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Sex and terror | Aug 09, 2004 11:14

There was never a terror threat against the All Blacks. Indeed, it's far from certain there was ever a specific "threat" against their next playing venue, Johannesburg's Ellis Park. What can confidently be said is that it would be nice to know exactly what's going on in Pakistan.

You wouldn't know this if you were relying on the local news media yesterday, especially the Sunday News, whose 'TERRORIST THREAT TO ALL BLACKS' headline occupied half a tabloid page above a story which virtually treated "the outrage at Ellis Park" as if it had already happened.

So where to start? Two weeks ago, according to Raja Munawar Hussain, the local chief of police, two South African citizens were arrested in the eastern Pakistan city of Gujrat, in the course of the raid that netted al Qaeda associate Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani. Hussain apparently told Associated Press that maps highlighting facilities in several South African cities were found, and later told Agence France Press that the two men had confessed under interrogation to being part of an imminent plot to attack a range of targets, including Ellis Park. The Johannesburg Star kicked the story alone.

But the South African government has not been allowed access to the two South African nationals, and the head of its National Intelligence Agency is insisting that, having contacted the Pakistanis, it still has no evidence that sites in the country were being targeted by terrorists. There have been doubts expressed about the whole story in the South African papers. The two men arrested may well have Islamist terror connections, but given the distinctly iffy quality of information that has emerged about the Pakistani al Qaeda arrests in the past couple of weeks, it wouldn't be wise to presume too much.

Meanwhile, a South African arrested in Mexico for having "strange and puzzling" travel documents has been released. American Conservative and Antiwar.com's Justin Raimondo is seeking to draw our Mossad passport scandal in with indications that terror organisations are abusing the South African passport system. It's not convincing, but he has some useful links to news stories on the South African angle.

Elsewhere on the Pakistani beat, sources in Pakistan's intelligence service have said that Mohammad Naeem Noor Khan, an al Qaeda suspect named by US officials as the source of information that led to the raising of the alert level in New York, was working undercover for them and that his outing has forced them to abandon a productive sting operation and take the man into hiding.

Washington Monthly's Kevin Drumm pondered the sting story:

What in God's green earth is going on here? I have a whole stew of reactions swirling around in my head about this. I'm beside myself that Bush administration officials are so spineless that they'd kill an undercover operation just to remove some political heat from themselves. But: I'm also angry that the reaction to Sunday's terror warning from Bush critics was so hysterical that the Bushies got panicked into doing this. And yet: I'm furious that Bush and his cronies have so corrupted our intelligence services that deep skepticism was hardly an unfair reaction. But: why did Tom Ridge insist on politicising Sunday's news in the first place? On the other hand: why did the New York Times print this? Did they know they were blowing an operation?

Who the hell knows these days? Juan Cole notes that the American leak of Khan's name also wrecked a British intelligence operation, and that Condoleeza Rice admitted to CNN's Wolf Blitzer that the Bush administration had given Khan's name to the press. Says Cole:

The outing of Khan, probably the most important asset the US has ever had inside al-Qaeda, is a huge disaster and a setback to attempts to finish off the top leadership of al-Qaeda.

The Observer looks at the kind of information Khan was compiling .

Somebody queried the Rationalists' statement I linked to on Friday on the results of a Christchurch School of Medicine study of 330 prostitutes - pointing out that on the information presented it doesn't actually debunk Maxim's claim: the Rationalists were talking about the total sample of 330 sex workers in the study, Maxim was talking about street prostitutes only.

So I had a look. I couldn't find the full paper, but the study was published in 2001, based on research conducted between May and September 1999. The abstract indicates that it found that street prostitutes, estimated to make up a third of Christchurch's sex workers, did begin at an earlier age, largely because massage parlours were forbidden by law to hire anyone under the age of 18.

Of the sample of 303 sex workers, 220 were in parlours. Just under a third of the sample said they had begun sex work under the age of 18, suggesting that about a third had begun on the street.

If there were 12 prostitutes under 18 in the sample of 303, and assuming the number of street workers in the sample was even roughly proportionate, then Maxim's "two thirds" just doesn't add up. So where did the claim come from? Happily, we can trace it through a good old-fashioned process of Maxim fact-mangling:

An earlier version of Maxim's 10 reasons "fact" sheet says that "A Christchurch School of Medicine study found two-thirds of Christchurch street prostitutes starting working under the age of 18." A "myths" page on the Maxim site says: "A Christchurch School of Medicine study found that two-thirds of street prostitutes began selling their bodies under the age of 18." But then we move to the current version of the "reasons" page, which says: "A Christchurch School of Medicine study found that nearly two-thirds of Christchurch street prostitutes were under the age of 18." What odds on where this factoid will head next?

The irony is that the authors of the Christchurch study highlighted the need for "legislation and policy" on health and safety "to encourage the control women can exert over their work practice". Five years on, after law reform, that policy has begun to emerge. Last week OSH published A Guide to Occupational Health and Safety in the New Zealand Sex Industry. Over 100 pages, it covers everything from personal security to disinfecting dildoes. Sex workers can complain if their employers don't meet the standards it sets out. Whatever our misgivings about the sex industry, it's undeniable that in this respect decriminalisation has begun to improve the lot of those who work in it.

BTW, I made an update to Friday's post having finally, I think, sorted out the Maxim-Young-Nats-AUSA business with the help of a reliable source.

And, finally ,back to the rugby on Saturday night, which basically just pissed me off. The All Black pack without McCaw and Robinson is looking more and more deficient, George Gregan's ability to play the referee is peerless (if Ali Williams was going to be yellow-carded for persistent offside, what about Smith and Waugh?), but mostly there appear to be too many failures of judgement on the field. Tracey Nelson's stats for the game are up now.

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Uncharitable | Aug 06, 2004 12:39

Student politics, as we all know, is a strange business. But it got more curious this week with the election, by a margin of a couple of hundred votes, of Greg Langton as president of the Auckland University Students Association.

Langton is northern regional chair of the Young Nationals, and a member of the university's Evangelical Union. Neither of these facts ought to stand in the way of his election to the student office. But an email sent out on a Young Nats mailing list says that Langton's campaign was receiving financial assistance from the Maxim Insitute.

Craccum magazine tried to follow up the story this week, but got a no-comment from Maxim. Langton, who ran on a platform of "students not politics", has denied the assistance but it appears that there's a little more clarification required yet.

AUSA rules presently forbid candidates from spending more than $200 of their own money on campaigns - an impratically small amount in the modern world - and some students are claiming that Langton's swish campaign DVD could not have been produced for such a sum. Langton says it really was a shoestring job.

The money from Maxim is said to be relatively modest, either $1000 or $2000, and I don't really wish to bag Langton himself. The more acute issue here is that Maxim has charitable status - which means that it can't engage in direct political activity of the kind indicated in the Young Nats' email. If it does prove to have provided assistance to Langton, or to the Young Nats, then as far as I can see it is morally and legally required to resign its charitable status and the consequent tax advantages attached to it.

I might also venture to suggest that the Young Nats be careful who they get into bed with, so to speak.

NB: I was finally able to sort this out a bit better this afternoon. Craccum appears to have conflated the National party email, which referred to the Young Nats getting together to discuss their candidates for the AUSA elections (it's mildly unusual for students elections to be explicitly party political) and the Maxim money, which was a separate issue. I understand that Maxim was preparing to give Langton $2000 for his campaign but appears to have taken fright after Craccum broke the story.

Meanwhile, the Rationalists have caught Maxim fibbing in public - again. Maxim's fictitious claim that "A Christchurch School of Medicine study found that nearly two-thirds of Christchurch street prostitutes were under the age of 18" is still being made here on the Maxim website.

I presume I'm not the only one still feeling confused over the Amokura Panoho affair, which seems to have played out in reverse. The public phase began a week ago, when she resigned from her position with the Department of Labour's Community Employment Group after her employer questioned her role with the fledgling Maori Party.

The questions arose after two members of John Tamihere's electorate organisation attended a Maori Party hui and heard Panoho speak there. Tamihere was informed and passed on "concerns" about a potential conflict of interest to his fellow minister Ruth Dyson, who then, without, she says, knowing the identity of the employee in question, passed on those concerns to Labour Department chief executive James Buwalda. Buwalda met with Panoho, who resigned of her own volition last Friday.

Funny thing is, she doesn't seem to have done anything wrong. After her resignation became news and reporters started asking questions, Trevor Mallard claimed that she had "pressured" her staff to attend the hui, then Tamihere suggested that she had used CEG resources for the benefit of the Maori Party.

Both withdrew their claims this week after the department said it had accepted Panoho's word that she had not crossed the line, although Buwalda did issue a memo to staff emphasising the need for political neutrality.

Panoho says she resigned before the department reached a conclusion in order to spare the CEG from being drag through the political mud. But it does seem that the whole thing would have remained confidential if she hadn't resigned. She now says she is considering legal action against Tamihere. Meanwhile, Tariana Turia is claiming the government has a hit list of Maori Party members.

I can't help but feel that Labour has been played beautifully by the Maori Party here: the moment a question was raised, Panoho resigned, immediately escalating the affair and making it very difficult for Labour to do anything similar in the course of what will undoubtedly be a very bitter series of battles in the Maori electorates. Turia is making passive-aggressiveness into a highly effective keynote style, and the government just looks bad again.

No Right Turn turns the blowtorch on the government over the affair and says that Gerry Brownlee is misleading the public over the censure of Maori Language Commission chief Haami Piripi.

Meanwhile, out there in the world, billions of dollars of Iraq's money is being sluiced into Halliburton's coffers with little apparent oversight or accounting - and no say for Iraq's "sovereign" government in how the money is spent. The story comes at the same time as the news that the US Securities Exchange Commission has fined Halliburton $7.5 million for defrauding its investors through unacceptable accounting practices. The company's CEO at the time was US vice president Dick Cheney, who is being evasive about what he knew. Billmon does some more digging in search of Dick.

Asia Times is predicting that the Pakistani leadership will continue to produce arrests between now and the US presidential election as "bargaining chips" in its push for more US government favours. The UK Home Office is playing down Pakistani claims on both Pakistan's role in this week's British terrorism arrests and a specific plot for an attack on Heathrow Airport. The Independent is now describing the alleged Heathrow plot as "a media dream". Some weeks you wonder if anything is true …

Rolling Stone has acquired the secret "annexes" to the Taguba Report on the Abi Ghraib abuses. The new details of brutality and sexual torture appear to bear out claims made by the New Yorker's Seymour Hersh and foster the belief that the prison was hideously out of control.

Further in the Torturing for Freedom World News, the Guardian has a story on the dossier released by the so-called Tipton Three detailing various disgraceful forms of abuse at Guantamamo Bay.

Riverbend is back on the blog.

And The Independent reports on what is very possibly the scariest Bushism ever.

To end on a slightly cheerier note, congratulations to my Net rugby friend Tracey Nelson for putting the All Blacks' flat backline theory on the news agenda at the press conference after the Springbok game at Jade Stadium. Now everyone's talking about it.

And finally, I had a you-had-to-be-there moment this week, when Dion from the D4 got up on stage with the MC5 and absolutely freakin' nailed their protest classic 'American Ruse'. That was the highlight of a set that had its moments but also veered sometimes into pub rock - or perhaps it was just the regrettable Aussie pub-rock sound mix. I spent quite a bit of time tuning into the pure and natural guitar playing of Deniz Tek, late of Australian cult rockers Radio Birdman. Deniz, a one-time participant in the US space programme, was very, very cool. But, then, as my friend Woody says, Deniz was born cool …

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Declaring war | Aug 05, 2004 11:28

Knowing John Banks, he probably was thinking of George W. Bush when he invited his enemies to "bring it on" this week. But at least Bush had men with guns for enemies. The mayor of Auckland was declaring his war with Transit New Zealand.

Banks' problem is that Transit, whose statutory duty is to keep the nation in motion, is so far dissatisfied with the Auckland City Council's half-assed planning around the proposed series of annual V8 supercar races through crucial points in the Auckland roading network.

Transit isn't alone. North Shore City has also flagged objections to the race plan, earning its mayor an attack in a silly and abusive press statement from Banks. The latest body to earn the wrath of our mayor is the Auckland Regional Council, which is also of the belief that Auckland City's planning is inadequate and wants resource consent hearings to be adjourned until some better work has been done on potential traffic problems.

The most interesting issue here is the future of the Victoria Park flyover extension. Transit's recent work on the Auckland motorway network has focused on choke-points on the CBD fringe: Grafton Gully has been reshaped and is now vastly more efficient. A new off-ramp from the North-Western motorway to the Northern is under construction, and will mean traffic doesn't have to leave one motorway to join the other. An extra lane is being built for the Southern motorway around Spaghetti Junction. This is all good stuff: effective road spending.

And probably the next choke-point to be targeted is the two-lane Victoria Park flyover - probably through the addition of an extra lane each way (the bold idea of a park tunnel appears to have disappeared). But expanding the flyover would mean the construction of permanent support columns in Beaumont Street, along one side of Victoria Park. This, unfortunately, is part of the proposed course for the annual V8 racing. It would be difficult to have both, and so - unbelievably - it appears Auckland's mayor has now declared himself opposed to a very necessary improvement to Auckland's roading network because it would interfere with his damn V8 race.

I know there's support for the racing, and that it will attract crowds, and it would be great if some way could be found of holding it. But that won't happen unless the council stops glossing over the issues and actually serves the public properly. There still seems to be no clear plan, for example, to address the fact that a major New Zealand Post depot lies inside the race course.

If you happened to be in the Auckland CBD between 5pm and 6pm yesterday, you will have seen how even minor obstructions - and there will be weeks of those with the race - can back up and create gridlock through the city. It's simply unacceptable for Banks to sit in his office firing out press releases attacking organisations that are actually doing their jobs.

Meanwhile, in this month's Metro magazine, Matt Philp makes what is the definitive assessment so far of Banks' $3 billion Eastern Transport Corridor plan. He comes to the same conclusion as most commentators: that Transit had good reason to place the road near the bottom of its priority list for Auckland; that there's no obvious way of funding the thing; and that the whole project could simply collapse. (This morning's Herald expands on another issue raised in the Metro story - where on earth do we find the skilled labour to build it?)

But my favourite part of the Metro story - because it's so John Banks - occurs when Philp queries the startling claim in an op-ed piece published under the byline of Banks and Manukau mayor Barry Curtis in the Herald, that "over the whole corridor, the benefits, including social multipliers, could reach $46 billion":

Metro: "How did you arrive at that sum, of more than $40 billion of benefits?"
Banks: "I've never used that figure."

Yes, that's our mayor. Unfortunately.

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Pink Frost | Aug 03, 2004 11:39

It takes about 55 minutes to travel by train from Wellington station to Paraparaumu, and I passed the time on Saturday by dipping again into Michael King's Tread Softly For You Tread On My Life. I'm an essayist by inclination and by aptitude, so King's 2001 book of "new and collected writings" strikes a particular chord with me, more so than some longer works.

It may also be, of course, that my attention has been fatally fractured by a decade of Internet use. But the joy of a book of essays and speeches is that you can dip again into it and have as many small, complete literary experiences as time allows.

So I opened the book at page 101, to 'A Vision for the New Millennium', a thinkpiece on nationhood originally written for the Sunday Star Times' millennium supplement. On its second page, King quotes the sonorous, richly optimistic concluding lines of Allen Curnow's 1943 poem, The Skeleton of the Great Moa in the Canterbury Museum, Christchurch:

Not I, some child born in a marvellous year,
Will learn the trick of standing upright here

Those lines still move me. They look forward to a sense of ease and belonging that could not be claimed by Pakeha back then, when Curnow and his fellow poets were, as a matter of intent, trying to spawn us a culture beyond "the spirit of exile". King quotes them on his way to the joyous declaration that we got there, that we have achieved "a second indigenous culture", one that does not diminish, and is not diminished by, Maori identity. He concludes with a "millennium invocation" he says he first heard from "my father's Ngati Maniapoto friend, Bill Herewini":

May the calm be widespread
May the sea glisten like greenstone
And may the warmth of summer fall upon us all

The train scooted across the Porirua estuary, through the land where King grew up.

The essay, and those the follow it in the book, including 'A Fraction Too Much Friction?', a 1999 speech that might be taken as a stand against political correctness, whatever that actually means, turned out to be a timely read. I hadn't got round to reading the full text of Trevor Mallard's much-ballyhooed speech, 'We are all New Zealanders now', but it proves to have more than a little Michael King in it.

The speeches by Mallard and John Tamihere last week are, certainly, positioning exercises by the government. Among other things, they seek to fend off the more damaging perceptions of its philosophy in government; to engender the government "personality transplant" that someone in the NBR declared was necessary. But it's a real shame if they are to be greeted as only that, because they both do have actual content. They ought to be taken to mean something.

Mallard and his speechwriter refer specifically to King's ideas on national identity without actually using the phrase "a second indigenous culture" (it's tempting to suppose that some spin doctor nixed the word "second" lest it be taken to mean something less than "first"). It is safer to declare that "we are all indigenous now", and to incur the wrath of Titewhai Harawira, than to be seen to declare any distinction - which jibes a little with his criticism of National's "assimilationist" philosophy.

Mallard's speech quite specifically refers to and rebuts National's stance from Orewa and since. He rightly takes aim at the cheap and inaccurate cracks about tangi leave and the fitness of Maori who become doctors after gaining entry to their course of study through affirmative action.

His comparison of National's philosophy to that of North Korea is over the top and unfair, but there was plenty that was over the top and unfair in the Orewa speech (the "non-Maori radicals, having climbed high into our social hierarchy" to procure their "dangerous drift towards racial separatism", for example).

He defines, with the aid of the 1989 Principles for Crown Action on the Treaty of Waitangi, the Treaty principles that Brash said "were never defined" (David Slack might wish to feel a little satisfaction at having helped push that one to the top of the rhetorical pile).

On the other hand, there is a degree of sophistry in Mallard's phrase: "Maori have no extra rights or privileges under the Treaty or in the policy of the New Zealand government," when it would be truer to say that whatever rights Maori organisations do enjoy, they enjoy them under the same system of law that serves us all.

But I can't see that this is Orewa-in-drag as some commentators have claimed. Read the two side-by-side. Brash is trying to declare an impending race war (…racially divided nation, with two sets of laws … divisive trend to embody racial distinctions … that separatist path …").

Mallard talks of "the spirit of the Treaty in terms of New Zealand in 2004" as "open-ended, not a straitjacket. It was a preliminary agreement to an on-going relationship under the same law and government." Brash casts it as an artefact from which we must move on and intones against projecting "current values onto 19th century New Zealand."

At a personal level, there's an undercurrent of the politics of resentment in the Orewa speech that I could never relate to. I just don't think I was angry enough, or will ever be. As an injection of ginger, Brash's speech did us all a favour - there would not have been the obligation to reflect that resulted in the (re)positioning behind Mallard's speech. But as a vision, it seems as mired in grievance as any of the malcontents on whom it trains its sights.

Among my bookshop hauls on this trip was another essay: A.R.D. Fairburn's spiritedly indignant We New Zealanders, published in 1944 as a stand-alone volume by the Progressive Publishing Society. Fairburn was at the time in transit from Marxism to Social Credit and is consequently hopeless on economics, but much of the rest of it, such as his railing against "wowsers" and "some unusually virulent outbreaks of 'morality'" at the time, seems to resonate quite well in 2004. I'll leave comment on that book for now, because I have some plans to return to it more comprehensively.

And, finally, by way of flippant conclusion, who else saw Shortland Street last night? Evil psycho Dom turns up The Chills' 'Pink Frost', a pretty little thing about murder in the night, murmurs "I love this song," and drowns the too-clever-for-her-own-good Avril in the bath. Now there was a cultural moment …

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Not so rough trade | Aug 02, 2004 11:24

Yes, it'll take another two years at least to conclude negotiations, and as long as the rich countries can wangle to properly implement, but the outcome of the Geneva WTO round - which finally puts agricultural export subsidies on the block - is both a vindication of the process and a good thing for the developing world. Getting the US to take even half a step back on its disgraceful cotton subsidies was probably more than could have been hoped for.

I didn't expect her to have anything positive to say, but I Googled up Jane Kelsey anyway to see what her response would be. Nothing yet: although there's an ARENA press release from last week in which she confidently predicts the failure of everything, fumes about "power brokers behind the scenes" and demands that the WTO be "put out of its misery". Sigh …

More measured responses from Africa dwelt on the gap yet to be filled between the promises of Geneva and concrete action from the rich nations, and the Christian Science Monitor hailed a new lease on life for world trade. China was sort of pleased. The Australian hailed a little shift in power towards the poor nations. The BBC has a Q&A on the agreement.

Back home in the Herald, we were, rather prematurely, busy totting up the extra export dollars.

Speaking of the dollars, you might wish to buy The Listener this week and read Gordon Campbell's story on the nation's remarkable economic run and the business lobby's curious determination to continue to behave like things are all perfectly awful. Honestly, some of those people need a clip upside the head …

Remember the New Republic's July Surprise story from a couple of weeks ago? The one that claimed that instructions had gone out from the White House for Pakistan to procure a major Al Qaeda arrest in time for Democratic convention? Well, it happened - although with Bin Laden apparently otherwise engaged, it was Ahmed Khalfan Ghailan, a suspect in the 1998 African embassy bombings.

The Western press seems to have steered clear of overt comment on the, er, coincidence, but an Indian news service and Democracy Now! are speculating on the timing, both noting that news of the arrest was delayed four days, until the convention was underway. It does, it must be said, make the current New York terror alert seem a bit whiffy too.

Ron Reagan, the late president's son, appears to have been saving both barrels for his op-ed in Esquire: The Case Against George W. Bush, which is pretty much all of this tone:

Politicians will stretch the truth. They'll exaggerate their accomplishments, paper over their gaffes. Spin has long been the lingua franca of the political realm. But George W. Bush and his administration have taken "normal" mendacity to a startling new level far beyond lies of convenience. On top of the usual massaging of public perception, they traffic in big lies, indulge in any number of symptomatic small lies, and, ultimately, have come to embody dishonesty itself. They are a lie. And people, finally, have started catching on.

That's hardly Dubya's biggest problem in the media, though. What's the guy gonna do now that Garth George has turned on him?

Meanwhile, inveterate flag-burner Paul Hopkinson has done it again in Parliament's grounds. I'm not particularly offended by the burning of the flag - it seems to me a relatively harmless means of protest against the state - but it's more than it seems a bit obvious and embarrassing, the act of someone more infatuated with his own ability to protest than anything else. I did have to smile when I noticed that Nick Kelly, the annoying man who kept trying to be a Labour Party member when no one wanted him, was involved. Like I said, infatuated with their own protest …

Thanks for all the responses to last week's blogs - too many to reply to individually, especially when I'm catching up after a few days away. Amusingly enough, a few readers were fixing to switch their vote until they got to the line that noted that Nick Smith and Ken Shirley's furious church-bashing statements were in fact satire on my part.

While I was away I did my usual trawl around Wellington's second-hand bookshops for forgotten and mouldering snatches of the national conversation, and came up with a couple of gems, but more of that tomorrow, probably.

There were a few responses to my query about the strangest places people had read Hard News: "How about in a bar in an ex-church in the cloister of a converted Catholic girls' school in Singapore at 2am on Rugby World Cup night, thanks to my mate Simon who discovered the WAP site," offered Greg Wood. "And then again while eating Coco Pops in a wall-less Japanese restaurant, in the rain, on the beach, on Bintan, with a mighty hangover after a huge 80s-style house party in an Angsoka villa: I guess the really weird bit was my headspace, rather than the location!"

Ivan Bruce told of reading it "in a tourist only cybercafe/guarded room in Barracoa Cuba. Topic = Don Brash most popular for Prime Minister. Result = return home in panic."

Pete Darlington was closer to home, and "not too weird actually; on a handheld PC (HP IPAQ) over Mobile Jetstream in the middle of Cook Strait at 5.45 AM with a strong cup of Interislander tea (cos their coffee's undrinkable). Worked a treat I might add as well."

Robin Paul got the blog in "Chabarosk in the far east of Russia, a couple of hundred miles north of Kobe, Japan. The sort of place where I hear the have microbreweries. Or Bishkek, north of Afghanistan, where they definititely do. I was with Jungin at the time, and I believe she mentioned the word 'Turkmenistan', but I have a gut feeling that I am wrong. One lives and learns. If you google Bishkek, it's much better than it sounds."

Rob Hargreaves read it in "a cafe in La Paz, Baja, Mexico just me and the cockroaches dodgy email at its best," but good old Christiaan Briggs takes the hand with "a Baghdad internet cafe, in the lead-up to the invasion."

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