Archival Rescue 21 ~ Iraq, Paul McGeough

Elusive Democracy
April 30, 2005, Paul McGeough, Sydney Morning Herald

The announcement of a new cabinet in Iraq is not the end of the process - it's just the very beginning, writes Paul McGeough.

Hardly a shot was fired. Iraqis celebrate great events by pumping lead into the sky. But as they contemplated the uncertain state of their first elected government in half a century on Thursday night, the guns were left behind the kitchen door.

Three long months ago they had stepped out to the polls, refusing to be intimidated by insurgency threats of a bloodbath. But, for now at least, they have a half-baked government that is taut with tension and distrust.

Many dwelt on the historic nature of the day. In Washington, President George Bush hailed the new leadership team as the face of Iraqi unity and diversity - but unity was in short supply and diversity was the problem.

A local observer, who shares the benefit of his wisdom with the Herald from time to time, was pensive as Thursday's assembly session wrapped up: "You remember at the end of the invasion we talked about the two dialogues - the one that Iraqis have with the Americans and the other, more important one, that they have among themselves. That's what you are seeing now."

He was contrasting insistent claims by prominent players that there had to be unity and inclusiveness, with a hectoring speech to the assembly by the black-turbaned Abdul Aziz Hakim, the leader of the Shiite political alliance that dominates the parliament and the new cabinet. Hakim is a powerful figure behind the new Government and many Shiites talk of the broad sweep of ministries allocated to his religious colleagues as his personal fiefdom.

So when he warned against "handing over the country's assets to our enemies", and called on the Government to "de-Baathify Saddam's terrorists from all state institutions", many inside and outside his tent read it as an imminent purge of the security forces and the bureaucracy.

Despite the herculean tasks ahead, and rising public anger coupled with pressure from the White House and from Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who is the single most powerful figure in post-Saddam Iraq, the politicians were simply unable to name a complete government.

Obliged by an ethnic and religious impasse to shove colleagues into critical ministries on an acting basis - defence, oil, electricity and human rights - and to leave two of the four deputy prime ministerships vacant, the prime minister-designate, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, still argued that his partial cabinet represented "national unity".

Hakim and Jaafari's religious Shiite coalition took 17 posts. The Kurds, king-makers in the assembly by dint of their second-biggest block of votes, won eight; the Sunnis, who largely boycotted the poll, got seven (including tourism); and there is one Christian. Six ministers are women and none is from the political group of the outgoing interim prime minister, Iyad Allawi.

Jaafari promised on Thursday to name the remaining cabinet appointees "in a few days".

This is another transitional government. Its key task is to supervise the drafting of a new constitution. Given it took 12 weeks to put together a partial cabinet, it seems most unlikely it can deliver a new national charter in the 15 weeks to the deadline in August. The constitutional debate must settle all the hoary old chestnuts of Iraqi politics and society. These are the deeply divisive, no-middle-ground issues at the heart of the conflicting political, ethnic and religious agendas in post-Saddam Iraq.

Each time they became a stumbling block since the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, they were deferred to be dealt with in this process. They include the role of Islam and the conservative tenets of sharia law; the unremitting wrangle between central and regional government over control of potentially massive oil revenues; and Kurdish demands for regional autonomy and, especially, their demands for control of the oil-rich northern city of Kirkuk.

It's a high-stakes game. The process imposed on Iraq by the US has involved short-term appointed or elected administrations, in which most of the players have had more of an eye on surviving into the next round than on the needs of their economically crippled and insurgency-bloodied nation.

In that sense, this is the endgame. The new constitution is scheduled to be endorsed by a referendum at the end of the year - though there is a provision in the transitional law for a six-month delay. But after the referendum, there is to be yet another national vote to appoint the government that will rule till the end of the decade.

The risk now is that having squandered the past three months, Jaafari's team will have hardly warmed their ministerial chairs before they, too, shift into election mode, in which conflicting and divisive populist agendas will distract them from any sense of a single government agenda.

Amid all that they have to find a circuit-breaker to a virulent insurgency that wound back in the weeks after the January 30 poll but which, US and Iraqi officials say, has been coming back with a vengeance as the political impasse over the cabinet dragged on.

Building on the US and Allawi-backed campaign to draw Sunnis into the armed and intelligence services and the bureaucracy after the disaster of the early US decision to remove Baathists from government and to disband what was left of Saddam's Sunni-dominated military, calls for the inclusion of Sunnis in the new cabinet were intended to drive a wedge into the insurgency.

But Jaafari's refusal to accept Sunni ministerial nominees and Hakim's call for a purge could be a serious setback. There is an expectation that Hakim's Badr Brigade militia will be given control of the military, police and intelligence services, in which the US has invested more than $US5 billion ($6.4 billion).

The US has tried to argue that only former Baathists directly involved in Saddam's atrocities should be barred - possibly hundreds of individuals. But Jaafari and his colleagues made clear they want a sweep of thousands, insisting on trials for any former officials or soldiers accused of wrongdoing in the Saddam decades. A hardline Hakim associate, Hussain Shahristani, also insisted recently that thousands more involved in the insurgency would have to be prosecuted.

After years of suffering at the hands of Saddam, the Shiite leadership does not believe in a negotiated rapprochement - it argues that only guns, not talking, will see off the insurgency. "I don't think the insurgency can be beaten by negotiations," Shahristani said. "For us in [Hakim's] alliance, we don't think it's serious. We think it's surrender, and the Iraqi people will not accept surrender." And there was more than a hint of vengeance when he said: "We know that most senior officials in the [interior ministry] are from the previous intelligence department who've been oppressing the Iraqi people."

It all sets the stage to drive even more Sunnis into the embrace of the insurgency and for what the political commentator Wamidh Nadhmi described as "a warlord system that will destroy the country". He told the Herald: "It doesn't say much for democracy. The Sunnis have to be allowed to participate. The Sunnis they have included in the cabinet are not taken seriously, so I have no confidence in its ability to be a uniting force. This Government is not viable.

"They are opening the door to the security services for the Badr [Brigade] and this is a cause of real fear." Jaafari's cabinet is propped up by a deal in which the Shiites and the Kurds have attempted to accommodate their conflicting agendas - its detail has not been released. Allawi tried to bluff his way into power. He failed and now goes into opposition; and the Sunnis, who all sides insisted must be included, have been left dangling.

The politicians' inability to put on even a veneer of unity underscored a deep anxiety as observers watch Iraq's wearied population seek a haven - the things that bind these Iraqi groups have much less cohesive power than those that divide them.

"This Government is unjust and we reject it totally," said Alaa Makhi, a spokesman for the Iraqi Islamic Party, a well-known Sunni party which boycotted the election. "It does not suggest credibility on the other side, and it does not represent a national accord."

The Sunnis have been offered one of the deputy prime ministerships and the important defence ministry - but only if they nominate candidates that are acceptable to the Shiites.

"It was very disappointing for us that most of our candidates have been sent back," said vice-president Ghazi Yawar, who had been a key Sunni negotiator. He gave as an example Sadoun al-Dulame, whom the Shiites rejected as a candidate for defence. He is a sociologist who went into exile after he was sentenced to death by Saddam.

Thursday had all the trimmings of a historic day. But 89 members, including Allawi, did not present themselves for the ceremonial naming of this incomplete government. A Shiite MP, Lame'a Abed Khadawi, was absent, too - she was gunned down on Wednesday when she opened the gate of her home to a stranger.

It's a dangerous time to be a Sunni in Iraq. Equally, it will be dangerous for Shiites if the Sunni minority is pushed to the fringes. And it's a dangerous time for all if the Kurds flex their muscle to the extent that some US officials now publicly canvass the risks of civil war.

All this will severely test the extent to which the US can control events - it does have a fat chequebook but many Shiite hardliners argue they are capable of taking over the security agencies and dealing with their enemies. Many, in fact, relish the opportunity.

Archival Rescue 20 ~ Aus Military in Iraq

Military lawyers a law unto themselves
April 30, 2005, Marian Wilkinson, Sydney Morning Herald

Australian officers in Iraq have been faced with a legal and moral minefield, writes Marian Wilkinson.

At the peak of the insurgency attacks in Baghdad at the end of 2003, an Australian military lawyer, Major George O'Kane, was asked by his US superiors to help with the transfer of a suspected jihadist who had been picked up by US Special Forces in the Persian Gulf and was to be taken to Abu Ghraib prison.

The suspect, US commanders told O'Kane, was a "high-value detainee". He was a suspected member of al-Qaeda whom US intelligence officers wanted to interrogate. At the time O'Kane helped in this transfer, he had on his desk serious complaints from the International Committee of the Red Cross, claiming prisoners at Abu Ghraib, especially those under interrogation, were being abused.

Just a day or so after the transfer, one "high-value detainee", also picked up in the Persian Gulf, was photographed by a US military officer, kneeling in a small cell at Abu Ghraib, his hands bound behind his back. A dog bared its teeth a metre from his face. That was just one of many photographs to appear months later, when the Abu Ghraib prison scandal broke. It is unclear if the photo was linked to the prisoner O'Kane helped to transfer, and a Defence spokesman said yesterday that information on the identity of the prisoner in the photograph was a matter for the US Government.

O'Kane took no part in interrogating the jihadist. As an Australian legal officer seconded to the US military headquarters in Baghdad, his job was to process the suspect and get him to his place of interrogation. But the case is an example of the legal and moral conundrum faced by Australian military and intelligence officers serving as junior members in the US coalition in Iraq and Afghanistan.

As 450 members of a new Australian taskforce set up in Al Muthanna province in southern Iraq, human rights lawyers are again asking whether the Howard Government is giving its military and intelligence officers clear guidelines under international law to ensure they do not expose prisoners to torture or abuse when they are handed to their allies.

As the new Iraqi Government struggles to its feet, there is also a legal debate over whether all prisoners will, as expected, be handed over to Iraqi authorities, or whether so-called high-value detainees, former members of Saddam Hussein's regime or key insurgents, will first be handed over to US intelligence for interrogation.

The Herald asked the Defence Department a week ago to lay out Australia's policy on the transfer of Iraqi prisoners, but there was still no final answer yesterday.

THE Howard Government's policy on the handling of prisoners in Iraq has been controversial since the first Australian forces arrived in the country in March 2003 and began scooping up Iraqi prisoners and handing them over to the US.

The legal brains of the Government agreed to a so-called memorandum of understanding with Washington that officials hoped would limit Australia's legal responsibilities for the prisoners. At all times, Australian forces would be accompanied by a US or British officer, who would take charge of any prisoners the Australians secured, transferred or transported. By doing this, Australia's obligations to prisoners under the Geneva Conventions "were not activated", as the senior Foreign Affairs lawyer, Greg French, said. It would not be responsible for them.

But Labor's foreign affairs spokesman, Kevin Rudd, and leading international lawyers in Australia said this was an attempt to "shirk" responsibilities. Hilary Charlesworth, a professor of international law from the Australian National University, and several of her colleagues argued that Australia, as a member of the US-led coalition, was "directly responsible for the welfare of any Iraqi prisoner it captured".

Professor Don Rothwell, from Sydney University, said that, at least for the first year of the Iraq war, Australia also had a responsibility to ensure any civilian prisoners it transferred to the Americans, including suspected insurgents, were treated with humanity.

The theory was soon put to the test in Iraq, and Australian defence and intelligence officers struck a legal and ethical minefield. When O'Kane transferred the jihadist suspect to Abu Ghraib, he had limited power, but he did have knowledge. He was not only given the confidential Red Cross complaints about Abu Ghraib, but he was the principal drafter of the coalition response to them. As the US army investigation of Abu Ghraib later found, that response glossed over the complaints, "to the point of denying the inhumane treatment, humiliation and abuse identified by the [Red Cross]".

Even more difficult was the legal and ethical dilemma faced by other Australian officers seconded to US operations. One officer, whose name has been withheld by the Defence Department, learnt that his US military colleagues were hiding high-level Iraqi prisoners of interest to US intelligence. The practice, known as keeping "ghost detainees", violated international law and has been condemned by US military lawyers and the Red Cross.

Yet the officer, when told of the "ghost detainees", did not inform his Australian superiors, Australian military sources said. He came forward only after the Abu Ghraib scandal blew up in the Australian Parliament. His evidence was handed over to the US embassy in Canberra but was never revealed to the Parliament or the public.

An Australian intelligence officer, Rod Barton, also found himself in a legal quagmire when he was sent, as part of the Australian contingent to the Iraq Survey Group, to search for Saddam's weapons of mass destruction. His duties included questioning former Iraqi weapons scientists held in a prison near Baghdad Airport called Camp Cropper. He became disturbed after seeing two prisoners who appeared to have facial bruising. Then another scientist mysteriously died - from a brain tumour, Barton was told.

On returning to Australia in March last year, he raised his concerns about abuse with the Defence Department, recommending that no Australian be involved in interrogating prisoners. There was little interest, even though Australian officials were receiving reports from military lawyers in Iraq, including O'Kane, of the Red Cross complaints about prisoner abuse.

A legal black hole opened up for Barton when he returned to Iraq in September to help compile the final report on Iraq's weapons program. By then the Iraqi interim government had been installed. But the US head of the Iraqi Survey Group, Charles Duelfer, was still issuing instructions on interviewing Iraqi prisoners. He asked Barton to interview several prisoners about the contents of the weapons report.

But Barton had learnt the British were refusing to do interviews after receiving legal advice that they had no authority to do so. "They weren't allowed to question them or prepare questions or even allowed to use the product of the questioning after June," he recalled. Australian officials could not tell him what to do, so Barton decided not to do any more interviews.

Many Australian military and academic lawyers who spoke with the Herald last week said that Australia needed to be more vocal about the legal pitfalls for its military and intelligence officers in Iraq. As O'Kane warned in his final report on his Iraq experience, the handling of prisoners in conflicts such as Iraq and Afghanistan "will always become a red-line issue unless properly planned for and resourced appropriately". For Australia, relying on its senior partner, the US, has proved problematic.

Of all places...

Who else but the antipodeans could think of these things...

Another diversified link (will get back on smh soon, maybe later).

Library captures digital heritage
29.03.05 by Andrew Janes nzherald.co.nz

Like a rapidly deteriorating Alzheimers patient, New Zealand is losing its recent memory.

Penny Carnaby, the National Library's chief librarian, says much of our history could be lost because of the digital age in which we live.

In pre-internet times, most of our heritage was printed, painted or recorded. But now, a lot of the material that future historians will want to study to give them a sense of what New Zealand was like in 2005 is online.

A lot of information and commentary on recent events that New Zealanders have felt enormously proud of - The Lord of the Rings trilogy or the America's Cup - is on the web and not in print, says Carnaby.

"If you did not preserve that we would not have the story."

Or to put it another way, somewhere out there the next Janet Frame may be bashing out brilliant emails. But while these will hang round on a few computers and servers for a while, much of it will simply disappear.

Carnaby and the library's innovation and technology services director, Graham Coe, are part of a team working to preserve our digital heritage.

Last year, in a move supported by all political parties, the Government committed $24 million over four years to the project.

Not even Act leader Rodney Hide objected to this use of taxpayers' money - "because we'll be preserving his speeches as well", says Carnaby.

The digital archiving project is a foundation stone for New Zealand's Digital Strategy, released by the Government in draft form last year and due to be finalised by the middle of this year.

The project will see video, sound, text and graphics saved as digital objects.

Websites or blogs that have existed for a few years will also be saved.

Because of the earthquake risk in Wellington and to protect our history from future cyber-vandals, the archive will be replicated on computers in Auckland.

"Security will need to be like Fort Knox," says Carnaby.

The project will be completed by 2007. After that it will need to be maintained and added to, and the National Library will also start digitising its physical collection.

Coe says not everything will be saved and this raises some interesting questions about what to include and what to leave out.

Most hard-copy New Zealand publications are already deposited with the National Library so these will also be saved electronically.

Carnaby says even some give-away advertorial publications will be preserved as social ephemera of our era.

But what about local porn or hate sites? Saving this type of material may irk social and cultural conservatives, but leaving it out would effectively airbrush our history.

Coe says museum curators and archivists make these types of judgments every day.

Journalists, too, edit in a similar way as they consciously or unconsciously decide what to leave out of their stories.

On the technical front, Coe says the library is about three months away from choosing a technology provider. This may be an IT company or an electronic publisher.

The hardware and software could come from different suppliers.

The National Library now uses Sun Microsystems technology, which it is happy with. Coe says the project's RFI (request for information) mentions the library's relationship with Sun but leaves the door open for other providers.

The manager of the National Library's innovation centre, Steve Knight, is internationally recognised for his work in developing meta-data systems and is the intellectual leader of the project.

Together with what Carnaby describes as some "seriously bright technical guys", Knight is developing a meta-data preservation tool.

Because technology changes so fast, the digital archive will need to be transferred to a new operating system every 10 to 15 years. But it was important to preserve the technological context in which a poem, for example, was created, said Coe.

"It's not just the words but how they are arranged on the page which gives a poem its cadence and meaning."

What Knight's meta-data preservation tool will do is allow a poem written using Microsoft Word software to be accurately replicated 100 years from now, even though no one will use Microsoft Word then.

"It does not sound that sexy but it's the key to preserving digital objects," says Coe.

Carnaby and Coe are also excited about the international collaboration happening around the project and the fact that New Zealand is leading the world in preserving its digital history.

If successful, it is hoped the National Library's archive will be used as a reference site for other libraries round the globe looking at similar digital storage.

The project is also being peer-reviewed by a variety of heavyweight academic institutions, including the British National Library, the Royal Library of the Netherlands, and Cornell University and the Getty Research Institute in the United States.

"We put things in front of them and they give us input," says Carnaby.

"It's not an issue that any country can solve on its own."

The bottom line is that the archive will make the jobs of historians - and journalists - much easier in the future. Imagine, with a few keystrokes, being able to check out your great-grandfather's website or your great great aunt's blog.

For the record

* The National Library's role is to collect and maintain literature and information resources relating to New Zealand and the Pacific.
* In the digital age, that means preserving material published on websites and other electronic media.
* The Government has provided the library with $24 million for a four-year project to develop systems for preserving our digital heritage.
* The library is about three months from settling on a technology platform for the project.

An archive ~ but do they have backup?

www.archive.org

The web is full of incredibly useful sites that compile, free of charge, links to everything we do and don't need to know. And very often we call these archives. The catch - how well protected from fire and flood are the archives? Are there back-up archives? Are there "fixed" (untampered with) archives that we can refer back to, confidently knowing they have not been "fixed-up" (if you will).

Yes yes, there are all these things. The point though, is that these things are all rather loosely connected and a major meltdown would loose them all.

Not quite the kind of back-up we had in mind

Diversifying a bit on this one, this is an article from Forbes.

Net Makes Recording Calls A Snap
David M. Ewalt, 04.12.05, 6:00 AM ET Forbes

NEW YORK - Recording phone calls is generally an activity associated with criminal and embarrassing behavior. From Richard Nixon to Linda Tripp, the people doing the recording are usually going out of their way to protect themselves or implicate somebody else.

But now the increasingly widespread adoption of voice-over-IP technology (or Internet phone calling) could make the recording and archiving of phone calls much easier and more common. Since Internet-based phone calls already consist of packets of data, they're potentially much easier to copy and archive than traditional calls. Convenient recording of phone conversations could prove a boon for businesses that need to keep track of every bit of information. But it also poses significant moral questions and threatens to undermine personal privacy.

So far, technical and social roadblocks have kept the recording of VoIP calls rare. But as IP phones find their way into more homes and offices, the practice is likely to become more common.

Voice-over-IP services are already surging in popularity. Internet phone service is now sold by phone companies like Verizon Communications (nyse: VZ - news - people ), cable companies like Comcast (nyse: CMCSA - news - people ), Internet companies like Time Warner's (nyse: TWX - news - people ) America Online, not to mention startups like Packet8 (nasdaq: EGHT - news - people ) and Vonage. According to market research firm IDC, the number of U.S. subscribers to residential VoIP services will grow from 3 million in 2005 to 27 million by the end of 2009.

Adoption has been even stronger in businesses, where corporations can replace their expensive phone networks and save money routing calls over their computer network.

Archives of phone conversations could be very useful in the corporate world, particularly in businesses that already have to keep track of all their communications for regulatory reasons, like the financial services industry. "The reason is to create this audit trail," says Burton Group analyst David Passmore. "If companies are making copies of their written communications, why wouldn't they feel compelled to extend that to phone calls?"

Other industries that depend on phones for a living might also want to record their conversations. Businesses that run call centers could record calls in order to provide better customer service and keep tabs on agents. We're all familiar with the recorded message: "This call may be monitored for quality assurance."

Sales people could easily keep track of requests from customers. And media organizations could keep perfect records of conversations with sources, provided that the second party is aware of and has agreed to be recorded.

Despite the potential benefits, so far not many people are recording and archiving their Internet calls, says Passmore. Even though complete archival of phone conversations is easier than ever, "people have just been sort of ignoring it."

One reason is that even though comprehensive archiving is now much easier, it's still not exactly a piece of cake. Internet calls generally pass from phone to phone over the network, not through a central point where they could be easily recorded. While it would certainly be possible to reroute that data stream through a device that captures and archives it, such an effort would increase the complexity of a VoIP deployment and make it harder to manage.

Of course, once you start recording calls, you have to figure out where to store them. Most of the VoIP technologies in use don't automatically compress the audio stream, so a preserved phone conversation takes up a fair amount of space on your hard drive, perhaps as much as a megabyte for a two-minute call.

"That starts to add up," says Burton. "And as cheap as storage is, it ain't free." Stored phone calls also lack any sort of indexing elements--like the keywords and headers in e-mail--that make them easily searchable and retrievable, making them less useful for corporate applications. (Some advanced search technologies in the works today could eventually solve this problem).

Products are already appearing on the market to make recording VoIP calls easier. Last month, New York-based United Virtualities released software called HotRecorder that can archive calls over PC-based VoIP services like Skype, AIM, Yahoo! Messenger, and Net2Phone (nasdaq: NTOP - news - people ). And specialized products from Witness Systems (nasdaq: WITS - news - people ) sit inside a corporate network and archive all the calls employees make.

But even though the technological barriers are dropping, the biggest barriers to widespread VoIP recording may remain the moral and ethical ones. The laws on recording phone calls vary state to state. In some places, it's illegal to record without everyone's consent; in others you can record a call if just one party on the call knows about it. But even where it's legal, archiving calls could alienate customers, employees or friends, discouraging most of us from attempting it.

Says Burton, "There are a lot of people who feel storing calls like that is wiretapping."

"There are a lot of people who feel storing calls like that is wiretapping." Well yes.

A Great loss of learning

A message from Nostradamus to web users.

Le grand perte las que feront les lettres,
Auant le cicle de Latona parfaict,
Feu grand deluge plus ignares Sceptres,
Que de long Siecle ne se verra refaict.


A great loss, alas! there will be of learning,
Before the cycle of Latona [the moon] is completed;
Fire, great flood more through ignorant rulers,
How long the [Lunar] cycle will not see itself restored.

1Q62

Pretty clear. But just to emphasis, a decoding;

Line 1 ~ self explanatory. Nostradamas is very specific here and literally spells it out. "Les Lettres". Letters. ABC, or 123 if you like. Units from which language, indeed reality based life, are constructed.

Line 2 ~ moon= think of all the cyclic events you can think of that are "cycling" right now and involve moons, but are incomplete. To shed it more light on, think of all the incomplete moons you can think of. Not sure I am being very specific here. How to ebb clearer, ok, think of a moon that is turned and a cycle not yet at fullness. Goodness. Perhaps I should stop and move on to line 3.

Line 3 ~ Grand deluges plus indignitions and sceptres.

• fire=mars/war/inflammations of the earth and mind/molotov cocktail throwing/etc.
• flood=no need to go on too much here, general large sweeping bodies of water engulfing the earth, freakish tides and melting icecaps.
  
• "more through ignorant rulers"= clear statement pertaining to previous bullet points (no need to press issue here on this blog at this moment).

Line 4 ~ "How long the [Lunar] cycle will not see itself restored". Line works on various levels. In web context, Lunar=loopily whimsical nature of the web.

Techy compulsive archivalists need to get their techy archival selves on to it. Or all our learning will be lost. And looking at the time-frame as indicated by a series of events, I would say it's getting rather urgnet.

Rescue Interupt

A perfect example of why the web needs to develop a less volatile backup archive retrieval system - my pc crashed again.

I got a new hard-drive and memory. I saved all my bookmarks I'd been saving up to link and posit here. I reinstalled. I pulled out my floppy (which the bookmarks were saved on, not having enough hard drive space previously to run a disc burner) and went to import my old bookmarks to my newly reinstalled browser. The disc was busted. Couldn't open file, let alone import the godd'mn thing. Poof. A month or so of saved up scandals lost forever to the ether.