ASIO To Appeal Scott Parkin Verdict.

It is now possible that the outcome of Scott Parkin's Federal Court case will become a Federal election issue. Spook-squad ASIO have been granted leave to appeal the verdict. Should their appeal fail the Howard Government's only option will be to censor the issue on grounds of national security. Given the timespans involved this decision may be taken just before the next Great Australian Opinion Poll.

It's an amazing amount of fuss over a few peanut butter sandwiches. We know ASIO were aware of a file about them, as its existence was reported in a world-renowned US magazine. We know that ASIO would have, given that Parkin's prior activities were in the US, made its security clearance based on US intelligence. We can make a fair guess from this (as I've said before) that ASIO was at least aware of the Pentagon's Parkin file.

What we can be sure of ASIO having, however, was the looming date of September 11 2005 and a notion in their heads that a "security threat" story released on that date would have considerably added dramatic impact in highlighting the need for increasingly alert security agents.

I'm also pretty certain that many in the Australian Cabinet, particularly the Ministers for Immigration and Foreign Affairs, would have been happy to please Dick Cheney. An antagonist of the former Halliburton CEO's business interests would have been too good a target to miss. A story publishable on September 11 of security, immigration and federal agents working together to catch a dangerous activist would, you'd have to think, be too tempting a propaganda exercise not to attempt to enact. Was the apple in Parkin's eye too devilishly delightful for PM Howard's Sons of Adam and Daughters of Eve to resist? Here's a good adage that works for me- it's that "if something is too good to be true, then it probably is." It might also work for senior Liberal politicians.

The lawyer representing the Director General of Security told the Federal Court that it's decision to allow Parkin to read documents leading to his adverse classification could cause irreparable.harm unless it was was set aside. Charles Gunst, QC, for ASIO boss Paul O'Sullivan, said it was expected that ASIO ransack its files and open them for scrutiny. He said the resulting identification of documents might cause harm to national security. He also told the court that its earlier decision provided a precedent in which applicants could have access to documents merely by asserting without proof that a wrong decision had been made in their security assessments. It would seem that ASIO are fairly grumpy to be on the receiving end of their own style of tactics, and the possibility of being probed without choice.

In a War On Terror with such a major propaganda front, that the co-operative efforts of US and Australian intelligence communities has lead to such inept mishandling of a single Halliburton protester would make Coalition Of The Willing information gathering once again appear incredibly incompetent. This, have no doubt, would be regarded as a scenario not in the Australian national interest. Increasingly intense legalities serve to demonstrate the perceived severity of the situation.

The fact ASIO have gone to such extraordinary lengths to protect their knowledge of Parkin implies that whatever they're concealing will not be revealed. Should they fail in their appeal they still have a final option. Attorney General Ruddock can exercise his self-ordained powers to silence the matter. It's highly likely that, if a verdict that ASIO deems inappropriate is returned, and given such publicly stressed importance of overturning the court's verdict, Ruddock might be forced to act. The Federal Court will be aware of such a possibility.

Justice Peter Heerey said the matter raised important issues about the court process and national security. In other words, this has now become the litmus-test of the relationship between the Australian legal and intelligence systems.

Given that the Parkin case has taken all of this year to get this far, there's a strong possibility that the verdict on the ASIO appeal will not be handed down till the latter part of next year, when Prime Minister Howard is expected to call an election. This could mean that the Australian Government, already facing a public that is suspicious of co-operation with the Bush Administration over the invasion of Iraq, may face a public voting after having recently seen an action of unprecedented ASIO authoritianism. On the other hand it may finally have just been informed of Government supervised deceit and negligence by the agency that is supposed to be one of our front-line champions in this war.

The ultimate choice will be our Prime Minister's. Whichever way he goes, the Australian judiciary will eagerly await his verdict to determine how much more power he will have over it in the future. If our legal system tells the public to fear its legislators on the eve of an election, Mr Howard himself may finally have something to fear... an electorate voting to protect its civil liberties.

Court quotes sourced from The Age.

AWB- Sham, Scam, Shame.

Australian government officials have bribed and lied and found themselves to be as untainted as newborns.

Our Prime Minister, Foreign Minister and Trade Minister are innocent. It wasn't their fault that a government agency was paying bloody money to a dictactor that Australia was about to go to war with. Anyway, if they didn't read all the cables from everybody trying to tell them what was going on, how could they possibly know.

The first Cole Inquiry stories are bouncing around the world pretty quickly... I picked up the AP version from the Houston Chronicle. You'll find that a lot of US Farmers are going to be interested in this result. The US Democrats certainly, are. They weren't running the inquiry when the Australian ambassador asked for it to be ignored in support of Howard's re-election. They are most certainly in charge now.

Opposition leader Beazley's claims that the inquiry was rigged by it's terms of reference are correct. There was no way that this inquiry was ever going to able to find a minister or a department guilty. The talented side-stepper Attorney General Ruddock made sure of this a year ago.

Our PM has been very quick to claim the proven innocence of his ministers... do you think he's had a long weekend worrying about it?

Anyway.. over to you, US Democrats. We can't serve justice upon these charlatans while they make their own rules. I hope you have better luck

Bringing In The Sheaves

Talk about whistleblowing! In order to save his own skin (or parts thereof) the former AWB chairman has exposed our Prime and Foreign Ministers as liars of the worst kind. This is not a matter of "core or non-core" promises but of a national leader being deceitful regarding his decision to engage his country in a war.

Our leader told us that Australia had not considered invading Iraq until the UN debates that occurred not long before Coalition forces jumped the border (after the Australian SAS's head start.). Now we learn that Australia's ambassador to the UN was laying groundwork for the military action a year before the event.

If UN ambassador John Dauth had his ear to the ground he would have been aware, at least from US intelligence circles if not from the suddenly deaf ASIO, of the AWB payment system. You can guess that Dauth was concerned about that information going public. He was cetainly concerned enough to let Trevor Flugge have what could only be described as extremely sensitive and privileged information.

What Flugge did with this advance knowledge amazes me. While USAid were preparing a program to resuscitate Iraq's agriculture system. Flugge's approach to the same problem was to stuff the boot of his car with a couple of million dollars in cash to give out where he considered appropriate.

At the same time as Flugge was driving around throwing money out the window, our Foreign Minister was trying to keep the wheat boats sailing. Knowing that the boatload on it's way wouldn't be regarded as Food-for-Oil, Downer tried, to the UN's disgust and disallowance, to have it recategorised as post-war aid.

If Australia's ambassador to the UN knew about Australia's invasion plans then it is highly unlikely that our Foreign Minister and Prime Minister did not. If Messrs Howard and Downer kept this knowledge secret and gave us another story then they should hold themselves accountable for such an enourmous deception.

While we're talking about lies, I'd like to revisit a big one that Downer made last April when an Adelaide based Iraqi Professor Of Agriculture Kays Jumas was gunned down by Australian corporate military personnel. At the time Downer downplayed the death as an example of the low-calibre of CMPs when in fact Jumas was shot by an elite Australian outfit.

If Downer was deceiving again then the wheat inquires have been missing a possibly very important witness. I hope that even if Commissioner Cole has been unable to look at this aspect that the new US inquiry will examine the circumstances.

Now that we know that we were mislead by our government in both the motives and the stage-timing of this deathly plundering, a call should be made for our relevant Cabinet members to step aside until exhonorated.

I'm sick of the lies, sick of all the deaths being treated as debating points, and tired of watching our leaders spout the rhetoric without care. Whatever it takes to end this fiasco, it's time to do it.

Masters Of War- University Of Adelaide Degrees

Tired of KBR getting all the engineering jobs? Looking for a career in building Weapons Of Mass Destruction? Adelaide Uni can help. They're now training engineers for more advanced construction work, at least up to the technology level that Raytheon allows us local savages to access.

It's odd for the university to now announce that it has been been running the specialised maritime engineering program for a year already, instead of at the program's initial implementation. Given that the start of the academic year was just before the South Australian elections I wonder if the story might have been considered politically inappropriate at the time. To me it seemed that the whole concept of the Defence State, complete with number plates and BAE bus shelter ads, seemed to have been shelved in the last pre-election four weeks. In such a context I can understand a reticence for publicity.

The ASC's head explains that "The Masters degree will greatly accelerate up-skilling and, in time, strengthen Australia's indigenous naval engineering capability."

Indigenous knowledge- we seemed to be hearing a lot of that sort of thing when everybody was announcing the AWD construction deal last year, especially from Defence Minister Hill. The CEO of Raytheon Australia was a little more weasly regarding the "local knowledge" topic last year. He explained to the Australian-Israeli Chamber of Commerce that "All of our employees in Raytheon Australia are Australian, but if we need deeper specialist expertise or assistance in transferring technology to this country we can call upon any number of engineers and other experts to assist."

"We, in Raytheon Australia, use the term “Reach Back” to describe this key asset that allows us to draw upon Raytheon’s global resources."

In other words, the REAL knowdedge, the most important formulae and data pertinent to assimilating US warheads with local ships, will never be allowed near South Australian minds.

Downer's Dog Days

Poor Alexander Downer! His leash has been cut, he's about to receive the political equivalent of a snip from the vet, and everyone's trying to put him down.

It's bad enough that through the demise of the Bush Administration's power supply he's just been demoted from alsatian to poodle, but now that the the Democrats are about to control the US' own Australian Wheat Bribe investigations, he's just lost the "flea collar" of ministerial non-accountablility that he buried in Commissioner Terence Cole's terms of reference. No matter what Cole says when he hands down his findings in the next few weeks, Downer is about to be judged by the US Congress. Where Cole can't find Downer guilty of participating in one of the more heinous war crimes of the Iraq invasion. Democrat congressmen can, and probably will, banish him from the international political arena as punishment for his crimes.

Of particular interest to new inquiry chairmen is the Republican response to Australian requests to provide a smokescreen before the last Australian Federal election. Australian ambassador to the US Michael Thawley made a quiet plea that the investigation into Australian corruption be shelved to avoid any pre-poll embarrassment to PM Howard, and Bush's henchmen were happy to comply. Thawley was rewarded for his act of heroism by being made a Vice President of a mult-billion dollar pension fund.

I'll be interested to see how Thawley conducts himself in this matter. Will he fall on his sword by saying that it was his own idea to intercede, or will he reveal the chain of communication from Howard and Downer that would show the US public exactly who the war criminals are in this matter.

With another Australian election on the horizon, the likelihood of the matter being swept under the rug again is extremely negligible. Our PM may face a situation where he has to lose some of his key players in an attempt to maintain political survival. I predict there will be an empty kennel in the back yard a monogrammed bowl that is no longer licked. But late at night, when the moon is full and the wind is blowing in the right direction, perhaps you'll hear a howl.

Australian Federal Court Backs Halliburton Protester Scott Parkin



The Australian Federal Court has announcedoday that deported activist Scott Parkin does have a right to know why ASIO deported him. The court has granted Parkin access to the ASIO documentation used in his negative security classification.


On the day before Septemberr 11 last year Parkin was arrested and placed in solitary confinement amidst claims he was a violent activist. He was portrayed in Australian September 11 media as a threat to Australian security. Newsweek reported in January that the Pentagon had kept a file on Parkin handing out sandwiches as a protest for Halliburton's food charges in Iraq. It is likely Australian intelligence agency ASIO declared that Parkin was a potentially violent activist on the strength of this file's existence, though it's unknown if ASIO were allowed to read it.

Parkin told Australian ABC Radio today that he'd be "..thrilled to come back to Australia." and that he feels he has been vindicated.

Spy agency ASIO can still appeal to the High Court, and if this fails Australian Attorney General Phillip Ruddock can still have the information witheld under grounds of national security.

Why The Kovco Inquiry Findings Were Delayed

I've got a theory as to why the inquiry findings into the death of Private Jake Kovco are not being released till next year. In both Australia and the US sentiment against the war in Iraq has never been higher, and the control of US Congress may be decided on this issue, as it might in Australia next year.

The circumstances surrounding Kovco's death are being considered unfortunate by some and negligent by others. Testimonies have referred to the inappropriate cleaning up of evidence and confusion in details of evidence by comrades in close proximity. Then there's the accidental switching of bodies that led to the remains of a deceased Bosnian contractor being flown to Australia instead of the fallen soldier.

That the information has been witheld in a case such as this, in which so many people are concerned as to what might have transpired, shows the concern of our military and government that the current political climate is considered inappropriate to divulging "sensitive" data, and also that the release of information regarding events of the war in Iraq in being very carefully controlled by military and government propagandists.