GUARDIANS, OR THE HARPIES ON THE WALL

Bali, 2002 Picture Courtesy AP

QUOTE

I have a fascination for the documents that blow through the ruins of war, the pages of letters home and the bureaucracy of armies and the now useless instructions on how to fire ground-to-air missiles that flutter across the desert and cover the floors of roofless factories.
Robert Fisk. The Great War for Civilisation.


TEXT

In the background, Cardinal George Pell was being hauled across the coals by lawyers being paid thousands of dollars a day to treat him with very little respect. It might have been a secular witchhunt, but there it was. Spotlight, an excellent film, won the Oscar for Best Picture. There were so many rivers running every which way. Harpies perched on walls. The occasional guardian offered sage advice. "Old habits die hard." The Royal Commission into Child Sexual Abuse in Institutions dragged on in excoriating detail. Many would have preferred to have died rather than be exposed to such public humiliation. Rumours ran every which way. The Church did not come out looking good. Travesties lay on both sides of the fence. Darkness in the swirls. You didn't have to look too far.

"I don't remember, I don't recall, very much at all."

The Church may have once been a foundation for Western culture, but Pell's comment on their obligation to follow Christian principles was met with derisive laughter from the audience. Crowd funding had covered the cost of alleged victims flying to roam.

Oh how sweet it would be to be in Rome.

He had sat often enough as a teenager at the top of the Spanish Steps, watching the sun rise over Rome.

Every ignominy, every scandal, every piece of hypocrisy, it was all burnt into a sea of conflicting standards. "I am not here to defend the indefensible," Pell said; and he had few defenders in the Australian media.

He had covered services in St Mary's where the now Cardinal Pell had officiated.

The initiation into the mysteries.

The formation, as the nuns called it. The creation of a link between the human and the divine.

He had been impressed by the atmosphere, the ritual.

What was now being labelled an abuse of power; while all around lay other abuses of spiritual power, in a world, in a realm, where everything was fragile; where some had departed to protect themselves; and others had arrived to protect a world blotting out in a period of conflict and terrible pain.

Humans were humans, celibacy an unnatural state, the exposes so damaging, the statistics so appalling, the discrediting so final, the damage so absolute. And while Christianity thrashed around in the destruction of itself, Islam was on the March. Child brides. Slavery. Tea boys. There were very dark forces afoot; everywhere.

There were spirits above the meditation sites, the founder of Falun Gong had claimed. And they could walk through walls, appear and disappear at will, here at The End of Days. A fast road to enlightenment.

Fighting was breaking out between refugees and border guards in Europe. The gloss had gone off Malcolm Turnbull. His own interior had changed, and he was simply adjusting. The old days when he had felt like a crushed entity at the bottom of an aquarium full of liquid lead had been vanquished. And sooner or later all these disasters would break through into another stream, and the scandals of one day would be the history of another; but few would survive the ignominy of loss of their own credibility.

Things were changing, that was all. The sins of the Church exposed. The power of The Great Satan there for all to see. Humans, with so little love for each other, so prepared to exploit, appeared, often enough, to be doomed. Brussells does not have the right to change the cultural and religious history of Europe, the critics said more concisely than ever. And so the world spun, and there would be no rest.

THE BIGGER STORY

How Fairfax and Paul Sheehan bought the lies told by "Louise"


NICKY BRYSON AND MYRIAM ROBIN
Freelance writer and Crikey media reporter

A week after the story of "Louise", who claimed she had been gang-raped by Middle Eastern men, was first splashed on the front page, and four days after Paul Sheehan acknowledged how it all fell apart, The Sydney Morning Herald this morning broke its silence on how one of its senior writers published a story of horrific abuse and bureaucratic indifference that was, probably, false. But the paper maintains Sheehan's line that "key elements of the story were unable to be substantiated", despite the wealth of evidence that the story told to Sheehan was highly unlikely, and should have raised red flags for both Sheehan and his editors. The paper stated at the bottom of page 2 this morning: "In last Monday's paper, the Herald reported the details of an alleged sexual assault under the headline, 'The horrifying untold story of Louise', "A subsequent column printed in last Thursday's edition ... acknowledged key elements of the original story were unable to be substantiated. The original story, which has been corrected, included aspersions against the Middle Eastern community and raised untested allegations of inaction against the NSW Police. The Herald sincerely regrets the hurt and distress this report caused to these groups and unreservedly apologises." The story highlights a startling case of journalistic error, made all the more significant because it came from such a senior writer and was taken seriously enough to put on the front page of Australia's most trusted newspaper. Sheehan has apologised several times in the past week, and got on the front foot admitting his error before Fairfax's competitors got wind of it. He has been relatively transparent about the reasons why he came to believe 'Louise's' story despite little corroborating evidence. But if he had not, it is likely the scandal would have come out anyway. In the days immediately following the story's initial publication, many on social media noted that aspects of it seemed far-fetched. The similar claims made by a woman in several Reclaim Australia rallies were recalled. Some, like Richard Cooke, who tried to contact 'Louise' wrote that they found her a difficult subject who was unable to give journalists ways to validate her story.

EU migrant crisis: Stranded asylum seekers storm Greece-Macedonia border fence
By Europe correspondent James Glenday, wires

There have been dramatic scenes on the border between Macedonia and Greece as asylum seekers used a steel pole to break down a barbed wire fence.

About 7,000 people are stuck on the Greek side of the border trying to get through to Macedonia, and tensions boiled over at the Idomeni camp overnight.

Asylum seekers ripped away barbed wire from the border fence before using a pole as a battering ram to smash a section open.

Around 300 people forced their way through a Greek police cordon and raced towards a railway track between the two countries.

They threw stones at Macedonian riot police and shouted: "Open the border!"

Authorities responded with several rounds of tear gas, fixed the fence and then called in reinforcements.

At least 30 people, many of them children, requested first aid in the stampede that ensued, the charity Doctors Without Borders (MSF) said.

Skopje said one of its policemen was hurt and required hospitalisation.

The protest occurred several hours after Macedonia allowed just 300 Syrians and Iraqis to cross.
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WE ARE ALL BEING PLAYED - INCLUDING YOU

From Twitter Source Unknown

QUOTE

Terrorists, terrorists. terrorists. In the Middle East, in the entire Muslim world, this word would become a plague, a meaningless punctuation mark in all our lives, a. full stop erected to finish all discussion of Injustice, constructed as a wall by Russians, Americans, Israelis, British, Pakistanis, Saudis, Turks, to shut us up. Who would ever say a word in favour of terrorists? What cause could possibly justify terror? So our enemies are always terrorists.

Robert Fisk, The Great War for Civilisation.

TEXT

Random, he said; and in the increasing sanity of his thinking... Well he could hear them still. But he was increasingly at peace. He had fulfilled one function and would soon fulfil another. Time stretched out. He made lists of things to do on paper. Dinosaurs and black holes and a million books he wanted to read. He made a shift into the positive. There were so many cruelties that had played out while he maintained silence; withstood the mocking, switched off the tormenters, distracted himself. "But doctor, I don't feel like that anymore, I don't feel the need to write myself off, to drown the voices," he said; and shimmered with a kind of ephereal pleasure, as a doomed world continued to spiral slowly into chaos; a descent into the damned.

There was a ceasefre in Syria which would last five minutes as Islamic State ran rampant, regrouped, ran rampant. The news was all appalling, a contrivance against dust, a theatre of the absurd in the American elections, a time ripe for the plucking. The words Donald Trump were on everybody's lips. The same betrayal of the middle classes which characterised American and Australian politics was throwing up mavericks. Malcolm Turnbull, smooth operator, had already proved just as disappointing as his predecessor, supporting indefensible wars, smiling for the cameras as his bombs rained down on the Middle East. He was killing more Muslims per month than his predecessor Tony Abbott. And he was even more hostage to his predecessor, and to the disastrous legacy of John Howard.

Smile, just keep on smiling. If it looks good it is good.

And besides, the people are all fools. We flirt with them at election time, pretend that our policies are in their best interests, remain openly contemptuous of their stupidity, but they are too stupid to notice; and go on about our blissful, self-important lives.

If people had thought Australia would improve under Turnbull, they had so far been sadly mistaken.

They should put a forensic audience through the entire government, the judiciary, the bureaucracy, everything. And should ask one simple, basic question: why should someone sit in traffic for four hours a day, now the average commute in Sydney, and pay exorbitant taxes on their wages, and everything they bought, everything they did, virtually the air they breathed, to support this.

And hack the entire discredited shambles into a lean and mean organisation that served the people, not fed off them.

Australian democracy was in serious decay; but it would stumble on a little longer.

And then the terror attacks would come. And the cultural, social and religious landscape of the country, transformed into the present shambles by the social engineers, the liars, the lawyers, the bureaucrats, the social engineers, would change again. A freedom loving country would disappear; as easily destroyed as had been the sacred lands of the indigenous, that most beautiful country, a pearl of the divine; vanished and vanquished, just like that.

He was reading The Great War for Civilisation; in part, he guessed, to understand the origins of it all.

He hadn't been paying much attention when more than a million people died in the Iran Iraq Wars of the 1980s, when America backed their friend Sadam Hussein.

 He was paying attention now.

THE BIGGER STORY


By RAJA ABDULRAHIM and DANA BALLOUT

Feb. 28, 2016 8:16 a.m. ETWall Street Journal


BEIRUT—The Syrian regime and its Russian allies stepped up airstrikes on Sunday after a relative lull in violence a day earlier when an internationally brokered truce went into effect, according to antigovernment activists.

The activists and monitoring groups also linked to the opposition said some of the strikes hit areas controlled by Free Syrian Army rebels, who are a party to the partial cease-fire. A number of civilians were killed, the activists said.

The truce represents the biggest effort in years to calm violence in a war that has claimed more than 250,000 lives and displaced millions.

Russia had said it wouldn’t conduct any airstrikes on Saturday in respect of the partial cease-fire, which is meant to last for two weeks and help create a calmer environment to convene peace talks in Geneva on March 7. But on Sunday morning, Russian planes launched numerous strikes throughout the northern province of Aleppo, the activists said.

Aleppo has been the focus for weeks of an intense offensive by the regime, backed by heavy Russian airstrikes and Iran-linked militias on the ground. The offensive has largely targeted rebel groups rather than Islamic State.

“Yesterday Aleppo was calm, but airstrikes resumed at six in the morning today,” said local activist Yasin Abu Raed, currently in Aleppo’s northern outskirts.

Areas targeted today included the towns of Anadan and Hreiytan in northwestern Aleppo outskirts.

The Syrian regime, citing local sources, said “terrorist groups” linked to Turkey in the northern countryside of Aleppo targeted the town of Nubil with rockets Saturday night. The regime frequently refers to all its opponents as terrorists.

A map released by a Russian news agency Saturday showed small, limited areas the Moscow government considers covered by the cease-fire. The provinces of Aleppo and Idlib were entirely excluded.

The truce allows for continued attacks by the regime, the Russian and the U.S.-led coalition on both Islamic State and the al Qaeda-linked Nusra Front, both of which are present in different areas in Aleppo province. The strikes on Sunday hit Free Syrian Army rebels in the Aleppo area, the antigovernment activists said.

Nusra’s exclusion is particularly problematic because it is present in much of opposition-held territory and is mixed in with more moderate rebels in many places. Moderate rebels fear the regime and its allies will use this as a pretext to keep attacking and said there were some immediate indications that this might be happening.

In Idlib province, where Nusra has a larger presence than in neighboring Aleppo province, airstrikes continued. Nusra Front fighters pulled out of some of their bases located within towns and cities “in order not to be an excuse for Russia to strike them,” one Nusra member said on Saturday.

Central Hama province was also targeted, the activists said. Clashes in western Latakia province between regime forces backed by Russian officers and Shiite militiamen and rebels were ongoing, activist said.

On Saturday, the Syrian Network for Human rights reported 14 cases of the cease-fire being breached. Antigovernment activists reported airstrikes and mortar fire from regime forces across a number of provinces in western Syria in areas controlled by rebels who agreed to the truce.

But overall, it was calmer than the previous week when the announcement of a cease-fire was met with an escalation of violence.

In the rebel-held Damascus suburb of Daraya, which the regime side struck with dozens of barrel bombs on Friday, residents were hesitant to spend too much time outside, unsure how long the lull would last.

“They are very cautious and afraid that the airstrikes will start suddenly,” local activist Shadi Matar said Saturday. “The residents haven’t forgotten what happened yesterday and all the days that preceded it.”

In another opposition-held Damascus suburb, Arbeen, the local council posted a video online of local residents taking advantage of the cease-fire to clear the streets of debris from past regime and Russian airstrikes.

Sydney Morning Herald Mark Kenny

Malcolm Turnbull's cut-price National Broadband Network is facing mounting delays and rising costs, according to a damning internal progress report obtained by Fairfax Media.

The report, marked "commercial in confidence" and "for official use only", sets out a litany of problems in delivering the Coalition's supposedly more budget-friendly fibre-to-the-node (FTTN) model.

By the company's own assessment, the giant infrastructure project has fallen two-thirds short of its benchmark construction timetable. Connection costs to each house or business are also blowing out. The model had been marketed to voters as superior to Labor's NBN because it was "Fast. Affordable. Sooner".

The "final design" process for connections - needed before construction can start - is running far behind schedule, according to the February 19 report.

While 1,402,909 premises should have been approved at the date of the report, the figure was sitting at 662,665 - 740,000 fewer than planned.

The snapshot says NBN Co has achieved 29,005 fibre-to-the-node "construction completions", while noting its internally budgeted target for this period was more than three times this at 94,273.

The report, which was never intended for public disclosure, reveals the extent to which the more than $46 billion project has drifted off course, mainly during the time when Mr Turnbull was in direct control as communications minister - the portfolio he held before replacing Tony Abbott as Prime Minister in September.

In a statement, nbn rejected claims the company is "at risk" of not meeting its targets but refused to be drawn on "alleged internal documents". 

"The company's management has proven repeatedly that it can effectively monitor and manage those risks," it said. "This is an incredibly complex project unlike any infrastructure build anywhere in the world."

Under the heading "Commercial in Confidence: Scale the Deployment Program", the report outlines a plethora of faults, including that delays in power approvals and construction are being caused by electricity companies which account for 38,537 premises or 59 per cent of overall slippages against the target.

Another 30 per cent of delays are down to material shortages...

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A HOLE IN THE WALL

Islamic State position taken out by Western airstrike Picture courtesy Telegraph

QUOTE:

As I write, Western countries (several, particularly the US, now with severely reduced international credibility) face a larger, more unified, capable, experienced and savage enemy, in a less stable, more fragmented region, with a far higher level of geopolitical competi­tion, and a much more severe risk of great-power conflict, than at any time since 9/11.

David Kilcullen, Blood Year.

TEXT: 

As the world drifted towards calamity, his head became more active. Military trained empaths roamed the perimeter. Two black cats, psychic animals, sat on the rooftop next door in the early hours of the morning; until he shooed them away. All the themes were coming into play. It was six months since he had finished Terror in Australia: Workers' Paradise Lost, and the story had continued to expand in the interim. The world was already transforming beyond reocgnition. 119, or was it 120, the day's reports varied, people had been killed in Islamic State bomb attacks in Syria. At the same time, the "Coalition", in itself a farce, announced there had been 38 bomb strikes in a single day. How many dead? How many injured? How many civillians? How many mujahadeen? Nobody would ever know.

Events which would have once been front page news barely rated a mention in the back of the papers. Australia's population had officially topped 24 million, that dream, vision, whatever you wanted to call it, of Malcolm Fraser, the aristocrat from Victoria who had dreamed of a big Australia. Well they had their big Australia, these so-called visionaries, but it was not a happy place. All the problems that were meant to be solved by a larger population had morphed into a whole new set of problems.

The lockout laws had created a backlash against the government, a people fed up with grotesque levels of regulation. The streets remained dangerous. Jerking ice addicts, already stricken, crippled, hobbling as if already destroyed, gathered in knots in the Cross. They made the pinned eyes or the desperate sweat of a former generation of heroin addicts look positively benign. "It's the perfect drug for the age, apocalyptic," he said at a party; people he had known for decades, sometimes it seemed for generations, so much had the world changed.

He had always said it, the world of the future will be nothing like the world we know now, in the 1950s, 60s, 70s, 80s, from child to young man to flaunted, desecrated coconut, from meandering delinquent to earnest hopeful, as if reaching for the sky could salvage the Earth. But instead the world was full of fallen angels, and now a new awakening, those who had been seeded into the timeline. Sometimes there were accidents, as in his own case, his parents marooned on the neighbouring moon after their craft crash landed, his life, his memory, beginning with that most wrenching of departures. He missed them still, would always miss them. As the Earth, that void, filled his consciousness; and he survived in the undergrowth. Nobody would ever know.

But as unlikely as it seemed, there was now the Awakening. For every action an equal and opposite reation. And even in a place as remote as Australia, dismissed, these days, as a backwater; you could feel the stirrings, the brightest of intellects, the most piercing of lights, cast against those screens of pain, the souls being harvested for a Dark Lord, Lord of All The Worlds, as they so mistakenly described him, the greater the agony the more heightened the transformation, the cruelty of men beyond description, beyond any understanding. He was reading The Great War For Civilisation; and a great war it was, if size and consequence and the number of pointless deaths, rather than the depth of the ignominy, meant Great. He remained astonished at how cruel humans could be to each other. How little they cared for the deaths of others of their own kind. How little, in the end, life meant to them.

THE BIGGER STORY:

Russia warned of “a new world war" starting in Syria on Thursday after a dramatic day in which Gulf states threatened to send in ground forces.

Foreign and defence ministers of the leading international states backing different factions in the war-torn country met in separate meetings in Munich and Brussels following the collapse of the latest round of peace talks.

Both Russia and the United States demanded ceasefires in the long-running civil war so that the fight could be concentrated against Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil) - but each on their own, conflicting terms.

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WISER ANGELS

Karbarla, Iraq, courtesy LA Times

"I was depressed by my war. Everything I covered in Afghanistan and Pakistan seemed to be going in the wrong direction. Wars were supposed to have definitive ends and have identifiable enemies, like the twentieth-century wars I'd grown up hearing about. Instead we now seemed to be locked in some kind of forever war. And it was becoming harder to report them. Places I had travelled to freely in both countries had become no-go areas. Afghanistan was more violent; Pakistan more anti-Western. Peshawar, which had been such a friendly place to live in my early twenties, had grown so hostile I felt as if I was the only Westerner there. Women I'd writen about were being killed. Hotels I'd stayed at were being bombed. Friends had been taken hostage. Late-night discussions with fellow journalists had become macabre - instead of the old gossip of who was sleeing with whom, we talked about whether we'd prefer to be killed by sujicide bomb or a knife at our throats.

Christina Lamb. Farewell Kabul: From Afghanistan to a More Dangerous World


The guardians had come. He could feel them now, their wings half-furled, a black cat at the meditation site. "You need help," one of the many voices said, and he did not argue. The constant murmur had worn through the throne room, had disintegrated the flesh off skulls, had worn away in righteous probity the sins to which all flesh were prone. They had reached a new and more serious age. He was going to be wracked from heaven and from earth. He thought of him often now, the clack clack clack through the night of the old man playing chess in his dreams; "I've been here for a hundred million years and you've been abducted by aliens," he said, and laughed wrly, one afternoon during their briefly formed routine, playing chess in the late afternoon. "There aren't too many people like us."

The old man agreed and played another move. He heard all the lines of doubt and movement. "He's thrown away his livelihood." Everything was attack. There were no friends there. They had kept it up for years and wondered, why the erratic progress? But they forgot, he could see inside their sordid dreams. "We don't tell our bosses," one of them told him through the liquid ether; and he didn't have to be informed. Information shuffled down the line, transmitted in ways the carriers themselves did not understand. If the Apocalypse was coming, as so many feared, did any of it really matter? He would thrash against invisible voices and invisible enemies, strained, worn thin, a damaged psyche, and then, loh and behold, there would be another transformation.

There were trained empaths in the mix, but they were few and far between. And if not trained, they concealed their talents. "He knows we're here," one of them said at an Islamic conference, and he let it slide. There was no use attempting communication in such dangerous zones. "He has no business here." He closed all links. And in any case most of the messaging was negative; and he gained only slowly in confidence on one hand, and threw it all away with the other. The level of surveillance of the ordinary citizen is almost the same as that feared by the clinically paranoid, one commentator said, and at that he laughed. How true it was. He wanted time out, but there was no time out to be had. There was a bracing for future gusts, a terrible, wind-worn despair; and then the guardians declared their presence.

"You need help," one of them said again. "We're here now. We will protect you."

Well that might be a wan hope; in a treacherous time. Everything had been sacrificed, for what? A moment's drunken insanity, a kind of laissez faire "who gives a toss", a bravado that might have worked in the past but in the current, constricted age was no longer appropriate. What was once daring was now tragic. What was once a flaw was now a dangerous vulnerability. What had once been talk of a new style of consciousness was now a sentimental tug at a past that had never been, a future which never evolved.

The grand project of social reclamation, or reform, all the words, inclusive, harmonious, diversity, all of it was a charisma, a world that never was and never could be. They lived on the edge of a complex, devolving situation, both faroff and near. Where the threat lay? It lay everywhere; from within and without, from multiple contradictions and hypocries, on bureaucracies built on noble causes, higher causes, on government that had run rapidly out of control. You could have held me by the hand, you could have spoke to me directly. We tried to reach out. We tried to tell you. "Never mind," he shrugged.  There are more things in heaven and on Earth.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/mehmet-biber-20150930-gjy2se.html

A Sydney man who has returned from the battlefield in Syria has warned of more attacks like the murder of police accountant Curtis Cheng and says he would voluntarily leave again if the government handed his passport back.

The Sun-Herald can reveal that Mehmet Biber, 23, has returned from the Middle East and is living in western Sydney with his wife and one-year-old daughter.

He is one of six men who allegedly left Australia to join the terrorist group Jabhat al-Nusra in Syria in 2013. The al-Nusra front was later usurped by Islamic State.

Mehmet Biber (second from right) with "fellow aid workers" in Syria.

Mr Biber is one of about 30 Australian alleged fighters believed to have returned home but only the second to be publicly identified after Melbourne nurse Adam Brookman, who negotiated with the Australian Federal Police to return in July.

AdvertisemeOn one of several Facebook profiles he has created then shut down in recent months, Mr Biber warned of more attacks like the shooting outside Parramatta last year by schoolboy Farhad Jabar.

"Let the general public know that home ground attacks such as the likes of the one we seen at parramatta will start to become more frequent as the australian government sticks its hands deeper into the blood of the muslims via joint attacks on muslims overseas," he posted.

Mehmet Biber with his Auburn soccer team.

After the Paris attacks in November, he posted: "f you attack Islam and Muslims for years on end indiscriminately then it's stupid and naive to think there wont be retaliation and consequences... just sayin".

Mr Biber has written lengthy posts blaming the Australian government "for breeding homegrown extremism" and espousing the importance of hijrah – an Islamic concept of migration that has been hijacked by Islamic State to refer to the highly-meritorious journey to the group's new "caliphate".

He said it is the most "undermined, feared, revered and belittled topic of our community leaders" and it was an obligation for Muslims in "lands of disbelief".

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Since 9/11, some 300 Americans--born and raised in Minnesota, Alabama, New Jersey, and elsewhere--have been indicted or convicted of terrorism charges. Some have taken the fight abroad: Americans were among those who planned the attacks in Mumbai, and more recently a dozen US citizens have sought to join ISIS. Others have acted entirely on American soil. What motivates them, how are they trained, and what do we sacrifice in our aggressive efforts to track them? Paced like a detective story, United States of Jihad tells the entwined stories of the key actors on the American front.

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