Memo to Gillard and Obama: So what is the precise difference?

Try and pick the “anti-American” “terrorist” ”traitor” who should be prosecuted and deserves to die from the reputable newspaper which is reporting on foreign affairs.
Yes, it’s the Australian citizen and Wikileaks editor who should be assassinated.

Where is the logic when both editors have published identical material on the same day from the same original source?

Well, there is no logic being applied by Prime Minister Gillard and President Obama as heads of their respective governments.
Nor is logic something being practiced by sections of the international media, as evidenced from the U.S. Fox News excerpt above where it is very evident that none of the speakers have actually read any of the cables they mention.

It is becoming increasingly hard to believe that current Swedish legal moves against the Wikileaks editor are not now perverted by design so as to eventually see him extradited to the United States.

Something which will eventually involve the reputation of British Prime Minister David Cameron and his government:

Informal discussions have already taken place between US and Swedish officials over the possibility of the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange being delivered into American custody, according to diplomatic sources.
Mr Assange is in a British jail awaiting extradition proceedings to Sweden after being refused bail at Westminster Magistrates’ Court despite a number of prominent public figures offering to stand as surety.
His arrest in north London yesterday was described by the US Defence Secretary Robert Gates as “good news”, and may pave the way for extradition to America and a possible lengthy jail sentence.

Examples of the published cables:

The New York Times published online, Executive editor W. Keller, 2 December 2010:

Date 2009-08-06 05:28:00 Source Embassy Kabul Classification SECRET S E C R E T KABUL 002246 SIPDIS DEPARTMENT FOR SRAP, SCA/A, INL, EUR/PRM, INR, OSD FOR
FLOURNOY, CENTCOM FOR CG CJTF-82, POLAD, JICENT KABUL FOR
COS USFOR-AE.O. 12958: DECL: 08/01/2019
TAGS: PREL, PGOV, MARR, AF
SUBJECT: COMPLAINTS TO GIROA ON PRE-TRIAL RELEASES AND
PARDONS OF NARCO-TRAFFICKERSREF: REFTEL KABUL 02245 Classified By: DEPUTY AMBASSADOR FRANCIS J. RICCIAR DONE FOR REASONS 1.4
(B) AND (D)1.

(S) SUMMARY: On numerous occasions we have emphasized with
Attorney General Aloko the need to end interventions by him
and President Karzai, who both authorize the release of
detainees pre-trial and allow dangerous individuals to go
free or re-enter the battlefield without ever facing an
Afghan court. On July 29th, Legal Adviser Harold Hongju Koh
and Deputy Ambassador Frances Ricciardone demarched Attorney
General Muhammad Ishaq Aloko about our concern over pre-trial
releases and presidential pardons of narco-traffickers
(Reftel Kabul 02245) In Spring 2008, Post had previous
demarched National Security Advisor Rassoul about our concern
over pre-trial releases. Despite our complaints and
expressions of concern to the GIRoA, pre-trial releases
continue. END SUMMARY

Wikileaks published online, Senior editor J. Assange, 2 December 2010:

VZCZCXYZ0001OO RUEHWEBDE RUEHBUL #2246 2180528ZNY SSSSS ZZHO 060528Z AUG 09 ZDKFM AM EMBASSY KABULTO SECS TATE WASH DC IMMEDIATE 0662S E C R E T KABUL 002246SIPDIS DEPARTMENT FOR SRAP, SCA/A, INL, EUR/PRM, INR, OSD FORFLOURNOY, CENTCOM FOR CG CJTF-82, POLAD, JICENT KABUL FORCOS USFOR-AE.O. 12958: DECL: 08/01/2019 TAGS: PREL PGOV MARR AF SUBJECT: COMPLAINTS TO GIROA ON PRE-TRIAL RELEASES ANDPARDONS OF NARCO-TRAFFICKERSREF: REFTEL KABUL 02245Classified By: DEPUTY AMBASSADOR FRANCIS J. RICCIAR DONE FOR REASONS 1.4(B) AND (D)

¶1. (S) SUMMARY: On numerous occasions we have emphasized withAttorney General Aloko the need to end interventions by himand President Karzai, who both authorize the release ofdetainees pre-trial and allow dangerous individuals to gofree or re-enter the battlefield without ever facing anAfghan court. On July 29th, Legal Adviser Harold Hongju Kohand Deputy Ambassador Frances Ricciardone demarched AttorneyGeneral Muhammad Ishaq Aloko about our concern over pre-trialreleases and presidential pardons of narco-traffickers(Reftel Kabul 02245) In Spring 2008, Post had previousdemarched National Security Advisor Rassoul about our concernover pre-trial releases. Despite our complaints andexpressions of concern to the GIRoA, pre-trial releasescontinue. END SUMMARY

Looking for Mr. Good Stork

The Australian Federal Government’s My Hospitals website is up and running and I decided to see what is said about hospitals on the NSW North Coast.

With a bit of nudging the lists from the mid to far North Coast came up here and here. Then the fun began when linking to hospitals in the Clarence Valley.

According to the new website there were no births at Maclean District Hospital in the financial year 2008-09, which was to be expected as its maternity section was closed down years ago despite community protests.

Grafton Base Hospital had 478 births + <10 births in the same financial year. Again something to be expected as it is the only relatively large hospital in the area and it usually records births it the vicinity of four hundred or so.

Wondering how these figures compared with the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) regional profile for the Clarence Valley local government area I went looking.

I found that birth numbers didn’t quite add up when one compares My Hospitals and ABS data, even when the former is operating on financial year dates and the latter on calendar year dates.

The ABS has 278 births recorded in Grafton Statistical Area for year ended 31 December 2008 and no births recorded for the Clarence Valley Local Government Area in the year ending 31 December 2009.

An official 2009 zero birth rate was taking things a bit too far, so who isn’t keeping accurate records? The ABS, local court houses, someone else? Or did bad weather blow The Stork off course?

Well Clarence Valley residents may actually in part be the culprits when it comes to accurate record keeping. Because it appears that Australians don’t always promptly register the births of those little bundles of joy.

Elsewhere on the ABS website it states:

Of the 295,700 births registered in Australia during 2009, 88% occurred in 2009. A further 9% occurred in 2008, and the remainder (3%) occurred in 2007 or earlier. It is expected that some births, particularly those that occur in November and December, may not be registered until the following year.

Now in New South Wales parents are responsible for registering the birth of their newborn within 60 days.
However, somewhere in Australia in 2009 (presumably including NSW) over 8,000 people probably turned up at the court house or registry office with a one and a half to three year-old child in tow and told the clerk that the toddler holding their hands actually existed. Others obviously went in after the Christmas and New Year’s Eve parties were over to inform the world that their family had grown.

How long will The Reject Shop last in Yamba?

Maud Up The Street tells me that yet another bargain store is trying its luck in Yamba Fair shopping centre. This must be at least the fourth such store which has parked itself in the same spot in the last ten or so years.
Maud reckons it’s losing customers already because it assumes that everyone coming through its door is a potential shoplifter – ‘let me look in your bag’ seems to be the mantra - and not a month into this store’s life media reports are also saying the whole chain is just not drawing a big enough crowd:
“THE worst Christmas "for a very long time" has seen The Reject Shop slash its profit forecast - and its shares savaged. Investors wiped more than 20 per cent off the low-end retailer's share price, while the shock profit warning sent shudders through the nation's retailers and weighed on the shares of other retailers.
Reject Shop chief executive Chris Bryce blamed the Reserve Bank of Australia's increase in interest rates in early November for a sudden drop in customers through its 195 shops.”

Very interesting Abib titbits......

This has not been Australian Senator Mark Arbib's week for positive media coverage. Abib is the current duty senator for the NSW North Coast seat of Lyne, which must - ahem - reassure the sitting federal member and his electorate.

• In recent months there have been media reports that Senator Arbib has been undermining Ms Gillard but Labor insiders deny this.
  
  
• Secret US embassy cables obtained by WikiLeaks and made available exclusively to The Age reveal that Senator Arbib, one of the architects of Kevin Rudd's removal as prime minister, has been in regular contact with US embassy officers.
  His candid comments have been incorporated into reports to Washington with repeated requests that his identity as a ''protected'' source be guarded.

• Mark Arbib: otherwise known as CIA Agent 007.
  Visitors to the senator's Wikipedia page this morning may have been surprised to learn his role as Minister for Social Housing and Homelessness, among other portfolios, had been usurped by some decidedly more colourful titles.
  CIA agent, US Mole, Traitor, and US Embassy Hero were listed below the right-wing Labor powerbroker's photograph on the popular online encyclopedia following revelations by WikiLeaks today that Mr Arbib was as a confidential contact of the United States embassy in Canberra.
  
  Which leads one to wonder - did then U.S. Ambassador to Australia Robert McCallum, who had such a negative opinion of the Australian prime minister in office, encourage Arbib to consider deposing Rudd?

TwitDef: Getting close to checkmate?

TwitDef continues in the Land of Oz and Mitchell appears to have lost his queen and be close to having his king in mate........

From Posetti’s legal rep to Mitchell’s legal rep on 9^th December 2010:

“We are instructed to act for Ms Julie Posetti in relation to the matters raised by your client, Mr Chris Mitchell, in your letter dated 29 November 2010 sent to our client on 1 December 2010.

Our client denies Mr Mitchell's assertion that she has defamed him.

The Twitter posts by our client about which your client complains were a fair and accurate summary of matters stated by Ms Wahlquist at the Journalism Education Association Conference on 25 November 2010. Whether or not the matters stated by Ms Wahlquist were right or wrong, they were matters that nevertheless related to a matter of public interest, namely, the conduct of journalism and the editorial policy of a major national newspaper in relation to climate change, being in itself a significant question of public interest, especially in the lead up to a Federal election. Our client in her Twitter posts gave a fair summary of the matters stated by Ms Wahlquist and clearly held out those posts as being reports of statements attributed to Ms Wahlquist and not our client's own views.

Your letter does not attempt to suggest that the Twitter posts were not a fair summary of what Ms Wahlquist said and, indeed, your client acknowledges that his initial conclusion that the posts did not reflect Ms Wahlquist's statements was a conclusion that he was misled into adopting. We note also that, while we appreciate that what is published in The Australian (of which your client serves as editor in chief) may not necessarily always reflect your client's own personal views and is not determinative of the position, it is nevertheless somewhat telling that the "Media diary" article titled “The Posetti tapes” appearing in the online version of The Australian on 30 November 2010 suggested that the "Tweets are a fair summary of what Wahlquist said".

As a fair report of proceedings of public concern (in particular, proceedings of a public meeting held in Australia related to a matter of public interest - see section 29(4)(l) of the Defamation Act 2005 (NSW) and its equivalents in other states), our client is entitled to the defence available under section 29(1) of the Defamation Act.

For similar reasons, our client is likely also entitled to a defence of common law qualified privilege.”

Copy of entire Posetti 9 December letter here in PDF

Copy of Mitchell 29 November letter here in PDF

Jonathan Holmes on the subject of TwitDef

Good news for the frail aged and carers in the NSW Northern Rivers region

Federal Member for Page Janelle Saffin’s media release on 9 December 2010 brings some good news for older residents in the Northern Rivers region and their families :

Older people in Page will benefit from a total of 80 new aged care places allocated across the electorate by the Australian Government.

Page MP Janelle Saffin said the new places allocated under the Aged Care Approvals Round for 2009-10 include 39 residential care places and 41 community packages for care in the home.

“The new allocations reflect the need for varied types of aged care in our local community.

“While there is a growing demand for residential places, there are also many people who prefer to remain in their own homes.

“The allocations are for 32 high care residential places, 7 low care residential places, and 41 community aged care packages,” Ms Saffin said.

Local providers receiving the new allocations:

Baptist Community Services Northern Rivers: 5 Community Aged Care Packages

Ex-Services Home Ballina; 32 Residential Places High Care

Southern Cross, St Catherine’s Villa, Grafton: 2 Residential Places Low Care

St Michael’s Apartments, Casino 5 Residential Places Low Care

Frank Whiddon Homes Grafton 13 Community Aged Care Packages

Frank Whiddon Homes Kyogle 13 Community Aged Care Packages

Uniting Care Yamba 10 Community Aged Care Packages

The Aged Care Approvals Round for 2009-10 for Page is worth an estimated $2.34 million.

In addition, the Australian Government will provide the aged care sector nationally with $147 million in zero interest loans to build 819 places, along with more than $41.6 million in capital grants.

One perspective on the Great Information War of 2010

From The Human Network in The Blueprint post on 5 December 2010:

A few months ago I wrote about how confused I was by Julian Assange’s actions. Why would anyone taking on the state so directly become such a public figure? It made no sense to me. Now I see the plan. And it’s awesome.

You see, this is the first time anything like Wikileaks has been attempted. Yes, there have been leaks prior to this, but never before have hyperdistribution and cryptoanarchism come to the service of the whistleblower. This is a new thing, and as well thought out as Wikileaks might be, it isn’t perfect. How could it be? It’s untried, and untested. Or was. Now that contact with the enemy has been made – the state with all its powers – it has become clear where Wikileaks has been found wanting. Wikileaks needs a distributed network of servers that are too broad and too diffuse to be attacked. Wikileaks needs an alternative to the Domain Name Service. And Wikileaks needs a funding mechanism which can not be choked off by the actions of any other actor.

We’ve been here before. This is 1999, the company is Napster, and the angry party is the recording industry. It took them a while to strangle the beast, but they did finally manage to choke all the life out of it – for all the good it did them. Within days after the death of Napster, Gnutella came around, and righted all the wrongs of Napster: decentralized where Napster was centralized; pervasive and increasingly invisible. Gnutella created the ‘darknet’ for filesharing which has permanently crippled the recording and film industries. The failure of Napster was the blueprint for Gnutella.

In exactly the same way – note for note – the failures of Wikileaks provide the blueprint for the systems which will follow it, and which will permanently leave the state and its actors neutered. Assange must know this – a teenage hacker would understand the lesson of Napster. Assange knows that someone had to get out in front and fail, before others could come along and succeed. We’re learning now, and to learn means to try and fail and try again.

A letter to The Guardian editor on the British legal response to Assange allegations

 

From guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 8 December 2010 21.02 GMT:

Many women in both Sweden and Britain will wonder at the unusual zeal with which Julian Assange is being pursued for rape allegations (Report, 8 December). Women in Sweden don't fare better than we do in Britain when it comes to rape. Though Sweden has the highest per capita number of reported rapes in Europe and these have quadrupled in the last 20 years, conviction rates have decreased. On 23 April 2010 Carina Hägg and Nalin Pekgul (respectively MP and chairwoman of Social Democratic Women in Sweden) wrote in the Göteborgs-Posten that "up to 90% of all reported rapes never get to court. In 2006 six people were convicted of rape though almost 4,000 people were reported". They endorsed Amnesty International's call for an independent inquiry to examine the rape cases that had been closed and the quality of the original investigations.

Assange, who it seems has no criminal convictions, was refused bail in England despite sureties of more than £120,000. Yet bail following rape allegations is routine. For two years we have been supporting a woman who suffered rape and domestic violence from a man previously convicted after attempting to murder an ex-partner and her children – he was granted bail while police investigated.

There is a long tradition of the use of rape and sexual assault for political agendas that have nothing to do with women's safety. In the south of the US, the lynching of black men was often justified on grounds that they had raped or even looked at a white woman. Women don't take kindly to our demand for safety being misused, while rape continues to be neglected at best or protected at worst.

Katrin Axelsson

Women Against Rape

WikiLeaks: a tale of two U.S. Government positions on one issue

It would appear the United States Government has one rule for dealing with powerful media organisations (whose editorial stances could affect its political standing both internationally and domestically) and another for dealing with Wikileaks.

According to The New York Times on 28 November 2010:

About 11,000 of the cables are marked “secret.” An additional 9,000 or so carry the label “noforn,” meaning the information is not to be shared with representatives of other countries, and 4,000 are marked “secret/noforn.” The rest are either marked with the less restrictive label “confidential” or are unclassified. Most were not intended for public view, at least in the near term.

The Times has taken care to exclude, in its articles and in supplementary material, in print and online, information that would endanger confidential informants or compromise national security. The Times’s redactions were shared with other news organizations and communicated to WikiLeaks, in the hope that they would similarly edit the documents they planned to post online.

After its own redactions, The Times sent Obama administration officials the cables it planned to post and invited them to challenge publication of any information that, in the official view, would harm the national interest. After reviewing the cables, the officials — while making clear they condemn the publication of secret material — suggested additional redactions. The Times agreed to some, but not all. The Times is forwarding the administration’s concerns to other news organizations and, at the suggestion of the State Department, to WikiLeaks itself. In all, The Times plans to post on its Web site the text of about 100 cables — some edited, some in full — that illuminate aspects of American foreign policy.

Letters sent and received according to Foreign Policy and Public intelligence on 26 November and 28 November 2010 respectively:

From Assange to U.S. Government representative; Subject to the general objective of ensuring maximum disclosure of information in the public interest, WikiLeaks would be grateful for the United States Government to privately nominate any specific instances (record numbers or names) where it considers the publication of information would put individual persons at significant risk of harm that has not already been addressed. WikiLeaks will respect the confidentiality of advice provided by the United States Government and is prepared to consider any such submissions made without delay.

From U.S. Government to Assange legal representative; We will not engage in a negotiation regarding the further release or dissemination of illegally obtained U.S. Government classified materials.

Background:

CNN in Public Intelligence on 25 October 2010; An initial comparison of a few documents redacted by WikiLeaks to the same documents released by the Department of Defense shows that WikiLeaks removed more information from the documents than the Pentagon.
CNN accessed the Department of Defense versions from the official U.S. Central Command website, where it posts items that have been released under the Freedom of Information Act.