The Stupid Continues

Even After His Political Death, The Culture Wars Rage On

Oh what joy. The anti-radicalisation kit handed out by the Federal Government to help teachers spot radicalising kids is a travesty.

News of the booklet, launched last week by the counter-terrorism minister, Michael Keenan, was first published in Sydney’s Daily Telegraph under the headline, “Schoolyard Terror Blitz”.

But Bouma said the information in the kit was not intended for public consumption. “People should have been trained in how to use it and how not to abuse it … to simply throw it out there was not the intention,” he said.
Other experts in radicalisation told Guardian Australia on Monday that teachers should not to “jump to conclusions” about students who show symptoms described in the kit, warning Australia risked its own Ahmed Mohamed incident. Ahmed, 14, was arrested in Texas last week after a clock he assembled was mistaken by a teacher for a homemade bomb.
Grossman, who also said she was unaware the booklet was being produced and distributed to schools, questioned the use of the case study relating to “Karen”.
“For me, that is not an example that I think is particularly helpful,” she said. “I think we want to be very careful not to conflate political activism automatically with violent extremism.

“There is a difference between people who get involved in what you would call incidental violence as a result of a political protest. To me, that’s not what we mean when we talk about facing and tackling the very serious issues around violent extremism.
“It’s going to draw attention away from some of the really valuable things that are included in the awareness kit that should be up for discussion and debate.”

The case study of 'Karen' is particularly worrisome because it links 'alternative music' to radical eco politics. You sort of wonder if by radicalism, they really meant the kinds of people who chain themselves to trees to stop logging and CSG mining. If so, this is nothing but the same old culture wars being raged by the Liberal and National Party, that places the alternative and counter-culture groups as the 'other' and sets about trying to disenfranchise them out of their own country. 

Which is to say, the execrable Tony Abbott's leadership was pretty off-the-mark in so many ways it wasn't funny. It's barely been a fortnight since he was ousted so it is hard to sheet this home to Malcolm Turnbull, but the fact that this kind of idiocy is being carried out by the government shows that you only have to scratch the surface these LNP types to find seething hateful culture warriors, carrying on like they are the sole inheritors of civilisation. They're wowsers - every bit as backward and stupid as the Mothers of Prevention in the USA. 

Deservedly, there is a piece of satire going the rounds:

The Stupid Never Stops. 

The Martin Place Siege

Wog Day Afternoon

Yes, I'm being rude because I'm incensed. I'm particularly hating on the identity politics being drawn out like one of those outlines they draw on corpses in old American movies. If this is allowed to become an identity politics issue, we'll see it feed in to the asylum seeker issue, and no good is ever going to come of it.

As the dust and gun smoke settles on the dramatic siege, we now understand that the culprit was a misfit with a gun and the wrong song in his heart. He wanted to have us frame his hostage-taking as a political act, but it seems it was the desperate final act of a cornered man.

I have to say the way things unfolded seemed very strange and disjointed, what with the media embargo and the self-censorship by the mainstream media. But at its heart was the burning question was "What kind of idiot walks into a cafe and turns it into a siege?"

The Lindt Cafe, was across the street from some major banking headquarters as well as the Reserve Bank of Australia. It was also in the vicinity of the consulate generals for the USA and Japan. It was a  target rich environment and the man opted to take hostages in the Lindt Cafe. Clearly this wasn't an act of terror, it was a cry for help -but he waved the black flag with the arabic squiggles on it and the media all went, "oh that must be ISIL."

It's only the day after that we're learning the whole thing was ad hoc; he took the wrong flag to his own hostage taking; he wasn't really all that together to begin with; and maybe perhaps should've been behind bars and not out on bail. It's not like I have any special analysis that somebody else isn't hurling around - I'm just jotting down my own outrage at the whole media circus.

It seems incredibly pathetic to me that for the better part of the day while it was unfolding that we were led to believe that it was a political act. It was only political if you take the view that the personal is ipso facto political - the way that Carol Hanisch said it, but applying identity politics to Islam instead of gender. It's kind of stupid to take a bloated subjective sense of one self and seeing in it the universal-political. In the same sense that it's hard to buy this Man Haron Monis' own views about his own political importance, it is hard to buy into the notion that a black flag with arabic writing on it is ergo Terrorism-with-a-capital-'T'. It was more terrifying because it was so gratuitous, so ridiculous in the end-analysis and so bloody stupid. This was not 9/11.

The truth is a lot more easily understood as the random violent undertaking by the unhinged - and more's the pity that two people had to die in all the unleashed chaos. The politicians are making a field day out of this, what with flags flying at half mast and praising the NSW police for their expertise, courage and dutifulness. Look, I don't mean to be the party pooper but it was one middle-aged guy with a shotgun holding hostages in a downtown cafe. It wasn't exactly the public beheading on YouTube of the American journalist somewhere in Syria. Whatever this was, it was not that.

He was just this angry, misplaced future-shocked human being who was looking for an out - an elaborate dramatic - sensationalist even - plot for an assisted suicide. His hostage taking venture was about as stupid as 'Dog Day Afternoon' and went about as well.




What Kind Of Man Reads Playboy The Koran?

Still, we must ask ourselves what kind of manner stupid we were dealing with.

Some years ago there was a dickhead writing letters to the family of dead Australian soldiers castigating them. That was this guy Man Haron Monis.

Some months ago it was reported that some sheikh was offering 'spiritual healing' but turned out he was sexually molesting his customers. That was also this guy Man Haron Monis.

Sometime last year it was reported that some religious dude had stabbed his wife to death and set the corpse on fire. That was this same guy again, Man Haron Monis.

Do you see a pattern emerging where neither the law nor media draws a line to connect these things? This guy was disturbed.

Now the same guy somehow gets bail from his 40 charges of sexual assault and being an accomplice to murder, and goes and does this shitty little thing. I think we're entitled to ask, just what the hell happened inside the system that failed us so badly? The community outrage is going to centre on this issue and the governments - both Federal and NSW - had better have some good answers. So far the indication is pretty cruddy.

Showdown In The Lindt Cafe

Turns out, ASIO knew about this guy and he wasn't on the Terror watch list.

Speaking in Sydney on Tuesday after laying flowers at a spontaneous memorial for the victims at Martin Place, Mr Abbott said Monis was well known to federal and NSW police and ASIO, but "I don't believe that he was on a terror watch list". 

"If I can be candid with you, that is the question that we were asking ourselves around the national security committee of the cabinet today," Mr Abbott said. 

"How can someone who has had such a long and chequered history, not be on the appropriate watch lists, and how can someone like that be entirely at large in the community?" 

He said the federal government had acted upon hearing "terrorist chatter of acts of random violence against Australian citizens", such as upgrading security at Parliament House in Canberra and raising the terror alert. 

"But … we do have to ask ourselves the question, could [the Martin Place incident] have been been prevented?"

The answer is, you can't. Unless you're like the Woody Allen joke where he fails a metaphysics exam because he looked into the soul of the student next to him.
More to the point, there's every indication this guy was mentally ill, but nobody diagnosed him.

Short of that, what could they have done? Picked him up on the street and tortured him until he confessed to plot when he himself had no idea what he was going to do until 3 days before? The unknowable is the unknowable for a reason.

A Side Note On Torturing Terrorists

Look, it's not about the Martin Place siege but more about the CIA report, which has been bugging me all week and then this siege happened. We in the wider community know what's right and what's wrong. And we know it right into the heart of democracy. Then suddenly, once in power, these politicians condone the unthinkable. It's such a weird phenomenon.

I found this on YouTube which is tangential, but has something important to say about this stuff:



You tell'em Denzel because they sure didn't listen to the real people who objected after 9/11. After a near-deacde of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, I think by 2011 we'd descended into this kind of fiction:



We're really not in a good spot in the moral high ground stakes here.

It's War At Home

Sheikh-ing All Over

Okay, bad gag. But you know what I mean. Today's big news is that upward of 800 Federal and State police were involved in multiple busts of alleged terror cells sympathetic to the ISIS/ISIL//Caliphate. Thwarted by the AFP was a plot to randomly snatch somebody in Martin Place and behead them as a demonstration. The mind boggles, but there you have it. The imagery is almost something out of a comic book tending to gore rather than strictures from scripture. Basically some people out there were being wire-tapped and they plotted to do something savage and stupid, so the AFP got them.

This would be the moment we're supposed to praise the terror laws, including the APEC laws which had (and continue to have ) no sunset clause. I know, we forgot all about them - even I forgot about them until I started moving back here to Blogger - but these same snooping spook laws would have been the ones deployed to nab these ISIS/ISIL/Caliphate sympathisers.

Thanks to the efforts of the AFP, nobody random got beheaded in Martin Place. It's so good to be alert but not alarmed!

Multiculturalism Is Not The Problem

You're going to read it in the papers soon where people are going to take this little conspiracy of crazies as a sign that multiculturalism "failed" in Australia. They're winding up to throw their best junk ball pitch right now as I type this. You know those opportunistic xenophobes are out there.

There's really a simple explanation for this phenomenon of angry radicalisation of these muslim youths: it's cultural alienation. It's really hard growing upon anglo Australia and all the heroes of masculinity are blonde sporting gods or whatever. It's hard growing upon the west when all the movies and TV shows portray your cultural heritage as the potential enemy. A kid from a muslim family will inevitably live in a kind of cultural shadow. Not much gets done to bring them in from the cultural alienation, which explains why a distant call-to-arms may appeal so strongly to these youths.

Australian multi-culturalism is a bit of a fudge. The big demand put on immigrants is that they give up on their cultural heritage and go naked, and instead don the shallow cultural, icons of a largely artificial nation. It's a difficult call. in some ways the cultural distance and chasm is unimaginably large, and unfathomably deep. I don't condone people who run to radicalism as a desperate ploy to shore up self esteem but it's not like I'm without empathy for their plight. They don't need our sympathy - yet they do need us to understand them a lot more.

It's tough to navigate this stuff in Australia and establish a sense of identity. It's hard to feel like you belong in a place that denies you your history or metaphysics. People may say they need to get over it, but it's not easy getting over your family heritage.

Worse still are the people who go around pointing to this sort of thing as a reason way multiculturalism "fails". They say the failure to assimilate is the ultimate failure - but it is often spoken by people who have never experienced any alienation in their lives. Rich white people who went to distinguished private schools, selling down the prospect of people finding a place in Australia because they don't abandon everything that came with them in their cultural suitcase, are not helping.

At best, multi-culturalism in Australia sets up a halfway house safe zone where people can feel a certain amount of legitimacy in holding on to the things that are important from their origins. If the rich white people didn't bleat so loudly about the alleged failure of multiculturalism in Australia, maybe the children of these immigrants wouldn't feel the need to radicalise in the shadows.

My Song Of The Week

Terrified Yet?
Yeah. I wrote a song about having David Hicks live nearby. This is it.
I don't really know what to say except I sort of do say it all that I feel in this song.

A Terrorist In The Neighborhood

David Hicks Is Staying In Abbotsford

In one of those dumb ironies, he seems to be a customer at my local supermarket. That's right. As Humphrey Bogart once intoned in Casablanca, "of all the gin joints in all the towns in all this world, you had to walk into mine." The news on him is scarce because there's a gag on the man so he can't say anything. I imagine thrusting a microphone in his face would elicit an "I can't talk guys, so please don't talk to me."

David Hicks has been revealed as living in Sydney's inner-western suburb of Abbotsford, with several media locating the convicted terrorism supporter yesterday.

Despite multiple requests for media to leave, News Limited newspapers located Mr Hicks, who was found to be accompanied by a female friend.

Hicks said that he planned to spend about another two weeks in Sydney, before likely returning to South Australia.

"I'll be here for another two to three weeks," he said.

Despite his pleas, media were seen continuing to hound Mr Hicks, who is currently the subject of a US Government gag order should he speak out about his treatment in the US operated Guantanamo Bay facility - a place he was held for over five years.

"I can go to jail if I talk to the media... please don't talk to me," he said.

There you go, it does.
It's a far cry from G'itmo, but you get that. As most of you know, I actually thought David Hicks was a foolish person who managed to stick his neck into other people's business and got a noose thrown around it. While it's hard to condone Camp X-Ray in any way shape or form, I never felt you could say that somebody in his position could say he didn't have it coming to him. One doesn't end up in the company of Al Qaeda by mistake. While it may seem incredibly unkind, from my own historic perspective on all this, I think the guy got off lightly. But I've written all that before, and to tell you the truth, it's rather boring to rehash.

The new twist is that for the next fortnight, I have an ever-so-slight chance of running into David Hicks, "known terrorist, convicted Al Qaeda collaborator". I've been trying to imagine just what is going to be like and I can't help but think I'd stare and gawk and gander.
"Oh look, he likes Pepsi over Coke! What a terrorist!"
"Oh wow, he likes Helga's wholemeal breads! And crunchy peanut butter!"
Of course I don't think I want to know, but it'd be hilarious to see a celebrity in action at the local supermarket. It's not like Paris Hilton is dropping into Five Dock Superbarn any time soon. Besides which, the day he gets to spew his guts to the press is the day he becomes a millionaire. The rest is just posturing.
I doubt I'll get the opportunity to even say "you had it coming you mug," but... I might. Then again, maybe there is a queue forming at Supabarn of people who want to beat the crap out of him. :)

Bucking The Trend

They Say Patriotism Is The Last Refuge Of The Scoundrel
Here's a piece of news for the day: The US Senate has decided not to go with the extension for the Patriot Act.

The Senate on Friday blocked reauthorization of the broad antiterrorism bill known as the USA Patriot Act, pushing Congress into a game of brinksmanship with President Bush, who has said the nation will be left vulnerable to attack if the measure is not quickly renewed.

With many Democrats and some Republicans saying the bill does not go far enough in protecting civil liberties, the Republican leadership fell short of the 60 votes required to break a filibuster. Now the future of the law, which greatly expanded the government's surveillance and investigative powers in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, is in doubt.

The debate, a passionate fight about the balance between national security and personal privacy, became a touchstone for repercussions after the disclosure on Thursday night that Mr. Bush had secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States to search for terrorist activity.

There's even more juicy stuff in all of this. You'd think that the lawmakers in this country would sit up and take notice of this decision. In the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave, they're not going to let go of those freedoms without a bit of a fight.
Stay tuned.

Waiting For Nomar
It was supposed to happen late in the week and it didn't. Nomar is still pondering his options between playing for the Yanks, Dodgers, Indians or Astros. In the mean time, he visited the Dodgers to check them out.

"Both were great meetings," Colletti said, "at least from my perspective."

The New York Yankees, Cleveland Indians and Houston Astros also have courted Garciaparra, a five-time All-Star beset the last two seasons by wrist, Achilles and groin injuries. By Friday night, none of those organizations had been notified that Garciaparra was off the market.

Once among the elite shortstops in the game, Garciaparra, 32, played more games at third base than shortstop with the Chicago Cubs last season and has told the Dodgers he would be willing to play first base or left field.

The Dodgers signed shortstop Rafael Furcal and third baseman Bill Mueller in the last two weeks, and have been looking to upgrade over Hee-Seop Choi at first base and a variety of candidates in left.

Cesar Izturis, the Dodger shortstop for much of the last four seasons, had Tommy John surgery on his right elbow and is not expected to return until June or July. When he signed Furcal, Colletti suggested Izturis, when healthy, would play second base and Jeff Kent would move to first base.

It is unclear what a Garciaparra signing would do to that plan, though it is unlikely the Dodgers would ask Garciaparra to learn two new positions in a three-month span, and likely they would prefer not to have him test his Achilles' tendon and groin in left field every night.

Among the four teams vying for his services, one would think that the Dodgers who signed Bill Mueller last week have filled their 3B needs without Nomar. In other words, he's got just as little space on the Dodgers as he does with the Yanks, and of course the Dodgers don't play a DH.

Walk-off HBP put me onto this magnificent recording by Ry Cooder called Chavez Ravine.


Since reading the liner notes and learning the story of how a vibrant Mexican community was wiped out and sold down the river in order to build Dodger Stadium, I kind of lost my sentimental regard for the Dodgers. I don't even know if it's fair blaming the Dodgers for stuff the ownership of 50 years ago carried out; but it's repellent stuff and I for one don't really want to like the Dodgers any more - and this is the club that broke the race barrier and even broke Hideo Nomo into the MLB.

Well Mr. Garciaparra, you might want to check out the Ry Cooder album before you sign with the Dodgers to play at Chavez Ravine.
Oh yes, of course there's also the fact that Yankee pinstripes would you suit you very well Mr. G.

More From The Crypt of (Anti-)Terror

Can't Be Said Enough
Pleiades has sent in this link to the Margo Kingston Web Diary where a person has written in a substantial letter of plea that she sent to the government committee. It was penned by one Olga Ohanessian of Panton Hill Victoria. She says she was born to parents who were refugees from Europe.

The recent very public raids against alleged terrorists (who may have been pre-judged in the media circus, paraded in American style orange jump suits, shackled like the convicts at Port Arthur must have been) was done so under the existing laws. The present laws are demonstrably adequate and do not need to be amended. The alleged terrorists will, (we hope) have their cases publicly tested in a court of law under the existing laws. If the amendments to the terrorist laws are passed, we won't even know who has been "disappeared", or what various tortures are being applied to them, or even if they are still in the country, or if their human rights are being abused. The veil of secrecy inevitably leads to abuses of power.

The amendments propose a draconian curtailment on the right of free speech. We already have our own camps with razor wire a la Siberia, far away from prying eyes. Will they be filled with Australian citizens whisked away in the dead of night on the basis of a suspicious or "subversive" comment? If these thoughts appear far-fetched, please do not dismiss them. In the Ukraine voices of dissent, be they poets, musicians, journalists, ordinary citizens, disappeared in their thousands. Some of their graves are now monuments of pilgrimage in the new emerging democracy. Others simply disappeared, but all over the Ukraine, the sites of the incarcerations and executions are known and publically acknowledged.

Generations of fearing secret police leaves a nasty legacy where people do not trust their neigbour. The consequences of this proposed legislation on changing the cheerful, happy, caring Australian culture into a fearful suspicious one will be longlasting.

She's right. How can we be championing freedom to the Middle East countries while we busily dismantle our own out of fear?
What did Yoda say? Fear turns to anger and anger turns to hate? Better believe it. :)
Jokes aside, the refrain I keep thinking about is the one where terrorists weren't going to change the way we live, and here we are busily changing the way we live to accommodate politicians who get so much mileage out of fear and ignorance. This, combined with the dismantling of an education system means they want more fear and ignorance out there so that they themselves don't have to be so darned clever. I would remind them of Abraham Lincoln's old adage about foolin' people: "You can fool some people all the time and you can fool all the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time."

Some Thoughts On Politics On A Monday
You can't say this stuff in the public press. So I'm putting it here.

There's an old cartoon that dates to about 1984 on Sydney University in Honi Soit where somebody drew a cartoon wherein it portrayed dogs licking balls.
Frame 1: Dogs may lick their balls.
Frame 2: Dogs may lick each others' balls.
Frame 3: But one thing that dogs don't do is STUDENT POLITICS!!!

That's the way I feel about all politics - The best minds of any generation just don't do politics. they might do Sex, Drugs & Rock'n'Roll, indulge in frat-house orgies in their wayward youth, but they just don't do this stuff called politics.
They do science and art and music and law and perhaps Medicine (though I have personal experience of the fallacy of this notion that medicos are somehow intelligentzia) they just don't do politics.

So no matter how clever these plucky little self-promoters called politicians claim they are, you can bet your bottom dollar they're not the brightest sparks. The awful truth is that in their pursuit of excellence, all the people in the arts, sciences, and law (though probably not medicine) wake up one day and go "Holy Smokes! We've left the running of the ship to morons and we're about to hit the iceberg at full speed."

It's a shock, and damn right so it should be. The kid who they beat through out high school and University has somehow transformed him/herself into a suited demagogue harranguing for votes, running the damn country to ruination come, passing asinine laws, filling their pockets with ungodly Superannuation sums, and collecting accolades in pages of history that land on them because out of a process of elimination. Somebody was PM, you see...
Seriously folks, John Howard's intellect hasn't a patch on say, literary critic Don Anderson or author David Malouf.
Peter Costello's intellect hasn't got a patch on Nick Cave or Paul Kelly or Peter Carey.
Philip Ruddock is no intellectual match for David Helfgott, or a Peter Weir or even the awful, awful, Philip Noyce.
Even on her best day, Amanda Vanstone is about as ineffectual an intellectual as Nicole Kidman, known-High-School-dropout, and that's saying a lot. Yet there she is, running a ministry!
These untermenschen are running (more like ruining) our country.

The Labor folks aren't much better. Kim Beazley might fancy himself a historian but he's not really doing anything worthy of being called intellectual; he's not a Don Watson let alone a Manning Clarke.
Kevin Rudd is a born-again Flat-earth Creationist as far as we're led to believe. Well, what can you say about an ID-iot.
For all the hooha, nobody in their right mind ever thought Mark Latham was going to be the next Milton Keynes.
John Dawkins couldn't tell the difference between education and vocational training (just look at his so-called 'reforms') and Paul Keating was at best, a witty try-hard but he certainly was not the intellectual equivalent of even the most run-of-the-mill University lecturer in just ab out anything.
It's sickening. Really.

So the question that we all struggle with today is this: how does it feel to live under the second best (and worse) minds of the generation, all of them demagogues who got voted in on the fearful prejudices and stupid behaviour of the aggregate masses? And this is the system we're trying to sell to the Iraqis and Afghanistan. There are days I don't wonder why they keep getting spirited insurgencies, especially when you consider the kind of candidates they get. We're pushing a faulty product. :)

UPDATE
Pleiades sent in this other link that covers the anti-terror laws section regarding 'sedition' and the many objections to it.

Sedition around the world

5.35 Mr Chris Connolly submitted that 'sedition has a long and undignified history', and that important figures in history who have been charged and sometimes imprisoned for sedition, include both Ghandi and Nelson Mandela. He argued that:

...sedition charges are either the last desperate gasp of an authoritarian regime (eg Ghandi) or the extreme and sometimes ludicrous result of a regrettable moment in national history (eg McCarthyism).

5.36 Mr Chris Connolly concluded:

The clear lesson from the history of sedition laws is that they are used routinely by oppressive regimes, or are used by more liberal regimes at times of great national stress. Their use is nearly always the subject of considerable regret at a later date.

5.37 In the same vein, Mr Laurence Maher observed that a survey of the history of sedition demonstrates that (among other matters) 'its only purpose and use has been to throttle political dissent'.

5.38 The committee was told that many other countries have been moving away from crimes of sedition. For example, the Gilbert and Tobin Centre of Public Law submitted that:

The Gibbs review observed that the UK Law Commission found that a crime of sedition was unnecessary, since seditious conduct is already captured by the ordinary offence of incitement to crime. Reviews of criminal law in Canada and New Zealand omitted sedition offences altogether.

5.39 Mr Robert Connolly, representative of the Arts and Creative Industries of Australia, highlighted the application of sedition laws outside Australia, telling the committee that:

The countries that have repealed sedition laws, or made them inactive, are: Canada, Ireland, Kenya, New Zealand, South Africa, Taiwan, the United Kingdom and the United States. The countries that have active sedition laws that have been used or revised in recent years are: China, Cuba, Hong Kong, Malaysia, North Korea, Singapore, Syria and Zimbabwe. I imagine that it is perfectly clear to the majority of Australians which list we feel Australia should belong to.

...and so on. There's more and it's worth a look through if you have time.

Mailbag Stuff

Magic Of Makeup
These came in from somebody, probably in response to my quip about Zhang Ziyi's makeup problems for her FHM shoot.



Pleiades Mailbag Stuff
These came in this morning.

Link 1: Al Qaeda as a database
This one follows on on the notion tat Al Qaeda is essentially a kind of bnlowback from years of black-ops screwing over the Muslim world.

Al Qaida was neither a terrorist group nor Osama bin Laden's personal property . . . The terrorist actions in Turkey in 2003 were carried out by Turks and the motives were local and not international, unified, or joint. These crimes put the Turkish government in a difficult position vis-a-vis the British and the Israelis. But the attacks certainly intended to 'punish' Prime Minister Erdogan for being a 'toot tepid' Islamic politician.

" . . . In the Third World the general opinion is that the countries using weapons of mass destruction for economic purposes in the service of imperialism are in fact 'rogue states," specially the US and other NATO countries.

" Some Islamic economic lobbies are conducting a war against the 'liberal" economic lobbies. They use local terrorist groups claiming to act on behalf of Al Qaida. On the other hand, national armies invade independent countries under the aegis of the UN Security Council and carry out pre-emptive wars. And the real sponsors of these wars are not governments but the lobbies concealed behind them.

"The truth is, there is no Islamic army or terrorist group called Al Qaida. And any informed intelligence officer knows this. But there is a propaganda campaign to make the public believe in the presence of an identified entity representing the 'devil' only in order to drive the 'TV watcher' to accept a unified international leadership for a war against terrorism. The country behind this propaganda is the US and the lobbyists for the US war on terrorism are only interested in making money." (Our emphasis, Ed.)

In yet another example of what happens to those who challenge the system, in December 2001, Maj. Pierre-Henri Bunel was convicted by a secret French military court of passing classified documents that identified potential NATO bombing targets in Serbia to a Serbian agent during the Kosovo war in 1998. Bunel's case was transferred from a civilian court to keep the details of the case classified. Bunel's character witnesses and psychologists notwithstanding, the system "got him" for telling the truth about Al Qaeda and who has actually been behind the terrorist attacks commonly blamed on that group. It is noteworthy that that Yugoslav government, the government with whom Bunel was asserted by the French government to have shared information, claimed that Albanian and Bosnian guerrillas in the Balkans were being backed by elements of "Al Qaeda." We now know that these guerrillas were being backed by money provided by the Bosnian Defense Fund, an entity established as a special fund at Bush-influenced Riggs Bank and directed by Richard Perle and Douglas Feith.

What a drag.

Link 2: Richard Neville's Take

On the weekend I arrived in Wellington, a navy frigate shuddered from a series of explosions and burst into a ball of orange flames. Two minutes later, like a scene from Pearl Harbour, it sank to the bottom of the sand. Was Osama bin Laden grinning in his cave, or from the grave? Not really. The ship was scuttled to provide a dive attraction. In the spirit of swords into ploughshares, the wreckage will be transformed by Neptune into an artificial reef, providing a future haven for barnacles, lobsters and scuba divers. If only all weapons of war were put to such use. Who doesn’t like the new New Zealand? One person doesn’t, and his identity will come as no surprise.
Can you guess? Yup, the new United States ambassador, Bill McCormick, a seafood tycoon, who achieved his posting by tossing gold at Republicans, and probably a few crates of crayfish. McCormick warned New Zealand that its relations with Washington will “not improve” until it drops its 1985 ban on all things nuclear, including US warships. Then he attacked the nation for not attacking Iraq: "It is always disappointing when there isn't participation by a freedom-loving country . . . in a very important matter". That is, murdering civilians, torturing POW’s at will, often as a kind of recreation, and using chemical weapons (Also see HOTLINKS in the right hand column). New Zealand’s Prime Minister, Helen Clark, the former headmistress of the St Trinians Girls School, politely told the ambassador to jump in the harbour. The Australian Government, meanwhile, licks the shoes of visiting Torturer General Donald Rumsfeld and offers him the outback as a bombing range.
In Wellington, the local newspaper mocked McCormick for reinforcing the “image of the US as a swaggering superpower, strutting the world in the expectation that small countries such as New Zealand will simply fall into line”. What this nation was not willing to do, “much to US displeasure, is blindly embark on foreign adventures that are dubious ethically and ill-conceived strategically. New Zealand followed the US into the quagmire of Vietnam. Wisely, it has not repeated that folly in Iraq”. The long standing friendship between the two countries “does not and should not mean blind allegiance. A more experienced diplomat than Mr McCormick would know that”. What a change from the appeasing drivel dished up by the Australian media. But of course! New Zealand is a Murdoch free zone. Hallelulah!

I'm not normally a big fan of Nevillle and how expresses his ideas, but I will vouch for what he's written here. New Zealand have done fine in not sending troops to Iraq. After all, the last terrorist incident in their territory was by the French against The Rainbow Warrior. Then again, for better or worse, it's easy to be militarily irrelevant when you are so far away from the world.

We Do What We're Told

In case you don't believe most people just do what they're told, check this out:

She was a high school senior who had just turned 18 -- a churchgoing former Girl Scout who hadn't received a single admonition in her four months working at the McDonald's in Mount Washington.

But when a man who called himself "Officer Scott" called the store on April 9, 2004, and said an employee had been accused of stealing a purse, Louise Ogborn became the suspect.

"He gave me a description of the girl, and Louise was the one who fit it to the T," assistant manager Donna Jean Summers said.

Identifying himself as a police officer, the caller issued an ultimatum: Ogborn could be searched at the store or be arrested, taken to jail and searched there.

"I was bawling my eyes out and literally begging them to take me to the police station because I didn't do anything wrong," Ogborn said later in a deposition. She had taken the $6.35-an-hour position after her mother lost her job. "I couldn't steal -- I'm too honest. I stole a pencil one time from a teacher and I gave it back."

Summers, 51, conceded later that she had never known Ogborn to do a thing dishonest. But she nonetheless led Ogborn to the restaurant's small office, locked the door, and -- following the caller's instructions -- ordered her to remove one item of clothing at a time, until she was naked.

"She was crying," recalled Kim Dockery, 40, another assistant manager, who stood by watching. "A little young girl standing there naked wasn't a pretty sight."

Summers said later that "Officer Scott," who stayed on the telephone, giving his orders, sounded authentic. He said he had "McDonald's corporate" on the line, as well as the store manager, whom he mentioned by name. And she thought she could hear police radios in the background.

Summers shook each garment, placed it in a bag and took the bag away. "I did exactly what he said to do," Summers said of her caller.

It was just after 5 p.m., and for Ogborn, hours of degradation and abuse were just beginning.

At first, scam seemed too bizarre but then the reports kept coming in
The first report of such a call came in 1995, in Devil's Lake, N.D.; another came later that year in Fallon, Nev. The caller, usually pretending to be a police officer investigating a crime, targeted stores in small towns and rural communities -- areas where managers were more likely to be trusting.

Most were fast-food restaurants, where the male and female victims were young and inexperienced, and assistant managers were likely to be working without supervision.

At first, nobody believed store managers when they insisted after the fact that they had just done what they were told to by someone they believed to be police.

"Did the manager tell a whopper?" a newspaper headline in Fargo, N.D., asked after the manager of a Burger King there insisted that he thought it was a police officer who had told him over the phone on Jan. 20, 1999, to slap a 17-year-old employee on her naked buttocks.

"It's just not conceivable to me that there's any reasonable justification for what happened," a North Dakota state judge said as she sentenced the manager to 30 days in jail for disorderly conduct.

Restaurant owners and police often said they assumed the caller and victims were in cahoots in a bizarre scam to extract settlements from individual franchises.

But the hoaxes continued -- by the end of 2000, there were more than a dozen. By the end of 2003, there were nearly 60.

Detectives eventually would conclude the calls were the work of one man because the methods of operation were practically identical, with only slight deviations:

On Nov. 30, 2000, the caller persuaded the manager at a McDonald's in Leitchfield, Ky., to remove her own clothes in front of a customer whom the caller said was suspected of sex offenses. The caller promised that undercover officers would burst in and arrest the customer the moment he attempted to molest her, said Detective Lt. Gary Troutman of the Leitchfield Police Department.

"We asked her why she hadn't called local police, and she said she thought it was local police who had called her," Troutman said.

On May 29, 2002, a girl celebrating her 18th birthday -- in her first hour of her first day on the job at the McDonald's in Roosevelt, Iowa -- was forced to strip, jog naked and assume a series of embarrassing poses, all at the direction of a caller on the phone, according to court and news accounts.

On Jan. 26, 2003, according a police report in Davenport, Iowa, an assistant manager at an Applebee's Neighborhood Grill & Bar conducted a degrading 90-minute search of a waitress at the behest of a caller who said he was a regional manager -- even though the man had called collect, and despite the fact the assistant manager had read a company memo warning about hoax calls just a month earlier. He later told police he'd forgotten about the memo.

On June 3, 2003, according to a city police spokesman in Juneau, Alaska, a caller to a Taco Bell there said he was working with the company to investigate drug abuse at the store, and had a manager pick out a 14-year-old customer -- and then strip her and force her to perform lewd acts.

Kentucky employees say they never were warned

By the time the caller telephoned the company-owned McDonald's in Mount Washington in April 2004, supervisors had been duped in at least 68 stores in 32 states, including Kentucky and Indiana. The targets included a dozen different restaurant chains.

Managers of at least 17 McDonald's stores around the nation had been conned by that time, and the company already was defending itself in at least four lawsuits stemming from such hoaxes.

But Summers, who had worked for the McDonald's 25 miles southeast of Louisville for about eight months, said she had never heard a thing about the hoaxes. Neither had Dockery, or the store's manager, or McDonald's area manager, according to court depositions they gave later.

Company executives had sent out memos to owners and operators about the hoaxes, but as global security director Michael Peaster acknowledged in one of them in 2003, "It appears the information is not reaching our restaurant staff."

So unwarned, Summers said she did the bidding of the man she thought was a cop.

As Ogborn tried to cover herself with an apron, Summers took her clothes to her car; "Officer Scott" said police would arrive shortly to pick them up.

At one point, Summers said later in a court deposition, she asked herself why it was taking so long for police to show up -- the Mount Washington department was less than a mile away.

But "when I asked him questions about why," she said, "he always had an answer."

At the caller's instructions, she refused to tell Dockery, the other assistant manager, what was going on.

Dockery hugged Ogborn and tried to console her, and Jason Bradley, 27, a cook who Summers at one point called in to watch Ogborn, refused to go along with the caller's instructions to remove her apron and describe her. But neither of them called the police, nor demanded the search be aborted.

By now, Ogborn had been detained for an hour. Her car keys had been taken away, and she was naked, except for the apron. She would later testify that she thought she couldn't leave.

"I was scared because they were a higher authority to me," she said. "I was scared for my own safety because I thought I was in trouble with the law."

Summers then told the caller that she had to get back to the counter, and the caller asked if she had a husband who could watch Ogborn.

"She said no, I'm not married yet, but I intend to be," Bradley recalled in his deposition, adding that Summers "started laughing like she was talking to a friend." The caller told Summers to bring in her fiance, and at about 6 p.m., she called Walter Wes Nix Jr., at home.

"I asked if he would help," Summers said. "I said I had a situation."

Perceived authority carries much power, studies show
Psychological experts say it is human nature to obey orders, no matter how evil they might seem -- as was illustrated in one of the most famous and frightening human experiments of the 20th century.

Seeking to understand why so many Germans followed orders during the Holocaust, Dr. Stanley Milgram, a Yale University psychologist, took out a classified ad in 1960 and 1961, inviting residents of New Haven, Conn., to take part in what they were told was a study of the relationship between punishment and learning.

A man in a white lab coat introduced the participants to a student, and told them to shock the student each time he made a mistake, increasing the voltage with each error.

In reality, the machine was a prop, and the student was an actor who wasn't shocked. Yet nearly two-thirds of Milgram's subjects gave what they believed were paralyzing jolts to a pitifully protesting victim simply because an authority figure -- the man in the white coat -- had commanded them to do so.

"With numbing regularity, good people were seen to knuckle under the demands of authority and perform actions that were callous and severe," Milgram wrote of his results, which were later replicated in nine other countries.

Milgram died in 1984, but his biographer and protege, Dr. Thomas Blass, said in an interview that the behavior of the people duped in the strip-search hoaxes would not have surprised him.

"Once you accept another person's authority, you become a different person," Blass said. "You are concerned with how well you follow out your orders, rather than whether it is right or wrong."

Youthful victim endured physical, emotional abuse
As his fiancee had requested, Nix showed up at the Mount Washington store.

"She told me there is a girl in the office who was caught stealing," Nix said in a court deposition. Summers also advised him that "Officer Scott" had accused the girl of dealing drugs -- that police at that very moment were searching her home in Taylorsville.

Nix, 42, a father of two and an exterminator by trade, attended church regularly and had coached youth baseball teams in Mount Washington. He is a "great, super guy, a great community guy," his best friend, Terry Grigsby, said later in a deposition. "He was a great role model for kids. … I don't think he'd ever had a ticket."

Summers handed Nix the phone and left the office. The caller told Nix he was a detective. For the next two hours, Nix later told police, "He told me what to do."

And Nix did as instructed.

He pulled the apron away from Ogborn, leaving her nude again, and described her to the caller. He ordered her to dance with her arms above her head, to see, the caller said, if anything "would shake out." He made her do jumping jacks, deep knee bends, stand on a swivel chair, then a desk.

He made her sit on his lap and kiss him; the caller said that would allow Nix to smell anything that might be on her breath.

When Ogborn refused to obey the caller's instructions, Nix slapped her on the buttocks, until they were red -- just as the caller told him to do, Ogborn testified later.

Each time Summers unlocked the door and ducked back into the office, Nix handed Ogborn the apron back so she could cover herself -- as instructed by the caller. When Summers left, the abuse began anew.

Ogborn said the caller sometimes would talk directly to her, demanding that she do as she was told if she wanted to keep her job and avoid further punishment. She said she believed she was trapped. Nix outweighed her by 145 pounds and stood nearly a foot taller. "I was scared for my life," she said.

Caller described as 'a freak who plays God'
The caller was unusually persuasive, according to workers across the country who talked with him.

He had mastered the police officer's calm but authoritative demeanor. He sprinkled law-enforcement jargon into every conversation. And he did his homework.

He researched the names of regional managers and local police officers in advance, and mentioned them by name to bolster his credibility. He called some restaurants in advance, somehow getting names and descriptions of victims so he could accurately describe them later.

Summers said "Officer Scott" in Mount Washington knew the color of Ogborn's hair, as well as her height and weight -- about 90 pounds. He even described the tie she was wearing.

Around the country, many detectives initially assumed the caller had to be watching the stores from across the street with binoculars. But later officials would say he simply was a master of deception and manipulation.

For example, when the 17-year-old victim at the Fargo Burger King started crying, the caller told her to "be a good actress" and "pretend like it doesn't bother you" so the manager wouldn't "feel so bad" about what he was having to do.

Allan Mathis, the manager of a Hardee's in Rapid City, S.D, who strip-searched an employee in June 2003, said in an interview: "I didn't want to be doing it. But it was like he was watching me." Mathis spent 40 days in jail before he was acquitted on rape and kidnapping charges.

The caller wasn't always successful; phone records show he sometimes called as many as 10 stores before finding one where managers would take his bait.

Stanford University psychologist Philip Zimbardo, who conducted a renowned prison experiment in which college students assigned to play guards became so sadistic that the experiment had to be aborted, said the caller was "was very skilled in human psychology -- he may have even read about Milgram."

Zimbardo, who is a consultant to one of the restaurant chains targeted by the caller, described him in an interview as a "skilled confidence man."

The lawyer for Mathis, the Hardee's manager, told the Rapid City Journal that his client was a victim of "a freak who plays God."

Employees are trained to think, `Can I help you?'

In her book, "Making Fast Food: From the Frying Pan into the Fryer," Canadian sociologist Ester Reiter concludes that the most prized trait in fast-food workers is obedience.

"The assembly-line process very deliberately tries to take away any thought or discretion from workers," said Reiter, who teaches at Toronto's York University and who spent 10 months working at a Burger King as part of her research. "They are appendages to the machine."

Retired FBI Special Agent Dan Jablonski, a Wichita, Kan., private detective who investigated hoaxes for Wendy's franchises in the Midwest, said: "You and I can sit here and judge these people and say they were blooming idiots. But they aren't trained to use common sense. They are trained to say and think,`Can I help you?'"

Even supervisors at fast-food restaurants made ready targets, said Milton Prewitt, national editor of Nation's Restaurant News, a trade publication. "You dot your `i's, cross your `t's' and push the buttons, and after a year of that," he said, "you might be an assistant manager."

Quick-serve restaurants — as they are known in the industry — also may have been vulnerable because managers are trained to cooperate with law enforcement, said Gene James, president of the National Food Service Security Council, an industry group.

Ultimately, of the 70 confirmed locations where the calls triggered strip-searches, 53 were fast-food stores and nine were sit-down restaurants.

Sexual abuse steps up as some are eager to obey

Some managers cried as they carried out the caller's orders. But court documents show that others performed with great zeal.

At a Burger King in Pendleton, Ind., a supervisor was so intent on finishing a search of a 15-year-old girl in December 2001 that when the girl's father arrived to pick her up from work, he had to jump over the counter to end her humiliation.

And in Dover, Del., a Burger King manager who was strip-searching an 18-year-old employee in March 2003 fought off the worker's mother and boyfriend so strenuously that state police had to be called.

Court records also show that over time, the demands in the hoax calls grew more perverse.

At a McDonald's in Hinesville, Ga., in February 2003, a 55-year-old janitor was told to put his finger in the vagina of a 19-year-old cashier, supposedly to look for contraband, according to court records. In Joplin, Mo., according to a police report, a caller in May 2004 persuaded a 16-year-old girl who was managing a Sonic restaurant to strip-search and perform oral sex on a 21-year-old male cook — and then got the cook to strip-search the manager.

`I have done something terribly bad,' man says

Louise Ogborn had been in the back office for nearly 2½ hours when the caller said she should kneel on the brick floor in front of Nix and unbuckle his pants.Ogborn cried and begged Nix to stop, she recounted in her deposition. "I said, `No! I didn't do anything wrong. This is ridiculous."

But she said Nix told her he would hit her if she didn't sodomize him, so she did.

Like the rest of her ordeal, it was captured on a surveillance camera, recorded on to a DVD. And it continued until Summers returned to the office to get some gift certificates, and Nix had Ogborn cover herself again.

The caller told Nix then that he could leave but that Summers needed to find another man to replace him. She called in Thomas Simms, a 58-year-old maintenance man who did odd jobs at the store.

Simms would say in a deposition later that he was shocked by what he saw — a young woman trying to cover herself with a small piece of cloth. Summers insisted it was OK for him to watch her, that "corporate" had approved it.

Nix left, drove a few blocks to his home and immediately called his best friend, Grigsby, who recalls Nix saying, "I have done something terribly bad."

`Something is not right,' 9th-grade dropout decides

It was Simms, the Mount Washington store's maintenance man and a ninth-grade dropout, who refused to play the caller's game.

He had stopped by the restaurant for dessert and coffee when Summers pulled him into the office and handed him the phone. The caller told Simms to have Ogborn drop the apron and to describe her. Simms refused.

"He said, `Something is not right about this,'" Summers recalled in her deposition.

And finally, she realized the same. She called her manager — Lisa Siddons — whom the caller had said was on the other line. Summers discovered Siddons had been home, sleeping.

"I knew then I had been had," Summers said. "I lost it.

"I begged Louise for forgiveness. I was almost hysterical."

The caller hung up.

Ogborn was so cold she was shaking and so stunned that, as Dockery wrapped her in a blanket, she asked if she had show up for work the next morning.

Repercussions hit all of those involved

Summers watched the store video later the same night, saw what Nix had done, and called off their engagement. She hasn't spoken with him since, according to her attorney.

She initially was suspended, then later fired, for violating a McDonald's rule barring nonemployees from entering the office. A couple of weeks later, she was indicted on a charge of unlawful imprisonment, a misdemeanor. Nix was indicted on charges of sodomy and assault.

Dockery was transferred to another restaurant.

Ogborn never went back to work at the store.

She began suffering from panic attacks, severe insomnia and nightmares about "a guy attacking" her, according to a court deposition from her therapist, Jean Campbell. Riddled with anxiety and depression, Ogborn was forced to switch from one antidepressant to a second, then a third and a fourth, before she finally found some relief.

"I can't trust anyone," she testified in a lawsuit she filed in August 2004 against McDonald's, alleging it failed to warn employees about the hoaxes. "I push people out of my life because I don't want them to know what happened."

She graduated from Spencer County High School, but was too shaken to enroll at the University of Louisville, where she had planned to study pre-med, Campbell said.

"She was dealing with a lot of issues of shame, feeling contaminated, feeling dirty, questioning herself," Campbell said in her deposition. "When anything like this happens, it destroys our illusions."

Restaurant chains failed to act quickly, ex-agent says

Despite the mounting number of cases across the country, restaurant industry officials failed to act more quickly or decisively, Prewitt said, in part because "nobody could believe it, it was so weird."

Some of the strip-searches weren't even reported to police, because embarrassed restaurant officials were reluctant to publicize them, said Jablonski, the ex-FBI agent. The fiercely competitive chains also initially were reluctant to talk to each other. "For a variety of reasons, they were slow on the draw," he said.

James, the head of the industry's security group, said the quick-serve chains acted "appropriately and expeditiously," although the group's previous executive director, Terrie Dort, acknowledged last year to The Associated Press that it took until 2003 "for the pieces of the puzzle to come together and for everyone to start comparing notes and realizing the scope of the problem."

Many police departments filed their case away under "miscellaneous" because they couldn't figure out how to pursue the caller, Prewitt said, or had trouble figuring out what crime, if any, he had committed.

Several departments were able to trace the calls to phone booths in Panama City, Fla. But that was as far as any had gotten until the Mount Washington hoax.

Dockery told her no. "Take as much time off as you want," she said.

Lone detective presses Bullitt case, gets help

The lone detective on the Mount Washington Police Department, Buddy Stump, had worked only a few weeks as an investigator when he got the call.

He had spent most of his career doing factory work and was home watching an "Andy Griffith" rerun when his deputy commander assigned him the case. "I joked that I was watching my training films," Stump recalled.

He was furious when he saw the store surveillance video. "It burned me up that this had happened to an 18-year-old girl," he said.

He was able to track down the phone number the call had been made from, but it was listed to a nonexistent phone and turned out to have been made on a pre-paid calling card. "I figured we didn't have a chance to catch him," Stump said.

He eventually learned the call had originated in Panama City, and that the largest seller of phone cards there was Wal-Mart. But that didn't help much — the largest seller of everything is Wal-Mart, and it has three stores in Panama City alone.

But a Panama City detective told Stump a bit of interesting news — an officer from West Bridgewater, Mass., was hot on the same trail.

Detective Sgt. Vic Flaherty had been assigned to lead a task force investigating the crimes after the caller hit four Wendy's in the Boston suburbs on one night in February 2004.

Flaherty had traced a calling card used in some of the hoaxes to one of the Panama City Wal-Marts, but that store's surveillance video only captured customers entering and exiting, not at the registers.

After hearing about the Bullitt County call, however, he helped Stump trace that calling card to its source. This time, they were in luck: It was purchased at 3:02 p.m. at another Wal-Mart in Panama City on April 9, 2004 — just hours before it was used to call the Mount Washington McDonald's.

The camera at that store was trained on the registers, and it showed the purchaser was a white man, about 35 to 40, with slicked-back black hair and glasses. The same man could be seen on Flaherty's video entering the other Wal-Mart, where he was wearing a black jacket with small white lettering.

Flaherty and a colleague flew to Panama City on June 28, 2004, and local officers immediately identified the jacket as the uniform worn by officers of Corrections Corp.of America, a private prison company.

When they showed it to the warden at the company's Bay Correctional Facility, he identified the man as David R. Stewart, 38, a guard on the swing shift.

Stewart denied making the calls, but when confronted, he started to "sweat profusely and shake uncontrollably," Flaherty wrote in a report. Stewart also asked, "Was anybody hurt?" and said, "Amen, it's over," according to the report.

Stewart insisted he'd never bought a calling card, but when detectives searched his house, they found one that had been used to call nine restaurants in the past year, including the Idaho Falls Burger King on the day its manager was duped.

Police also found dozens of applications for police department jobs, hundreds of police magazines, police-type uniforms, guns and holsters. "It was very apparent Dave Stewart wanted ... to become a police officer," Flaherty said.

Mount Washington became the first department to charge Stewart.Stump drove to Panama City to arrest him on June 30, 2004.

Stewart eventually was brought to Bullitt Circuit Court, where he pleaded not guilty to solicitation to commit sodomy and impersonating a police officer, both felonies, as well as soliciting sex abuse and unlawful imprisonment, both misdemeanors. He was released on $100,000 bond pending his trial Dec. 13. His bond was posted by his brother, C.W. Stewart — a retired police officer from Cheektowaga, N.Y.

Suspect considers himself `a victim as well,' letter says

Married 11 years and the father of five, Stewart had worked as a mall security guard, volunteered as an auxiliary sheriff's deputy, and driven a propane truck before taking the prison guard job.

He had worked 11 months there before his arrest; he was fired a week later.

His family has stood behind him — his mother said he is "a good boy" and another relative said he's well liked in Cheektowaga, the Buffalo suburb where he grew up.

Stewart declined to be interviewed, but in a letter responding to Ogborn's suit in Bullitt Circuit Court, he said: "I received your notice but I'm in no way responsible. I feel bad for your loss because I am a victim as well. I lost my job, my home and my car all over something I did not do."

In fact, he deeded his residence, a $37,900 mobile home on a dirt road 20 miles north of Panama City, to his wife for $100, according to Florida property records.

His Louisville lawyer, Steve Romines, said his client is not bright enough to have pulled off the hoaxes. "Based on numerous conversations with my client, I don't believe he is persuasive or eloquent enough to convince somebody to do these preposterous things," Romines said in an interview.

Stewart has been charged only in Bullitt County. Flaherty said prosecutors in Massachusetts are awaiting the outcome of the Kentucky case before deciding whether to proceed against him.

Detectives in other jurisdictions say they didn't press charges because the caller's crime would be a misdemeanor for which he could not be extradited.

There has not been a reported hoax call since Stewart's arrest, according to police and lawyers for the restaurant industry. Romines said there have been two, but he declined to say where, and none have been reported by news organizations.

Some see how hoax worked, others shocked

Across the United States, at least 13 people who executed strip-searches ordered by the caller were charged with crimes, and seven were convicted.

But most of the duped managers were treated as victims — just like the people they searched and humiliated.

They all "fell under the spell of a voice on the telephone," wrote a judge in Zanesville, Ohio, in an order acquitting Scott Winsor, 35, who'd been charged with unlawfully restraining and imposing himself on two women who worked for him at a McDonald's.

Chicago lawyer Craig Annunziata, who has defended 30 franchises sued after hoaxes, said every manager he interviewed genuinely believed they were helping police.

"They weren't trying to get their own jollies," he said.

Many of the supervisors were fired and some divorced by their spouses, Annunziata said. Others required counseling.

But the duped managers have been condemnedby others.

"You don't have to be a Phi Beta Kappa to know not to strip-search a girl who is accused of stealing change," said Roger Hall, the lawyer for a woman who won $250,000 after being strip-searched at a McDonald's in Louisa, Ky.

A Fox-TV commentator asked how the managers who went along could be so "colossally stupid."

While the incidents were triggered by a "perverted miscreant" wrote a federal judge in Georgia, the managers "still had a responsibility to use common sense and avoid falling prey to such a scam."

Though the Milgram experiment may help explain why supervisors went along with the caller, even Milgram's disciples say it doesn't absolve them of responsibility.

Just as one-third of the participants in Milgram's study refused to shock the subject, some supervisors refused to go along, including a supervisor at McDonald's Hillview store, who hung up on the caller the very night of the Mount Washington hoax.

"Nobody held a gun to their heads," said Blass, whose book about Milgram is titled, "The Man Who Shocked the World."

"They had the critical ability to decide whether to carry out their orders."

Suits target McDonald's in Mount Washington case

In her suit against the $19billion McDonald's company, Ogborn contends it failed to warn Mount Washington employees about the hoaxes even though the company and its franchises were already defending lawsuits in Georgia, Ohio,Utahand elsewhere in Kentucky.

"This suit is about failure to warn, failure to train, failure to supervise," said Louisville lawyer StevenYater, who with William C. Boone Jr., is representing Ogborn.

Although a McDonald's security executive had sent a 10- to 15-second voice message to every store in the region about hoax calls about a week before the Mount Washington incident, Siddons, the manager there, said in her deposition that it didn't mention strip-searches.

The company also failed to execute a plan it had developed to send warning stickers to be placed on the headset and cradle of the phone in every store, Peaster, McDonald's global security director, said in a deposition.

Ogborn's suit, which is set for mediation Oct. 31 and trial March 30, also names Summers and Dockery as defendants, saying they "forced Louise to remain imprisoned, in the nude, for over four hours."

Dockery declined to be interviewed, although in court papers, she denied wrongdoing and said Summers had kept her in the dark about what was going on.

Summers has filed her own claim against McDonald's, alleging that the incident would not have occurred if she had been warned.

She declined to be interviewed, but in her deposition, she angrily asked how McDonald's "could have failed to spread the word."

"You've destroyed three lives," she said. "Hope you're happy."

McDonald's points fingers at others, including victim

McDonald's blamed what happened on Stewart and Nix, over whom it says it had no control. The company has sued both of them.

Its Louisville lawyer, W.R. "Pat" Patterson Jr., said McDonald's employee manual clearly noted its policy against strip-searches. "The employees didn't read it," Patterson said in an interview. "That is all I can say."

The company admits it knew of the earlier hoaxes, but Patterson said it reacted appropriately by sending memos to owners and franchisees. "McDonald's did what every quick-serve restaurant did — maybe more."

In a prepared statement, a spokesman for McDonald's USA, Bill Whitman, said, "We are keenly aware of these unfortunate incidents and will continue to take appropriate actions to safeguard customers and employees."

Asked what additional steps the company has taken since the Mount Washington incident, he said it would be "inappropriate to discuss in detail specific security and safety measures."

In court papers, McDonald's also has blamed Ogborn for what happened to her — saying that her injuries, "if any," were caused by her failure to realize the caller wasn't a real police officer.

Questioning Ogborn during a deposition, Patterson suggested that although she had no clothes, she could have walked out of the office, but stayed voluntarily to clear her name.

"Did it ever occur to you to scream?" he asked.

Ogborn declined to be interviewed for this story on the advice of her lawyers, although she agreed to be identified by name.

Her therapist said she followed orders because her experience with adults "has been to do what she is told, because good girls do what they are told."

Lawyer wonders how each of us would react

Bullitt District Court Judge Rebecca Ward initially dismissed the charge against Summers, saying she "definitely exercised poor judgment ... but was as much a victim as Miss Ogborn."

Ward later reversed herself and reinstated the charge; she set Summers' trial for Dec. 7.

Summers' lawyer, Wendi Wagner, said in an interview that "everybody agrees, in hindsight, `How the hell could you let this happen?' ... But how many times did it happen over the past 10 years?"

In a brief interview, Nix insisted that he — like Summers — thought he was following a policeman's orders.

Nix is scheduled for trial Tuesday. If convicted of sodomy, he faces a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison — twice the penalty that could be meted to Stewart, although his lawyer, Kathleen Schmidt, noted that plea negotiations are under way.

"I can understand how people can question what he did," Schmidt said. "But they weren't in the same position. Maybe you and I wouldn't have done this, but how do we know?"

You'd better believe it. You can't make this stuff up; though in some ways I wish I could or that it were indeed fiction. It's so terrible.
It pretty much shows that if we do what were told. What are the ramifications of this? I believe it makes us reconsider the much discredited 'Nuremburg Defense' - Don't think for a moment that the Nuremburg defense of "I was following orders" as having some kind of reality to it, we're living in an ideological construct. If indeed human beings do what we're told in most part, then it takes an extraordinary human being not to follow orders; so in turn when we convict somebody at War Crimes Tribunals, we're trying and executing people for not being exceptional and extraordinary in the face of immense evil. Most of us buckle, and by corollary, we'd all be hung at Nuremburg for our ordinary human-ness.
Thanks to PJ over at Remote Control Society.

My Own Private Australia

I found these funny things here
Hilarious stuff to find both Alien and Predator are just a couple of goons living in NYC, and are ardent New York Yankee fans.
Also, Jesus' face is painted over Jeter's in one of the episodes. That's funny too.

I'm Living In The Nile
Stuff in my life is going really skewiff and I don't know how I'm going to put meals on my table in December. I have some small jobs lined up but my big translation gig of September-October just looks like it's going to join my July 2004 as my "Big Unpaid Works" list. I don't want to write too much about it as it put enormous pressure on my Producer friend (and it's not his fault) and one day I will write about how it all came to pass, right here.In the mean time, suffice to say, I haven't a clue how I'm going to go forwards.

The July 2004 job is a separate big bill that is likely not going to get paid soon, though that would really help. At this moment I'm leery about doing more translations in the near future. Writers complain they get short-shrift in the development process; let me tell you, translators get even shorter shrift.

All donations accepted. Just go click on my music page, find the first song you like (or hate) and 'donate' some cash to my paypal account. Thanks. You can find the donate button underneath the song play bar under the cover art somewhere. :)

UPDATE The 'donation' button isn't working at iCompositions. I'll try to find a paypal link some other way. :)

Now He Notices
Kim beazley says Sedition laws are unnecessary.

Mr Beazley said the change had arrived out of left-field and it was not foreshadowed during Prime Minister John Howard's discussion with state and territory leaders in September.

"It's not necessary. It's got nothing to do with dealing with terrorists, frankly, so why put it in?" he told Southern Cross radio in Melbourne.

"Look, this is an unnecessary addition to what has been now well-debated and well-discussed laws for control orders for detention.

"We do have archaic sedition laws which do need to be upgraded, but there needs to be a reasonable discussion on that.

"I'm for putting in jail people who are criminals, people who are terrorists.

"I'm not for putting cartoonists and talk-back radio hosts in jail when they satirise politicians.

"The point about them is their vagueness.

"You can see a point or two in them that might assist you if somebody's out there talking up a bit of a riot, but on the other hand, you know, you can also see there's a bit of a threat to the artistic community, a threat to those who are engaged in political discussion."

Mr Bracks today said while he has supported the Federal Government's counter-terrorism laws, he did not accept the definition of sedition as making it illegal to "promote ill will and hostility between different groups".

"The sedition proposals were not part of the (Council of Australian Governments) agreement signed up to by Victoria," he told Fairfax newspapers.

It's such a shame he's so lame and so behind the game. We would've been better as a population had he swung into action a couple of weeks ago and went to town on this stupid legislation.

Queensland Premier Peter Beattie is another who is pointing out the bleeding obvious if belatedly:

"I'm just a little concerned that they will impose restrictions on free speech which aren't intended," he said on ABC radio.

"I don't think that the sedition provisions are central, frankly, to achieving the anti-terrorism position and I've had that view from the beginning.

"The thrust of what we agreed to at COAG is in the law, the sedition provisions, as far as I'm concerned, are ancillary and unnecessary.

"The spirit of COAG and the agreement we reached can be done without the sedition provisions."

But Mr Beattie admitted that the sedition laws were entirely a matter for the Federal Government and did not require the states to pass complementary laws.

His comments follow criticism of the reforms by Victorian Premier Steve Bracks and Law Council of Australia president John North.

And naturally Attorney General Philip Ruddock says it's all okay.

Mr Bracks wants the sedition part of the bill removed so it can be dealt with separately.

"I think that can be done better in a more considered way without effecting if you like the rights of people to publicly speak out and to have that restricted as part of these laws," he said.

But Federal Attorney-General Philip Ruddock has dismissed the concerns raised by Mr Bracks.

"I would counsel him to get clear advice on how the measures are intended to operate and to speak of them in an informed way, rather than picking up on some of the ill-informed debate that is occurring right now," he said.

Yeah, right.
As If.

Terror-Flops

Tony 'Bliar' Blair takes It On The Chin


In case you're wondering, the anti-terror law modifications Tony Blair wanted to put in were defeated in the House of Commons. What's interesting is that not only did the Tories oppose them, his own people crossed the floor to side against it. So Blair might want to look into changing his party whip.

Mr Blair says his authority is intact, despite his first Commons defeat, over a key part of his anti-terror plans.

But Tory leader Michael Howard says Mr Blair should resign, while Lib Dem leader Charles Kennedy warned Mr Blair could become a "lame duck" leader.

MPs, including 49 Labour rebels, voted down plans to detain terror suspects for up to 90 days without charge.

The police and Home Office said they were disappointed that their demands failed to get parliamentary approval and officials will meet Mr Blair shortly for a briefing on counter terrorism.

Mr Blair has said he hopes MPs "do not rue the day" they rejected his call to allow police to detain terror suspects for up to 90 days without charging them.

MPs voted against by 322 votes to 291, but later backed a proposal to extend the detention time limit to 28 days from the current 14 days.

Mr Blair, who is planning to quit as prime minister before the next election, has said he will serve a full third term.

He told BBC News: "I don't think it is a matter of my authority - of course I would have preferred to have won rather than lost."

Meanwhile in Australia where anti-terrorism is a way of life, there's now a chance you can be stripped of your citizenship if they find you guilty of terrorism. Now that's going to be a total freak out.

Prime Minister John Howard has asked Attorney-General Philip Ruddock and Citizenship Minister John Cobb to investigate whether terrorists should be entitled to keep the protection of citizenship.

And in the wake of Tuesday's arrests of 17 suspected terrorists in Sydney and Melbourne, Treasurer Peter Costello urged Muslims who wanted to live in a strict Islamic state to leave Australia.

"There are Islamic states around the world that practice sharia law, and if that is your object, you may well be much more at home in such a country than trying to turn Australia into one of those countries, because it is not going to happen," said Mr Costello.

As police in Sydney located a burnt-out car believed to be linked to Tuesday's raids, Federal Parliament began debating tough new counter-terrorism laws which Mr Howard said were needed to try to pre-empt attacks.

He confirmed the citizenship plan was on the agenda but said it could be difficult to put in action.

"It remains under consideration," Mr Howard told Sky News. "It's not right at the top of our list, there are arguments for and against and I am listening to those arguments but we are not about to make a decision on that."

It's also going to be very interesting to see how nations will respond when we dump these so-called terrorist criminals after their lengthy sentences, destitute and penniless, right on their doorsteps just because they were born there.
The rednecks must be having a field day with this stuff. Seriously, you can't write this sort of maliciousness as it is petty, mean and really really head-in-the-sand about the rest of the world.

Now I know why I'm listening to a lot of King Crimson this week. I'm actually really, really pissed off. I'm seeing Red.

Mailbag Funnies

Link 1: So you wanna be a US Republican?

Link 2: Michael Jackson sings his defense.

Also, found this pic predicting a Stormy Thursday for Sydney:

It's apparently a boat washed ashore in the Narabeen Lakes area.
It kind of looks like the subject of an old oil painting. :)

I Have At Least One Ally

Sharing my outrage, my housemate PJ has taken to the Web with his own weblog, 'Remote Control Society' where he says he's just going to post up all the stupid things going on in our part of the world. Really stupid things.
If you look at the 'Friends' Sites' on the right hand column, you'll see the latest addition there. Maybe you'll see some outrageous stuff there. It'd only be outrageous because you have common sense.

Today's Guff Of Terror

"When In Doubt, Get The Towel-Head!"


The above pickie is radical Islamist cleric 'Abu Bakr' who is allegedly inciting people to acts of terror. Another bearded 'Goldstein' in a long line of them that have been thrown up in the last few years. I guess Bert wasn't tough enough.

Swinging Into Action...

Police counter-terror operations swooped on terror suspects in Sydney and Melbourne and arrested 15 men including a prominent Muslim cleric.

Sydney, Australia - Police arrested 15 alleged Islamic extremists in raids Monday and said they had foiled a major terrorist plot, days after parliament passed new anti-terror measures triggered by the London bombings in July.

Authorities refused to comment on speculation that the suspects were linked to a group whose members were seen last year filming Melbourne landmarks.

'I am satisfied that we have disrupted what I would regard as the final stages of a large scale terrorist attack or the launch of a large scale terrorist attack in Australia,' New South Wales Police Commissioner Ken Maroney said.

Helicopters and 400 police swept through suburbs of Sydney and Melbourne during Monday's raids.

'They are currently being interviewed by police and my expectation is that they will appear in Sydney courts this morning,' Maroney said.

Officials refused to comment on speculation that those arrested were Moslem radicals whose homes were raided by spy agency ASIO in June.

Members of the group, followers of fiery Algerian-born cleric Abdul Nacer Benbrika, were last year observed filming the stock exchange, the central train station and other landmarks in Melbourne.

ASIO is believed to have pushed for an urgent change in the law so plotters could be picked up even when the time and place of the attack they were plotting had not been established.

The arrests came four days after an amendment to the terror laws was rushed through in a special session of parliament to deal with a 'specific threat' to national security.

The change came at the insistence of intelligence agencies who feared a group of locally born Moslem extremists were planning a terrorist attack.

Parliament is also about to consider major new anti-terrorism laws. The government has won over critics within its own ranks and opposition members of parliament by adopting minor changes to its proposed legislation.

The new proposal, likely to become law by the end of the year, provides for terrorist suspects to be served with control orders that for a period of 12 months would oblige them to wear electronic tagging devices, report to authorities regularly and undertake not to make contact with certain people or groups.

Police would also get the power to detain suspects without charge for up to 14 days. A further provision would bulk up the seditions laws to make it a crime to incite violence or sow hatred.

The push for new counter-terrorism legislation came in the wake of the London bombings in June in which an Australian was among the more than 50 people who died.

ASIO voiced its concern over 'home-grown' Moslem terrorists prepared to die in order to kill and main others in Australia.

There has not been a major terrorist attack in Australia, but 88 Australians were among the 202 people killed in the first Bali bombings in October 2002. Four Australians were among the 23 people killed in the second bombings on the Indonesian island of Bali in October.

There are around 300,000 Moslems in Australia, around half of whom live in Sydney. Australia's national security alert level remains at 'medium' -- where it has been since the September 11, 2001 bombings in the United States.

I guess they're now going to get questioned without access to a lawyer and then they're going to be held for 2 weeks without a charge. It's a minor miracle that the ones in Victoria weren't shot on sight.

Peter Costello says the raids were linked to the law changes:

"As the prime minister said last week, certain intelligence matters were bought to the attention of the government, and acting on the basis of that advice the government proposed some amendment to the law and that went through the parliament last week," he told ABC radio.

"Now of course you see that some arrests have been made and you don't want to comment too much on any operational matters but you did hear the NSW commissioner and the Victorian commissioner make their own observations about what those arrests had prevented."

NSW Police Commissioner Ken Moroney and Victoria Police Chief Commissioner Christine Nixon said the raids in their capital cities had foiled a large scale terrorist attack.

"I heard the Victorian commissioner say that she also believed that the changes to the legislation which the (federal) parliament made last week were of assistance in relation to that," Mr Costello said.

"Let's hope that we have prevented a large scale terrorist event and one has to bear in mind now that various charges will be laid and the law will follow its course.

"But this does really illustrate that the threat of terrorism is real, that we cannot be complacent about it.

"It's no consolation to wait until after an event and then try and pick up the suspects."

I'm not sure how I feel about this as there are some issues that race through my mind:

1) How do they know this?
They probably have accumulated circumstantial evidence, but ho on earth do they know with any kind of legal certainty? and I'm not asking a Greater Epistemic Doubt question here where you end up questioning reality. I'm asking, how do they know what they believe is going to be Justified True Belief that will stand up in court? Or even that of public opinion?

2) Is this the beginning of Pre-Crime intervention cases?
In 'Minority Report', they vaguely touch upon this issue of arresting people before they commit their crimes and freezing them down for years. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense in the crimes of passion, but it did make for exciting cinema. The thing is, these terror attacks that were plotted have not taken place. So now it's a crime to plot a terror attack; but how will it stand up in court?
"Look at these photos. Look at these bombs. Look at these plans. They were clearly going to do it!"
I'm not sure about the man on the street, but I think it's going to hold about as much water as a strainer.

Even if it does turn out these 15 people were plotting mass bombings on major landmarks with concrete proofs of their plans and what-not I'm still not satisfied that they bent the law out off shape to get to these folks.

UPDATE:
Well here we have it, the first shootings in the War Against Terror on our very own soil.

POLICE have shot and wounded a suspected terrorist after he allegedly opened fire at them outside a mosque in Sydney's west this morning.

The man, who was wearing a backpack, had been under surveillance by counter-terrorism officers in Green Valley just before 9am.
When police approached the suspect after he left the mosque in Wilson Rd, the man allegedly fired two shots - wounding an officer in the hand.

Police returned fire, hitting the man in the neck with a single shot.

Assistant Commissioner Graeme Morgan today confirmed police had been monitoring the man, aged in his 20s.

"Police attending Wilson Road saw a man that was of interest and as they did ... witnesses have told police that he produced a firearm and fired at the police," Mr Morgan said.

"One officer was struck, we believe in the hand, and suffered a minor wound.

"One of the police officers returned fire and the person of interest to police was wounded in the neck."

Ambulance officers treated the suspect at the Wilson Rd scene before taking him to Liverpool Hospital.

He was later undergoing surgery in a serious but stable condition.

They are now reporting 17 have been rounded up as terror suspects; amongst them is controversial radical cleric Abu Bakr. It's almost like some Dungeons and Dragons scenario if you don't mind me saying, where a bunch of vigilante PCs raid a temple.


UPDATE 2
Link 1: ABC Online... Group Committed to Jihad, court hears The Melbourne group were hauled in front of a judge for a hearing already. 'Justice' is swift when it wants to be, obviously. :)

Link 2: Keelty Seeks Suppression of Terrorism Allegations this one's sort of weird. The "We don't want a trial in the media because we want to really slam these fuckers in court" logic.

Sixteen people were arrested in Sydney and Melbourne, after what Mr Keelty says was an almost 18-month investigation.

Mr Keelty says seven people in New South Wales will be charged under counter-terrorism laws that were passed last week.

The Commissioner says the allegations against those people should not be made public.

"An application will be made by the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecution this afternoon to suppress the details of the allegations," he said.

"It's important that we give these people a fair opportunity to prepare their defence before the court rather than run the trial in the media."

Hmmm. So is it 16 or 17? Can't people do some maths and let us know? :)

Yankee Fan Apologia
I found this in google news today..

Psychoanalysts could argue that many athletes unconsciously dread success. Some superstars equate superiority with greed and narcissism. After a monster season, A-Rod (A-Choke?) could barely hit a pitch in the five-game playoff series against the Angels. (His mother told reporters that Alex's performance was hindered by the recent death of an uncle who acted as his surrogate father.) But to these eyes, the 2005 Yankees wanted the crown. They resembled a well-fortified mythical beast that promised and strived for immortality, but inevitably gave in to bodily limitations. Even on the highest throne in the world, man sits on his arse.

Why do non–New Yorkers, myself included, cheer so emphatically for a team we expect to succeed? Why do Democrats? Aren't the Yankees the sporting analogue of doodle dandy U.S. imperialism, spending intimidating sums on colonizing the game's greatest players, launching preemptive strikes on small-market teams with potential Weapons of Red Sox Destruction? In a summer of second-place soul-searching, Ernest Becker's Pulitzer Prize–winning, post-Freudian psychoanalysis primer The Denial of Death provided me an answer to this dilemma and every dilemma. Best known, perhaps, as the butt of a joke in Annie Hall, this 1973 text universally reduces human anxiety to a single overarching fear, encapsulated in the title.

Because he fears death, man, per Becker, "must desperately justify himself as an object of primary value in the universe; he must stand out, be a hero, make the biggest possible contribution to world life, show that he counts more than anything or anyone else." Cheering for the Yankees is an investment in a seemingly foolproof hero myth. (Conversely, cheering for the Chicago Cubs is an annual acknowledgment of mortality, and a textbook case of Rankian neurosis: "With the truth, one cannot live.") To root for the Yankees is, simply put, to deny death. And because we deny death, we are all Yankees.

Does this season's early playoff exit mark the death of this dynasty? Probably. But if you want to continue the causa sui project, to fight off mortality neurosis by tranquilizing yourself with trivialities and hero myths (and yes, this is what sports is about), here are three reasons why I might be wrong:

1 Comeback Kid: The true pride of the Yankees rests on the notion that bodily decay does not exist—or rather, that it can be hidden from view. How else to explain the expensive acquisitions and subsequent demotions of Kevin Brown and Tony Womack, years past their prime, both scaling new heights of ineffectuality?

But then there's Jason Giambi. Starting the season in Womackian fashion (announcers cautiously invoked a "depression" diagnosis) after a winter of allegations and "maybe I did and maybe I didn't"s, the former MVP was asked to take a minor-league vacation by Yankee execs eager to sweep decay under the rug. He refused—a veteran's prerogative—and re-emerged. Extra batting practice with Don Mattingly and a 24-hour looped screening of Rockys I through V molded Giambi into the fiercest, sweatiest lefty slugger the Yankees had owned in years. Pharmaceutical means be damned. Giambi denies death on his own terms.

On a personal level, Giambi reaffirmed my faith in the grand illusion. To liberally quote the bible on existential sports fandom, Frederick Exley's 1968 semi-autobio A Fan's Notes: Giambi, "when I heard the city cheer him, came after a time to represent to me the possible, had sustained for me the illusion that I could escape the bleak anonymity of life. . . . He may be the only fame I'll ever have!"

2 Small Ball: Steinbrenner's win-or-win business model remains both infamous and politically incorrect. Trade away young prospects for older, established superstars. Seek home run power, not relief pitching. And yet, some of the brightest stars in the 2005 Yankee lineup—Robinson Cano, Shawn Chacon, Bubba Crosby, Aaron Small—arrived fresh off the boat from AAA Columbus (or worse, the Colorado Rockies' pitching rotation), chewing up less than one percent of the team payroll combined.

Aaron Small provided heartwarming proof that Major League Baseball is staged for maximum dramatic effect, to shelter the masses from their fear and trembling. A 33-year-old journeyman pitcher who considered retiring in AAA this season, Small joined the Yankees as an injury replacement and won 10 games without a loss. In his spare time, the happily married pitcher works with foster children and church youth groups. You can script this. (See: The Rookie with Dennis Quaid.)

3 Love Fest: The Yankees' major off-season hurdle has already been cleared by an improbably fruitful session of marital counseling. "We didn't use the word love, but it was pretty warm," admits Torre about his hour-long sit-in with the Boss last month in Tampa. Steinbrenner never hid his mounting frustration with the stoic, revered manager over the course of this grueling season, going so far as to forcefully funnel his criticisms through the mouths of YES Network reporters. Torre and Steinbrenner had spoken only five times since spring training, and many speculated that the Boss would replace him with fiery Devil Rays manager Lou Piniella. (Torre has led the Yankees to eight consecutive division titles, but such is the burden of New York expectations.) In the end, the "talking cure" helped cooler heads prevail. "I had to not only hear it," Torre adds, "but to hear the tone in which it was said."

That's some bleak shit going on there. :)