March 10, 2008
SCIENCE: July 05, AU Edition
COPY CATS
Entrepreneurial American scientists are destined for the dog house, says Susanne Quick
It’s just another brown brick building in a suburban American business park. But Suite J at the Waunakee Business Center in Wisconsin is about to turn into the animal cloning debate’s ground zero. Genetic Savings & Clone Inc. – the entrepreneurial outfit that introduced the first cloned pet cat to the world in December – is opening its doors in this small Madison, Wis., suburb this month. The company’s CEO, Lou Hawthorne, has promised that by year’s end, a dog will be born here.
In the eight years since Dolly the Sheep’s birth was announced to the world, research into animal cloning has progressed in ways few dreamed possible a decade ago.
Scientists have now cloned barnyard animals and endangered species. They’ve created cloned cows from frozen steaks and cloned mice from cancer cells. They’ve talked about resurrecting extinct creatures such as woolly mammoths and Tasmanian tigers. And with the news on Thursday that soft tissue from dinosaurs had been discovered, re-creating these giant lizards does not seem so farfetched. Despite the scientific excitement, creativity and ingenuity that have inspired and driven this research, cloning remains uncomfortable – even freakish – for many people.
Who and what are the clones? Are they healthy animals or deformed monsters? How many animals are sacrificed in the pursuit of one healthy clone? And, in the end, what will it lead to?
As ethicists and scientists weigh the motivations for animal cloning – improving the food supply, fighting disease, saving endangered animals – the arguments for and against cloning mutate and evolve along with the research advances.
That debate is now moving to the backyard.
In December, Genetic Savings & Clone announced the birth of Little Nicky, the first cloned cat to be sold as a pet. The recipient, a Texas woman known only as Julie, paid $50,000 to have her beloved – but dead – kitty cloned. While some say she was swindled, Hawthorne believes she was given an incredible, if expensive, gift.
‘Our product is based on love’, Hawthorne said.
David Magnus, director of Stanford University’s Center for Biomedical Ethics, scoffed at this claim. He said the high death rates and possible cruelty that go into cloning make Genetic Savings & Clone’s product anything but ‘loving’.
Also, he and other critics said consumers are being duped: The animals they think they are getting – their original pets – cannot be reproduced.
And finally, they think Genetic Savings & Clone’s product is grossly frivolous in light of the number of animals in shelters who need homes.
‘Everything about this is objectionable’, Magnus said.
But Autumn Fiester, a bioethicist at the University of Pennsylvania, said there isn’t evidence to show that animals are suffering – at least any more than commercially bred dogs or cats.
She added that the claim that pet owners are being duped is condescending. As for the frivolous argument, she says, ‘Then you’re arguing against buying any luxury good.’ Among those involved in cloning, she is in the minority.
Robert Lanza, vice president of medical and scientific development at Advanced Cell Technology – a Worcester, Mass., company at the forefront of cloning technology – called it ‘troubling.’
Rudolf Jaenisch, a professor of biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a researcher at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, called pet cloning ‘ridiculous’ and ‘preposterous.’
Somatic cell nuclear transfer – the shop name for cloning – is conceptually a pretty easy process.
A cell – such as a skin cell – is taken from an adult animal. The nucleus, and the DNA it houses, is sucked out and placed next to an empty egg cell that’s had its nucleus removed. The new egg-nucleus combo is then jolted with electricity or bathed in a chemical cocktail.
‘What you want to do is basically trick the egg into thinking it’s been fertilized by a sperm’, said Neal First, a retired professor of animal sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the first researcher to clone cattle.
If all goes well, the duped egg starts to divide, eventually creating an incipient embryo, which researchers implant into a surrogate animal.
While this may sound pretty straightforward, it’s actually a messy, hit-or-miss process that yields few successful clones.
Depending on whom you talk to, the number of successful clones – i.e., those which survive beyond birth – can run as low as one-in-1,000 to as many as 15 percent.
Researchers believe this is the result of a host of molecular issues, some they can pinpoint, others they can’t.
The mystery is in the egg. ‘There are molecules in the egg that allow the DNA to reprogram’ and start anew so that it’s read as the blueprint for an embryo, not an old skin cell, Lanza said.
But what those molecules are and how they work remains elusive.
There is also an issue of extra DNA in the egg. Even though the egg’s nuclear DNA is removed, other genetic material remains floating around the egg cell in a form known as mitochondrial DNA.
No one knows for sure what effects this might have on a developing clone embryo, but it does mean that the clone, despite its name, is not an exact genetic duplicate of the donor. It has some other DNA that may or may not affect its development.
Then there’s the issue of imprinting. Mammals carry two copies of each gene: one set from their mother, the other from their father. But only one of these copies is active at any one time.
In a clone, ‘the normal battle between mom and dad’ is not taking place, Lanza said. The end result: critical messages from the genes are being lost during an embryo’s development, potentially leading to cardiac problems, respiratory ailments and ‘a messed up placenta.’
The hurdles don’t end here.
When DNA is in a quiescent state, it looks like spaghetti noodles with proteins attached to it. This means that when the skin cell DNA is sucked out, it’s carrying a lot of protein baggage. It is possible these proteins may get in the way of the egg-skin cell DNA fusion.
Researchers at Genetic Savings & Clone say they have solved this problem by using a new technique called chromatin transfer that cleans the DNA. The result, according to Hawthorne, is higher efficiency.
‘Our losses are well under 50 percent’, he said, adding that such losses are typical in commercial breeding.
Magnus and others question these claims; scientists at Genetic Savings & Clone have not published their results. But Jim Robl, president of a South Dakota biotech company called Hematech and one of the developers of chromatin transfer, said he, too, had gotten good results using this method to clone cows.
Yet, the battle over pet clones only partially hinges on technical and molecular hurdles.
These animals are behaviorally complex. They are not just products of a strict genetic blueprint, but of the multicolored and textured tapestry of their environment and experiences.
This means that a consumer who’s paying thousands of dollars in hopes of getting the same dog or cat will be getting an animal that behaves differently than the original. That, said Magnus, is ‘a rip-off.’
Finally, critics of pet cloning said there’s the issue of the millions of animals who don’t have homes that are living on the streets or housed in shelters.
Magnus and Spiegel-Miller believe Hawthorne’s business is minimizing the plight of these animals.
They charge that the money Hawthorne’s clients are willing to spend on a clone would be better used on these other animals, that Genetic Savings & Clone clients should head to a local shelter, pay $50 for a cat or dog that needs a home and donate the rest to the shelter.
That would be a more ethical way to spend their money, they say.
Fiester and Hawthorne dismiss the criticism as baseless.
‘Why should someone who loves their cat be more obligated
to donate money or help shelter animals than someone else?’ Fiester said.
He also threw back the notion that cloning for agricultural or medical purposes is somehow more ethical.
In the end, he said, the future of the pet cloning business will depend upon the quality of the product.
If Genetic Savings & Clone can create animals that pet owners are happy with – animals that aren’t sick or compromised and behave in ways similar to the original – the business will succeed, Hawthorne said.
His scientists also are looking into how to enhance pets and make them live longer and healthier.
‘Our clones will be better than normal,’ he said. ‘Clones are going to become the preferred pets.’
Posted by InvestigateDesign at 11:51 PM | Comments (0)
TECHNOLOGY: July 05, AU Edition
IT’S A SMALL, SMALL WORLD
From cough syrups to eyeglasses for cows, Martha McKay takes a peek into a very tiny future
At the nanotechnology show in New York City recently, companies touted the state-of-the-art, from quantum dots to microscopes powerful enough to see atoms.And then there were two guys from Cleveland hawking cough syrup.If you follow the nanotechnology industry closely, this sort of thing isn’t surprising.
But if you don’t, such seemingly humdrum technology on display alongside the advances at the fourth annual NanoBusiness conference might seem unusual.
Spend time with nano-experts and one thing becomes clear: nanotechnology is more commonplace than you might think – from nano-engineered eyeglass coatings used on one in five pairs of eyeglasses, to sunscreens and stain-resistant fabrics.
One of the most hyped areas of technology since the Internet, nanotechno- logy is the study and engineering of really small things – particles and gizmos from 1 to 100 nanometres, or a billionth of a metre, in size to be specific. The paper you are reading this on is about 100,000 nanometres thick.
As you might expect, there are hundreds of ways of using nano-sized particles and devices, with new ideas popping up all the time.
The U.S. government will pour an estimated $1.3 billion into nano-based R&D with a particular emphasis on such areas as cancer research. Here in Australia, governments are putting up $100 million for domestic nanotechnology research this year.
Jeffrey M. Jaffe, president of research and advanced technologies for Lucent Technologies’ Bell Labs, told conferees how telecommunications networks could be transformed by nano-sized devices. Tiny power supplies working together with nano-sized microphones, tiny sensors and video displays could one day give us a communications ‘wallpaper’.
Even the ability to have ‘several microphones inside a phone would be a tremendous (sound quality) improvement’, he said.
Out at the New Jersey Nanotechnology Consortium, university researchers have 60 to 80 nano-based projects under way.They include building a stress gauge to strap on the back of a fruit fly. The tiny device will enable scientists to tell if the drosophila is asleep (they don’t have eyelids, in case you wondered). Researchers, who
study fruit flies because they are well-suited to genetic studies, want to be able to test whether their modifications to the fruit fly’s sleeping patterns work.
They are also looking into ways to build an electronic nose that can smell, a real-time DNA analyzer, and what they call a ‘rubber mirror’, which would map the imperfections of your eye and allow the creation of perfect corrective lenses.
‘We could fit a cow with glasses’, says David Bishop, vice president of nanotech-nology research at the labs.
But along with purely scientific uses for nano-devices, many companies hope to turn a profit – the motivation behind Cleveland-based Five Star Technologies and its cough formula. Nano-emulsions and dispersions made using a patented technique called controlled-flow cavitation make the cough syrup adhere to the throat better.
Gerry Weimann, Five Star’s CEO, doesn’t think consumers really care about the ‘nano’ aspect of the syrup, which is made by another company called Improvita Health Products.
‘Most people are just looking for a good experience – not a lot of people wonder about the technology behind it’, says Weimann.
Posted by InvestigateDesign at 11:47 PM | Comments (0)
July 05, AU Edition
ON TERROR’S FRONTLINE
Last March, Investigate brought you the story of al-Qai’da’s Pacific hideaway in the Philippines. In this exclusive dispatch from deep in the island jungles of our northern neighbour, journalist MATTHEW THOMPSON and photographer RENAE CARLSON report that the war against the Islamic terrorists who have us in their sights is being hindered by fake treaties, political opportunism, and bad intelligence.
The War on Terror is a circle of wars. It has hot zones like the Philippines, Kashmir, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Chechnya, and Iraq, all sharing the experience of war, but each with its own logic, reason, and radius of impact.
The war also has cooler areas, cities across the world where sleeper cells wait for contact from their superiors in the mechanics of terror – master bomb-makers and logistics experts.
These areas are battlegrounds of intelligence rather than arms. If the intelligence fails, jetliners ram city buildings, shrapnel sprays through shopping centres and churches, and the logistics men retreat to their sanctuaries.
The jihadist’s great crimes of the past year include scattering train carriages in Madrid; transforming a Russian school into an abattoir; demolishing a Hilton hotel in Egypt; and sinking a Philippine passenger ship as it sailed from Manila. Several hundred civilians were deliberately targeted and killed in these attacks alone, and more than one thousand injured. Today nearly three years have passed since the night Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) breathed fire across Bali’s nightlife, burning and blasting more than 200 to death, including 88 Australians, and wounding many times that number.
Yet there has still been no atrocity here on our own soil, even if one of JI’s bombing crew at Bali, Ali Gufron (a.k.a. Mukhlis), told interviewers the attack was ‘a curse from God that [Australians] be afraid of their own shadow’.
These curses have been strongly encouraged by JI’s allies, al-Qa’ida. A month after the Bali atrocities, bin Laden said ‘we warned Australia before not to join in in Afghanistan, and [against] its despicable effort to separate East Timor. It ignored the warning until it woke up to the sounds of explosions in Bali.’
The pain and loss from Bali was overwhelming, but consider the trauma if al-Qa’ida or its regional allies carry out the threat to send ‘cars of death’ into Australia, perhaps to Melbourne’s Lygon Street, Campbell Parade at Sydney’s Bondi Beach, or into the heart of Fremantle. Gone would be the sanctuary, the division between Australia’s relative orderliness and the turmoil of her neighbours. Whether or not the Spirit of Tasmania gets sunk en route to Hobart, a P&O cruise is bombed at sea, or a pair of vans explode at opposite ends of the Sydney Harbour Tunnel, depends to a considerable degree on how tough the Philippine military is on the Australia-hating terrorists who infest their south. Is it safe for the likes of the Bali-bombers to come and go, and to hold courses in bomb-making, or are these people being relentlessly and ruthlessly hunted?
If Australians want to know who to support in the War on Terror, they should look north to a bunch of ill-equipped, underpaid, malaria-wracked young men in uniform, who cope with violent death, corruption, and political incompetence in a struggle to shut down terror camps and hold their nation together. While Australian troops are serving a world away in the deserts and alleyways of Iraq, just a few hours flying time from here, Filipino grunts are locked in a hot war with our enemies.
***
Australia’s sworn enemy in the region, JI, is one of the most aggressive and entrenched terrorist organisations in the world, with the U.S. State Department estimating that its membership numbers in the thousands. Like all paramilitary groups, JI depends on experienced cadres to discipline and train recruits. Many of JI’s veterans cut their teeth in the Afghan jihad of the 1980s and later joined armed conflicts in Indonesia and the Philippines in the 1990s. These cadres have much to teach potential terrorists about how to protect themselves against intelligence and military operations, and offer expertise in the delicate arts of bomb manufacturing and detonation.
JI is like an Islamic Ku Klux Klan on speed. They are violent bigots who hate race-mixing and multi- culturalism, even if they will exploit
the West’s pluralism to further their aims, and who are fighting to bring large portions of South-East Asia under the sway of their own intolerant brand of Islam – a brand similar to that of their former benefactors, the Taliban.
And while much is made of poverty and lack of educational opportunities as ‘root causes’ of terrorism, many of JI’s luminaries lack these excuses. One of the senior Bali-bombers, Dr Azahari Husin, is a scientific author who studied engineering in the UK and lectured at university in Malaysia, yet still managed to fit in explosives training in Afghanistan and the Philippines.
Experts like Dr Azahari and his accomplice, Dul Matin – believed to have built the larger of Bali’s two bombs – have a habit of becoming known, so to avoid arrest they spend much of their time beyond the reach of the law. Since the mid-1990s, JI’s best and brightest have chosen to kick back in the picturesque mountains, swamps and jungles of the southern Philippines, within large regions controlled by Muslim rebels. There, JI has joined forces with elements of South-East Asia’s toughest guerrilla army, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (or MILF), and its most extreme, the head-lopping, bomb-planting, anti-Christian marauders of the Abu Sayyaf Group.
As Investigate revealed last March, members of the Australian Federal Police are in the Philippines, helping local authorities with counter-terrorism measures. The United States is more heavily involved, running the controversial ‘intel-fusion’ program which sees American military operatives stationed in terrorist hot zones to provide local armed forces with target information gathered via high-tech means such as state-of-the-art communication intercepts. This has caused a backlash from the shrill anti-American lobby in the Philippines, who paint the U.S. as greedy puppet- masters every chance they get. However, there are also concerns within the military about the intelligence’s accuracy. A general spearheading the war in central Mindanao’s terrorist heartland told me that the information is better for ‘storytelling’ than for war, because it is often out of date. He said that relying on the U.S. advice has led to botched raids, needless deaths, and could undermine the chances for peace in Mindanao.
But, in the ever-shifting alliances and deals in the war on terrorism, it turns out that the military is also getting help from the dominant faction of JI’s Philippine patrons, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front. The MILF is increasingly split between those who are open to a peace deal that will deliver land rights for their tribes, and the extremist commanders who will not abandon what they see as a religious war, and who embrace JI, the Abu Sayyaf, and al-Qa’ida.
This means that in some areas the military is getting tip-offs from the MILF which enable them to launch strikes on terrorist suspects inside rebel-held areas. A pro-peace MILF spokesman even told me that his organisation gave the police the information they needed in 2003 to trap and kill one of JI’s most formidable bombers, Fathur Rahman al-Ghozi. This is a remarkable betrayal, given that al-Ghozi, an esteemed Afghan veteran, had been very close to the MILF, establishing the JI training camp within their territory in the mountains of Mindanao and conducting joint JI-MILF terrorist attacks.
Yet in other areas the military seems to get nothing from the MILF and sits in idle observance of the current ceasefire, even with strong suspicions about terrorist recruitment and training taking place a stone’s throw from the frontline troops.
The Mountains
At a machine gun nest on a high ridge in the malarial mountains, the world divides between the known and the unknown.
Behind lies a beautiful and fertile valley, its lowlands lined by forested peaks as it widens toward the warm waters of the Moro Gulf. Ruins from the valley’s previous inhabitants dot the climb to this outpost. Back down to the left I can see the bombed-out remains of a large reinforced concrete building we hiked through. My hiking companions pointed out the proliferation of doors – most rooms had multiple entries and exits – and as fighting men, they saw meaning in this. The soldiers also showed me tunnels leading back into the mountain. They showed me cramped chambers with barred ventilation holes high on the walls and hooks hanging from the ceiling. Torture, they said. This is what they do to their own. This side of the ridge hosted the Bali bombers of JI when they practised the art of terrorist bombings, and it has since been picked over by the government forces that captured it four years ago.
Now all attention is directed north of the ridge into lands still controlled by thousands of Islamic rebels.
We crouch behind sandbags and gaze ahead into the vast volcanic wilderness of the Mount Kararao region, watching mists and low cloud drift across the jungle.
The reconnaissance company’s young commander, Lieutenant Jeriko Roman P. Sasing, tells me that worrying sounds often echo from the mountains. ‘We hear them playing with their bombs; their terror explosions’, says Sasing, whose few dozen men are charged with guarding this rugged frontier.
Sasing’s men are perched on the border of lands under the control of the MILF.
The Government has been unable to defeat the MILF despite three decades of fighting, so it has offered the rebels a ceasefire while the two sides discuss how much sovereignty the Republic of the Philippines is willing to cede.
The MILF fields about 12,000 full-time, uniformed fighters armed with automatic rifles, heavy machine- guns, mortars, rocket-propelled grenades, anti-aircraft guns and intimate knowledge of Mindanao’s rugged terrain. It can also call on tens of thousands of irregulars from the region’s farming men. More than a half-million people turned up to a MILF forum in May.
Full-scale fighting with the military breaks out every couple of years, but more often than not the ceasefire (signed in 1997) maintains the conflict as an armed stand-off punctuated by skirmishes which kill a mere dozen or so. About 120,000 people have been killed since the modern Muslim rebellions kicked off in the early 1970s. Having the ceasefire-protected time and space to be ‘playing with their bombs’ has been terrific for the MILF’s civilian-targeting units and their Indonesian friends from JI, who moved their training from Afghanistan to rebel territory in Mindanao in the mid-1990s.
The leaders of another al-Qa’ida affiliate, the Abu Sayyaf Group, hide in MILF areas and have merged their terror operations with JI.
Together, Mindanao’s bomb crews have killed hundreds and wounded thousands in Indonesia and the Philippines over the past few years. Including, of course, the 88 Australians at Bali three Octobers ago.
Disturbingly, reports have lately emerged from captured terrorists that the jihadist groups have been training together to strike shipping in the Asia-Pacific region, a threat that should be taken seriously after the Abu Sayyaf’s sinking last year of a passenger ship leaving Manila Bay. The bombing of the Superferry 14 killed an estimated 130 people and stands as the deadliest-ever maritime terrorist attack.
Yet as accomplished as they are, Sasing, who walks everywhere with an M16 slung over his back and whose eyes never stop moving, doesn’t much care for his neighbours. Not only are they noisy, they’re also pushy.
‘We had to withdraw from there’, he says, pointing about 100 metres up the ridge to a thickly-forested summit sporting an abandoned system of trenches and lookouts. ‘It was too dangerous. The enemy was harassing us’, says Sasing, using the military euphemism for being shot at. The MILF know these outposts well; they built them – the trenches, the sleeping huts.
‘Could they be sitting there watching us?’ I ask.
‘Yes, possibly.’
‘Do you patrol forward of here to see what they’re doing?’
‘No, that would be a breach of the ceasefire. Also, they have laid landmines and it is too dangerous’, Sasing says.
Ropes run along the perimeter of the outpost, and at likely jump-in points the soldiers have strung bottles of rum, each empty except for a bullet suspended inside to rattle if the ropes are bumped.
‘Sometimes deer sound them. The men up here hunt deer when they can, because all food and water has to be carried in and it can be very basic. But the enemy know this, and once when a soldier heard a deer call and went forward to hunt it, it was the enemy making the call’, says Sasing, cupping his hand over his mouth and simulating the animal sound. ‘They captured the soldier and cut off both his heads, above and below, then put them together and dumped him in a sack. No one here wants to be taken alive’, he says.
Sasing’s enlisted men receive about A$8.20 per day for their work. If the situation erupts, such as it might if they weren’t ordered to withdraw when harassed, then their combat bonus would be another 20 Australian cents per day. Their equipment is antiquated – this outpost’s main weapon is a World War II machinegun – and many soldiers are sick.
‘I have about 12 men in hospital with malaria’,
laments Sasing, as the rains come in. They used to receive anti-malarial pills, but ‘now there are shortages, so we rely on mosquito repellent’, he says.
I ask how frustrating it is for he and his men, all aged in their twenties, to camp for months and months on the edge of enemy territory, within which terrorists freely practise their trade, watching each other succumb to malaria.
‘We can only do what we are ordered to. The military is just a tool of politics. You know, on clear nights we see spotlights from [the MILF’s] Camp Sultan’, says Sasing, pointing across the jungle to a mountain obscured by clouds.
The enemy are close. The first contingent of guerrillas is one kilometre away – ‘just there’, says Sasing, jabbing a finger down the hill - and another six bases have been identified in the region. The most notorious of their bases is Jabal Quba, where JI moved much of its training after the valley behind us, formerly known as Camp Abu Bakar, fell to the Government in 2001. About 100 soldiers died on the road into Abu Bakar, yet now Government troops are restrained by the ceasefire, reduced to watching as fresh MILF forces move into the area each month and others leave in a rebel troop rotation.
Sasing leads me back down the ridge, slipping and sliding on trails now turned to mud. ‘It rains every day,’ he says, picking up his thongs and walking barefoot.
Once again we pass the ruined complex of the late founder of the MILF, Salamat Hashim, where an Islamic crescent moon rises from the broken roof. Soldiers have graffitoed the building with lists of battles and military campaigns; one artist’s work depicts a particularly acrobatic sexual feat.
Sasing is careful about what he says, but other senior military sources report their bitter frustration with the peace process. One senior army officer tells me that the ceasefire even prevents the military from building fences around MILF areas in the hope of hindering guerrilla troop movements and arms shipments, and that they likewise cannot conduct reconnaissance flights over the Mount Kararao region to see what JI, the Abu Sayyaf and their MILF hosts are up to.
These restraints remain despite a backdrop of continuing terrorist attacks. Bombers have hit the CBD of Manila and locations in two other major cities, Davao and General Santos City, as recently as Valentine’s Day, killing about a dozen and injuring almost 150.
The triple bombing followed the military’s airstrike on suspected JI and ASG leaders in Mindanao’s vast marshlands.
Romero is intimately familiar with Abu Bakar, and he tells me over fried fish and fruits that the threat grows worse the longer the ceasefire continues. The MILF is recruiting and rearming under cover of the peace talks, and weapons shipments have been reported landing on the coast, most likely from Malaysia. He tells me that there may well be a peace deal struck sometime in the next year, but it will let the MILF keep its weapons and leave large areas under its de facto control, just like the 1996 agreement signed with another Muslim guerrilla army – the Moro National Liberation Front – elements of which continue to attack Government forces.
All of which is ideal for the terrorists and kidnappers working out of MILF areas, he says.
‘There are JI about four or five kilometres from [Government occupied] Abu Bakar. The boundaries are imaginary, but if we cross, we will be charged with violating the ceasefire … and we will be fired at’, Romero says.
The guerrillas and the terrorists learn much from each other, with JI agents absorbing the skills of insurgency on Mindanao’s frontlines. In turn, members of the MILF’s special operations group ‘are taught by JIs to make IEDs [improvised explosive devices]’, he says.
While the troops sweat it out with malaria, World War II-era guns and 20 cent-per-day combat bonuses, the enemy is cashed up. Romero says that the MILF pocket percentages of ransoms from Mindanao’s thriving kidnapping trade; that they and their terrorist allies receive money from international Islamic charities; that they seize ‘revolutionary taxes’ from farming communities; that they have their fingers in the zakat, or Islamic donations given at mosques; that they run illegal logging operations. The overtly terrorist groups, the Indonesian JI and the Filipino Abu Sayyaf, also receive large payments from foreign backers, all of which makes it easy for the jihadists to pay locals to shut up when the military comes around asking questions.
And without local sources of intelligence, the military has very little to go on indeed. ‘We are facing a face- less JI – they look the same [as Filipinos]; they have learned our dialects – so unless someone tells us, we don’t know what they are doing,’ Romero says. The Government has more than 50,000 troops in Mindanao, yet even so, ‘we have sacrificed some areas’, says Romero, telling me a story later corroborated by Australian and US sources.
He takes my map and points out substantial stret- ches of the Mindanao coast and hinterland where the military has only a token presence. ‘It’s practically a free-zone for them [JI and the Abu Sayyaf], but if we move troops from Abu Bakar, then they will take it over again’, Romero says.
The US is providing satellite imagery, communication intercepts and other ‘technical intelligence’, but as long as local civilians who could potentially supply up to date ‘human intelligence’ are more likely to encounter terrorists and rebels than Government forces, the free-zones will remain, Romero says.
‘They are getting stronger.’
The Swamps
‘If the rain continues water will cover all of this,’ says Lieutenant Rhoel C. Tremedal of the Philippine light infantry, gesturing across the lush fields we glimpse between fruit trees. The scattering of homes our patrol passes are built on stilts, and their occupants watch blankly as we walk along the riverbank.
Tremedal and his men are stationed on the edge of Mindanao’s vast marshlands, their base a checkpoint on one of the tributaries of the Rio Grande. They have a sandbagged machinegun nest from which to order passing boats to pull in for inspection, but no one is stationed on the other side of the river, nor do any soldiers take to the water for river patrols.
‘We would be too vulnerable to ambush’, says Tremedal, one of the Philippines’ many bright young men who is spending his twenties clutching a gun, sleeping rough, and surrounded by farmers who commonly stash automatic rifles wrapped in greased-rags near their houses and whose sympathies often lie with the Islamic rebellion.
The rains make everything more dangerous in the marshlands, Tremedal says. When the water level rises from rain either in the marshes or in the surrounding mountains, boats can move swiftly in almost any direction, giving the enemy extraordinary mobility. By contrast, Tremedal’s troops will be struggling to secure what they can while their bunkers fill with water.
‘We will make necessary precautions – we will protect any Government facilities in the area’, he says. With roads becoming impassable and the waterways too dangerous because of the known presence in the marshlands of the MILF, JI, the Abu Sayyaf and bandits, ‘we will just move by foot’, says Tremedal, whose handful of men operate in a municipality with a population of about 80,000.
The entire marshlands cover about 500,000 square kilometres and contain about 500,000 people, almost all of them Muslims, who have never been conquered – not during more than 300 years of Spanish colonisation, not in the half-century of U.S. rule, not during the days of the Japanese invasion, and not by their own Government in the post-WWII years of Philippine independence.
Tremedal calls the patrol to a halt when the banana and palm trees thin out and we find ourselves entering a large open plain bordered a few kilometres away by thick forest and steep hills. The infantrymen fan out and study the horizon. ‘We should not go any further’, Tremedal says.
While small-group terrorist training and operations continue in the mountains and elsewhere, central Mindanao’s huge swamp is known as the main hideout for JI and the Abu Sayyaf’s top commanders. The coastal ‘free-zone’ on its western flank allows for easy entry and exit; the terrain is excellent for hiding in and is an attacker’s nightmare.
Back in the 6th Infantry Division’s operational base for the region, outside Cotabato City, the general who plans raids and airstrikes on marshland stilt houses suspected to be occupied by terrorists, Brigadier General Horacio T. Lactao, talks me through his difficulties.
‘The ground appears from the air as if it’s a hard surface, but it’s just water lilies. If you step on it, you go under. Even the bombs are not so good – the bombs sink because it’s this high with liquid mud’, says Lactao, holding his hand at his waist. ‘And the water is above a person’s head, so even if a bomb hits 10 metres away it will not damage the structure. The rivers are their mode of movement, and a lot of routes are unknown to us.’
Lactao is one of the Philippine military’s hardened journeymen – one of those officers who have not gone bureaucratic despite decades of active service; who are instead still sweating it out in the shacks and trucks of the hot zone. Lactao asks if I mind if he has a cigarette, then leans in with smoke curling from his mouth while an enlisted man paints small pieces of wood to add to a three-dimensional map of the marshlands. The general ashes, drifts his hand across the diorama, and tells me, ‘this area has been in constant armed conflict since early times. This part of the [Philippine] islands has never been subjugated because of its social structure. It was governed by Muslim warrior kings [called] Datus.’
‘The Spanish, when they conquered one Datu kingdom, they would be surprised that another would rise up. Each of these had their own domain. There’s a natural defence system here. Now that Datuism’s not being practised anymore, there emerged another group – the MNLF, and then the MILF. Then the Abu Sayyaf. Whoever has provided the guns is the one who commands’, Lactao says.
The Government will always be at a disadvantage to militant Islamic groups in central Mindanao, an intensely religious region, Lactao says.
‘Our laws are not consistent with the Koran – which one will they follow? Not ours. The Koran provides them with their standard. When you interview the Abu Sayyaf, they say the Constitution is just provided by man’, he says.
Terrorists such as those who blew the Australians to hell at Bali fit straight into this system, using their explosives expertise, money and reverence for Allah to win over the large number of Islamic clerics commanding MILF units in the marshlands. Jemmah Islamiyah and the Abu Sayyaf have fused operations in the marshlands and move together, Lactao says.
‘The terrorists contact the MILF’s Ustadz [military commanders who are also clerics], then move to them for protection. The MILF units of the fundamentalist leaders then form the outer ring of security around the terrorists, and because of the ceasefire we must avoid [military] contact with the MILF.’
The military has been cultivating informants in the marshlands, and Lactao says that a picture has emerged of how some of the most wanted men in the world move around. There is a group of about 37 JI explosives and logistics experts who have attached themselves to Khaddafy Janjalani, the Abu Sayyaf leader who has earned the blessing of al-Qa’ida through his ruthlessness, and enjoys a cult of personality throughout the world of jihad. Janjalani and his JI team, sometimes including Bali bomber Dul Matin, are surrounded by an inner security team of up to one hundred Abu Sayyaf fighters from the southwestern islands of Basilan and Sulu. Then that group will be surrounded by another ring of gunmen supplied by MILF commanders religiously disposed towards international jihad.
Janjalani, who has a US$5 million bounty on his head for his multitudinous outrages, always keeps his face covered, sometimes dresses as a fully-covered Muslim woman, and wears a bomb vest so that he can blow himself to atoms if cornered, Lactao tells me. ‘Then we will not have his body and someone else can become Janjalani, because that is the name that brings in large finances from foreign sources. For every bombing that [the Abu Sayyaf] conduct, they will receive US$200,000. In this way they made large amounts of money from the Superferry bombing and the Valentine’s Day bombings.’
Jemaah Islamiyah and the Abu Sayyaf have targeted U.S. citizens and interests, and in an attempt to eradicate these groups, the U.S. has stationed military intelligence personnel throughout Mindanao in what is known as ‘intelfusion’. The Americans are not universally welcome, especially with the mayor of Cotabato City, a former MNLF guerrilla named Muslimin Sema. Sema refuses to acknowledge his region has a terrorism problem, despite multiple arrests, exposed JI safe houses, testimonies from detained militants in the Philippines and Indonesia, and the still-unsolved 2003 car-bombing of the airport.
The U.S. has plans to fund highway construction near Cotabato City, but the project is suspended due to a perceived lack of action on terrorism. Sema is pissed off about this and has plastered the city with signs and banners calling American diplomats ‘agents of Satan’, proclaiming that ‘Arabs are charitable’, and denouncing the U.S. as ‘the world’s number one terrorist’. Sema knows that the US is providing counter-terrorism intelligence assistance, so signs around town also read: ‘Reject the terroristic policies of the U.S. in Mindanao’, and ‘U.S. presence here in Cotabato get out’.
All of which make working in and around this gunned-up frontier town an uneasy experience for a Western journalist. The first assumption of everyone I speak to is that I am American military, and it is hard not to be a little edgy when walking the streets or driving through the city outskirts, the roads hazy from countless barrels of burning coconut husks. Paranoia comes easily when I am told by one of the least drama-prone, most understated intelligence sources I know to ‘stay in your room at night’, and ‘do not overdo your luck.’ Pour another San Miguel and pass the ammunition.
Lactao smiles when I ask about the value of the high-tech intelligence he receives on terrorist positions and movements from the Americans based in central Mindanao. ‘It is only good if it comes in time. If it comes late, it is just good for storytelling. Sometimes they will be sending it way after the people have left. The Americans are learning much from us – some of them don’t have any experience’, he says, tapping out another cigarette to smoke.
The general stares at me. ‘Let me tell you about some recent operations targeting Janjalani and JI, who we know are in constant contact. On January 27 we conducted airstrikes against seven targets [houses] stretching over a kilometre along the river. We believe some were wounded, but not the main personalities. Now they learn their lessons, and the leaders will be sleeping outside in a hammock or sleeping bag or a banca [small boat] 50 to 100 metres away from the structure. They let their men sleep in the house.’
The terrorists struck back a fortnight later with the Valentine’s Day bombings – blasts in Manila and two of Mindanao’s cities, Davao and General Santos City. Twelve dead and almost 150 wounded. Several other devices were discovered before they could be detonated.
Lactao then tells me that as Janjalani and the JIs kept moving through the marsh in April, the military correctly anticipated that the MILF commander who had been protecting the terrorists would sign them over to another guerrilla commander well known as a fundamentalist Islamic cleric. The vow of protection is binding, and ‘if anything happens there will be an investigation within the MILF and within the al-Qa’ida organisation’, Lactao says.
Yet the military also faces heavy political fallout when it launches a strike or raid and hits the MILF instead of JI or the Abu Sayyaf. ‘It could disturb the peace process. We have to be dead sure that we are striking the right place at the right time. If they are in this house, we can only hit this house. The people in the marsh area are very religious; they look at the ASG [Abu Sayyaf Group] as international mujahadeen. If we hit the wrong house and kill innocent civilians, then it helps the enemy’, Lactao says.
The MILF is comprised of semi-autonomous units, with each commander operating like the Datu warlords that gave the Spanish such grief centuries ago. More secular elements currently have the most sway politically, and are using all their power to convince the organisation’s independent-minded commanders to stick to the peace negotiations with the Government. Getting into shootouts with the mainstream of the MILF could set off full-scale war again, of the sort last seen in 2003. ‘We must be 100 per cent sure of our information. It should be very precise because we are constrained by the peace agreements’, Lactao says.
It was in this climate that word came in April that the terrorists were staying on a particular hill inside the marshlands. About 120 special forces in plain clothes were dispatched from Davao in nondescript vehicles to a small town on the edge of the marsh area where they assembled for the assault. There the surprise was lost, however, after a civilian spotter text-messaged the enemy with a warning about Government troops massing. ‘Filipinos are fond of texting’, Lactao says.
Yet, Lactao says that the attack may still have succeeded, but for ‘some errors in the system’. The intelligence provided by the U.S. was out of date, and caused the Philippine airborne and land units to attack one kilometre to the side of the terrorists, starting a firefight with the MILF in violation of the ceasefire.
‘Intelligence must be real-time’, Lactao says.
Three soldiers were hit before they pulled out, including one man shot in the face, and on the other side, several MILF guerrillas were killed and a dozen or so wounded. To calm the situation, the Government flew the dead and wounded rebels to hospital.
The April incident was a lost opportunity to kill or capture scores of South East Asia’s most skilled and ruthless terrorists; men in close contact with al-Qa’ida. Nevertheless, Lactao says that the combination of informers selling out the jihadists and the sudden violence their information brings is having an effect on his prey: ‘They are getting paranoid and that’s why they are asking for shabu [methamphetamine].’
Yet the US can quite reasonably argue that without the millions of dollars worth of training and equipment it gives the Philippines each year, the country would be taking even more of a hammering from
the terrorists.
Until the US ran the Balikatan (‘shoulder-to-shoulder’) joint military and development exercise across Janjalani’s home island of Basilan in 2002, the Abu Sayyaf were running rings around the armed forces, sacking Christian towns and conducting mass-hostage takings at schools, hospitals and even Malaysian resorts. (When French and Germans were taken, the European response was worse than useless – funne- ling a US$25 million ransom through Libya with which the Abu Sayyaf bought more weapons, faster speedboats, and launched a new wave of violence.) A private security consultant based in Manila told me that the US and Philippines need each other. The Philippines needs the US to keep badgering it about JI, the Abu Sayyaf and al-Qa’ida. The US needs the Philippines to learn how messy life is. One matter the U.S. State Department will not stop pushing is the need for the Philippines to enact counter-terrorism legislation, which would enable security forces to detain suspected foreign terrorists. Lactao says that without that power, the military can only watch as suspected al-Qa’ida operatives roam Mindanao.
‘We monitored a meeting where one of these Middle Eastern men was trying to convince everyone to sign on with the cause. He said that the Muslim community is the next superpower, and he praised the head of al-Qa’ida.’ Yet most suspects can only be detained for six hours, or 72 if the offence is grave, and there are strict limitations on intelligence gathering.
‘We are not allowed to tap anyone’s phones, and we couldn’t detain anyone for interrogation purposes’, he says.
With Mindanao hotly contested ground in the war on terror, the island has more than its fair share of international undesirables, but when suspects have discovered they are under surveillance, they have complained to their embassies, with the military personnel involved castigated, Lactao says.
‘According to our reports, some of these Middle Eastern men are recruiting children as young as twelve to use later’, says Lactao, stubbing out his cigarette and smiling.
Still, a few undesirables are moved on or arrested. Two Middle Eastern men suspected of involvement with al-Qa’ida arrived in the Philippines in March this year – around the time when police seized hundreds of kilograms of explosives at a Manila house, apparently ready for use in the bombing of Easter celebrations. Philippine security officials speculated that al-Qa’ida was sending in specialists to coordinate the terror campaign. A Saudi Arabian national, Abdullah Nassar al-Arifi, was deported soon after arriving at Manila’s airport due to his listing on terrorism databases, while a Palestinian, Fawas Ajjur, was arrested in Mindanao. Ajjur was allegedly identified by Abu Sayyaf prisoners as their former explosives instructor on the blood-soaked
island of Jolo (pronounced HO-lo), in the Sulu archipelago.
The Jungle
‘Don’t misinterpret this as flippant. We are sad because today we have killed people’, says Colonel Orlando E. De Leon of the Philippine Marines.
I am in a Philippines Marine base on the island of Jolo, eating raw goat and drinking ice-cold San Miguel beer as an officer croons another karaoke epic of lost love.
‘This is our way of coping with what we do,’ De Leon says.
Today the Marines shot and killed about ten Abu Sayyaf fighters in an attack on a terrorist camp just four kilometres from my military lodgings. The operation began at around 10 o’clock last night when a local informant slipped the Marines a tip about the jungle camp and said that the 30 or so ‘Abus’, as the troops call their enemy, were holding a kidnap victim.
By midnight a group of sixty Marines began to creep into positions around the camp, with everyone in place by dawn, and a ring of reinforcements waited back should the Abu Sayyaf launch a successful counterattack.
The commanding officer, Colonel Juancho Sabban, tells me that they let the terrorists relax. ‘Dawn came, so they thought they were OK. They were boiling water for coffee, which gave them away – smoke. Then we attack’, he says, declining an offer of the microphone: ‘No, my men sing for me.’
The Abu Sayyaf guerrillas returned fire, taking about 45 minutes to shoot themselves out of the trap, dragging the kidnap victim with them but leaving behind several dead, including two commanders apparently involved in the raid on Malaysia.
Relatives of the slain took some of the bodies away to prepare and bury before sunset, in accordance with Muslim custom, which causes some confusion about the number of dead. The unclaimed corpses ranged in age from teenagers to the near-elderly, and the Marines truss them on poles to carry out of the jungle. ‘Their relatives are probably afraid,’ Sabban says.
‘There were blood trails, so we know they suffered wounded’, he adds, signalling one of his privates to replenish the beer. One the Government side, only two men were hit, suffering minor gunshot wounds to the hand and foot.
The Abu Sayyaf have been known to kidnap doctors to treat their wounded, and in one infamous incident stormed a hospital in the Christian town of Basilan, taking away medical staff, some of whom were raped, mutilated and murdered.
Sabban says that they will keep an eye on doctors after this encounter, but it is more likely that the Abu Sayyaf will pack their wounds with herbs according to traditions followed for centuries by the Sulu island people, known as Tausugs. Other military and intelligence sources tell me that the Abu Sayyaf take their wounded to nearby parts of Malaysia, where they share more kinship ties than they do with the bulk of the Philippines.
Jolo is a strange place. Its volcanic peaks, freshwater crater lakes and unspoilt beaches are overwhelmingly beautiful – a traveller’s dream. Even from that icon of war in the tropics, the Huey helicopter with a gunner at each door, the island looks too exquisite and too small to be a battleground.
However, Jolo’s jungles and coconut palm forests are thick with killers and outlaws. An estimated 500 heavily armed Abu Sayyaf fighters roam the island in teams, hiding in camouflaged bunkers or visiting their families after conducting terrorist attacks elsewhere in the archipelago; stowing hostages while waiting for ransoms, and hitting the military with improvised explosive devices and snipings.
Parked near the karaoke hut is a shot-up battered truck, the legacy of a nearby ambush a few days ago which killed three Marines.
Yet the Abu Sayyaf are not the only game in town. There are also about 1200 wayward guerrillas of the Moro National Liberation Front who have resumed their rebellion in violation of the MNLF’s 1996 peace treaty with the Government. Then there are the plentiful but less-organised kidnap-for-ransom-groups (KFRGs), and any number of heavily-armed criminals of opportunity. Oh, and then there’s the reported intrusion of al-Qa’ida. All on an island with a population of about 500,000, about one-eighth that of Sydney.
Jolo has been divided into two sectors for security purposes, with the Marines working one half and the army the other. When enemy forces launch large-scale attacks, as happens often enough, these two branches of the armed forces fight together.
The day after the raw goat, I board a Huey helicopter which flies me to Hill 300, which the army is occupying after recent fighting with both the Abu Sayyaf and renegade elements of the MNLF. Chinese tombs of travellers who died here a thousand years ago sit atop the hill. The graves have become a Muslim holy site, and the trees here are covered with fluttering plastic rubbish bags which have been tied to the branches as a nod of religious respect from the locals, who would otherwise just throw their trash on the ground. One of the Abu Sayyaf commanders, an Islamic mystic known as Dr Abu Pula, conducted rituals here before the army captured the hill. His men would also hang about asking pilgrims to pay a fee before they could bring their children close for a blessing.
The officer who assumed command of the offensive after two of his superiors were cut down, Major Feliciano Tabanao, tells me locals are happy to have free entry to the site even if Hill 300 is occupied by Government troops, many of whom are Catholic.
Yet as we listen to the pinging of insects and take in the view down to the stilt houses on the shores and out to the smaller islands of the Sulu Sea, Tabanao tells me that in the last couple of weeks soldiers have been killed and wounded from ambushes and improvised explosive devices.
‘This area is a known lair of the ASG. There are about sixty or seventy of them around here – highly mobile – and we have reports that they are laying landmines. Right now I cannot guarantee your safety’, says Tabanao, who seems very tired. He talks about the dead of this mission - his colleagues and an 11-year-old child caught in the crossfire.
I join a patrol down the inland side of Hill 300. The red dirt sticks in large clumps to my boots, weighing them down. Tabanao tells me that the ever-resourceful Abu Sayyaf ride horses through these areas, moving their supplies much faster than the troops can in many parts.
‘We don’t have horses’, he says.
Eventually we come to an empty village of battered houses built over formi-dable bunkers – large excavated areas covered by a double layer of coconut palm logs. An abandoned schoolhouse still has Arabic lessons chalked on its blackboards, and Tabanao points out a large kite leaning against a wall. ‘They use the kites as signals to warn of our movements,’ he says.
One of the pilots with us says that the kites are also used as a defence against helicopters. During Government attacks, guerrillas send up kites on heavy nylon strings which get tangled in the rotors.
The soldiers are careful to contain any sign of the religious tension many of them must feel serving somewhere like Jolo, but I spot a local word for ‘pig’ written on the schoolhouse door, an obvious slight to Muslim sensibilities.
As we wait back on Hill 300 for the Hueys to return, Tabanao tells me that although the military is making life hard for the Abu Sayyaf on Jolo, the enemy is very skilled and getting more so. The improvised explosive devices that are claiming troops are growing more
sophisticated. ‘We have reports of foreigners training locals in IEDs, and reports that a handful [of locals] went to Cotabato for explosives training’, Tabanao says.
Also, while the military does not have control over the seaways, ‘the leaders of ASG can get in and out easily – they come by boat’, he says.
Concern is growing about seaborne attacks by JI and Abu Sayyaf, particularly since a man arrested for allegedly planting Manila’s Valentine’s Day bomb said that the terror groups had earlier sent him to scuba training in preparation for strikes.
The Abu Sayyaf guerrillas of Jolo and Basilan know the water better than most; many of them grew up in the offshore stilt houses where small boats are the only way to get around. The sea is their highway, one general tells me, and with their famous quadruple-outboard motor 1,000 horsepower speedboats, the terrorists can easily travel at about 40 knots.
De Leon of the Marines looks pained when I ask him about this one afternoon at a base of the Marine Battalion landing Team on Jolo’s Quezon Beach, a glorious strip of sand and crystal clear water.
‘They are faster than us. How can we compete? We can only do 15 knots,’ says De Leon, walking us over to a row of very modest little outboards with 60 horsepower engines. ‘The ASG can outrun us on water. They can get away and hide their boats in the mangroves, with leaves on top so we cannot see them. They can cross the ocean at high speed, as they did in their attack on Dos Palmos [a resort on a distant island]. We need good, fast boats for amphibious assaults. It is what we are trained to do’, he says.
Debrief
The Philippines lost about a million people in the World War II. Manila was destroyed. Since then the Filipinos have endured multiple civil wars, natural disasters, dictatorship, massive corruption, widespread violent crime, and a democracy that has failed in the eyes of a growing proportion of the population.
Against that sort of backdrop, Filipinos could be forgiven for being slow to take counter-terrorism as seriously as do many Western countries. Yet slowly the authorities have realised that their calamitous financial state is unlikely to pick up should potential investors feel they run a serious risk of face bombings, sabotage, and kidnapping if they set up shop.
Even substantial portions of the MILF seem to have realised that without peace and security, the people they claim to represent will stay poor and impoverished. Part of the MILF’s realisation is waking up to what bad friends they’ve been keeping.
The rebel’s spokesman, Eid Kabalu, admits that JI has ties to some parts of the MILF, coming clean after years of issuing blunt denials and far-fetched assertions that the Indonesians just hung around the training camps without anybody noticing.
‘Honest-to-goodness, yes, there are some elements within the MILF who were able to establish a link with this group, but now we are trying to address this issue’, says Kabalu, from his home in Cotabato City.
The new consciousness in the MILF’s progressive faction, led by Chairman Al Haj Murad, even extends to wanting in on the anti-JI attacks. The military couldn’t do it properly on their own, Kabalu says. ‘You will notice that [in Lactao’s April assault] instead of hitting their target they hit us, our men on the ground.’
Despite April’s stuff-up, the MILF has since validated the Government’s hit list and is helping work out a battle plan, Kabalu says. What’s more, Kabalu talks openly of his organisation’s hand in betraying one of the world’s most accomplished and well-connected terrorists, Fathur Rahman al-Ghozi, who helped establish JI’s training at Camp Abu Bakar after the shift from Afghanistan.
‘There are some MILF elements who co-ordinated with the authorities [and] that is why he was effectively pinned down’, says Kabalu about al-Ghozi’s shooting death a few months after the bomber made fools of the Government by escaping from jail the day of Prime Minister John Howard’s visit to Manila for the signing of a joint memorandum of understanding on terrorism.
The MILF’s assistance is acknowledged by the commander of the armed forces in Mindanao and the Sulu archipelago, General Alberto Fernando Braganza. ‘There has been information provided by them that [has] triggered our operational activities’, says General Braganza, who is approaching retirement in September and seems a little less fired up than after his instalment last year.
Perhaps frustration is taking its toll. Last November Braganza proudly told me there had been no major terrorist incidents for two years (which was true if you squint hard and overlook the 170 combined dead from blasts at Davao and the Super- ferry sinking). Mindanao is a very peaceful place, he told me then. Yet several bombs have struck since November, and now Braganza admits that although the military has neutralised some terrorists, including 10 to 15 JI members, ‘there have been persistent reports of training activities in the central Mindanao area … [and] it’s expected that they also have their bases in the urban centres as part of their support system.’
Furthermore, the interception of the Palestinian in Mindanao ‘is a clear indication of the involvement of al-Qa’ida here,’ says Braganza, whose recognition of the problem seems to have won respect from U.S. officials more used to a culture of denial.
‘Braganza’s kicking some serious ass’, says a U.S. official who pulled his hair out last year over the Government taking months (during which a national election came and went) to admit that the Superferry 14 was bombed, just as the Abu Sayyaf had detailed in public statements.
Politicians have raised hell over U.S. claims that the Philippine borders are wide open to terrorists, but Braganza says frankly, they don’t have enough boats to secure Mindanao’s borders – which an Australian official described to me as ‘non-existent’. Nor is Braganza pretending that a peace deal with the MILF will solve everything. Some terrorist groups will dissolve, but ‘we expect that there will still be some that will remain, like the Abu Sayyaf Group and the JI network,’ he says.
Braganza advocates a combination of military action with a drive to bring law, development and education to regions where generations have grown up inside a guerrilla war. US and Australian aid projects are greatly appreciated, he says.
However, the military is just a tool of politics, as the reconnaissance lieutenant said on the mountains above Abu Bakar, and Mindanao’s politics is hard core. Plans for a joint U.S.-Filipino military and development sweep across Jolo, like that which cleaned up Basilan three years ago, were shelved after fierce opposition from local politicians.
Yet, as Braganza says, almost all of Jolo’s mayors live across the Basilan Strait in Zamboanga City, which has a large military presence as the armed forces headquarters for Mindanao and the Sulu archipelago.
‘They have their residences here; their children go to school here; they have properties here’, Braganza says. As many observers see it, plenty of the region’s politicians are doing well out of the situation, so why would they want to change it?
Braganza will be gone in a few months, and his replacement will face all the difficulties of fighting cashed-up and determined enemies while the Philippine economy continues to deteriorate. Local politicians, on the other hand, often stay in power for a decade or more in the Philippines, and are often succeeded by close relatives.
So to get the views of someone who will still be making decisions when Braganza packs up, I visit a mayor – and a mayor who does live in his seat of power. Soud B. Tan is the mayor of the notorious Jolo City, where Philippine security analysts say I am almost certain to be snatched if I don’t move with substantial firepower. ‘You won’t make it three blocks’, one tells me. ‘Men will produce guns and force you into a jeepney, a car, anything. No one will interfere.’ Duly protected, I drop by Tan’s mayoral compound to hear his take on matters.
Of all the many guns I’ve seen in the Philippines, Tan’s bodyguards are packing some of the snazziest – gleaming little room sprayers in tip-top condition. With his guards stationed out the front, in the hallway, and in the office where we talk, Tan sets me straight on the negative impressions people have of his town.
‘I can tell you that Jolo is a peaceful place to live … it’s a very peaceful place. Jolo’s only a little bit congested with people coming in’, says Tan.
Yes, they are coming in, so if anyone feels like helping stop them – for all our sakes – and has a little-used fast boat or two, I know some guys who could really do with them. Anyone?
An imperfect but proactive approach is surely better than doing too little, for the jihadists will exploit any lull in the counter-terrorism campaign. If they are using all their wits and resources just to stay alive, then their potential targets – including us – are safer. If they have the time and space to recruit, train and plan, then disaster is on its way.
Posted by InvestigateDesign at 11:33 PM | Comments (0)
July 05, AU Edition
THE GOOD OIL
Are we heading for a world with less petrol, or is there enough black gold in the ground to keep us driving 4WDs for five hundred years? CLARE SWINNEY looks at ‘peak oil’, the latest cry of ecological doomsayers and wonders if this time, the sky really is falling
Sydney, 2019. Centrepoint Tower basks in the glow of the sun’s last rays of the day before it slips below the distant and hazy ranges of the Blue Mountains. The motorways though, are almost empty, as they have been for most of the previous 18 months – ever since petrol hit the latest in an ongoing series of highs – $8 per litre. These days, the traffic is mostly buses and trucks, commuters having long ago given up on runs into the CBD each day in preference for telecommuting from their home computers. The ambitious and expensive network of tunnels built under the city are now largely falling into disuse by everyone except for squatters; it’s too expensive to keep it all roadworthy for the few remaining paying coustomers. And in the CBD, luxury high-rise ghettoes are crammed with people trying to escape now-isolated suburbs.
Such a scenario may sound outlandish, and perhaps it is, but according to a growing number of energy analysts Australians are in danger of living the dream-turned-nightmare. Oil, they say, is running out. The ubiquitous black gold that lubricates our daily lives and makes the economy hum is getting harder and costlier to extract from the ground. On this much virtually everyone, even the skeptics, agrees.
What they don’t agree on is when it’ll happen.
‘In the next three years’, argues author and researcher James Howard Kunstler in a recent interview with Grist magazine in the US, ‘we are going to be feeling the pain. Our lives are going to be noticeably beginning to be disrupted. In the next ten years, you will see the beginning of a major collapse of suburbia’.
Australia is a country heavily reliant on oil. Our strength as one of the world’s leading agricultural producers hinges on not just fuel oil for transport, but oil by-products as fertilizers.
According to Kunstler, rising fuel costs will force city-dwellers to grow their own food literally in household backyards and farms on the back doorstep. Many people, he says, will find their lifestyles change to accommodate a necessary grow-your-own component. Prices for lifestyle blocks and large city sections will soar, while prices of apartments will plummet.
Although Kunstler was speaking to an American audience, there are those in Australia, like the Green Party, who are convinced by his message, and throw the threat of falling oil supplies into an already-confused local debate over environmental policy and where the country – and world is hidden. For while on the one hand, environmentalists worry that the world is running out of oil (though they never mention that such a scenario would also go a long way towards cut greenhouse gas emissions), on the other, scientists such as Bjorn Lomborg, author of The Skeptical Environmentalist, disagree. According to Lomborg, there are vast reserves of oil in tar sands and shale, and while it is more expensive to extract, these sources could also keep the well from running dry for many, many years – 5,000, to be exact.
It’s not hard to understand why the skeptics would be, well, skeptical. After all, back in the 1970s environmentalists were predicting that today civilization would be beating back glaciers and that nations would be going to war over food. And there’s currently huge debate over whether rising temperatures are the result of man’s planet-destroying hubris which needs urgently to be put in check, or simply caused by natural long-term fluctuations in the climate. After all, if meteorologists can’t predict whether Saturday’s trip to the beach will be a wash-out, what makes them think they can project the temperature, five, ten, or fifty years down the track?
So is this matter of peak oil really much ado about nothing and another tactic by the Greens to garner inner-city votes and reduce vehicle emissions? Or is it the skeptics who are misinformed?
New Zealand-based geologist Alan Hart, who has worked on the frontline of the oil industry for 30 years, believes the ramifications of this ‘final’ oil crisis will be very serious indeed and our media has fundamentally failed to alert people to the realities of what lies ahead. Born in Texas in 1951, he graduated from the University of Texas at Arlington with advanced degrees in petroleum geology in 1974 and 1979, and has worked for several oil companies, including the 7th largest US petroleum company, ARCO. Since 2002, he has been on the board of directors of Canadian company, TAG Oil, which is concentrating on exploration efforts in New Zealand.
‘These journalists and radio hosts are entitled to their opinions and can denigrate spokespersons like myself all they want, but I personally know that peak oil will arrive in two or five or ten years. From that point on, the world as we know it will be changed unless the global community meets it head on and begins its preparations now.’
The act of taking oil from the ground is called producing it. Since the start of oil production in the nineteenth century, the world has produced about half of its ultimately recoverable oil resource. At the halfway point, the world will achieve what is referred to as its production peak – more oil will be produced in a year near the halfway point than ever before – or thereafter. This is what is referred to as peak oil.
There are varied opinions regarding when peak oil will occur. Dr Colin Campbell, a petro-geologist who is perhaps the world’s foremost expert on predicting oil trends, calculates that it will occur in 2006. Dr Campbell, who was conferred with a PhD from Oxford University and has worked as a geologist, manager, and consultant for a variety of oil companies, is currently the convener and editor of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil (ASPO) and a Trustee of the Oil Depletion Analysis Centre in London. He told the Guardian in late-April 2005 that about 944 billion barrels of oil have thus far been extracted, some 764 billion remains extractable in known fields or reserves, and that a further 142 billion of reserves are classed as ‘yet-to-find’ – that’s the oil geologists expect to be discovered. He said if this is so, then the overall oil peak arrives next year – with unpredictable and perhaps drastic consequences for the world.
Optimists focus on the figures and assume that just because the production peak has arrived doesn’t mean that oil is under imminent threat. But Campbell and James Howard Kunstler argue the petro-optimists are missing the point.
‘We don’t have to run out of oil or natural gas to have severe problems’, says Kunstler. ‘All you have to do is head down the arc of depletion on the downside of world peak production.’
In other words, as production decreases yet demand continues to increase, oil prices become problematic for the world long before the wells actually dry up.
The peak oil debate has recently heated up especially across the Tasman, where Energy Minister Trevor Mallard told Investigate the Government stands by its view that peak oil will occur sometime between 2021 and 2067, with ‘probability highest around 2037’, statistics that come from the United States Department of Energy’s Energy Information Administration.
‘I stress that other estimates abound’, concedes Mallard, ‘and that I’m not claiming that this is the right one, but it’s in our view the best estimate we have to work to for now’.
But critics say politicians like Mallard have no choice but to play it cool, lest the healthy economic outlook be exposed as a fraud. The man who just purchased a new 4WD on hire purchase would think the bottom had dropped out of his world and the young couple who’d just built their dream home an hour’s drive from their work places, where there was no alternative but to drive, would be gutted. It’s far simpler, say petro-pessimists, for the Minister to use smoke and mirrors to provide an illusion of a rosy future, which allow for the continuance of current trends over the coming years, rather than to tell it like it is. It’s like booking us to go First Class on the Titanic and moving all the furniture towards the end that will sink first.
It is significant that peak oil is getting much more coverage in the international media than it is in Australia’s daily press. But this will change. Ordinary people are learning about the theory, thanks largely to word of mouth and the internet. One who ascribes to this view is Kiwi builder Robert Atack. For six years now, this 47-year-old has been a modern Jeremiah informing people about the impending oil crisis. He, like some experts in world energy studies, believes it will have a catastrophic impact on humanity, an impact which could be lessened if we start our preparations now.
Atack has plunged $9,000 of his own cash into the issue, printing and distributing leaflets, CDs, DVDs, videos and books, which carry information from experts of Dr Colin Campbell’s ilk, to members of the public and parliament.
‘During the last term of government I had 10,000 copies of The Oil Crash And You printed and sent about 5 copies each to every MP. And I’ve sent a lot of e-mails – and I think probably most of the current government have had something sent to them’, offers Atack.
‘Trevor Mallard’s been in denial. Any official reply I’ve seen from his office since he became Minister of Energy is just the regurgitated rubbish Pete Hodgson’s secretary sent out, who became Mallard’s when he took over the job of Minister of Energy.’
Beyond the rhetoric, there is evidence that the oil industry really is in dire straits. According to oil geologist Hart it is an industry virtually working at full capacity now. It’s being pushed to its limits. He can tell by the number of oil tankers traveling around the world, the number of seismic vessels gathering seismic data for oil companies, as well as from the number of oilrigs in use.
At present, the world can produce about 84 million barrels of oil a day at the most.
Over 82 million barrels per day are being used at present and there’s an increasing demand for more. The world economy grew by 5.1% in 2004 – the fastest in nearly three decades. Among the leaders were China, (with around 1.3 billion inhabitants), expanding at 9.5%, Argentina at 9% and India at 7.3%, (around 1.1 billion people). Projections for the fourth quarter of 2005 indicate that 86 to 87 million barrels of oil a day will be required and this won’t be met. Although the biggest oil companies, ExxonMobil, Chevron, Texaco, and BP talk about there being ‘plenty of oil’ and being able to produce more, their production figures are actually going down every year, a problem compounded by a lack of refineries that create supply bottlenecks and push the price of petrol north.
While the oil industry can function well at the moment, it won’t in the imminent future. Compounding the oil availability problems is that for the past 20 years the industry has failed to attract enough new personnel. Faced with the choice of studying oil geology or the glamour of IT during the dotcom boom of the nineties, many students chose IT. The grim period of mergers and downsizing in the oil business added to the perception that the oil business was a beast in its death throes. As perhaps it is.
Managing editor of the Oil & Gas International Journal, Dev George, puts it, ‘It seems as though every major petroleum industry conference these days has at least one session devoted to bemoaning the critical shortage of new blood, the lack of young professionals – engineers and geologists and geoscientists as well as business and industry generalists – entering the industry.’
Hart says this spells doom for the oil business, because the ability to successfully locate and drill for oil is highly dependent upon having an employee base with extensive work experience.
‘In 1985, the average age for a member of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists was 38. The average age last year was 53. This shows that at this critical time when the industry really needs experienced employees, they won’t be there. It is really a dreadful situation we face’, offers Hart despondently.
The American Association of Petroleum Geologists has been providing videos and encouraging its 31,000 members to speak in public forums about the possibility of future oil shortages for the past 15 years. Hart began making presentations to various civic and business groups down under several years ago in an attempt to alert the public to the coming end to cheap oil, but finds it difficult to disseminate the message because the public is chiefly ‘unbelieving.’
‘Some people think that “peak oil” is nothing but evidence of a greedy oil industry trying to talk up the oil price’, but this is not so, says Hart: ‘Why would the industry manipulate prices so high that they drive away the very customers that are required to keep them in business? The last thing the oil companies want to see is a chaotic global event [peak oil] that destroys their carefully cultivated consumer base. If there was anything the producers – especially OPEC and petroleum companies could do to slow the price juggernaut,
believe me they’d be doing it now, not tomorrow.’
Hart says it’s the plight of his own four children that motivates him to inform the public about peak oil, because while he can educate them on the impending oil crisis, without the cooperative efforts of the rest of the community and nation, their entire livelihood is threatened by the coming dilemma.
Dr Peter Ballance, formerly Associate Professor of Geology at Auckland University, specialised in sedimentary and oil geology and holds a Doctorate of Science from the University of London. He contends that the threat of peak oil should be taken seriously. ‘It’s a physical fact. One which we may reach this year or in 10 year’s time’, he warns.
In regard to whether skeptical cientists such as Bjorn Lomborg are correct in claiming that there is plenty of oil, Dr Ballance admits that ‘people who say there’s plenty of oil are right in one sense, but in the sense of plenty of the ideal oil, they’re wrong. Much of that remaining oil will be in tar sands, oil shales, deep-sea locations and Arctic locations. All of that’s very expensive and environmentally damaging to extract.’
The cost of oil is not the real issue. The availability of oil is. It is currently cheap because we’re extracting fuel from easy fields whose technical infrastructure was put in place and paid for decades ago. When those fields empty, sooner rather than later, prices will rise.
It is commonly suggested that technological advances will play a role in finding meaningful quantities of more oil. Unfortunately, according to Hart, while technology has and will continue to enhance the oil industry’s ability to locate significant new accumulations of petroleum, it cannot compensate for the huge amounts of cheap oil we are chewing our way through.
‘Anyone who believes that technology will “save the day” like the plot of a Hollywood blockbuster is not facing up to reality. Technology alone cannot replace the amounts of cheap oil [less than US$10/barrel to produce] we are currently consuming on a global scale. It’s going to take a conservation effort too’, he asserts. Wishful thinking, whilst correct to a point, still ignores the reality that markets rely on plenty of advance warning and new discoveries, not magic wands, and that if another chemical existed that could replace oil as a fuel, or in plastics or any of the other myriad uses for oil, we ought to know about it by now. And we don’t. And on a worst case scenario those ‘markets’ may only have another five years to find the mystery new elixir, test it and produce it.
Yes, solar power can help reduce some of the dependence on oil, but currently we use oil to create solar generation capacity. The power and telephone lines into our homes are manufactured from oil. Computers are dependent on oil. Many pharmaceutical and health products require oil. For the markets to truly ‘take care of it’, planning has to begin immediately, argue petro-pessimists.
Some still refuse to face the possibility of a world with less oil, however, like those who believe Thomas Gold’s theory that oil is abiotic, or non-organic in origin. This theory, which holds a growing number of followers, suggests that oil is being produced within the mantle of the earth, from where it continually moves upward, to provide an unlimited supply. Dr Ballance says that there is no substance to Gold’s theory. ‘It’s one of the many myths on which people build hopes’, he says.
Although the oil industry has repeatedly proven that oil is biotic, meaning that it is derived from the degeneration of organic plant and animal remains from which the carbon molecules have been converted to complex hydrocarbon molecules through pressure and time, the Gold theory has retained many believers for a number of reasons.
There are genuine accounts of oil wells refilling, and drilling at levels deeper than 10,000 metres, which some say is evidence that has supported Gold’s theory. Ballance counters that the reason the wells have been refilling is not because oil is being magically produced deep within the earth, but simply because oil moves through permeable rocks in response to a pressure gradient. It can continue to move after a well has ceased to provide economic quantities of oil. Thus, it’s to be expected that old wells will in some cases refill with oil, but in no where near the quantities that will make any difference to a world that uses over 82 million barrels a day.
Likewise, the drilling beyond 10,000 metres does not lend support for the abiotic theory, either because when hydrocarbons are subjected to the temperatures and pressure that exist below 9,000 metres, they are generally destroyed says Hart.
Former industrial chemist Kevin Moore, who has an Honours degree in chemistry from Auckland University, has studied the abiotic theory and says its proponents are asking us to accept a process that defies the laws of chemistry. ‘Until the proponents of abiotic oil present a plausible theory, and they’ve presented none to my knowledge, it’s just junk science’.
The deepest bore to date was drilled by Russians in the Kola Peninsula to 12,262-metres from 1970 to 1994 and cost more than US$250 million. However, it was not drilled in order to search for oil or natural gas, but to study the nature of the earth’s crust. ‘While there’s no ultra-deep oil except in a couple of unusual fields, there is ultra-deep gas in many places. No matter where people get their information from, they can be assured that petroleum is not generated in the mantle. And if Russia, which passed peak production in the late-1980’s, has all of this deep oil, why isn’t it selling it on the world market?’, questions Hart.
According to peak oil advocates, Australia should be doing a thorough analysis of each sector of the economy to understand how vulnerable it is to oil prices and shortages and what can be done. For example, can our food be grown closer to where it is eaten? How do we maintain soil fertility without nitrogen-based fertilizers – which are made from fossil fuels? Can we invest now in expensive infrastructure that will be hard to afford when oil is expensive – like rail, wind turbines and solar technologies, to say nothing of nuclear power, which is once again on the agenda.
Australia is competing against the world for a limited amount of liquid energy. As long as oil demand outstrips the industry’s ability to supply oil, the prices will continue to rise. When global oil production does peak, and it soon will, the disparity between demand and supply will continue to grow and the situation will so worsen. It’s not a case of if, but when. While one can hope and pray that gigantic new sources of petroleum will be found tomorrow, if the majority of people working in the petroleum industry are correct, this won’t happen and continuing our gas-guzzling ways is only going to add to an already critical situation.
Posted by InvestigateDesign at 05:08 PM | Comments (0)
July 05, AU Edition
How do you take a radical idea and turn it into a market leader? JAMES MORROW talks to Ross Cameron, Managing Director of Dyson Appliances’ South-East Asian operations about how he took a vacuum cleaner developed in a Bath, U.K., coachhouse and turned it into one of the fastest-growing brands in Australia – and in the process
CLEANED UP
For almost eighty years, the first three words most people came up with when asked what they thought of when they thought about vacuum cleaners were ‘big’, ‘loud’, and ‘ugly’. But in the past decade that has changed radically, thanks to the work of British inventor James Dyson and his Australian counterpart Ross Cameron – two men who have not only turned the prosaic market floor cleaners upside down, but in the process introduced a new word to the language – ‘Dyson’ (as in ‘I have to Dyson the carpet’, or, just as common, ‘sucks like a Dyson’).
Today Dyson is the number one vacuum cleaner brand in Australia in terms of both volume and value, the result of a remarkable story that brings together radical thinking, a will to win, and a lot of dirty floors.
The story of how Dyson came to be a brand-leader not just in Australia but in Britain and the United States is a classic tale of an inventor working through prototype after prototype in a lab; of highs and lows with business backers; and lots of old-fashioned door-to-door (or rather, store-to-store) salesmanship. In 1979, British designer James Dyson – who had already invented a series of marine and gardening products – realized the common flaw of all vacuum cleaners, namely, the bag, and like all true revolutionaries, decided to do something about it. He sold his shares in one of his previous inventions for GBP10,000, and spent the next five years making 5,000 prototypes before coming up with his unique Dual Cyclone Technology in 1984.
But despite the genius of the technology, not everyone was interested. For one thing, big multinationals were reluctant to back a product that could, if it succeeded, do to the vacuum cleaner bag market (worth GBP100 million a year in Britain alone at the time) what digital cameras have done to makers of 35mm film.
Fast forward to 1989, and enter James Cameron.
Cameron, who at the time was working for S.C. Johnson Wax as part of their global team trying to develop equipment that would go along with the firm’s already-existing chemicals lines, recalls the first time he heard about Dyson’s product as a real eureka moment in his life. ‘I said to myself, wow, there’s the answer! I have an engineering background myself, and knew we had to do this’. So Cameron set about convincing his company to buy the commercial rights to Dual Cyclone Technology, and sat down with Dyson to make a viable vacuum cleaner for the marketplace.
‘So we had the backing of S.C. Johnson and James had a little coach house in Bath, in the U.K., and we had a couple of engineers. He would be designing, and we would be getting prototypes made, and finally we had the design sorted out’, says Cameron. ‘We were also meeting up regularly with the global marketing people from S.C. Johnson to make sure there were going to be buyers for this thing, and got them to spend $3 million on tooling. We got the machine produced in Italy, launched it in 1990, and did very well with it across Europe.’
Soon, though, the other shoe would drop – in the form of a corporate edict from on high that said vacuums were not part of the company’s core business, and therefore, the Dyson operation was shut down. Of course, it’s pretty hard to keep a good idea from eventually forcing its way to market, and that’s just what happened as Dyson and Cameron teamed up to take on the world. James Dyson started selling vacuums in the U.K. in 1993, and as soon as a barrel vacuum was developed in 1995 – about eighty percent of the floor cleaner market down under is for barrel vacs, as opposed to upright models – Cameron flew down to start breaking in to the local market. Of course, that’s the sort of thing that’s easier said than done – and as Cameron quickly discovered, his first problem was getting into a retail market he didn’t know about with a product no one had ever seen before.
His solution? Hit the streets.
‘I took it out to the stores, and was pretty persistent. A lot of people told me what I could do with my vacuum cleaner!’, laughs Cameron as he remembers some of the less-than-diplomatic receptions he was accorded by store managers. ‘But I wanted to win. I believed in the technology, and I made a decision that this was going to go, and I know it was just a matter of getting in the door and showing retailers the technology’.
This faith in the product – and the fact that the product was so unique (as opposed to other manufacturers who had for years been essentially repackaging old technology in new housings) – is what sustained Cameron, who notes that that sort of passion is necessary for anyone trying to get a business off the ground.
‘I suppose I was a bit naïve, but I’m bloody-minded, and I just wanted it to work.’
Eventually, though, Dyson’s break came, and David Jones placed an order for 120 vacuum cleaners in May of 1996. They sold just 24 through the following month, a number which Cameron still remembers vividly to this day. But better luck came in the form of a deal with Myer’s: ‘They said they’d put it on sale and placed an order for 170, and we’ve never looked back’.
But while this was the break Cameron was looking for, he realised that managing growth was going to be tricky, and that continued success – predicated as it was, at the time, on so much word-of-mouth advertising – depended on more than just being able to get more product to market. So Cameron and his team spent virtually every night of the week going out into the stores and training staff in how the Dyson worked. ‘We would take the thing out, pour fine powder on the ground and let them see how it separated it out, and even let them take them home to try them out’, says Cameron, who never moved the product out to market without also giving this sort of support to retailers. ‘They realized it was different, but it was damn hard doing all that training’.
From there, Dyson’s Australian operation grew at ‘a ridiculous rate’, with giant retailers like Harvey Norman and Retravision quick to sign on. All of which led to another problem that Cameron never imagined: many of his employees at the time did not want to work for such a high-growth company, having joined up thinking that they were going to spend their days at a staid little operation without too many demands being made of them.
‘In one year I lost 70 per cent of my staff – they couldn’t handle the pace. That was the year our sales doubled. They said they wanted to work for a little company and have a little job – and I knew they couldn’t meet our expectations’, says Cameron, adding that he went through a great deal of soul-searching about his hiring processes. And, as Cameron discovered, getting the right team on board was key as the company was tipped for major growth.
‘One of the things I said was that I didn’t need a lot of little Ross Camerons around’, he says, describing his hiring philosophy. ‘The important thing is to find people who have a vision, and who’ve got passion – the most important thing is that they have that.’
Cameron adds that this quest for strong, diverse people leads to a much stronger team, especially when there’s conflict over an issue.
‘I’m a hard taskmaster, but my people push back. If they defend an issue, I’m very likely to accept what they’re trying to say – I want strong people around me’.
Posted by InvestigateDesign at 04:35 PM | Comments (0)
July 05, AU Edition
NEW RUDD ORDER
Iraq, the United Nations, and the threat of terrorism in our region: What is Howard doing wrong? How would Labor do things differently? Investigate editor JAMES MORROW recently sat down with Shadow Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd to find out
INVESTIGATE: Do you think Iraq is better off now that Saddam Hussein is gone?
KEVIN RUDD: Well, the fact of the matter is Saddam’s gone, but to state the bleeding obvious we didn’t support the war. The fact of the matter is that that advice was not accepted by the Australian government, the Australian government fought in the coalition to remove Saddam Hussein, and in fact succeeded in removing him. Therefore we are, as people interested in and committed to universal human rights, happy that he’s gone.
But what one is concerned about is the stability of the country, and the regime which replaces him. What we’re uncertain about is how all this will shake down in the years ahead, particularly once there is an eventual withdrawal of US troops from Iraq.
INVESTIGATE: On the subject of the US’s eventual withdrawal, where do you stand on the question of keeping Australian troops in Iraq? After all, Mark Latham promised to have the troops home by Christmas, but Howard has committed another 450 troops.
RUDD: We think that [increasing the deployment] was an inappropriate decision for a number of reasons, one of which is the prime minister’s election commitment, to the Australian people in black and white, which was that there would be no substantial increases. Prior to the election from memory we had in country something in the vicinity of 300 troops if you add another 500, it’s basically a breach of undertaking.
INVESTIGATE: So what’s Labor’s plan?
RUDD: When I visited Iraq and spoke with Ambassador Bremmer, one of the things he impressed upon me was the problem of the porousness of Iraq’s borders, and of insurgents and jihadists coming across from Syria and Saudi Arabia and Iran and [the need] to do what was necessary to enhance the systems, procedures and personnel tasked with providing Iraq’s border security. We can provide a very effective training package for that as well as effective packages to assist Iraqis on the humanitarian front.
INVESTIGATE: In that vein, did you see Syria recently nabbed 113 people trying to make it into Iraq from Syria?
RUDD: I have not seen that particular report, but those figures would not surprise me. I stood in Bremer’s office in Saddam’s palace and examined a very large map of Iraq and its contiguous land borders with Iran, Syria and Saudi. These are borders that probably in the best of times were never properly policed. Now that we’re in the worst of times, in terms of Iraq, to paraphrase [CIA Director] Porter Goss, it has become something of a magnet for training jihadists from around the world.
It strikes us that the best thing to do is help the Iraqis build better border control and better border security systems. That’s something we’re not bad at.
INVESTIGATE: To bring the United Nations into the conversation for a moment, you opposed going into Iraq; does Australia always need the UN’s mandate to use force, or is there a danger that that limits our options?
RUDD: We take the UN charter seriously, and the reason we take the UN charter seriously is that, prima facie, it is better to have an international rules-based order than to have no international rules-based order. And to state the bleeding obvious, of course it’s inefficient. The bottom line is it was put together by a committee of nations in 1945. But critics of the UN don’t argue what sort of rules-based order, if any, should replace it. Are they arguing for the pre-‘45 world order, the pre-1919 world order, what sort of world order are they arguing for creating? Back to Westphalia, back to pre-Westphalia?
If you’re going to take the classic neo-conservative critique of the UN multilateral order, then think in the great tradition of Burkean conservatism, you should argue for something to replace that which you would tear apart. I don’t hear a coherent program along those lines other than occasional bursts of unilateralism when you judge it absolutely necessary. A lot of capabilities are divided within the strength of the UN charter: Article 42, which provides for collective action through the Security Council (that’s how we managed to achieve our outcomes in East Timor). You’ve also got Article 51, which provides for an opportunity to defend yourself against attacks, and Kofi Annan has argued for a further examination of that given the advances in weaponry in recent times. Then you’ve got doctrines of humanitarian intervention, which are much more controversial provisions.
INVESTIGATE: How does that all fit in, then, with the crisis in Darfur?
RUDD: The challenge at stake with Darfur is the question of whether it is a failure of the UN or the member states of the UN.
INVESTIGATE: Then isn’t the problem with the UN that it is only as good as it’s member states?
RUDD: Most cooperative endeavours are.
INVESTIGATE: Sure, if you’ve got an organisation with lots of different states that are not democracies and a few that are, don’t you wind up getting pulled down to the lowest common denominator, because those dictatorships keep one from being able to act?
RUDD: If you look back to the Commission on Human Rights, which is the subject of such comprehensive reform proposals by Kofi Annan’s reform panel, that is the inherent problem of having a democracy of states, states which irrespective of their internal political composition all having equal say in the general assembly.
But again, the critics of the UN system fail to argue the alternative. I don’t hear that. I don’t even hear that from the neo-conservative critics. Would it be the death of Westphalia? Would the sovereignty of individual states go out the door? If so, what replaces it? I just think that reforming the current system is the most practical way to go. I put in these stark terms and your readers will be familiar with Churchill’s great critique of democracy, and I think the same is true with the United Nations.
So it’s not about some belief in chanting the UN mantra for the sake of chanting the UN mantra. No, it’s not ideological, it’s practical. And contrast that with the various international systems of the pre-1945 period. And in this country which tends to be pro-American, and I have a career record of being pro-American myself, support for the UN tends to poll over 60 percent.
INVESTIGATE: On the issue of pro- and anti-Americanism, what did you make of that report from the Lowy institute which said that more Australians were more afraid of the United States than Osama bin Laden?
RUDD: I was actually in China when that poll came out so, so I haven’t gotten into it, but in terms of the responses in the poll that supported the US alliance, I think the figure was 38 per cent, and for America itself it was 58 per cent. That I think is an interesting insight into the way Australians think. Australians, since 1941 when [Labor] ran the country, we had an alliance with the United States for the first time, which was under an Australian Labor government, and we took a lot of criticism from those who accused us of departing from the mother country. We have been consistent supporters of a military alliance with America, and that has not changed and that will not change.
However, support of the US military alliance does not mean that you have to subsume every tenet of Australian foreign policy to American foreign policy. There are going to be areas of difference. There have been in the past, and you know what? There will be in the future. This is not the sort of thing where you just go and tick every box.
INVESTIGATE: Back to the whole concept of multilateral alliances and structures, what do you say to the criticism that if we were in the ASEAN treaty a few years back, we wouldn’t have ben able to liberate East Timor because we would have had to respect the sovereignty of Indonesia?
RUDD: I think it’s an intellectually incoherent argument, the reason being that in the Treaty of Amity and Cooperation refers to Article 42 of the UN charter, which in turn provides for collective action by states. It was only when the UN mandated action in East Timor that the Indonesians withdrew and we entered uncontested under the terms of the relevant UN resolultions. To use the ancient Latin phrase, that argument is complete bullshit.
INVESTIGATE: Where do you see China fitting in to geopolitics these days, especially with the Taiwan issue?
RUDD: I think the central foreign policy challenge for Australia in the next quarter-century is China. I don’t think the Howard government necessarily grasps that. If you look at the Prime Minister’s speech to the Lowy Institute recently, he described us Asia as constituting the stadium of international affairs for the century ahead. Well, that’s terrific that the Prime Minister has discovered a pre-existing reality which is staring the nation in the face for the previous quarter-century. Anyway, leaving that to one side, the core component of that is China. Why? China is the dynamic, and it is an unfolding story of rapid economic growth. Back in 1984 it has an economy slightly smaller than Canada and slightly larger than that of Australia. Now, depending on the measure, you’re talking about an economy that’s the fourth-largest in the world and getting larger.
INVESTIGATE: There’s a lot of economic growth there, but not much political freedom…
RUDD: The open question is, is China going in the direction of a democracy? Anyone making bold predictions on that I think has an excess of courage and a possible deficit of wisdom. It is a very difficult question to predict. To answer to the question how China will evolve politically, well, frankly it is impossible to predict.
On the question of China’s foreign policy behaviour, China now in terms of diplomatic and foreign policy activity in the region is much more activist than it has been in the past. China in the 1980s did not have much of a view of what was going on in the region. Now it has an acute view.
On the question of Taiwan, it is one of continuing core sensitivities, not just in terms of peace and prosperity across the Taiwan straits, but peace between China and the United States, peace between China and Japan, peace within the wider region. This is the core question within the core question.
INVESTIGATE: So if China makes a play for Taiwan, and the US ends up on the side of China, where does that leave Australia?
RUDD: The answer I will give is that it is not productive for the government or the alternative government of this country to speculate on how our alliance relationship with the United States will apply given future strategic circumstances.
INVESTIGATE: But how do you feel about Taiwanese independence in the meantime?
RUDD: We’re long term supporters since 1972. Remember, Labor Party history isn’t bad on China is not a bad one. The conservatives pretended China didn’t exist for 23 years, and you know, we thought that was kind of stupid. Our treaty with China remains unchanged, and we don’t budge from that. Now what is involved domestically within Taiwan, in terms of a liberal democratic principle of management, that we of course support, and I have long been on the record supporting that. I studied in Taiwan as a student, and I’ve seen Taiwan change over the years, but that doesn’t alter our view of the One China policy.
INVESTIGATE: Moving elsewhere in the region, regarding the insurgency in the Philippines, we’ve got a story on the al Qaida-linked Islamic problem. Should Australia be doing more?
RUDD: The connections with the wider al Qaida networks in the southern Philippines has been the subject of some study, and I’m of the view that there are connections. Based on advice I’ve seen it’s quite clear to me that there are connections. That leads to Labor’s fundamental premise in its policy on counterterrorism in the region, that is, beyond rhetorical flourish by a government with an eye on opinion polls in this country, as opposed to doing the hard yards of actually tackling terrorism on the ground, we argue that to be effective in the war against terrorism, what you need is a comprehensive, regional counterterrorism strategy which covers each dimension of the problem. That means, for example, effective intelligence coordination across all south-east Asian states, police cooperation across all south-east Asian states, and on top of that it means dealing with some of the underlying social and economic factors which make it easier for terrorist organisations to recruit. That is the sort of strategy we need. At present what we’ve got is a bit of money here, a bit of money there; fund that capability-building unit in Jakarta; who knows what the one in Kuala Lumpur is doing; what about the one in Bangkok?
As a starting premise, what we argue for is a comprehensive region-wide audit of our counterterrorism capabilities if you’re serious the enterprise, that’s where you start. Then the second thing you do is identify capability gaps, and you agree on a strategy across the region in order to clear the gaps. This is not happening. You have a bit here and bit there, usually in response to an event, and that is a classical conservative party misunderstanding of a fundamental national security challenge.
INVESTIGATE: It sounds like you’re talking civilian operations – but what about on the military side. If we had knowledge of someone with a suitcase nuclear weapon somewhere bound for Australia, does Australia have the right to go stop it?
RUDD: That’s a fantastic hypothetical…
INVESTIGATE: Perhaps, but so was 9/11 before it happened.
RUDD: Look: the only way Australia, a country with twenty million people and limited national security resources of our own, both military and non-military, could do so is collaboratively, with the states of the region.
I mean, John Howard by talking about unilateral action is alienating regional states and the diplomatic support necessary to actually engender the cooperative relationships which are necessary to stop terrorists on the ground. This is a mindless piece of politics and hairy-chestedness.
Ask yourself this question: if you’ve got a problem with terrorists in south-east Asia, can you concede that Australia could in any way act other than collaboratively with the local state involved?
Posted by InvestigateDesign at 04:16 PM | Comments (0)
July 05, AU Edition
HOWARD’S WAY
He’s won a fourth term, faced down a revolt from backbenchers, and has historic control of the Senate. So what next for the Prime Minister? ALAN ANDERSON provides an inside account of the power struggles within the Liberal party, the outlook for succession, and Labor’s last best hope.
With the Opposition languishing in the polls, the new Senate under Coalition control and the issue of the Liberal leadership at least tem-porarily quiescent, one would imagine John Howard to be at the peak of his power. Yet the past few weeks have seen him locked in tense negotiations with four of his own backbenchers, culminating in a partial repudiation of the policy with which he is most closely associated in the public mind. As we eagerly anticipate the Government’s legislative agenda, how far will Howard really be able to push things in a fourth term?
The revolt led by backbencher Petro Georgiou against mandatory detention has been an unsettling experience for the Government. With big ticket items like industrial relations and Telstra on the agenda, together with smaller but equally controversial reforms like voluntary student unionism, Howard will not want policies that should form his legacy to be watered down by nervous backbenchers.
Howard’s response has been to portray the revolt as a strength rather than a weakness. His welcoming of fresh ideas from the backbench carried a disturbing touch of Chairman Mao’s exhortation to ‘let a hundred flowers bloom’, although one hopes his motivation is less sinister.
Certainly, Liberal MPs identify the party’s capacity to generate ideas as a key advantage over Labor. ‘We are winning because we are about ideas’, one South Australian Liberal MP told Investigate. ‘They are more interested in factional politics.’
This is more than rhetoric. Two new policy journals, The Party Room, edited by former federal director Andrew Robb MP and tax crusader Senator Mitch Fifield, and Looking Forward, edited by South Australian Liberal MP Dr Andrew Southcott, have sprung up in the last few months. Freed of the discipline of staring down the barrel of electoral oblivion, Coalition MPs have greeted Labor’s decline with an eagerness to conduct their own policy debates in public.
The Coalition is providing its own opposition, while an impotent Labor Party is relegated to the role of spectator. There is every reason to believe that this is not a passing phase. Labor was sidelined before Coalition control of the Senate; deprived of its upper house veto it can only become less relevant. Policy is in fashion this season, and there is no doubt that it is making the Liberal Party look like the natural party of government.
Yet while Howard’s portrayal of the Liberals as the ‘party of ideas’ may encompass calls for tax reform or school vouchers, it was a contrived explanation of his surrender to the mandatory detention rebels. Howard’s line has only passed media muster because the press gallery were so keen to see immigration policy watered down.
The days of a meek and compliant backbench are gone. ‘There are two ends of the spectrum’, another Minister explained. ‘On one hand you have people like Georgiou, who know that they’re never going to get a position on the front bench. What has he got to lose? He figures he might as well do what he believes.
‘At the other end of the spectrum you have young, ambitious backbenchers. If you’re in your thirties and on the backbench, you want to make a name for yourself. You see there’s a logjam on the front bench at the moment, and you don’t expect promotion any time soon. So you’re thinking long-term, beyond this Government’.
In other words, the Coalition’s policy debates are partly a symptom of its success. Howard has an abundance of talent in the Parliament, much of it quite experienced, but there are only so many ministries to go around.
The two major themes championed by the party’s backbench this year have been tax reform and softening of mandatory detention. They represent two different models of backbench activism, at least one of which poses a direct challenge to Howard’s authority.
The so-called tax ‘ginger group’, led by Fifield and Victorian Liberal MP Sophie Panopoulos, was careful to give credit to the Government for past tax cuts while lobbying for more. They portrayed their cause as consistent with the direction of government policy, and their form of contribution is doubtless what Howard has in mind when calling for debate. But to be fairto Petro Georgiou and his mandatory
detention rebels, consistency with government policy would not have been a credible claim for their group to make. Asked to comment on where the line is drawn between healthy debate and white-anting, one Liberal Senator saw the policy itself as the main distinction. ‘The difference is about whether you are agitating to advance Liberal values, or to overturn them; whether you’re trying to get us to go forward or to reverse’.
Yet there is a distinction of process as well as substance. Sophie Panopolous invited controversy when labelling Georgiou’s group ‘political terrorists’, yet there is no question that their campaign was conducted using the threat of private member’s Bills and an embarrassing split in Government ranks. If not terrorism, it was at least blackmail, and it worked.
Media commentators, seeking to excuse Howard’s capitulation on a policy they detest, suggest that it sprang from his belief that ‘disunity is death’. But if disunity is death, has Howard not encouraged it?
The Coalition party room was solidly behind Howard on this issue. Had he wanted to stand firm, there is no question that Georgiou and his three colleagues would have been isolated and defeated.
Instead, Howard spent nine hours negotiating with the group, delivering substantial concessions that undermine the mandatory detention regime for any asylum-seeker accompanied by his family. To extend the Panopoulos analogy, Howard broke the rules and negotiated with terrorists.
One Victorian Liberal backbencher sees the rationale for Howard’s move as being specific to the issue. ‘The Palmer Inquiry was going to criticise the [Immigration] Department and recommend reforms. Howard was just moving first, so that when the report came out he would already have fixed the problems’.
Another explanation is that Howard was driven by memories of the dissipation of Malcolm Fraser’s authority in the face of regular defections. Yet the broader precedent has been set. ‘It will certainly encourage others to think they can get away with breaking ranks’, according to the Victorian. The incident has cast doubt over whether Howard be able to rein in the excesses of this phenomenon.
Of course, the one force that could reverse this trend is the federal Labor Party. Were it not for the absence of effective opposition from the benches opposite, Coalition parliamentarians might be more circumspect in airing internal policy debates than they have been in recent months.
What are the chances of a Labor revival bolstering discipline in the Coalition ranks? The prospect of a Labor leadership change, unthinkable before the Budget, is starting to look like a real possibility.
Returning to Beazley seemed a safe option at the time, but the Labor caucus must be wondering whether they have made their third mistake in a row.
Yet Coalition MPs see Beazley more as a symptom than a cause of the Labor disease. For one thing, a change in leadership will not alter the high ‘hack factor’ that is so apparent from a perusal of Labor CVs, or the resultant intellectual vacuum.
‘It’s about personnel’, was the Minister’s explanation of Labor’s woes, but it was not just a reference to the leadership. ‘Labor’s benches are full of trade union reps and former staffers. None of them have had any real world experience, and they’re not representative of the community. Our party room looks more like Australia’.
‘They just don’t have any ideas’, adds the South Australian MP. ‘They seem to be getting all their policy from one or two sources: tax policy from one think-tank conference; health policy from Catholic health groups. It’s because their MPs are basically just union and party hacks. They aren’t coming up with anything themselves’.
Equally damaging is the fact that Labor continues to break the primary rule of politics: look after your base.
This is perhaps Howard’s most important political legacy. Since 1996, ‘Howard’s battlers’ have continued to upset the traditional political balance. Won over by Howard’s rejection of the culturally elitist Keating agenda, a few battlers went home to Labor over the GST in 1998, before being cemented back into the Coalition’s corner by the border protection debate in 2001.
In 2004, the focus returned to domestic issues, with a traditional class warfare campaign under Labor’s pie-eating Aussie bloke, Mark Latham. Yet in spite of scare campaigns on health, a polarising debate over private schooling and a barrage of self-serving stories about Latham’s Green Valley upbringing, the battlers voted Liberal in greater numbers than ever. This, together with the abject failure of Labor’s anti-Costello campaign, suggests that Howard’s battlers have become the Coalition’s battlers, increasingly wedded to its aspirational economic message as well as its culturally conservative one.
Is this reversible? Beazley’s ham-fisted efforts to block Costello’s tax cuts suggest that Labor still believes it can regain its traditional support base. Yet it is questionable whether Labor can ever win back its socially conservative core demographic until it finds the courage to confront its latte set of academics, teachers and lawyers and reconcile the conflict between what Beazley’s father memorably called ‘the cream of the working class’ and ‘the dregs of the middle class’. Increasingly, Labor looks like it is just sitting back and praying for a recession.
This may well be Labor’s only chance. Asked to explain the Coalition’s electoral dominance, three Liberal parliamentarians independently came up with the same phrase: ‘strong economic management’.
It is interesting that Costello’s mantra is now echoed even by MPs more traditionally associated with Howard, given that it relegates Howard’s personal appeal to being a subsidiary cause of success. Yet it is a tribute to the Howard-Costello partnership that the Government has acquired a confident identity beyond the personality of its leader, in stark contrast to the personality cults of state Labor administrations.
This ongoing dominance leaves Howard with great responsibilities, and with the challenge of managing a restless backbench. He is the trustee of years of intellectual and political effort by liberals and conservatives, which have finally delivered the opportunity for serious reform. There are two tasks by which Howard will be judged.
The first task is to maintain the reform momentum. Kevin Andrews’ ambitious industrial relations reforms exceed the meagre expectations created by his ambiguous post-election pronouncements. If implemented in their current form, they will be a fitting capstone to Howard’s career-long struggle to liberate Australia from its antiquated IR system.
Peter Costello’s last budget also exceeded expectations, although purists will continue to call for a more radical flattening of the income tax system. Liberals have good reason to be satisfied with their Government’s fourth term performance thus far.
But Howard has yet to negotiate passage of his industrial relations laws, which have offended federalists and face a possible defection by Nationals Senator Barnaby Joyce. The sale of Telstra also faces hurdles, with some Nationals likely to complain so long as one farmer has mobile reception problems when trying to call the sheep in his back paddock.
On a smaller scale, there are also rumblings of dissent over voluntary student unionism, raising the fear that the policy will be watered down into insignificance as it was under Jeff Kennett in Victoria.
Securing passage of these reforms will be a test of Howard’s authority, not to mention his negotiating skills. This once-in-a-generation opportunity must not be squandered. Howard has acquired a large reserve of political capital over the past ten years. This is the time to spend it.
Yet there will be a temptation to do the opposite. Fear of a possible leadership battle in the coming year could cause Howard to question whether he should keep his powder dry; whether a ‘steady as she goes’ approach and the appeasement of dissenters is a more prudent course to maintain poll numbers and party room support in the short term. It can only be hoped that the surrender on mandatory detention was not a sign of such an approach.
This brings us to Howard’s second great task. Even he must appreciate that the end of his career is approaching. If Howard fights the 2007 election, it will be as a 69-year-old. And even if he fights and wins, what about 2010 and 2013? No one believes Howard will be around for those elections.
One senior Liberal told Investigate, ‘Our newer MPs are looking at the long term. They know the best chance they have of a long career is if the leadership transition is timed right and goes smoothly’.
The Liberal Party’s future does not end with Howard’s career; nor does Australia’s. Howard owes it to his supporters to devise a credible succession plan that bequeaths to his successor a legacy that does not die with Howard’s leadership. His aim should not be one more victory, but many, through a long period of conservative dominance of which he is merely the founder. At the recent Liberal Federal Council meeting, blatant promotion of Alexander Downer, a strong contender for the Deputy’s position under Costello, suggested that succession plann