© Alan Porritt/AAP

Brendan O'Neill meets the Voltaire-inspired attorney general of Australia

Ever since Captain Cook set foot here, Australia's exotic creatures have wowed the rest of the world. Mammals that lay eggs! Marsupials that hop! Well today, Australia contains what must surely count as the most exotic, rarely sighted creature of the twenty-first century: a politician who believes in freedom of speech. Extinct in Europe, seriously endangered in America, this most hunted of the modern era's political beasts still survives Down Under, and it goes by the name of George Brandis.

'I'm a John Stuart Mill man', Brandis tells me, over too much booze and amazing food at one of Sydney's oldest political haunts, which is called - wait for it - Machiavelli's. Brandis is the senator for Queensland for the ruling right-wing Liberal Party, a key cog in the government of Liberal PM Tony Abbott, and, most importantly, the attorney general of Australia. This basically means he's in charge of Australian law and justice. And since taking office with the election of Abbott in 2013, Brandis has doggedly, and often controversially, devoted himself to reforming the section of the Oz Racial Discrimination Act that forbids people from 'offending, insulting or humiliating' a person or group on the basis of their racial or ethnic origins. Why has he done this? Why is he so determined to rip up restrictions on insulting ethnic minorities? Why has he allowed himself to be branded by many on the Australian left as a 'friend of bigots' who is using his power to help 'unleash Australia's racists'?

Major U.S. technology companies have largely ended the practice of quietly complying with investigators' demands for e-mail records and other online data, saying that users have a right to know in advance when their information is targeted for government seizure.

This increasingly defiant industry stand is giving some of the tens of thousands of Americans whose Internet data gets swept into criminal investigations each year the opportunity to fight in court to prevent disclosures. Prosecutors, however, warn that tech companies may undermine cases by tipping off criminals, giving them time to destroy vital electronic evidence before it can be gathered.

Fueling the shift is the industry's eagerness to distance itself from the government after last year's disclosures about National Security Agency surveillance of online services. Apple, Microsoft, Facebook and Google all are updating their policies to expand routine notification of users about government data seizures, unless specifically gagged by a judge or other legal authority, officials at all four companies said. Yahoo announced similar changes in July.

As this position becomes uniform across the industry, U.S. tech companies will ignore the instructions stamped on the fronts of subpoenas urging them not to alert subjects about data requests, industry lawyers say. Companies that already routinely notify users have found that investigators often drop data demands to avoid having suspects learn of inquiries.

Russia will not engage in political bargaining with the Ukrainian government over its decision to cut off Crimea's water supply, Russian natural resources minister Sergey Donskoy said.

"The situation clearly shows that Kiev is unfriendly towards the people of Crimea. We're not surprised by this as recent developments characterize the regime in Kiev as anti-popular," Donskoy said, as quoted by Itar-Tass news agency.

Moscow will not take part in political bargaining because "it's the ordinary people who suffer" from water shortages, the minister said as he arrived in the city of Sevastopol.

Donskoy stressed that Crimea's agricultural industry is most affected in the current situation, but added that "we'll find ways to compensate the water demands."

"In Crimea, a lot of water is wasted. It's dumped into the sea. There's no water recycling in place, which would enable us to use water for technical needs after preliminary processing," he said.

The minister added that Crimea's water supply system is in rather bad shape after decades of Ukrainian rule.

Secretary of State Kerry gets to say whatever half-truth or fiction comes into his head about Syria, Russia or other "designated villains," but when he cites the inconvenient truth of Israeli "apartheid," he must scramble as fast as he can to retract and apologize.

It is a mark of how upside-down Official Washington has become over facts and evidence that Secretary of State John Kerry, who has developed a reputation for making false and misleading statements about Syria and Russia, rushes to apologize when he speaks the truth about the danger from Israeli "apartheid."

After public disclosure that he had said in a closed-door meeting of the Trilateral Commission last week that Israel risked becoming an "apartheid state," Kerry hastily apologized for his transgression, expressing his undying support for Israel and engaging in self-flagellation over his word choice.

Secretary of State John Kerry speaking to the AIPAC conference on March 3, 2014.

"For more than 30 years in the United States Senate, I didn't just speak words in support of Israel," Mr. Kerry said in his statement. "I walked the walk when it came time to vote and when it came time to fight."

He then sought to clarify his position on the A-word: "First, Israel is a vibrant democracy and I do not believe, nor have I ever stated, publicly or privately, that Israel is an apartheid state or that it intends to become one. Anyone who knows anything about me knows that without a shred of doubt."

Kerry added: "If I could rewind the tape, I would have chosen a different word to describe my firm belief that the only way in the long term to have a Jewish state and two nations and two peoples living side by side in peace and security is through a two state solution."

Kerry scurried to make this apology after his remark was reported by The Daily Beast and condemned by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which said: "Any suggestion that Israel is, or is at risk of becoming, an apartheid state is offensive and inappropriate."

The only problem with AIPAC's umbrage - and with Kerry's groveling - is that Israel has moved decisively in the direction of becoming an apartheid state in which Palestinians are isolated into circumscribed areas, often behind walls, and are tightly restricted in their movements, even as Israel continues to expand settlements into Palestinian territories.

According to a new report by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, more than 2,800 IRS employees facing disciplinary actions received more than $2.8 million in monetary bonuses.

In addition to the millions in bonuses, those IRS employees also received 27,000 worth of additional time-off bonuses and more than 175 quality step increases (which allows employees to receive promotions faster, according to the Office of Personnel Management). The report, written by J. Russell George, looked at a period between October 1, 2010 and December 31, 2012.

Of those employees with disciplinary actions during the time period, more than 1,100 of them with "substantiated Federal tax compliance problems" received over $1 million in cash awards, $250,000 in time-off awards and 69 quality step increase awards within the same year the IRS proved the employees hadn't paid their taxes.

Earnest moralists lament Americans' distrust of government. What really is regrettable is that government does much to earn distrust, as Terry Dehko, 70, and his daughter Sandy Thomas, 41, understand.

Terry, who came to Michigan from Iraq in 1970, soon did what immigrants often do: He went into business, buying Schott's Supermarket in Fraser, Mich., where he still works six days a week. The Internal Revenue Service, a tentacle of a government that spent $3.5 trillion in 2013, tried to steal more than $35,000 from Terry and Sandy that year.

Sandy, a mother of four, has a master's degree in urban planning but has worked in the store off and on since she was 12. She remembers, "They just walked into the store" and announced that they had emptied the store's bank account. The IRS agents believed, or pretended to believe, that Terry and Sandy were or conceivably could be - which is sufficient for the IRS - conducting a criminal enterprise when not selling groceries.

What pattern of behavior supposedly aroused the suspicions of a federal government that is ignorant of how small businesses function? Terry and Sandy regularly make deposits of less than $10,000 in the bank across the street. Federal law, aimed primarily at money laundering by drug dealers, requires banks to report cash deposits of more than $10,000. It also makes it illegal to "structure" deposits to evade such reporting.

Because 35 percent of Schott's Supermarket's receipts are in cash, Terry and Sandy make frequent trips to the bank to avoid tempting actual criminals by having large sums at the store. Besides, their insurance policy covers no cash loss in excess of $10,000.

In 2010 and 2012, IRS agents visited the store and examined Terry's and Sandy's conduct. In 2012, the IRS notified them that it identified "no violations" of banking laws. But on Jan. 22, 2013, Terry and Sandy discovered that the IRS had obtained a secret warrant and emptied the store's bank account. Sandy says that if the IRS had acted "the day before, there would have been only about $2,000 in the account." Should we trust that today's IRS was just lucky in its timing?

This is about a relentless film. A film that doesn't care what happens when false reality is ripped away. A film that actually does what every person who knows the truth wants to do.

This is a film you should see. It's called Water Time, and if you go to banditobooks.com, you can watch it for free, by signing up on Allan Weisbecker's email list.

Allan is the director and the star of Water Time. He made a good living writing for Hollywood into the mid-90s (Miami Vice, Crime Story), when he quit the scene to live a different kind of life.

A much, much different kind of life....that culminated in going on the road to see what had happened to America. Driving his truck, with his dog Honey, with his surfboard, with his laptop, on which he'd stashed compelling evidence that key events in modern American history had resulted in a shadow takeover of the country. A coup d'etat.

That's one of the subjects of the film.

It's about a man who knows the truth and wants to talk about it with average Americans on camera, before your eyes. It's about a man who makes his own frontier, who mourns the loss of his childhood friend who died in Vietnam, a war made into a horror through the assassination of JFK.

This is an impressive, comprehensive analysis of the February 2014 Ukraine coup from the perspective of a senior Russian academic. It details the interests and affiliations of the main Ukrainian domestic players - oligarchical clans many of whose leaders have dual nationality - with some shocking and little known detail. It exposes the glaring hypocrisies and double standards of the western sponsors of the coup and their Russian/Ukrainian '5th Column traitors'. It sees the coup and Russia's successful incorporation of Crimea as major game-changing events in the on-going, US-lead post-WWII machinations of the West to subdue Russia to its own agenda and outlines how Russia should now respond.

All-in-all a must-read for westerners needing to understand what is really happening in both the Ukraine and the wider Anglo-US-NATO globalisation drive which it brings into sharp focus


Transcript below:

The fool is John Kerry, who has looked bad in his rushing around between Washington and Tel Aviv trying to get in place a "framework" agreement between Israel and the Palestinians that would show progress in the efforts of the honest broker, assailing Nicholas Maduro of Venezuela for his "terror campaign against his own people," and, of course, denouncing the Russians for their "aggression" against the coup-regime of Ukraine. His statement that "You just don't in the 21st century behave in 19th century fashion by invading another country on a completely trumped-up pretext," has to be regarded as an Orwellian classic and may be his signifier in future history books, in the unlikely event that he makes it at all. His punchline has been the subject of many jokes and laughs in the dissident media, but the mainstream media have hardly mentioned it and certainly haven't made it the butt of jokes and a basis for discrediting the man (just as there has been no discrediting of Madeleine Albright based on her statement on national TV that killing 500,000 Iraqi children via the sanctions of mass destruction in the 1990s - which she helped engineer - "was worth it").

Of course, it is possible that Kerry really believed he was speaking truths, having internalized the assumptions that flow from U.S. "exceptionalism," which make words like "invasion," "aggression" and "international law" inapplicable to us as the world's police; and what might be a "completely trumped up pretext" if offered by the Russians is only a slight and excusable error or misjudgment when we do it. After all, the New York Times quickly used the word "aggression" in editorializing on the Crimea events ("Russia's Aggression," March 2, 2014), whereas it never used the word to describe the invasion-occupation of Iraq, nor did it mention the words "UN Charter" or "international law" in its 70 editorials on Iraq from September 11, 2001 to March 21, 2003 (Howard Friel and Richard Falk, The Record of the Paper).

The Pentagon is sending about 600 troops to Eastern Europe in response to Russia's incursion into Ukraine, Rear Adm. John Kirby announced Tuesday.

A company-sized contingent of U.S. paratroopers from the 173^rd Airborne Brigade will arrive in Latvia on Thursday, the U.S. embassy there announced Wednesday. A similar number of soldiers, about 150, are scheduled to land in Poland on Wednesday. Estonia and Latvia will also host American soldiers for joint training missions in the coming days.

U.S. troops will continue to rotate into the region "at least through the end of this year," according to the embassy.

"Russia's aggression in Ukraine has renewed our resolve to strengthening NATO's defense plans and capabilities, and to demonstrate our continued commitment to collective defense in reinforcing our NATO allies in Central and Eastern Europe," Kirby told reporters at the Pentagon.