before Iemma.Have a look at the start of the rot, under Bob Carr, in 2002, when Howard was revving up his 'terror' laws.

Later I saw another old lady asking police if she could go to David Jones.  They told her it would be always there and it would be best if she went home. Kindly old ladies being discouraged from David Jones?  That's not the Australia I grew up in!  I saw the reassuring sign that "it costs no more to shop at David Jones" but security guards blocked me from leaving via the Elizabeth Street doors.  How bizarre.