News has just come through that charges against The Chaser team for their APEC security breach stunt have been dropped. Good, someone has a brain. Yes, they did enter the APEC security zone — but you, dear police and security forces, stood back and saluted as you waved them through the checkpoints.

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Where the fuck do I start? For me, Anzac Day is a tangled mess of emotions and ideas — some about grand themes of global and national politics, others deeply personal.

What pleases me most about Anzac Day is that Australia and New Zealand commemorate the sacrifice of their war dead not through parades of tanks and missiles and a glorification of war but with highly personal ceremonies of remembrance starting before dawn.

We talk not of our nation’s military prowess — though Australia is, by all accounts, capable of fielding professional military forces which make almost everybody else look like disorganised amateurs — but of the personal qualities which have made this nation great.

Those qualities were listed in an Army recruitment advertisement designed by a soldier. They were reiterated this morning by Major General Mark Kelly:

Regardless of religion, racial background, or even place of birth, we gather not to glorify war, but to remind ourselves that we value who we are and the freedoms we possess, and to acknowledge the courage and sacrifice of those who contributed so much in shaping the identity of this proud nation…

The term Anzac has transcended the physical meaning to become a spirit, an inspiration which embodies the qualities of courage, discipline, sacrifice, self reliance, and in Australian terms, mateship, and a fair go. This is what Anzac means to me.

These are the qualities which once gave Australia such a fine reputation overseas — before our foreign policy became one of subservience to American Neocons, and before symbols of military might were perverted into supporting a never-ending War on Abstract Nouns. Before quiet patriotism turned into loud but ignorant flag-draped jingoism. John Birmingham wrote about this in his Quarterly Essay, A Time for War: Australia as a Military Power. But what does it all mean now under Chairman Rudd?

I ponder my own personal ethical dilemma. I feel the “boy’s toys” thrill when I hear an F-111 strike bomber roar into action, and can rattle off endless facts about military history. I’ve felt the power as I’ve squeezed the trigger of a semi-automatic weapon loaded with live rounds. Yet at another level I know it’s disgusting. We’re fat, (mostly) white westerners at the top the food pile, gorging our way through the world’s resources while portraying a handful of frightened refugees as some mortal threat. We ship them to concentration camps, for fuck’s sake! At gunpoint. And before anyone suggest this is some party-political thing, let us not forget that a Labor government created that policy of mandatory detention.

And in amongst all of that, I remember a dead soldier.

I remember a young man who made his choices with eyes open. He was defeated in a battle filled not with the sounds of gunfire and the splatter of blood — I’m sure he faced those piddly threats with his usual joie de vivre — but the roar of thoughts in his own mind. I remember how his death affected me and devastated his family, how the Senate thought the Army had failed to take proper care of their own, and how lives continue to be lost despite those Senate recommendations.

They shall grow not old,
As we that are left grow old,
Age shall not weary them,
Nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun,
And in the morning
We will remember them. Lest we Forget

Nicholas St John Shiels, service number 456021, you are remembered.

I pray that the commanders of Australia’s military forces, and their political “masters”, will one day remember that there are more important, more admirable personal qualities than the ability to cover one’s own arse.

[Photo credit: The rosemary sprig was taken from Matthew Hall's Twitter page. If I owe someone for that usage, I'll make good.]

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1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open it to page 161.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
5. Don’t search around and look for the coolest book you can find. Use what’s actually next to you.

And the sentence is:

“Sensitive site exploitation will continue.”

That sentence doesn’t make a lot of sense by itself, but the next one adds all the context you need:

So far there had been no WMD stockpiles found.

The book is State of Denial: Bush At War, Part III by investigative journalist Bob Woodward. It’s been months since I read it but for some reason it’s still on my desk.

This afternoon the BBC reports that unnamed “US officials” have evidence that North Korea was helping Syria build a nuclear reactor. Here we go again. I think I might listen to some classic Detroit techno instead.

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Of all the writing about the 5th anniversary of the US-led invasion of Iraq, one of the more interesting pieces is by Mary Ellen O’Connell (pictured) of Notre Dame Law School. In Learning from the Iraq War: The Wisdom of International Law, she argues that the most tangible lesson is that the US ignores international law at its peril.

Going into Iraq, we ignored the UN Charter, which prohibits the use of force except in self-defense or with Security Council authorization. Once in Iraq, we ignored the Hague Regulations, requiring us to put a stop to looting and to make only necessary changes to local law and government. We ignored the Geneva Conventions, which prohibit secret detention and abuse of prisoners of the kind we saw at Abu Ghraib.

The talk on Iraq is all about what went wrong, whether the surge is working, and when we can get out. We hear virtually nothing about international law and look set to repeat our mistakes. Violating the law has cost our nation and Iraq dearly. It has denied us the guidance of rules based on long experience and moral consensus. We have lost standing in the world, a literal fortune, and precious lives. Rather than internalizing the lesson of law violation in Iraq, we continue to defy the law in serious and self-destructive ways.

At some point, sooner or later, America needs to understand that international law does indeed apply to everyone — including America. Otherwise any US action against any other nation breaking the law is nothing but hypocrisy. (Hat-tip to Blog Them Out of the Stone Age.)

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Defence minister Joel Fitzgibbon has announced that the controversial purchase of 24 Super Hornet aircraft will go ahead.

The review of the Howard government’s decision to buy the aircraft — at a total cost of $6 billion even though the RAAF hadn’t wanted them — reached some damaging conclusions, including:

• There has been a lack of sound, long-term air combat capability planning decisions by the former Government over the course of the last decade.
• The retirement of the F-111 was made in haste but is now irreversible. The cost of turning the F-111 back on would be enormous and crews and skills have already moved on.
• The former Government’s decision to leave Australia’s air defences in the hands of the Joint Strike Fighter project was a flawed leap of faith in scheduling terms and combined with the quick decision to retire the F-111 early, allowed an air combat capability gap to emerge.
• The subsequent timetable the former Government put on the acquisition of an interim fighter left Defence planners with no choice but to recommend the Super Hornet. No other suitable aircraft could be produced to meet the 2010 deadline the former Government had set. One year on, that is now even more so the case.

Cancelling the order would still incur a financial penalty and create “undesirable tensions”, and the final conclusions is that “the Super Hornet is an excellent aircraft… and is the only aircraft which can meet the small delivery window created by the former Government’s poor planning processes and politically-driven responses.”

As a shareholder in Australia Inc, I’d like to know why the former “board members” allowed this to happen. When company directors are negligent they become personally liable so why, given the report’s damning conclusions, does Brendan Nelson not become personally liable?

Why were established evaluation and purchasing processes ignored? What is the connection between former defence minister Brendan Nelson (a member of the Liberal Party), and the then chairman of Boeing Australia, Andrew Peacock, a former leader of the Liberal Party?

Hat-tip to Tim Dunlop, who also notes:

[D]o you make procurement decisions on the basis of strategy or is it on occasion necessary to build strategy around procurements that have already been made? I mean, the White Paper may be still six months away but it is hardly as if it is being written from scratch. It looks like Fitzgibbon has decided that getting the Super Hornet decision locked away was the more important factor and is happy enough to make strategy decisions with the Super Hornets in the mix. To paraphrase another Defence Minister/Secretary, sometimes you do strategy on the basis on the equipment you have.

As in this case. We’re buying the Super Hornets because, essentially, it’s the only choice left.

[Photo: A US Navy (USN) F/A-18E Super Hornet aircraft, Strike Fighter Squadron 115 (VFA-115), Naval Air Station (NAS) Lemoore, California (CA), launches from catapult three during flight operations on board the USN Nimitz Class Aircraft Carrier USS Abraham Lincoln. US Navy via Wikipedia.]

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• Over at New Matilda, Ben Eltham has written a fine summary of The Super Seasprites Saga. He links to an explanation of the sunk cost fallacy which probably contributed to this monumental fuck-up.
• Laurel Papworth’s piece 2020 Summit: Objective Journalists vs Passionate Blogging, which I’m planning to respond to at length some time this weekend.
• A piece from The New Yorker, Scents and Sensibility: What the nose knows, which ponders, amongst other things, why one molecule smells of spearmint when its exact mirror image smells of caraway. (Hat-tip to 3 Quarks Daily.)
• And for a change of pace, try the selection of First Dog on the Moon cartoons which were published in Crikey through January and February.

Four pieces feels about right for today.

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Why do we never hear about the real work of the Australian military overseas? I’ve written about this before, but I’ve just stumbled across another example. We should have heard about this!

According to a post at the Iran Defence Forum, where I snaffled the photo, 67 Australian SAS troopers captured an Iraqi airfield defended by over 1000 troops.

The Australian SAS captured an Iraqi airfield during the invasion with over 60 intact aircraft camouflaged and buried.

A MiG-25 Foxbat fighter was amongst the captured aircraft, and apparently it’s on its way to Perth to be displayed at the SAS base there.

As I said last time, surely you, dear Department of Defence, can tell enough of the story to inspire the kiddies without “revealing operational secrets”. Hell, I’d love to record this kind of oral history! You know where to find me.

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A strange treat last night: I stumbled across a complete upload of the very fine 1984 docudrama Threads, which depicts the aftermath of a nuclear strike on Sheffield (and elsewhere). I’d seen it before, but it was still as powerful. Today, using The Power of Wikipedia, I discover that the scenario was based on the UK government exercise Square Leg, and that the Protect and Survive informational films it features are quite real.

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Three quick movies for you to watch on a lazy Sunday… things which I’ve been sent over the last week.

1. The 15-minute promotional film A Ballad for the Fair (pictured) tours the 1964 New York World’s Fair, with an emphasis on communications technology since it was produced by Bell System. Marvel at the video-phone! Warning: there is folk music. Hat-tip to Paleo-Future.
2. A creepy community service announcement about violence against women starring Australia’s celebrity criminal Mark Brandon “Chopper” Read. Chopper even has his own website. Hat-tip to Rhys McDonald via Five Thumbs Down. Check the latter for an amusing AFL players’ social guide.
3. The US shoots down a spy satellite. Thanks, Richard. I won’t bother discussing the military-strategy and international-politics angles of that one, there’s plenty elsewhere.

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At GlobalResearch.ca, Brent Jessop says the Pentagon’s Information Operations Roadmap bluntly states that the Internet, with its potential for free speech, is in direct opposition to their goals. The Pentagon reckons the Internet needs to be dealt with as if it were an enemy “weapons system”.

The Information Operations Roadmap says:

We Must Fight the Net. DoD [Department of Defense] is building an information-centric force. Networks are increasingly the operational center of gravity, and the Department must be prepared to “fight the net.”…

DoD’s “Defense in Depth” strategy should operate on the premise that the Department will “fight the net” as it would a weapons system.

The Information Operations Roadmap has a similar theme to the now infamous document Rebuilding America’s Defences [PDF file] from the rather scary Project for a New American Century (PNAC).

PNAC was founded in 1997 with many members that later became the nucleus of the George W Bush administration. The list includes: Jeb Bush, Dick Cheney, I Lewis Libby, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz among many other powerful but less well-know names. Their stated purpose was to use a hugely expanded US military to project “American global leadership.”

Rebuilding America’s Defences says:

It is now commonly understood that information and other new technologies… are creating a dynamic that may threaten America’s ability to exercise its dominant military power…

Control of space and cyberspace. Much as control of the high seas — and the protection of international commerce — defined global powers in the past, so will control of the new “international commons” be a key to world power in the future. An America incapable of protecting its interests or that of its allies in space or the “infosphere” will find it difficult to exert global political leadership…

Although it may take several decades for the process of transformation to unfold, in time, the art of warfare on air, land, and sea will be vastly different than it is today, and “combat” likely will take place in new dimensions: in space, “cyber-space,” and perhaps the world of microbes.

The Pentagon doesn’t think the Internet is all bad. As Jessop points out:

After all, it was the Department of Defense through DARPA that gave us the internet in the first place. The internet is useful not only as a business tool but also is excellent for monitoring and tracking users, acclimatizing people to a virtual world, and developing detailed psychological profiles of every user, among many other Pentagon positives. But, one problem with the current internet is the potential for the dissemination of ideas and information not consistent with US government themes and messages, commonly known as free speech. Naturally, since the plan was to completely dominate the “infosphere,” the internet would have to be adjusted or replaced with an upgraded and even more Pentagon friendly successor.

With some more healthy paranoia, Paul Joseph Watson writes at PrisonPlanet.com:

The development of “Internet 2″ is also designed to create an online caste system whereby the old Internet hubs would be allowed to break down and die, forcing people to use the new taxable, censored and regulated world wide web. If you’re struggling to comprehend exactly what the Internet will look like in five years unless we resist this, just look at China and their latest efforts to completely eliminate dissent and anonymity on the web.

This process of turning the Internet into an enemy is scary.

“The Internet” is very easily conflated with “the people on the Internet” and “the information on the Internet”, just as “the war against terrorists” becomes “the war on terror”. Once the entire Internet and the people who use it are declared “the enemy”, then all sorts of intrusive and secret measures are justified.

This Thinking Must Stop At Once.

Hat-tip to Bernard Robertson-Dunn.

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