New York's finest admit to having kept tabs on protestors.

New York police admitted on Thursday to compiling and then destroying a database of people arrested during anti-war protests, but rights groups decried the practice as an erosion of civil liberties in the name of the U.S. war on terrorism.
A "debriefing form" was used by detectives to record information on hundreds of people arrested in a series of protests since mid-February against the U.S.-led war on Iraq.
"After a review, the department has decided to eliminate the use of the Demonstration Debriefing Form," NYPD chief spokesman Michael O'Looney said in a statement that was first reported in Thursday's New York Times.
"Arrestees will no longer be asked questions pertaining to prior demonstration history, or school name. All information gathered since the form's inception on Feb. 15 has been destroyed."

Uh-huh... so you've basically just admitted to having secretly kept this information until now. Is there any reason we should believe you're not still secretly keeping it?

posted by James Russell | 10:21 PM

Scott Wickstein rates the media's performance in Gulf War II: The Son Of All Battles.

posted by James Russell | 10:17 PM

To paraphrase the fellow I linked to yesterday, "Christ Jesus, Blogger and my ISP are such utter cunts". I've been through not one but two freezes where I couldn't do a single goddamn thing with the Internet except connect to it—couldn't send or receive mail, couldn't do newsgroups, couldn't surf the Net—and now Blogger's giving me grief on top of that (I'm posting via Blogbuddy at the moment). Blogspot sites appear to be fucked, too. On we go, hopefully...

posted by James Russell | 8:30 PM

The Napster autopsy report.

Menn’s revelations are startling. Fanning’s ruffian uncle, John Fanning, actually conned his vulnerable nephew into handing over 70 percent of the company right at the outset. Later, Napster secretly paid musicians like rapper Chuck D to publicly support file-sharing (say it ain’t so, Chuck). At the end, after execs at the German media giant Bertelsmann tried to save the company—and ruined their own careers in the process—one of the young hackers provided the perfect postscript: “Everyone’s being greedy. We’re all fighting over scraps.”

posted by James Russell | 5:11 PM

All right, your homeland's free now, so fuck off.

The Federal Government is considering a reintegration package to encourage Iraqi asylum seekers to return home.
The Government offered similar assistance to Afghanis, detained at offshore immigration centres, whose applications for asylum were rejected. [...]
The Democrats say the Federal Government should not put any pressure on Iraqi asylum-seekers to return to their war-torn country.
Democrats leader Andrew Bartlett says he has concerns about the reintegration proposal.
"Nobody should be forced to return to Iraq against their will, now or in the future," he said.
"These people, who have already suffered enormously, should be able to have control over their own future, to return if and when they wish to return, at a time and manner of their choosing, or to remain in Australia," Senator Bartlett said.

posted by James Russell | 5:08 PM

In happier news, Souths have finally won a match. "About fucking time!" say all of us.

Yippee, hooray and thank the Lord, for the drought has broken. After an agonising wait of 271 days, South Sydney finally won again last night and didn't they love it.
It was like the Rabbitohs had won the grand final against Wests Tigers when winger Nathan Merritt dashed 80 metres to score the try that sealed Souths' 32-22 win two minutes from full-time.
Merritt's teammates converged on him in the Tigers' in-goal and the long-suffering Souths fans roared their heads off in delight. After the full-time siren blew to make it official, the Souths players took time to thank their fans. They didn't want to leave the field after that, and why would they?

The trick, of course, is going to be keeping that up. The win is nice, but we want more than just one. Still, the transition from the Piggins to the Pappas regime has at least been marked by a good show. I'm hoping they'll show you that run by Nathan Merritt on the news tonight, cos I imagine that would be something to see...

posted by James Russell | 4:59 PM

Donald Rumsfeld's thesis that there is nothing wrong in Iraq at the moment apart from the media coverage of it is finding predictable echoes here from some of the predictable suspects. Here's Miranda Devine:

On the ABC, there was no time to rejoice. It was all looting and anarchy. The World Today presenter John Highfield began: "Well, dawn has broken over Baghdad, welcoming day one of the new freedom - but if this is liberty, then it's far from perfect."
Who expected perfect democracy after one day of freedom from a totalitarian regime that ruled by torture and murder for a quarter of a century?

No one, dear. By the same token, though, I also doubt that they expected quite the level of "liberated" activity that there's been, you know, the looting and the anarchy.

Iraqi liberty got a cool reception, too, from the trio on Richard Glover's media forum. The ABC's Monica Attard, Channel Nine's Ross Coulthart and The Sydney Morning Herald's Ross Gittins offered their take on the jubilation in Baghdad. [...]
It is probably unfair to single out Attard, Coulthart and Gittins on the basis of a few comments made in a free-ranging radio discussion; they have much company in the free world. But they, after all, are among Australia's best journalists, with experience, knowledge and Walkley awards to burn. It is not a failure of intellect that feeds such cynicism.

Of course it isn't. I don't know what's feeding theirs, but the failure of Afghanistan is what feeds mine.

Then there's the ever reliable Piers Akerman. I've refrained from reading and commenting on Piers' bleatings, but he was too good to ignore today:

IT took the Catholic Church 359 years to come to grips with the fact that Galileo had correctly determined that the Earth is in orbit around the Sun.
Let's hope it doesn't take as long for the president of the bishops' conference, Francis Carroll, Archbishop of Canberra and Goulburn, to determine that the liberation of the Iraqi people was the correct moral thing to do.
It's not just the leadership of the Catholic clergy who are behaving so mulishly, despite overwhelming evidence of the joyous scenes beaming in from Baghdad.

Piers is actually refining Rumsfeld's position somewhat, you will notice, by not only not making reference to the looting and anarchy in Baghdad but by not even mentioning the media reports of same. The only visuals Piers has been getting from Baghdad are "joyous scenes", obviously.

In the spirit of compassion, however, let us forgive the muddle-headed clergy their apparent ignorance on this issue and look to someone who should be a little more closely in touch with the temporal world: Opposition Leader Simon Crean.
Alas, he is as other-worldly in his view of the liberation of the Iraqi people as those who make careers out of dabbling in the spiritual realm.

Such magnaminity from Piers! And such calling the kettle black by the pot! Cos there's nothing other-worldly about his apparent refusal to believe in the reality of anything but "joyous scenes" from Baghdad, is there?

It would be easy to dismiss the clergy, Simon Crean, and the loopy end of the commentariat spectrum as simply ignorant, but they're not.
They understand what they say, but they're all blind-sided to the obvious by their curiously warped, anti-US and anti-Howard ideology.

And there's nothing ideologically blinkered about Piers either, is there?

When the Iraqis turn Baghdad's former secret police headquarters into a museum, they should line the walls with the remarks these people have made and play looped tapes of their sermons and commentaries so future generations will know who were the enemies of liberty.

I would remind Piers at this point that neither Simon Crean nor Francis Carroll authorised the hijacking of passenger aeroplanes in order to fly them into the World Trade Centre in New York, nor did they authorise the placing of bombs to kill tourists in Bali nightclubs, nor did they authorise the use of suicide bombers to destroy civilian lives in Israel or to attack Coalition troops in Iraq. I would remind him of that, except asking Piers to maintain a little perspective and remember who the real enemies of liberty are would be asking too much. I certainly hope future generations DO get to know who the enemies of liberty were because Piers obviously doesn't.

posted by James Russell | 4:52 PM