JESSE VENTURA ABUSED BY TSA WILL NO LONGER FLY.

Probes on deal to fly troops

Richard Baker September 13, 2010 - 3:00AM

MULTIPLE official investigations have been launched into Defence Department contracts to fly Australian troops to the Middle East that have cost taxpayers more than $100 million.

The Inspector-General of Defence is investigating why two officers from an Australian Defence Force unit overseeing a 2005 tender process for the flights, David Charlton and John Davies, gave inside information to the winning company, which soon after employed them.

In addition, Defence Department secretary Ian Watt has asked an accounting firm to conduct a ''full probity investigation'' of this year's tender process for the Middle East troop and equipment flights contract, following further allegations of information being leaked to the winning firm.

The 2010 tender also involves Mr Charlton, who was back working inside Defence's Joint Movements Group following the $93 million collapse of his private airline last year. Mr Charlton has also been working as a consultant for 2010 contract winner Adagold Aviation.

Defence is set to face further parliamentary scrutiny, with opposition defence spokesman David Johnston yesterday telling The Age he would push for a ''full-scale inquiry into what is an emerging scandal'' once Parliament resumed.

Senator Johnston has written to Mr Watt to raise his concerns about this year's Middle East flight contract and urge that it not be signed.

''Under no circumstances whatsoever would I [want] to be seen to be acquiescing in the acceptance or execution of this contract,'' he wrote.

The Greens also have called for an inquiry into the 2005 and 2010 Defence contracts and outgoing Defence Minister John Faulkner promised further action.

Defence Inspector-General Ray Bromwich's probe of the 2005 Middle East Area Operations aviation tender comes after The Age obtained confidential emails that showed winning company Strategic Aviation believed it was being ''fed'' inside information about the tender by two Defence officers, Mr Charlton and Mr Davies.

The Age has been told Mr Charlton, an Army Reserve captain, was second in command of the Joint Movements Group, the unit overseeing the 2005 tender, and was responsible for collating information from bidders.

Mr Davies, an army warrant officer, was a logistics expert in the Joint Movements Group with access to tender information.

While Mr Davies was still working at Defence, he sent a Strategic Aviation director emails titled ''007'' and addressed to ''Mr Bond'' before the tender process had closed.

Mr Charlton and Mr Davies took senior management jobs with Strategic Aviation later in 2005 after the company, which was established at the start of that year, won the contract.

The Age can reveal further email exchanges between Mr Charlton, Mr Davies and Strategic Aviation chiefs Michael James and Shaun Aisen that indicate the company had an expectation of winning the tender before it closed, as well as knowledge of Defence's preferences and details of rival bids.

The emails show:

■ On March 1, 2005, three weeks before the tender closed, Strategic founder Michael James, wrote that rival firm Adagold Aviation, for which he was then working as a consultant, would not realise it had put up the wrong aircraft ''until the tender has been awarded and they find out who won it''.

■ Also on March 1, Strategic Aviation tied up an exclusive agreement with a British firm to lease an Airbus A-330 aircraft for 12 months, despite the tender not being awarded until several weeks later. Other emails show Strategic directors discussing how the A-330 was Defence's preferred option.

■ A plan by Strategic Aviation managers to become members of the Liberal Party to gain access to ''key players''.

■ A December 2005 email shows rival firms had complained to Howard government ministers about Strategic Aviation being awarded the Middle East contract earlier that year.

Mr Watt's terms of reference for the external review of the 2010 Middle East contract include an examination of whether the decision to award the tender to Adagold Aviation was influenced by ''vested interests'', ''conflicts of interest'' or ''outside influences''.

Strategic Aviation has denied wrongdoing and says it told Defence of its intention to hire Mr Charlton and Mr Davies.

Adagold has declined comment. Mr Davies said he played no role in the 2005 tender. Mr Charlton could not be contacted.

This story was found at: http://www.theage.com.au/national/probes-on-deal-to-fly-troops-20100912-15701.html

HANDBOOK SUGGESTS THAT DEVIATIONS FROM 'NORMALITY' ARE DISORDERS

By George F. Will

Sunday, February 28, 2010; A15

Peter De Vries, America's wittiest novelist, died 17 years ago, but his discernment of this country's cultural foibles still amazes. In a 1983 novel, he spotted the tendency of America's therapeutic culture to medicalize character flaws:

"Once terms like identity doubts and midlife crisis become current," De Vries wrote, "the reported cases of them increase by leaps and bounds." And: "Rapid-fire means of communication have brought psychic dilapidation within the reach of the most provincial backwaters, so that large metropolitan centers and educated circles need no longer consider it their exclusive property, nor preen themselves on their special malaises."

Life is about to imitate De Vries's literature, again. The fourth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), psychiatry's encyclopedia of supposed mental "disorders," is being revised. The 16 years since the last revision evidently were prolific in producing new afflictions. The revision may aggravate the confusion of moral categories.

Today's DSM defines "oppositional defiant disorder" as a pattern of "negativistic, defiant, disobedient and hostile behavior toward authority figures." Symptoms include "often loses temper," "often deliberately annoys people" or "is often touchy." DSM omits this symptom: "is a teenager."

This DSM defines as "personality disorders" attributes that once were considered character flaws. "Antisocial personality disorder" is "a pervasive pattern of disregard for . . . the rights of others . . . callous, cynical . . . an inflated and arrogant self-appraisal." "Histrionic personality disorder" is "excessive emotionality and attention-seeking." "Narcissistic personality disorder" involves "grandiosity, need for admiration . . . boastful and pretentious." And so on.

If every character blemish or emotional turbulence is a "disorder" akin to a physical disability, legal accommodations are mandatory. Under federal law, "disabilities" include any "mental impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities"; "mental impairments" include "emotional or mental illness." So there might be a legal entitlement to be a jerk. (See above, "antisocial personality disorder.")

The revised DSM reportedly may include "binge eating disorder" and "hypersexual disorder" ("a great deal of time" devoted to "sexual fantasies and urges" and "planning for and engaging in sexual behavior"). Concerning children, there might be "temper dysregulation disorder with dysphoria."

This last categorization illustrates the serious stakes in the categorization of behaviors. Extremely irritable or aggressive children are frequently diagnosed as bipolar and treated with powerful antipsychotic drugs. This can be a damaging mistake if behavioral modification treatment can mitigate the problem.

Another danger is that childhood eccentricities, sometimes inextricable from creativity, might be labeled "disorders" to be "cured." If 7-year-old Mozart tried composing his concertos today, he might be diagnosed with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder and medicated into barren normality.

Furthermore, intellectual chaos can result from medicalizing the assessment of character. Today's therapeutic ethos, which celebrates curing and disparages judging, expresses the liberal disposition to assume that crime and other problematic behaviors reflect social or biological causation. While this absolves the individual of responsibility, it also strips the individual of personhood and moral dignity.

James Q. Wilson, America's preeminent social scientist, has noted how "abuse excuse" threatens the legal system and society's moral equilibrium. Writing in National Affairs quarterly ("The Future of Blame"), Wilson notes that genetics and neuroscience seem to suggest that self-control is more attenuated -- perhaps to the vanishing point -- than our legal and ethical traditions assume.

The part of the brain that stimulates anger and aggression is larger in men than in women, and the part that restrains anger is smaller in men than in women. "Men," Wilson writes, "by no choice of their own, are far more prone to violence and far less capable of self-restraint than women." That does not, however, absolve violent men of blame. As Wilson says, biology and environment interact. And the social environment includes moral assumptions, sometimes codified in law, concerning expectations about our duty to desire what we ought to desire.

It is scientifically sensible to say that all behavior is in some sense caused. But a society that thinks scientific determinism renders personal responsibility a chimera must consider it absurd not only to condemn depravity but also to praise nobility. Such moral derangement can flow from exaggerated notions of what science teaches, or can teach, about the biological and environmental roots of behavior.

Or -- revisers of the DSM, please note -- confusion can flow from the notion that normality is always obvious and normative, meaning preferable. And the notion that deviations from it should be considered "disorders" to be "cured" rather than stigmatized as offenses against valid moral norms.

georgewill@washpost.com

HERALD SUN HIT PIECE USING THE 9/11 FALSE FLAG OP TO JUSTIFY THE AMERICAN WAR ON OUR FREEDOM

No time for weakness

• Andrew Bolt From: Herald Sun August 26, 2010 10:23PM

Defence Minister John Faulkner. Source: Herald Sun

THIS is no way to wage a war, with such tears and sighs even from our Defence Minister.

And not with such ambivalence from President Barack Obama, either - a deadlier sign of weakness.

I mean no disrespect to Senator John Faulkner. No, I admire the Defence Minister's obvious compassion.

But after watching the press conference called on Wednesday to announce the latest death of a Digger in Afghanistan I must ask: is this wise?

Faulkner appeared with Prime Minister Julia Gillard and the chief of the defence force, Air Chief Marshal Angus Houston, all looking grim.

Houston spoke soberly of the sacrifice Lance Corporal Jared MacKinney had made for his country.

Gillard went further, though, talking of "this dreadful news": "Of course it's a shock, it's a tragedy."

A tragedy? Most certainly, to the soldier's family, friends and comrades.

But a shock? A soldier's death in war?

Surely we must expect that when we send our soldiers to fight, some will die?

Then spoke Faulkner, face contorted in pain and voice halting.

"Coming so soon after the deaths of Private Tomas Dale and Private Grant Kirby late last week this tragic news is another very heavy blow for the defence community and of course a devastating one for the soldier's family," he said in a voice from the sepulchre.

"We've lost a fine and dedicated soldier, but he was also, and more importantly, a much loved young man whose death is going to leave a terrible, terrible gap in the lives of those around him.

"Much too often I've had to stand here and announce bad news and offer condolences to grieving defence families."

Every word heartfelt. Every sympathy honourable. I'd hope every Australian also reflected on the sense of duty that drove this soldier to serve, and on the price now paid by not only him, but his wife, daughter and unborn son.

But I repeat my question, as we now see TV footage from the Sydney funeral of SAS Trooper Jason Brown, attended by the Prime Minister and Opposition Leader Tony Abbott.

Was this intensity of public grieving - broadcast on every big-city television station - wise?

Both Labor and the Coalition are convinced the war in Afghanistan must be won. That country, once used as a safe haven by the masterminds of the September 11 attacks, must not be allowed to return to the savage control of the Taliban and its al-Qaida allies.

Jihadists everywhere would only take fresh heart, and find a new refuge. Many more civilians would die at their hands, should we fail.

Most of our soldiers in Afghanistan seem as sure as our politicians that their mission must not be abandoned.

But it's also clear the public is growing bored with Afghanistan, nine years after we first sent troops there. Many people now wonder whether the price, especially in lives, is worth the seemingly meagre gains.

After all, the Afghan government remains corrupt and largely ineffectual. Half the Afghan troops we train just go home.

Meanwhile, more coalition soldiers are dying there this year than in any before, and while we're sending young Australian men to help protect Afghanistan's fledgling democracy, we're seeing young Afghan men coming the other way in boats, leaving the work to us.

What gains we make there are almost never discussed. And there are gains.

When I last visited, for example, I saw young women, unveiled, working as journalists for a free media.

Under the Taliban, those women would be back in burqas, back at home, and back to hearing only the news the mullahs permitted to be reported.

But about the setbacks we suffer we hear plenty. The media feeds on them. The Greens, the party of the perpetually irresponsible, gleefully exploits them.

And now we see our leaders crumple as they announce death by death, even though we've lost only 21 soldiers in nine years of fighting.

What a change this is from 60 years ago, when we could lose 32 in a single battle in Kapyong valley and not flinch from the fight in Korea. More bloodied, but less bowed.

I DO not for an instant believe we should not publicly mourn the death of each Digger who dies in Afghanistan. I do not want us to play down the loss suffered by those who loved them.

But which Australian, on hearing Faulkner's sigh that "much too often" he's had to "stand here and announce bad news", would not question why we still fight in Afghanistan?

Which would know why we do?

Then there's this danger. The Taliban and their jihadist allies know they can never defeat our soldiers, but they can defeat our will to send them. Victory for them will come not on the battlefield, but in Western homes.

Why else the propaganda videos they release to cow the West? Why else the message sent the US by Osama bin Laden a year ago, jeering that "Obama is a weakened man. He will not be able to stop the war"?

The sighs of a Faulkner, easily found on the internet, could only convince our watchful enemy the West is too weak to fight for much longer.

In fact, the Taliban is counting on it already, thanks to the disastrous vacillating of Obama, whose troops comprise most of the coalition forces in Afghanistan.

This week the head of the US Marine Corps, James Conway, warned that the arbitrary deadline set by Obama for a pullout of US troops - July next year - was "giving our enemy sustenance".

"In fact we've intercepted communications that say, 'Hey, we only have to hold out for so long'," Gen Conway told a Pentagon news conference this week.

In truth, it would take "a few years before conditions on the ground are such that turnover (to Afghan forces) will be possible for us".

Conway excused Obama by damning him, saying the President - threatening war to a resurgent Taliban but promising withdrawal to impatient Americans - was "talking to several audiences at the same time".

Trouble is, this wired-up world no longer allows leaders to send different messages to different audiences.

We see both faces now. Even a Faulkner cannot show a firm jaw to the Taliban, but red eyes to Australians.

This is a war in which our leaders must instead show all the resolve they say they feel - if they truly mean to win. They are being watched, you see.