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Pleas for attention | Sep 17, 2004 12:01

Phillip Layton Edwards, having been convicted of manslaughter rather than the murder of David McNee, has now been sentenced to nine years' jail, with the (relatively unlikely) possibility of parole after four and a half years.

It's less the sentence I find troubling - in that it's commensurate with the offence of manslaughter - than the basis on which the manslaughter verdict was reached. If you haven't read Peter Wells' essay for The Listener, A lonely death, then I would recommend it. It's beautifully written and offers a perspective on the trial that didn't really come through in the other media.

Winston Peters, on the other hand, appears to have had his own interests uppermost as he has pursued an alleged scandal related to police handling of the case. From the safety of Parliament he has made a string of unsubstantiated allegations, moving on from one to another before the fizz goes out of it - and not being too bothered about who gets hurt along the way.

Yesterday, he claimed that the police withheld information that Edwards had shared amyl nitrate and Viagra with McNee before services were performed, and "experts know that it leads to psychotic behaviour." Meanwhile, the police held a conference to list and refute the previous allegations.

Peters won't care. Unlike the New Zealand Herald, he's in no danger of having legal action taken against him, and he's had plenty of headlines out of it all. Which was, of course, the point.

Speaking of desperate pleas for attention, at least Rodney Hide is being consistent. If you're going to urge the government to send troops into Iraq when it seems like a good way to curry favour, the least you can do is hold the line when the idea has become ridiculous.

Thus, Rodders called defence minister Mark Burton a "pinko pacifist" in Parliament yesterday, and was then obliged to withdraw the comment. There's an MP3 of the exchange here.

He's crowing about it in his blog, to the feverish agreement of some of his regular comments crew.

Look, these soldiers are engineers: they entered Iraq on a basic assumption of having the security to do their jobs. They simply don't have that, and things are getting worse. It makes a lot more sense to bring them home now than to wait until something ghastly happens. Perhaps Rodney and his team could form a brave battalion of their own, because it certainly appears that there will be few if any other governments putting their people into Iraq now.

Sticking with the all-turning-to-shit theme, Sydney Blumenthal's Far graver than Vietnam story for The Guardian is pretty mind-blowing, if really just a straightforward consult-the-experts yarn:

But, according to the US military's leading strategists and prominent retired generals, Bush's war is already lost. Retired general William Odom, former head of the National Security Agency, told me: "Bush hasn't found the WMD. Al-Qaida, it's worse, he's lost on that front. That he's going to achieve a democracy there? That goal is lost, too. It's lost." He adds: "Right now, the course we're on, we're achieving Bin Laden's ends."

Retired general Joseph Hoare, the former marine commandant and head of US Central Command, told me: "The idea that this is going to go the way these guys planned is ludicrous. There are no good options. We're conducting a campaign as though it were being conducted in Iowa, no sense of the realities on the ground. It's so unrealistic for anyone who knows that part of the world. The priorities are just all wrong."

Jeffrey Record, professor of strategy at the Air War College, said: "I see no ray of light on the horizon at all. The worst case has become true. There's no analogy whatsoever between the situation in Iraq and the advantages we had after the second world war in Germany and Japan."

Adam Bogacki noted this Sydney Morning Herald story in which a commercial trend-spotter says that US foreign policy is now hurting American's brands.

Does John Banks run an office, or a personality cult? For the second time this week, one of his staff has become involved in the maoyal campaign in a rather strange and possibly inappropriate fashion. First it was his press secretary Cameron Brewer, supposedly on his lunchbreak, heckling the Dear Leader's opponents on his boss's behalf and then, more seriously, trotting off and using the ratepayers' time to upload his pictures from the mayoral debate to Banks' campaign website. How often has this sort of thing been happening?

Then, last night, his "long-serving" ("long-suffering", surely?) personal assistant Trish Wanden was shouting and finger-pointing at Dick Hubbard at another mayoral debate. This is, presumably, all quite deliberate. It suits Banks to make the campaign as nasty, angry and irrational as he can. David Farrar begs to differ, congratulating the pair for "exercising their civil rights".

If you say so David. But really, this is silly: " It is interesting though that Banskie's staff are out there supporting their boss, while Hubbard's staff are not, presumably as they are too busy stopworking and/or striking!" No David, it's more probable that in the first case they were actually working, and in the second they were home with their families. I presume Hubbard doesn't feel the need to draft in his staff as a campaign rent-a-crowd. It is, after all, not what they're paid for.

Riverbend is back, talking about the brain-boiling heat in Baghdad last month and watching a bootleg of Fahrenheit 9/11 …

And, finally, who would've thought that it would be Jim Anderton who would front the really quite enlightened Misuse of Drugs Amendment Bill? Changes to the bill will allow the government to restrict or otherwise manage the supply of some recreational drugs without outright criminalising them. BZP-based party pills, and solvents, will be the first two substances to be treated this way (although, really, that's about the only thing they have in common). Other drugs (2C-I, perhaps?) could be added to the new categories in future. Interesting.

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I'm a New Zealander, get me out of here! | Sep 16, 2004 12:18

Clearly, this is the right time for New Zealand's lightly-armed engineering corp to be gotten the hell out of Iraq. Although the Minister of Defence is, inevitably, offering a benign explanation - the troops have simply reached the end of their year-long posting, former defence chief Air Marshal Carey Adamson wasn't beating about the bush in this morning's Dom Post lead story:

"... what's happening now is that everyone's a combatant whether they want to be one or not. As time has gone on the situation has become much more lethal and no one can guarantee their absolute safety."

NZ First's Ron Mark has welcomed the decision to bring the troops home, but clearly technical issues at the National and Act parties' press offices have prevented the issuing of forthright statements calling for the continued presence of New Zealand forces in Iraq. How odd.

A current Knight-Ridder wire story includes even bleaker assessments from both former senior military personnel and (anonymously) administration officials:

Many experts on Iraq say the best that can be hoped for now is continued chaos that falls short of a civil war.

"The overall prospects ... are for a violent political future," said Jeffrey White, a former senior Defense Intelligence Agency analyst ...

One senior administration official deeply engaged in Iraq policy said the new U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, the huge Central Intelligence Agency station there and the U.S. military command are working together far better than they previously did and collecting much better and more refined information on the insurgency. However, the official said, the recent improvements may not be enough to overcome setbacks caused by mistakes that date back to inadequate prewar planning.

"We've finally got our act together, but it's probably too late," said the official, who spoke only on the condition of anonymity because he's more pessimistic than the administration's official line on Iraq.

CBS News has some numbers, and Andi Henderson pointed me to this Sydney Morning Herald story which quotes the private security firm AKE Asia Pacific's assessment of the danger in Iraq:

AKE updates its security rating each week. At present Baghdad rates 62 out of 100. North and south Iraq are both 49. A rating of 40-49 indicates widespread militancy, 60-69 "advanced guerilla/civil war" and 90-100 is "total war (sub-nuclear)".

On this scale, Baghdad is not the most dangerous place on earth. Chechnya rates 72.

ABC Radio in Australia ran a report from its foreign affairs editor in Baghdad:

We're seeing kidnappings in the centre of Baghdad that we haven't seen the like of before. 30 armed men coming in and pulling those two Italian women and a couple of Iraqis out of their house.

We've had a over the weekend on Sunday, we had five car bombs in and around Baghdad, 13 or 14 rockets and mortars rained down on the green zone and one of them landed at a building behind my here as a matter of fact.

Today we've had that huge car bomb that you saw. There was another one outside the planning ministry. It didn't achieve its aim. Only the driver of that car was killed.

And just in the last little while there's been another attack in central Baghdad, a roadside bomb which struck a column of three four-wheel drive vehicles, completely destroying one of them. The other two managed to escape. Not sure at this stage how many people died there.

So certainly the temperature is hotting up.

And - hey ho! - the Ashburton Guardian has earned itself a notice on Today in Iraq for this editorial:

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, the War on Terror is a joke.

It never really added up. The Americans should have known better. They won the War of Independence by refusing to take on huge standing armies.

They preferred to fight the British on their own ground and on terms of their own choosing.

They should know that it's silly to chase terrorists with large standing armies.

Terrorists don't obligingly line up in formation to fight conventional armies. They hide among civilians and they target civilians as well as soldiers. When innocent people are killed by US army or Iraqi police retaliation, the terrorists gain recruits.

In military terms, chasing terrorists with armies doesn't add up. It's a bit like invading Russia in winter. You'll end up regretting it.

Terrorists are gaining a lot more recruits in Iraq and elsewhere.The bomb attack on the Australian embassy in Jakarta was obviously timed to remind the world that terror groups like Jemaah Islamiya, the Southeast Asian arm of al Qaeda is alive and thriving.

Effectively, the Americans have Fallujah-ised most of Iraq: created a situation where they cannot move against insurgents without creating further anger and distress amongst the civilian public. And now, the US Marine general responsible for Fallujah is telling reporters that he opposed both his original orders to attack the city and the later flip-flop instruction for him to withdraw. The upshot was the world of both worlds:

Lt. Gen. James Conway, the outgoing commander of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Unit, told the Washington Post he resisted called for revenge after four American security workers were killed and mutilated in Fallujah March 31. Instead, civilian authorities, Coalition Provisional Chief Paul Bremer and the White House, decided to send the Marines in to capture or kill the perpetrators

The Guardian's Ghaith Abdul-Ahad (aka onetime blogger Gee in Baghdad) describes the murder of Baghdad civilians from a US helicopter gunship.

Meanwhile, the White House is trying to slide over billions of dollars budgeted for reconstruction (only 6% of which have been spent) into the security effort (which, amazingly, isn't even counted towards the current year's US fiscal deficit because it's apparently too hard to assess). The New York-based Forward newspaper has an interesting editorial on the security implications of the deficit itself:

Right now, a steadily increasing share of our growing national debt is being bought up by a handful of foreign governments, not all of them friendly. Like any other debtor nation, America will eventually face restrictions on its freedom of action. The day will come, sooner than most of us realize, when our creditors will demand a say in our policies both at home and abroad. When that day comes, those who support the current administration because they think it keeps America strong and independent — and guarantees Israel's safety — will have a lot of explaining to do.

Forward also interviews Senator Bob Graham on his claims that the Bush administration killed an investigation into a Saudi connection to the 9/11 hijackers (which makes Michael Moore's theory seem a bit less wild-eyed) and that hundreds of Hezbollah operatives have been allowed to set up shop in the US.

Everywhere you look, it appears to be the most spectacular fuck-up imaginable. And yet all this stuff seems to berunning well behind arguments about what the candidates did or didn't do 30 years ago as an issue in the US presidential campaign.

Speaking of which, NoRightTurn and Josh Marshall both look at what might be the key to the CBS memos story: the statement by Colonel Killian's former secretary that the CBS documents are forgeries but they're true - in that they reflect both Killian's view of Bush's conduct in the National Guard and documents which did exist at the time but have been oddly mislaid. Marshall also notes previous lies by Bush on the campaign trail about how he came to get his soft Guard posting, and points to further evidence of embarrassing documents from his record having been withheld.

It all makes last night's Face the Nation interview with the Auckland mayoral candidates seem like a bit of a laugh - which it was, I suppose. While Kim Hill gurned away furiously, John Banks spoke as if he was not so much mayor of Auckland as president for life. Silly, solipsistic and bumptious, Banks blathered on about "my city council … our city council …" and contrived to give the impression that he alone was responsible for the city's economy.

Trouble is, it clearly unnerves his rival Dick Hubbard, and it sort of works on voters too. I have had a number of conversations lately with chaps who say, earnestly that Banks might be a prick, but "at least he makes things happen". I have started asking them exactly what he has made happen. There's never an answer …

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Major Barney | Sep 14, 2004 09:20

John Barnett has come out swinging on the New Zealand Idol funding issue in a comment piece on the OnFilm website. Critics of New Zealand On Air's $450,000 grant/loan/equity investment in New Zealand's adoption of the Idol franchise.

Barnett, as anyone who's ever had an indignant email from him will know, possesses a brutally effective rhetorical style. In this case he maintains that critics of the funding arrangement don't know what they're talking about: they're asking the wrong questions, they don't understand how either TV funding or the Idol franchise works.

He is, as ever, a little too ready to declare anyone who thinks differently to be an idiot. But is the case that the funding was not well explained or understood at the outset. NZOA and the government did characterise the money first as a loan and then as an "equity investment". The arrangement, because it is commercially sensitive, remains opaque. It's still not really clear to me exactly what constituted TVNZ's start-up costs on entry to Idol, nor what actually needs to happen for NZOA to get out of the venture with its original investment. On the face of it, the investment breached NZOA's policy of not funding offshore formats (although, as Barnett points out, it has happened in the past without comment).

And Steve Maharey's claim in Parliament that the Idol investment "has allowed hundreds of thousands of young New Zealanders to get into the music industry" is, to put it mildly, silly. The programme's long-term impact on the local music industry very much remains to be seen.

But, on balance, I agree with Barney. Even if NZOA never gets a cent back, in terms of what TV usually costs to make, $450,000 for 24 hours of television that captures the attention and imagination of a vast slice of the public is a snip. NZ Idol told us more about ourselves than most of the rinky-dink documentaries that get made with public money. If the point of NZOA is to foster the production of programming that (a) gets screened, (b) gets watched, and (c) feeds the national discourse, then Idol was a good investment.

Meanwhile, how about that Roger Federer? The appeal - well, grounds for appeal - of sport is that sometimes it's an opportunity to to watch someone do something supernaturally well. The performing arts offer the same thing, but in general you can't watch someone be a great businessperson or even a painter in real-time.

Watching Federer put away Leighton Hewitt yesterday, it was sometimes hard to believe what we were seeing. He casually makes shots that great players dream of making. John McEnroe, who ought to know, informed us that we just might be watching the best tennis player ever. As evidenced by his lapse into error in the second set of the US Open final suggests, Federer's greatest opponent at this point in his career is simply himself.

It's not just that Federer's got game: it's that he's got so much game.

Is somebody helping Dick Hubbard with his campaign? He has some more policies up as promised, and they do indicate a broader, more inclusive and, crucially, more coherent vision that than offered by the incumbent mayor - but somebody should explain to him that relying on your potential voters reading the newspaper is a risky bet in Auckland. Many Aucklanders do, on the other hand, spend a lot of time sitting in traffic with nothing to look at but campaign billboards.

Well, Putin hasn't wasted any time. Having hoisted the War on Terror banner, he is now defending freedom and democracy by starting to abolish it. It's pretty clear that no one can really stop him. If you missed Juan Cole's post on al-Qaeda and who's really winning the War on Terror, you really should read it. Also, Daily Kos ponders the all-turning-to-shit status of post-sovereignty Iraq.

Finally, I got the new Lonely Planet guide to New Zealand in the post yesterday. I was most pleased, because I wrote a reasonable chunk of it (several thousand words on 'The Culture') and I'm very happy with the way it reads in print. They were nice folks to deal with, too.

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Flap | Sep 13, 2004 10:15

The flap over the forged-or-not memos that reflect badly on Bush's National Guard service - and, more particularly, indicate that he has previously lied about same - is beyond bizarre. If the CBS papers are fakes, who's the source? It's really impossible to assess the competing forensic claims about the documents from this distance, but Kevin Drum points out that not only did USA Today say last week that it also had obtained copies of the memos from its own sources - it posted some more as PDFs on its website. This seems to rather strongly work against the idea that CBS News was the victim of a sting. But I have no idea where this one is going to go ...

Meanwhile, all hell is breaking loose in Iraq. Juan Cole speculates on what exactly is going on.

National's new health spokesperson Judith Collins appears to have signalled her style by proposing an amendment to the Care of Children Bill that would forbid confidentiality in cases of abortion for girls under 16 - and dismissing the objections of the Royal New Zealand College of General Practitioners and the New Zealand Medical Association as "bollocks" (is that a medical term?). All of us would hope that in such cases the rule would be that parents were notified and involved - but legislating to dictate that parents must be informed, regardless of the domestic situation, seems foolhardy.

The experience in US states that have passed such measures is, as Collins notes, fewer abortions. In many cases it also appears to have led to later, riskier abortions (because of the need for the patient to appear in court to seek a waiver), more out-of-state abortions and more unwanted pregnancies. The ACLU has a fact sheet and there's another one here.

I've just, a tiny bit belatedly, sent in my verdict in the "best publication" category of the Aotearoa Student Press Association awards, which are handed out this Friday. It looks to me like the standard has risen since last year, lending weight to the view that the student press is on a roll.

Further evidence: the relaunch of the one-time VUW rebel mag Lucid as a national publication. The most impressive thing about the new Lucid is the standard of sub-editing. Below the level of the country's marquee magazines - and especially in the yoof press - you are often likely to encounter poor spelling, bad grammar and crap sentences. But Lucid is tight. It doesn't bother with kind of gritty news coverage you'll see in Salient or Critic, and I'd expect to see more reportage in the features next time, but it's full of good writing and contains humour that is actually funny. Gotta love Newtown Ghetto Anger too. But if those little circles are so easy to draw, surely he should be knocking out a strip a week …

The B-Nets were the usual annual riot on Friday night, although there weren't any you-had-to-be-there performances of the order of last year's offerings from Scribe and the D4 (Scribe's off in London to play Notting Hill Carnival and Roots Manuva's birthday). I fancied I did quite well to get out of the after-party alive by 2am. Gareth Shute kindly offered me a copy of his book Hip Hop Music in Aotearoa and even more kindly dropped it around to my house over the weekend. It's a really nice book. I feel some pride about getting a few emergent local rappers - including Upper Hutt Posse, playing their second Auckland gig - on stage at the two Housequake! dance parties I staged in early 1989 (15 years ago!), during a summer back from London, and it's fun reading about it all.

Finally, ladies and gentlemen please show your appreciation for Rob O'Neill, whose regular blog, Heat, bows out today. Rob's a very fine chap and I'm grateful to have had his contributions on Public Address. I'll buy him a drink next time he ventures over this way. And I'm delighted to announced that the key role of expat correspondent in Australia will be taken up by Che Tibby, who has absolutely earned his stripes and will have a permablog with us as soon as we can choose a colour and knock up a masthead. Righto …

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