Thursday, July 20, 2006

My war update, redeclaration of boycott

After some few drafts on the topic and lengthy thought, I have decided to withhold publishing and resume my strike against war.

I re-instate my passive boycott of blogging until I see time fit to return.

There is nothing I can do to make Israel stop and as far as I am concerned Hezbollah are being hypocritical in complaining about "zionist aggression" when Hezbollah provoked the current conflict and continue to launch rockets into Israel.

As usual, I am disappointed in everyone.

Note to Greg: Greg Felton, my reply to you shall have to wait. This blog is inoperable during my boycott resumption.

I anticipate this may be a shorter boycott then the last one.

Emigre, zionist against war.

Sunday, July 09, 2006

Economy update

My hair is almost long enough to tie back. So is a lot of other peoples. I have been looking around for short haircuts in the streets but I see fewer then I used to. Public transport in Sydney is full of women with shoulder length hair. Even cafes are full of women with low maintenance hairstyles and regrowth.

Hair is one of the first things to tell the tale, when people cut down on their grooming budgets. It could just be winter, but I'm not so sure.

Saturday, July 08, 2006

My enquiry into Kovco and Sinanovic's head injuries

It looks like the Australian government has accidentally revealed what it was trying to cover up. Apart from their bodies being accidentally swapped in a Kuwait mortuary, Kovco and Sinanovic both had head injuries. Head injuries that were being kept under wraps in a civilian mortuary instead of in the usual US military morgue.

What seems to have happened, so far:

A deliberate effort to prevent Private Kovco's death from making the headlines "at home" failed. Private Kovco's body was supposed to have arrived back in Australia, in a hurry, before the press heard about it. The use of a civilian mortuary for processing non-civilian bodies with head injuries may be off the record standard practice.

Brigadier Cosson found the army had tried to get the body home too quickly. read more


Normally, apparently, a foreign cadaver in Iraq would take eight days to return home. Australia, the defense force enquiry says, planned on having Private Kovco back within four. The enquiry line is that this was "to meet the wishes of Private Kovco's family".

Except that Private Kovco's family say they were complying with the army's wishes. Blaming the family for the Australian government's political desire to rush an Iraq war body home and there-by avoid the Anzac day press, is low. Military families rarely question the letter of the law and it seems the Australian defense force had been hoping to take advantage of just that.

A dog ate our tag

Defense association excuses get worse, and reveal more.

"It was a badly lit morgue, the digger in question was emotionally affected, the surname of both Private Kovco and the Bosnian fellow are not dissimilar, they both had head injuries".

An Australian defense association spokes-person explaining, to the ABC, how one rushed home body got mixed up with another rushed home body.


1. "It was a badly lit morgue".

Defense forces are armed with torches, are they not?

2. "The digger in question was emotionally affected".

The platoon sergeant in question was private Kovco's platoon sergeant. Emotional or otherwise, a platoon sergeant should be able to recognise his privates and a digger should be able to recognise his mate. Unless the platoon sergeant was not that familiar with his privates, and not that emotional. Or, unless the mate a digger is trying to recognise has died from a point blank shot in the head. A point blank shot in the head rendering facial features somewhat unrecognisable. Point blank shots in the head are generally self applied.

In any case, blaming "the digger" for a military stuff-up shows poor form on the part of the defense association.

3. "The surname of both Private Kovco and the Bosnian fellow are not dissimilar".

Private Kovco's surname is Kovco. The surname of the contractor he was mixed up with is Sinanovic. Suggesting the two names are not dissimilar is akin to suggesting Schmidt and Bernstein are similiar on the basis of being spelt with an s and a t. That "Kovco" and "Sinanovic" are supposed to be not dissimilar and therefore somehow are a contributing factor in a body mix-up makes the co-alition look very very stupid, very very racist, and very very bad at making up excuses. Kovco starts with a K. Sinanovic starts with an S. The only consonant these two names have in common is "v".

4. "They both had head injuries."

Kovco and Sinanovic both had head injuries. And therein lies one coincidence too many. Presumably Sinanovic's head injury was the cause of Sinanovic's death, as was Kovco's. I wonder, how did Sinanovic's head injury happen. Are privates and contractors wearing their helmets to work? Or was Sinanovic, like Kovco, shot in his room, when he had his head gear off.

The mortuary


The defense force enquiry seems to be suggesting that Australia used an independent civilian mortuary, instead of the usual military mortuary, to speed up the usual eight day return. As if this was some sort of deviation from standard practice. Yet there was another body from another country, of a man working as a contractor for Halliburton, also with a head injury, being kept in the same independent mortuary. Is this a mortuary that is regularly used, to speed home bodies of soldiers and contractors with head injuries?

Juso Sinanovic's head injury

The Australian defense force enquiry into the swapping of Private Kovco's body with Halliburton carpenter Juso Sinanovic's, states that Juso Sinanovic's body had a head injury and suggests that the similarity between Kovco and Sinanovic's injuries contributed to the mixing up of their bodies. Yet a May 12 ABC transcript states that Juso Sinanovic died of a "brain haemorrhage". A brain haemorrhage is sometimes used to refer to a type of stroke that accounts for less then 15 percent of stroke cases. A brain haemorrhage of this type rarely leaves visible outside lesions or marks on the head that might resemble a bullet hole. In it's simplest form, a haemorrhage is the rupturing of blood vessels. I guess at a stretch a bullet wound could be said to cause haemorrhaging, but it is a descriptive stretch in determining a cause of death. Questions remain, was Sinanovic's haemorrhage the same kind of haemorrhage as Kovco's, if it was then why was it not described as a gun-shot injury and if it wasn't then how could it have contributed to the bodies being mistaken one for the other.

Why the defense force tried to cover it up

Private Kovco died from a head-injury when his own gun discharged in his barracks during an unpopular war. The first known Australian Iraq War defense casualty, he couldn't have died in a less heroic manner.

"Private shot with own gun". A far cry from the usual national roll out, when Australia's Anzac day parade goes to print.

It doesn't take much of a conspiracy theorist to understand that getting Kovco's body back quickly to avoid the press as Anzac day approached, would be a pretty high priority. Unfortunately it was all just too rushed.

On April 27, two days after Anzac day, Private Kovco's mother told The Age that her son's body got mixed up on the way home from Iraq. At the time, she said, with justified anger; "I have shut up for the army... we have shut up and we let the army handle it".

Had the bodies not been accidentally swapped, everything may have passed quietly for the army as planned. Kovco's body would have been cremated or buried and another Anzac day parade would have passed without reality hanging over it to remind everyone that once apon a time, Anzac day was a reminder of how crap war is.

Archived articles
SMH
ABC
ABC transcript

Sunday, July 02, 2006

The truth about Al Muthana

Some time ago, in February 2005 actually, I wrote that I didn't think the world was being told the entire whole truth about what the co-alition "of the willing" were doing in Al Muthana. The claim, at the time, made through mainstream media outlets in highly questionable press releases, was that non-combatant Japanese forces, supported by Australian troops, were conducting civilian engineering projects in the province.

At the time, this seemed highly curious to me. Because Al Muthana is a rural area. Why the big deal about engineering projects in the restive province of Al Muthana, which at that time hadn't seen much of the bombing and things that were going on in other areas. Surely Baghdad would have been the engineering priority, with it's infrequent electricity supply, near non-existent telecommunications network, and water purification concerns. After all, there are a lot of people in Baghdad and we hear frequently how disgruntled it's bloggers are by lack of power and intermittent net connection.

Back then, a bit of a research told me everything I needed to know, but not quite everything I wanted to know. I found out relatively easily that Al Muthana was the site of one of Saddam's biggest weapons production plants. A factory that was built in 1975 and had been active through out the eighties, was severely bombed during the 1991 gulf war** and had produced nothing through out the nineties but a health hazard. No one need much of an imagination to picture the environmental mess a former weapons factory oozing chemicals would be after an allied bombing.

What were, I wondered, non-combatant Japanese troops assisted by Australian troops, up to. What were they up to in the place where Saddam had built his weapons.

I dropped the hints. But no-one in the mainstream seemed to pick it up. Paul McGeough ran a piece about there being oil in the south, and this he concluded might be a plausible explanation. I was not satisfied. True, there is oil in the south and every man and his grain merchant is interested in it. But Iraq's southern oil fields are to the east, and Al Muthana is south-south. The supergiant oil fields Paul talked about are in Basrah and in Maysan - not Al Muthana. I know, I think some of us went off on a tangent at the time. Perhaps we were imagining roads being built to truck oil from Basrah through Al Muthana in a detour around Kuwait to get to Saudi Arabia (we would not be without reason, in entertaining these ideas).

What I mean, is, the oil explanation didn't totally convince me, in this particular case. There must be some other reason and, I was fairly sure, it had something to do with a defunct and toxic weapons site. No, I did not think Japanese troops would be tidying up the place and doing an environmental clean-up. A cursory one had already been done, in 1992-94 according to some sources. Besides, had an environmental cleanup been the reason, it would have been all through our headlines and Bush, Blair, Koizumi and especially John Howard would have been hypocritically pillocking on about how green they were being and how green Saddam was not.

Something fishy was certainly going on.

But I didn't have enough information at the time to support my suspicions, I couldn't get into Iraq to check it out myself and all the independent journo's in Iraq were hanging about Baghdad avoiding car bombs and looking for "human interest" stories. As far as I could make out, there were no embeds with the Al Muthana coalition military team. At least, there are no mainstream news reports about Al Muthana from embedded reporters. Hmm.

So what has happened now is, I have just coincidentally read Rod Barton's book about his role in UN weapon's inspecting and am observing that Australian mainstream media is reporting that Australian forces are moving out of Al Muthana, and that the Japanese "engineering" non-combatant forces are moving out too (which is why Australian military support is no longer needed there).

I am also reading that a batch of "old" chemical weapons have been recently uncovered. Which the blogosphere loves of course - all the rightwingers can weakly rant "Saddam had WMD" and all the Scott Ritter fans can happily proclaim "they were OLD weapons and UN-USEABLE".

Sooo. Anyway. When I read Rod Barton's book, I got the impression that while UN weapons inspectors had thoroughly inspected quite a lot and gotten to basically riffle through all the files they could find, and had concluded that Saddam's weapons program was basically over and that there was no way he or anyone else could restart it as long as sanctions were imposed while weapons inpectors were present, I got the impression that there was more that intelligence wanted to know. (Intelligence, always wants to know everything). There was more intelligence wanted to know, specifically, there was more intelligence wanted to dig up. That is, there was more buried intelligence. Pre-war inspections fairly much came to an end in 1998, two short years after the oil for food program began, so no further digging could be done, None of much consequence anyway.

In 2005, the occupation provided the perfect cover to go and do the forensic excavations that could not of been done before. And now those excavations seem to be over, in Al Muthana anyway. Australian troops were deployed from about May 2005 for two rotations of six months (one year) in Al Muthana. And, almost as timetabled, they are now leaving the area. While the rest of Iraq is still full of troops.

Evidence is suggesting to me that Australian and Japanese troops were stationed in Muthana to check out an old inoperable weapons facility. And seeing as they are the only troops withdrawing from any area in Iraq at all, I would say there is nothing more to be found there.

What did they find in Al Muthana

The most, it seems, anyone could find was a bunch of old casings and some degraded chemicals. The most anyone could find, is exactly what a lot of people have been saying all along: Saddam had no WMD . The weapons that he did have, at one point, long ago, were fairly poor and supplemented by a lot of bluffing and pretending he had more cards in his pack then there actually were.

What they wanted to hear

What has come out of the war in Iraq is not what everyone who wanted war, wanted to know. Or hear.

A lot of Americans probably wanted to hear about liberation. Some Iraqis probably wanted to hear Saddam choking while he swung from a pole. Oil monopolies, would have liked the sound of oil gushing.

Intelligence wanted to hear (it does seem they rely on hear-say) about Iraq's history; weapons, dissidents, politics, how Iraq's military history connected with other histories. It seems, the war has been a fairly fruitless exercise for intelligence operatives. All there is to know was always fairly plain; the war was went to on a lie.

Nobody found any WMDs. Instead, what has been revealed by the war is a global network of extraordinary renditions, abduction and torture. A network in which western governments and their intelligence operatives collaborated with eastern governments and their mukharabat.

Is the war over it yet

Some press releases are being bandied about at the moment, plugging the withdrawal from Muthana as a "handover" to Iraqi forces. As I have mentioned before, Al Muthana is a low population area. There was no fighting there from the start. The area was declared, 16 months ago, by Howard, before his troops even got there, to be a "benign" area. The idea that a formerly benign area is now suddenly restive enough for a "handover" is ridiculous.

Anyway. What this also means is that while some sectors may take an Australian military exit from Muthana as a signal that Australia is backing out and the war might be over soon, no such thing, unfortunately, is really happening. Britain is certainly saying that British troops leaving Al Muthana may be redeployed in other areas rather then returning home.

Basically, Australian troops have now been freed up by some 450 (the 450 that were in Al Muthana) and those "spare" troops may shift to more populated areas now. There were, at the time those 450 troops were stationed in Al Muthana , 900 other known troops operating in Iraq. And there is no word, of any of them returning.

**Footnote. I won't call it gulf war one as others do in jest, because there are too many gulf wars that preceed 1991 to turn a blind eye on. Just because 1991's gulf war was the first our generation experienced, does not mean it was the first other generations had to endure.

Related links

My first article about it.

Navigate to here to read an archived copy of the February 2005 "rebuild" article that I referred to as dubious. In it, Howard says troops are to stay for about a year and are to "to assist Japanese forces engaged in the rebuilding process, such as constructing new roads and schools." Note he doesn't say they will actually be building roads and schools, only engaged in some sort of a building process "such as roads and schools". Which gives him the normal wriggle room he requires when he is telling a whopper. Anyway. One year sounds like a pretty good length of time to do some excavations and things, on an old weapons facility site.

Maps

Click here to see a map of Iraq and it's provinces.
Click here to see a map of Iraq and it's oil fields.
Click here, for a map of Iraq airports.

Other interesting facts: a new defense airbase was opened March 07, 2006 next to Iraq's international airport, it has been named "Al Muthana". It is miles away from the province Al Muthana. Two military "building" projects that were going on at the same time with the same name. HMM.

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