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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What emerged were two pieces:

1. For the governance topic: Managing continual, rapid change with a clear framework of values.
2. For the topic on “the economy”, which is where discussions of broadband policy ended up: Broadband: It’s about symmetry, not speed.

I’m well aware that they don’t really provide a properly-researched, well-argued case. Nevertheless I hope that in some way they’ll help influence debate. Comments appreciated — perhaps over where the submissions themselves are blogged.

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I won’t have time to do anything with it until (probably) tomorrow evening. Meanwhile, can you suggest people who might be interesting contributors?

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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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In today’s Sydney Morning Herald, Richard Ackland has published his “top 10″ list of intrusions on our civil liberties for 2007.

“A year ago we published a list showing how our liberties had been whittled, starting with the sedition laws and ending with David Hicks. Now there is a fresh outcrop of abrasions to our rights, although, sadly, there is an eerie consistency about some of the players.”

His list includes an entire entry just for one man’s efforts:

4. Philip Ruddock. Once again the former attorney-general deserves his own special entry in the human rights hall of infamy. This time for his unique conception that an accused person can have a “fair trial” based on hearsay evidence and evidence extracted by coercion.

As number 1, Ackland mentions just a name: Dr Mohamed Haneef. I’m hoping the forthcoming judicial inquiry gets to the bottom of that debacle!

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John Howard, during his time as prime minister, talked a lot about the rule of law. If we are a nation of laws then those laws must, presumably, reflect what we believe about ourselves as a nation. As people. As human beings. As Australians.

Howard, quite correctly, sees a century of the rule of law as one of the great achievements of Australian federation. And yet, under his watch, fundamental legal principles were eroded. Laws made as part of the so-called War on Terror introduced imprisonment without trial, secret evidence, searches without warrant…

With these conflicting thoughts in mind, I opened the pages of Julian Burnside’s book Watching Brief: reflections on human rights, law, and justice while leaving Australia for the first time.

As dusk fell somewhere over the Timor Sea, I imagined the horror of traversing that ocean below in an over-crowded, leaky refugee boat only to be hauled off to a concentration camp a quarter of the world away. Meanwhile, I ordered another brandy and Mr Burnside provided me with a concise, clearly-written explanation of just why I’d been so angry with the Howard government, and so angry with a weak and ineffectual opposition for allowing it to happen.

The book is studded with pertinent observations, explained well. I’ll mention only two which stood out for me.

1. Our own government was actually cynical enough to call the 9000-volt electric fence around the Baxter Detention Centre a “courtesy fence”.
2. Under Australia’s own laws regarding “crimes against humanity” (let alone international law), the extended detention — sorry, let’s call it what it is! — the continued imprisonment of people who have committed no crime (i.e. refugees) is illegal. John Howard, Philip Ruddock and Amanda Vanstone should all be charged. Unfortunately only the Attorney-General can launch proceedings, which Ruddock obviously wouldn’t do if he were one of those to be charged. However he is no longer Attorney-General.

John Howard is gone, but his laws remain. Burnside’s book provides a useful roadmap for what Kevin Rudd needs to un-do.

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The Core’s sole source of income was advertising, and most of it came from nightclubs. Nightclub managers are [coughs] the most honourable and [chokes] reliable [gargles] businessmen and women who can be found. Their integ… [coughs] [chokes] … sorry, I seem to have something caught in my throat.

They’d brag about how their new club night would be the biggest, brightest thing ever. “It’ll be huge,” they’d say. They’d want to book a heap of advertising — on credit, of course — and wanted discount.

“Sure,” I’d say, showing them our rate card and the discounts on offer.

“We’ll book a full page for 8 weeks then, for that 25% discount,” or whatever it was.

“Sure,” I’d say again. “Just sign here.”

And then they’d freeze.

“What’s this?” they’d ask nervously.

“Oh this is just our standard advertising booking form, showing what we just agreed. It says that you’re booking a full page for 8 weeks, and you’ll get a 25% discount — and that if you don’t run for 8 weeks, or don’t pay on time, the price reverts to the normal rate. Just sign there at the bottom.”

And that’s when they’d start mumbling about having to see how things went, or they had to check with the owner, or where did I leave those car keys…

Verbal agreements aren’t worth the paper they’re written on, as the saying goes. If I’m doing business with the reptiles that run nightclubs, I’ll make sure there’s a written record. If you’re genuine about sticking to your side of the bargain, then writing it down shouldn’t be the least bit controversial.

The same goes for politicians.

Especially politicians who come up with ideas like non-core promises.

If, as the Citizenship Test says, we have freedom of speech, freedom of religion, equality under the law and so on, how about we just write that down? If we’re genuine about “Australians having rights,” there can’t be anything wrong with putting it on paper, and signing it into Law.

Last night Geoffrey Robertson reminded us that Australia had fallen to 35th and 39th in the two latest international press freedom ratings. Today, I’m sure some redneck talkback callers are saying a Bill of Rights will destroy the church or somesuch paranoid rant. They are simply wrong. A Bill of Rights would protect their chosen religion too.

If anyone opposes a Bill of Rights, they’re not genuinely interested in human rights for others, only for themselves. It’s as simple as that.

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To emphasize the key themes, I’ve used TagCrowd to make a tag cloud of the Declaration. Note, Gentle Reader, the most-repeated word of all: everyone.

Now you can perhaps argue about the details. P J O’Rourke, for example, reckons:

All men are created equal. We hold this truth to the self-evident, which on the face of it is so wildly untrue. Equality is the foundation of liberal democracy, rule of law, a free society, and everything that the reader, if he or she is sane, cherishes. But are we all equal because we all showed up? It does not work that way at weddings or funerals. Are we all equal because it says so in the American Declaration of Independence, the French Declaration of the Rights of Man, and the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights? Each of these documents contains plenty of half-truths and nontruths as well. The UN proclaims, “Everyone has the right to rest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours.” I’ll have my wife inform the baby.

High-minded screeds cobbled together by unrepresentative and, in some cases, slightly deranged members of the intelligentsia are not scripture. Anyway, to see what a scripture-based polity gets for a social system we have only to look at the Taliban in Afghanistan or the Puritans in Massachusetts.

But the core words stand out so brightly in that TagCloud. And those core words are being ignored by John Howard’s cynical intervention.

Perhaps you should ask your local MP why so few of them have been enshrined in Australian law and what they, personally, have done about that.

If they’re a Coalition MP, perhaps you should ask them why they’re being party to such a disgusting, heavy-handed approach to what is, yes, a major problem — but a problem which has been sitting there for the entire time they’ve been in government.

Production Note

TagCrowd has already removed common stop words like “the” and “of”. I’ve added a few more so the focus is on the content not the structure: “against”, “article”, “declaration”, “forth”, “held”, “including”, “nor”, “proclaimed”, “promote”, “shall” and “whereas”.

I’ve added a bunch of words to that list to remove things which are about the structure of the Declaration rather than the content, such as “whereas”.

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The Bush administration’s assault on some of the founding principles of American democracy marches onward despite the Democratic victory in the 2006 elections. The new Democratic majorities in Congress can block the sort of noxious measures that the Republican majority rubber-stamped. But preventing new assaults on civil liberties is not nearly enough.

Five years of presidential overreaching and Congressional collaboration continue to exact a high toll in human lives, America’s global reputation and the architecture of democracy. Brutality toward prisoners, and the denial of their human rights, have been institutionalized; unlawful spying on Americans continues; and the courts are being closed to legal challenges of these practices.

It will require forceful steps by this Congress to undo the damage.

And those forceful steps?

Here’s their list as bullet points, though the full editorial is well worth reading.

• Restore Habeas Corpus, the ancient right for someone to challenge their imprisonment in court
• Stop illegal spying
• Ban torture, really
• Close the CIA prisons
• Account for “ghost prisoners”
• Ban extraordinary rendition
• Tighten the definition of combatant
• Screen prisoners fairly and effectively
• Ban tainted evidence
• Ban secret evidence
• Better define “classified” evidence
• Respect the right to counsel

Let’s come back to this list in six months and see what’s been fixed.

Thanks to former senator Stephen Loosley for the pointer.

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But, you know, I just heard Archie Roach and Sara Storer singing his story on RockWiz. And bugger me, it turns out he’s one of the country’s most important human rights activists.

Bloody embarrassing not to know that, eh?

I mean, you’re probably more likely to remember, oh, that nigger woman on a bus, who was she again?

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Speaking on ABC TV’s Lateline on 8 March, Keelty says we should look at techniques which have been used “successfully” in such bastions of human rights as Indonesia, Singapore and Pakistan — even referring to it as “best practice”.

Keelty equates reprogramming people to convincing an informer to give evidence, and says this is the next step… to re-program somebody who has a belief or holds a belief. It has already been discussed with the government in the context of anti-terrorism control orders.

Commissioner Keelty, just in case you’ve forgotten Articles 18 and 19 of the UN Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, here’s a refresher…

Belief: a Basic Human Right

The UN Covenant on Civil and Political Rights was signed and ratified by Australia.

18.1 Everyone shall have the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion…

18.2 No one shall be subject to coercion which would impair his freedom to have or to adopt a religion or belief of his choice…

19.1 Everyone shall have the right to hold opinions without interference.

19.2 Everyone shall have the right to freedom of expression; this right shall include freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing or in print, in the form of art, or through any other media of his choice.

The UN Covenant on Civil and Political Rights expands upon the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and it does have provisions for “limitations as are prescribed by law and are necessary to protect public safety, order, health, or morals or the fundamental rights and freedoms of others”.

But the key word is necessary. Not convenient or useful, but necessary. You may only restrict human rights if there’s no other method at all for preserving our safety. There’s a burden of proof there, and Keelty hasn’t even begun to address it.

Who’s Belief?

The dangerous question, of course, is who chooses what political beliefs we “should” have.

Keelty was careful to call his proposal “de-programming” — making a distinction between the bad “brainwashing” or “programming” done by Them and the healthy “de-programming” done by Us.

But whether a change in belief is “forward” programming or “reverse” de-programming or sideways “re-programming” is simply a matter of your political beliefs and how you want to spin it.

Spin 1: Make it sound community-minded

Keelty admits there might be a PR problem here. He says we need to…

“…be very careful as to how we present those operations, not only back to the Australian community, but to those within the community who might otherwise take up the the cause because they see one part of their community being disenfranchised or mistreated by the authorities.”

Quite.

So he tries hard to make it sound humane, twice mentioning that you might “turn” someone using “somebody who’s influential within the community. A respected imam, for example” — once more reinforcing en passant the propaganda that terrorist = Muslim.

But in the end Keelty is quite pragmatic:

“The best scenario would be… the one that is likely to yield the best results.”

And what is best? Well, this technique…

“…also opens up the opportunity to get information that would otherwise not be available.”

Spin 2: Make it sound medical

Commissioner Keelty also tries to equate his “de-programming” to treating drug addition. After all, it’s “healthy” if we’re treating a “sickness”.

“People who believe something that the wider community doesn’t believe in and certainly doesn’t understand and when you get into the realms of suicide bombers, that is something that is so foreign to, I guess, our way of thinking that somebody who is in that position has to not be thinking rationally. So if I guess the extension of that is if they’re acting and thinking irrationally, then how do we convert that behaviour and bring it back to rational behaviour? In a sense, that is a sickness.”

Except for one tiny problem.

The health model is about getting the best result for the patient, based on the medical opinion of qualified doctors. That’s not the same as getting “the best result” for policeman who are after “the opportunity to get information”.

The full transcript of the interview makes interesting reading.

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