That’s the start of my guest post today for Electronic Frontiers Australia, entitled Without civil liberties, government is just a criminal racket.

It’s an essay that combines some thoughts about the constant battle for civil liberties with my reaction to the video posted by Wikileaks at Collateral Murder. It’s footage from 2007 showing a Reuters photojournalist and his driver and others being killed by US helicopter gunfire in Baghdad. It’s footage the US Department of Defence didn’t want you to see. It’s challenging to watch.

This is one of a series of guest posts for the EFA as part of their current fundraising campaign.

The cat vomited this morning. Again. Artemis has this habit of gorging her food and then, five minutes later, throwing up wherever she’s standing.

Today it was a projectile effort from the heights of the TV stand, a reddish-brown spatter right across the living room floor.

Remember that last time you threw up? How the acrid stomach acids burnt your throat and mouth? How it felt like it was surging up into the back of your nose? It’s just like that. Freshly warm and mixed with the reek of cheap fish.

You can’t help but get it on your hands as you wipe it up.

I’ll bet just the thought of that smell is causing tightness in your sinuses, clenching in your throat.

Wiping up cat vomit first thing in the morning is rather unpleasant, no?

If wiping up cat vomit is the worst you have to think about today, then you’re one of the luckiest bastards on this planet. It’s not a particularly demanding sacrifice to make in return for some furry companionship.

Today is, of course, Anzac Day, our national memorial for those who’ve made the ultimate sacrifice for our country, and that other country.

After writing a highly personal Anzac Day Rememberings last year, today I wanted to write something equally worthy. As I wandered the house pondering possible themes, Artemis did her projectile vomit trick. I was annoyed and, yes, disgusted. Then I was disgusted at myself for having such a strong reaction to such a minor inconvenience.

War is perhaps a little bit more inconvenient.

Especially for those who have to do the actual combat thing.

Australia is at war today — in Afghanistan and elsewhere. It’s a distant thing, though. Unlike the graphic scenes of our first television war in Vietnam, media is now tightly controlled. We rarely see anything but the approved images of Our Brave Boys and Girls.

And yet it can’t possibly be so neat and tidy.

I was moved by the comments of “War Weary” in Crikey yesterday:

I want nothing to do with commemorating the destruction to mind, body and soul that is war. For my father too, who served close to the full six years in WW2, war was a brain-altering experience.

I have two photos of him from that time: in one taken just before his departure he looks like any other young bloke of his era; and in the second, taken barely 18 months later, he has the gaunt, harrowed face of a man at least twice his age. He survived not one but numerous life-threatening incidents, each of which alone could have led to post-traumatic stress disorder — a condition he never fully recovered from to his death.

My father didn’t drink to drown his terrors. He put a tight lid on them and felt largely ashamed of his inability to keep that lid on. “I’m just not tough enough,” were some of his final words. Ours was a home strictly controlled and dominated by my father’s chronic and largely untreated anxiety and hyper-vigilance, and the necessity to keep him functioning at all costs so that he could earn our keep. It was a different, more subtle kind of violence than that of the alcoholic, but no less destructive.

As a Lebanese friend (born when the war in Lebanon started and knowing nothing else until well into his teens) remarked to me once: “It sounds like there was a war going on inside your home, whereas for me the war was always outside.”

My mother was granted a war widow’s pension after his death — but I felt moved to write a long letter to the Department of Veteran Affairs at the time, describing in summary the damage to all of us, his children. Where was the help for us? Each of us suffered long-term psychological damage, leading to enormous difficulties in establishing and sustaining intimate relationships. All of us have had to fund our own psychological help over many years. Not least this meant that our capacities to contribute positively to our communities were negatively impacted.

While Veterans Affairs and the military today clearly do recognise and attempt to mitigate the psychological damage of war, the grim reality and perniciousness of it have not yet permeated our cultural consciousness.

“War Weary” is right about the psychological damage of war, both on those who serve and on their friends and families. Their story is far from unique.

I remember one long night of chatting and drinking with a mate who’d just returned from… well, from some time away doing whatever it was that he did. He paused for a while. He looked into the distance at nothing in particular, the thousand-yard stare.

Then he started talking again.

Slowly.

Quietly.

You know, the first time you line up someone in your sights and you pull the trigger and see them drop, it’s pretty confronting. After you’ve done it a few times, you don’t… you don’t get used to it, but it does become a little less confronting.

In a firefight, look… everybody’s shooting, all the confusion… you don’t really connect specific acts with specific…

Then he paused again. He took a long slow sip of his beer. What seemed like an eternity passed before he said just one more sentence:

A knife, on the other hand, is a whole lot more personal.

Yes, “War Weary” is right. The psychological damage of war is appalling. But he or she is wrong about Anzac Day.

We don’t commemorate “the destruction to mind, body and soul that is war”. We commemorate the strength and fortitude of the individual men and women who face it, sometimes never to return, or to return… changed.

These men and women make their sacrifices in what we hope is a valuable exchange. Sometimes it’s to protect our very way of living from a clear global threat, and the exchange is clear. Sometimes it’s part of a more complex trade, where the motives are less clear. And sometimes, despite public rhetoric about some great terror, we fear that it’s really just for convenience or commerce.

Yet those men and women choose to serve and, perhaps, to be sacrificed.

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

We trust that our politicians, who decide where and when those men and women serve, make worthy decisions about this most valuable exchange.

Prime Minister Rudd, Sir, are you making worthy decisions? Please look me straight in the eye when you answer that.

[This piece was inspired by re-reading How I decide what and when to blog, and especially the quote therein from Umberto Eco. Photo credits: The rosemary sprig was taken from Matthew Hall's Twitter page from last year. If I owe someone for that usage, I'll make good. The two soldiers were found on a defence industry news website, but I believe the image is © Commonwealth of Australia and therefore usable here.]

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.

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.)

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.

In Getting Duped: How the Media Messes with Your Mind, Yvonne Raley and Robert Talisse write:

One common method of spinning information is the so-called straw man argument. In this tactic, a person summarizes the opposition’s position inaccurately so as to weaken it and then refutes that inaccurate rendition. In a November 2005 speech, for example, President George W Bush responded to questions about pulling troops out of Iraq by saying, “We’ve heard some people say, pull them out right now. That’s a huge mistake. It’d be a terrible mistake. It sends a bad message to our troops, and it sends a bad message to our enemy, and it sends a bad message to the Iraqis.” The statement that unnamed “people” are advocating a troop withdrawal from Iraq “right now” is a straw man, because it exaggerates the opposing viewpoint. Not even the most stalwart Bush adversaries backed an immediate troop withdrawal. Most proposed that the soldiers be sent home over several months, a more reasonable and persuasive plan that Bush undercut with his straw man.

The Weak Man tactic is a twist on this…

As Talisse, co-authors of the 2006 paper which coined the term, explains:

[A] person sets up the opposition’s weakest (or one of its weakest) arguments or proponents for attack, as opposed to misstating a rival’s position as the straw man argument does. In a July 2007 edition of Talking Points, Bill O’Reilly took on a claim by the New York Times that we had lost the war in Iraq by saying that “the New York Times declared defeat in Iraq Sunday on its editorial page, and there’s no question the antiwar movement has momentum.” (The editorial actually said that “some opponents of the Iraq war are toying with the idea of American defeat,” but let us assume that O’Reilly’s characterization was correct.)

O’Reilly then offered a weak man explanation for the purported defeat: “The truth is the Iraqi government and many of its citizens are simply not doing enough to defeat the terrorists and corruption. The USA can’t control that country. No nation could… Unfortunately, the Iraqi failure to help themselves has come true.” Although Iraq’s failure to aid in fighting terrorism and corruption could be why we are losing the war, the troubles in Iraq could also stem from a host of logistical reasons, some of which may shed a negative light on the current administration. O’Reilly, however, kept any discussion of these reasons offstage, suppressing the various other possible — and possibly more likely — reasons for “defeat” in Iraq. Meanwhile his claims that the “USA can’t control that country” and that “no nation could” deflected blame from the US government.

Hat-tip to 3 quarks daily.

I watched the video.

I cried.