STRANGE TIMES

The High Court train is still coming, even if people look the other way. When it gets here the legal game-playing stops and reality will be released with Pell. That reality will run right over those still facing the wrong way. No prize for guessing what political elements will be run over. The smart ones are already well away from these tracks but the Victorian Premier is tied to them.

Steve Owens is not prepared to convict on the strength of what he now understands are the accusations and that is moving past the former position of not approving of a word on word conviction on principle.

After the appeal, and even before I read Weinberg I had already thought the appeal to the High Court ought to be made and what that court ought to find because of the merits of this case as they had slowly been revealed to me before that appeal. Nobody thought an appeal ought to be launched on the basis that the word on word legislation was unconstitutional, so Steve even if he didn’t like it, must have thought that it was open to the jury to find guilt in this case on the strength of that evidence as the majority concluded. Without Weinberg Steve would be lost.

The appeal itself was as I read it, unexplainable head-shaking crap from the majority and typical understatement from the dissenting lawyer turned judge.

If Weinberg did not exist, and some other judge had joined with the majority for a 3:0 decision I would not have altered my view of this case in the slightest. The majority were not dealing with the reality of time and space, let alone in their proper sequence by starting with the leaders of the procession. The leaders had to get to the priests sacristy first; and physical consequences follow from this deductive fact: starting with a time span that had just ended and another commenced.

Even running the impossible argument; say the boys had got there first anyway (and they physically could not without an actual and thus memorable disruption to what would have to have been a stalled procession, that we know did not happen because it was not recalled by the unchallenged witnesses) then the boys would have been discovered by the leaders of that procession as they entered that same room and no crime could result!

So despite the accusation, the facts disclose that the room is already occupied! And everything of the time sequence problem flows from this undoubted fact. The total normal time length of the procession had to expire without any opportunity arising for the boys to enter the sacristy.

The hive of activity evidence then prohibits a subsequent entrance to this area. The boys could never have been there! That is what Steve Owens -and all the other bigots- won’t turn their mind towards.

My ability to spot a consequential massive miscarriage of justice does not rely on the games (with either good or bad motives) that are played by the bourgeois legal profession. I’m only glad that Weinberg was around and able to do as much as he has for the further legal process of the High Court that is coming in about 3-4 months now. Our legal system is the very flawed adversarial system that Australians suffer under. I am not defending ‘their’ system but it looks like Steve Owens is.

On the purely legal issue, my view developed and changed from ‘not guilty’ to something else altogether…

These 5 accusations (for all the reasons already discussed by me) can’t be accepted to being proved to beyond the point of reasonable doubt. That doubt is only in theory; in practice, it’s really the opposite. The accused has 2 strikes against them by being there in the dock in the first place! The presumption of innocence is theory. Doubt ought to have -in this case- remained standing in the accused favor but I failed to convince Steve of this.  Dissenting judge Weinberg has convinced Steve of this. The rest of ‘us’ that he read could not get through to the political opponent Steve. Such a surprise!

But a provable lack of opportunity is not guilty because of a demonstrable time and place problem and is another matter altogether. The evidence shows the room where the 4 charges were said to have occurred could not be available for these attacks as others were using the room.

5-6 minutes were not (and so even if unreasonably extended to 10 minutes) available for the crime.

The entire case has collapsed on those 2 physical points of time and space. There was no opportunity for Pell or anyone else to have committed these crimes at that time and place. If that is so it is clear that all 5 charges are simply false.

The defense was correct to say that the case was impossible because it was!

How the jury and the majority missed this is interesting of itself but not important because that is what they have done like it or not. Facts are, as is said, stubborn things!

There is thus not even a need to look further and ask why the accusations were made by J, or how convincingly they were made by him; because without opportunity nothing could have happened no matter what was said! Enter the political, social and cultural dimensions to this case.

A lack of opportunity conclusion ALSO ends the legal issues – BUT we are left not with a political opponent that is still under a cloud and so maybe he is just lucky to have got off… because he is rich and powerful – but instead we are left with an innocent man that is now and could have been for years politically, socially and culturally attacked by the forces that now have to account for what they have been doing with all the power and funds at their disposal. An inquiry is in order to get to the bottom of this.

My question is not what sort of games can the legal profession play to hide that reality, but rather what was the SANO task force actually doing when they had a responsibility to work out if such an implausible accusation was even possible in the first place?

There are in short also the political, cultural and social issues to consider along with the legal, and there are many people who do not want these factors examined. Steve can start by acknowledging that this is the case. A clearly identifiable element do NOT want any further investigation; as a democrat I am deeply concerned about the power of the police and publicly-funded ABC journalists and I do want this inquiry.

For the account to have been real people had to be disappeared or there had to be a Catholic conspiracy to assist in a crime of pedophilia and that (with the people in this procession) is not the real world.

This 2nd form of acquittal thus drags in the police for these other reasons. The police who were in a position to know and yet didn’t go to the trouble of sorting this opportunity issue out; behaved much worse than just recklessly.

They had no excuse to have not sent a couple of police along to record over several Sundays just how the event would have unfolded, that could in any way enable boys to do the bad behavior claimed – without adults noticing what was going on! The police ought never to have flown to Rome over such twaddle! Pell should never have even been interviewed about such crazy accusations. This is persecution heaped upon persecution.

The fact that this man ‘J’ is mentally disturbed in some manner is totally relevant.  I correctly picked up on the issue.  How is it that such a series of implausible accusations from a mentally troubled person were pursued by the police? This will have resulted after all the struggle, trauma and costs that Pell, the Church, and Catholics generally have been put through in a total defeat of all these accusations!  Indeed all the charges against Pell were all flawed to such a sad extent that these last 5, and clearly lunatic accusations were all that went to trial!

Steve is only ‘…prepared to go as far as judge Weinberg and say that there is a significant possibility that Pell is innocent and on that basis should walk free.’

‘Significant possibility’ when the words Steve is looking for are the jury got it wrong; that Pell ought not have been convicted; Pell ought not have spent 1 day in jail, but he will have spent over 14 months in jail and even Steve Owens with so little time to study the issue, understands that this outcome is wrong!  So that begs the question; how was it that the police who are paid to do the investigating couldn’t understand that Pell ought not to be charged let alone convicted from the evidence that they cobbled together? Why did they choose to believe a person with a mental disorder who was changing his story?  Why did the police advertise for complainants? Why did they bring such feeble-minded accusations all the way to Rome, when J could not even get into the room because other people were already there? Is this how Australia ought to run? There are also the political and cultural aspects of our country to consider and Steve knows this and that is why Steve is dissembling.

People like David Marr have definitely not gone to ground and neither have the police. They have caused the mischief and will get away with it if there is no inquiry and the Victorian ALP Premier does not want one!

Marr did not think the High Court would be interested BUT they are! Mind you when Marr thought that Pell would win the appeal he thought the High Court ought to be interested! Chris Kenny just said ‘say what?’. Marr is exactly the bias of this case writ large. Marr’s motive is to get Pell irrespective of the evidence! Marr has no problem looking both ways to suit himself, just like all the rest of the anti-Pell campaigners that Steve is now unable to openly unite with. Yet Steve is also not wanting to expose them.

I am after an inquiry and their goal will be to prevent an inquiry. Steve Owens is heading for another fence to sit atop, with the pretense that it’s all too hard to work out!

What Weinberg has done is not now the important part that I have been trying to get at, and others are trying to hide from. Weinberg had explained the law to his incompetent Supreme Court colleagues – that somehow he could not get to join him in the real world. He went down 2:1 and I don’t understand that, nor do I claim to fully grasp how the jury could have been so flawed.

As luck would have it, Pell won the support of a single judge and that legal expert could clarify matters sufficiently for the scales to fall from Steve’s eyes. As far as an acquittal goes that is the simple luck of having this single judge to guide and explain how this case has gone so terribly wrong.

So now Steve, like me, also now thinks the High Court will rule in Pell’s favor. I couldn’t convince Steve, nor could Bolt, or Windschuttle etc., Steve just held to his initial discomfort of this being just 1 man’s word against another, with no supporting evidence at all and THAT Steve found himself unable to countenance, but that was the law and so there was nothing to see other than that. Importantly for Steve, the change of stance is only just enough. Weinberg is simply not concerned with the police misconduct that I have spotted and want dealt with. Weinberg is not interested in an inquiry that drags in the ABC. Steve can’t see anything wrong with what the police and the ABC have done, and in his view, Australia ought to just move on as the system has worked as it should!

There is now sufficient doubt for Steve to understand the case to the degree required to go along with that minority of one judge and condemn the majority decision as an error that he wants the High Court to overturn 7-0.  WOW; that is something.

So, if all the judges had sung from the same hymnbook, Pell would have no support from Steve except that he thinks that the law which could permit a word on word trial to bring forth a conviction of beyond a reasonable doubt in the first instance, is wrong.

Luckily, we have the ruling elite lawyer turned judge to solve our thinking for us. Weinberg gives Steve the excuse to go further than he previously had.

What Steve had managed was something like; that bastard Pell could be convicted because it is the law that the jury can decide who they believe! And though Steve’s not happy with that state of affairs, nevertheless that is the law, and Pell had a fair trial and the jury convicted. So, nothing unusual in that and the High Court ought not to interfere with that!

No concession to any deductive reasoning from amateurs.

No concern about what the police have been up to.

No problem with a culture of hysteria generating a collective blind spot.

No problem with the publicly funded ABC bias.

NADA care, ZIP comment.

Steve can just bleat that really we can leave it for our betters to decide Pell’s fate. I can picture Steve, straw in mouth bringing in the squires sheep talking to another muck covered peasant; ‘Aye Jim lad; and it’s not as if that rich bastard has not had the very best legal minds that money can buy now is it?’ ‘They would have gone through all that stuff that them there Pell supporters are raising now; wouldn’t they Jimbo?’ Tis not for the likes of us to work this out and we’re all too busy with the sheep and the fires anyway! Mark my words, the lawyers will sort this out and we can rest assured of that.’

Given Steve understand ‘its the timing of the subsequent events that matter.’ who got to the room first? J and R who had to double back and work out where to go as they went back into a church like all young boys would NOT do after they got out of the joint or those leading the procession?

Naturally, Steve will stick to not knowing. It won’t matter to Steve to get to the bottom of this either.  Steve won’t want another hearing for the other people in the procession to explain reality. Once people answer that question of who got back first all the rest goes up in smoke.  The room was a ‘hive of activity’ from that point on!  It was known to be a hive of activity by all those actually involved.  None of these people believed such an event could have happened!!

Apparently the police from SANO have Steve’s full support. I on the other hand call for an inquiry into what has made Australia a laughing stock right across the world.

According to Steve, Pell is just lucky to be getting out under a cloud of suspicion thanks to Weinberg. The ability of others to see right through this is pure luck and anyway methodologically flawed. People ought not to try to work this out themselves because they were not in the room for the whole trial, so they really are not in anything like the best place to do the job. We should all just keep quiet and let the process unfold. But why will that not end with the police getting away with this misconduct, and Victorian Premier Andrews not looking the other way?

If it weren’t for Weinberg as far as Steve is concerned, Pell would just sit there and do his time!

Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews and fence-sitting pseudo leftists can pretend there is nothing to investigate. But when the film is made it will show them all up as the threats to democracy that they really are.   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evil_Angels_(film)

How the Pell case jury was misled by the Barrister for the police prosecution on the question of opportunity.

A boxing referee says as their last instruction to ‘defend your self at all times and come out fighting’ and whatever else is going on you had better listen to that because that is when it all gets terribly real! There is no evidence for any conspiracy, in the Pell case. There is evidence of a stuff-up from the defense who dropped their guard after a simple lawyers trick from the other side that IMV worked as it was intended to.

Chris S Friel has exposed what happened at the point where for the jury and then later the majority judges of the appeal, opportunity for the crime was settled.

Yet the opportunity for the crime had not IMV become settled for the judge, Kidd, and so his failure is still apparent to me.

Both sets (jury and majority) did not grasp who from the procession was where and why there was, despite the attempt at a con job, nevertheless always someone in or around the priest’s sacristy at the relevant time.

Kidd was much better informed. He had the full story from when the jury was excluded and the 2 sets of Lawyers and himself had their ‘private’ conversation that led to the prosecution being obliged to withdraw that which there was no evidence for. He knew what the prosecutor was attempting to do over the issue of opportunity. He knew there was a fundamental clash of disinterested people accused of nothing being in the same room that by definition precluded 2 boys dressed in Choir garb from also being there and poking around!

The opportunity for any such MAD crime as was proposed to have been inflicted was never available. It is not open to the jury to find guilt absent opportunity and it is the judge who, under such circumstances, must direct the jury accordingly. The judge was not misled in any way by the prosecution and was in a position to place all the relevant people in the relevant NOW 10 minute period to exclude the possibility of any 2 choir boys poking about unobserved anywhere in or near the sacristy.

The very big issue is that the police, using extremely cheap methods of basic police work, ought to have been able to have worked this lack of opportunity out for themselves and the case with its huge costs and massive ramifications not only for Pell but for the Catholic church never have gone to trial.

The conclusion is that a wide-ranging inquiry into the police investigation is required and that ought to be the focus even now before the High Court has ruled.

I urge people to read widely across Chris Friel’s extensive work on the Pell case and on some other issues as well found here https://independent.academia.edu/ChrisFriel

Bellow is;
https://www.academia.edu/40840873/The_Hiatus_and_the_Crown and I have copied this work in full and just laid it up differently and added some additional comments.
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The Hiatus and the Crown by Chris Friel

The “hiatus” is an enormous problem for the Crown. Robert Richter’s moving animation was meant to highlight it as Bret Walker underlined in his appeal. I have argued that the very idea (supported by the majority) was demolished by the dissent, albeit without using the word. Recently, both Keith Windschuttle and Andrew Bolt have provided very concrete demonstrations of the impossibility by attending carefully to the progress of the altar servers in the procession. I have tried to dot a few I’s, and cross some T’s in this respect. Actually, however long the procession took makes little odds as the altar servers in the procession were bound to arrive either before or shortly after the rogue choirboys. [Here I have to say that the leaders of the procession had to get there FIRST and the tail end of that same procession had to get there at about the same time that J gave evidence that he and R arrived and started poking around, ie. the room was occupied thus preventing the initial proposed poking around] This means [additionally] that they [the other Priests and Adult altar servers] would have interrupted Pell’s six minutes’ worth of scandalous behaviour, [making it] something that could not have gone undetected. For this reason there was just no opportunity for the assault to happen. The Crown, of course, were quite aware of the problem, and attempted to meet it by a conjecture quite unsupported by the evidence which they had to retract before the jury (upon a submission from the defence). I shall present some of the transcript from the trial and make some observations.

The relevant transcript is as follows: The prosecutor initially told the jury in his final address (at 1446):
‘Altar servers, according to McGlone, go in to priest sacristy, bow to the crucifix to end the mass, according to McGlone, before returning to their worker sacristy awaiting the interval of decorum, that Potter and Portelli spoke about, that must elapse before clearing duties can begin. Poking around the corridor, priest sacristy door unlocked and opened, altar boys go in.

The prosecutor went on to say (at 1461): ‘So I’m just doing it frame by frame if you like to give you an idea of what the Crown is submitting occurred on this occasion, the subject of the first incident. Then the altar servers enter and bow to the crucifix before leaving the priest sacristy and awaiting the green light from Max Potter. It is then another five to six minutes, p.473, line 26, it’s then another five to six minutes whilst parishioners were walking up to the sanctuary and kneeling, according to Potter, where Potter would give parishioners their private time.’

Then he says (at 1462): ‘So Potter says it’s then another five to six minutes, this is after he’s unlocked the door, having taken the book in, it’s then another five to six minutes whilst parishioners were walking up to the sanctuary and kneeling, “Where we’d give parishioners their private time” before he would move to the sanctuary to start clearing up. Remember he said, “Then we would move in after that,” at p.473. Door 2 unlocked, door opened, altar servers come in, bow to the crucifix, leave, no other priests with them. Then there’s five to six minutes of a gap.’

MS SHANN for the Defence put this to the judge: ‘Can we just raise one issue in particular which is really with the hope that our learned friend might take the opportunity to either tell us where we’ve got this wrong or fix it up with the jury. The submission was put that the altar servers would go into the priests’ sacristy to bow to the crucifix, and then go and wait in the workers’ sacristy for the interval of decorum to pass. That is not a concept which we can find anywhere in the evidence, nor was it put to McGlone who said, “We bow to the cross and then start going back and forth between the priests’ sacristy and sanctuary,” that’s at 981 to 982, or Mr Connor who says, “We bow to the cross and then start clearing in and out of the priests’ sacristy for the next ten minutes,”

1039 to 1040.’ The prosecutor made this retraction in his final address to the jury:‘ Mr Foreman and members of the jury, before lunch I had spoken about there being this period of time after the altar servers had bowed to the crucifix in the priests’ sacristy and before Mr Potter had started ferrying items from the sanctuary to the priests’ sacristy. I think I might have said that the altar server were in their workers’ sacristy during this five to six minute time period. There is, of course, no evidence of that, and there’s no evidence of where they were. There is evidence of where they weren’t from J, and that is that they weren’t in the priests’ sacristy, so I was inviting you to conclude that it was during this period waiting for the green light from Mr Potter that, wherever the altar servers were, it was not in the priests’ sacristy. I just wanted to make that clear.’

In this theory that the Crown had to retract, the idea is that the hiatus in the sacristy ran from approximately the fifth to the tenth minute after Mass and that while the altar servers had by then arrived at the priests’ sacristy to complete the procession with a ceremonial bow they had temporarily left and waited in the workers’ sacristy (which was where, for example, the florists worked) and remained there until it was time to get busy replacing items from the sanctuary to the priests’ sacristy. The notion had to be retracted, though, because it was purely conjectural and found no basis in the evidence. It was very clearly a desperate and arbitrary straw clutched upon by those who appreciated well the strength of the opposing argument. Still, it might be claimed that, though unsupported, the theory may well be true. For if the complainant’s evidence is taken as compelling, and if the altar servers were not present during the assault, but if they had arrived at their destination, and if they had to be on hand as they were soon to get busy, and, for sure, they had to be somewhere … then maybe they were just next door?

To the contrary, we must point out: In the first place, this would lengthen the time of quiet on the sanctuary to around 10 to 12 minutes, a little more, maybe, when one factors in the phased entry and withdrawal of the servers [leading and tailing the procession]. This, perhaps, is not impossible, but the only grounds provided for a hiatus at all are from Potter’s evidence which refers to 5 or 6 minutes immediately after Mass had ended (or after the procession had reached a certain point). To double the hiatus, in effect, is to cherry pick and misapply this evidence. There would simply be no necessity for the altar servers to make themselves scarce for this duration. Moreover, and in the second place, if the altar servers were in the habit of doing such a thing it would be a matter of practice, and evidence of such practice would have to be based on some authority such as Potter. But no citation is given – the idea being purely conjectural.

Third, and in any case, the very purpose of the hiatus is to allow a period of calm on the sanctuary rather than the sacristy. So there is simply no reason to allow peace and quiet to prevail there – by expelling the servers, adults and children [??], only to leave and disturb the florists next door! Fourth, and pertaining to all matters in the hiatus theory, the idea only arises on the supposition that Potter opened up the room and left it unattended for an extended period of time. This is quite gratuitous, but gets its flimsy support from the evidence, to wit, that McGlone could not say that Potter was always there to meet the returning altar servers. Now, the evidence in Court was, as Weinberg noted, was that this would only ever have been for a couple of minutes (see McGlone’s evidence referred to in 729). Still, we have to ask where Potter was during this time, and there simply is no reason to think that he would be in the workers’ sacristy, preserving the calm of his own work place. For if calm was needed there it was surely needed for him in that place.

Fifth, and moreover, supposing some peace and quiet was needed in the sacristy so that the altar servers (adults included) had to go elsewhere then presumably they would have had to be redirected to that place by someone (Potter) who would have stayed in the priests’ sacristy. For example, he may have wanted people out of the room until the concelebrating priests who had left their valuables in the priest’s sacristy returned so that they might have some security – in which case he would surely have kept watch in that very room – if he unlocked it at all, which seems otiose. [note: serving no practical purpose] If the altar servers had to wait somewhere before they got busy why not just keep them waiting outside? [because they were carrying stuff already that had to be put away all before 2 stray 13 yr old Choristers arrived to start poking about] But, sixth, then, the theory of the eviction to the workers’ sacristy is quite insufficient to exclude others who would return to the priests’ sacristy.

I mean, those who did not have to busy themselves on the sanctuary.
These include concelebrating priests returning to disrobe and collect their valuables (here see Potter’s evidence in 727, 732; Finnigan’s 735-6),
those who had collected money and who were handing it over to those who would deposit in the safe (728),
and also, in particular, those altar servers who formed the rear of the procession and who were charged with returning the mitre and the crozier.

My understanding from those informed on this matter is that, even though these items would normally be kept in the Bishops’ sacristy [at the time unable to be used because it was being used as an art studio for painstaking repair of valuable works of art] , still, they would be collected in the priests’ sacristy, presumably by the sacristan (Potter) or the assistant sacristan.

Even if a pause in the business of the altar servers made for a hiatus in the to-ing and fro-ing from sacristy to sanctuary this pause would not ensure a hiatus in the sacristy.

Seventh, even if the first, and then the second tranche of altar servers were redirected (there and back again) from priests’ to workers’ sacristy (for no assigned reason) we have in any case no peace and quiet in the very public corridor that included, say, people working in offices who would have wished to have been allowed to give evidence
i (see Finnigan referred to in 734; Mallinson, 737; Cox, 735; and also Rodney Dearing, 738). Just before when they were sneaking in, and just after when they were “freaking out,” the choristers would have encountered this crowd – contrary to the evidence given by the complainant. The sneaking in, especially, which on this theory would have been only after all the altar servers had been and gone (before coming back again shortly), would have been especially acute.

Eighth, we can add that this would equally be true of Pell who arrived after the choirboys did allowing them time to start poking, stealing, and drinking. We would only point out that in this scenario the brazenness of his already bold actions is increased by the recent presence and current proximity of the altar servers, and also, by making his return later, affords him even less time for interruption (say from his MC who he somehow managed to shake off).

Ninth, we have elsewhere pointed out the difficulties for the account given of the return of the choristers. We would simply point out that an additional delay of 5 or 6 minutes plus only makes the account more problematic, for example, in meeting up with the other choristers.

Tenth, and finally, we note that Justices Ferguson and Maxwell, whose task it was not only to give a ruling but to offer reasons, while they conclude (at 300): “In our view, taking the evidence as a whole, it was open to the jury to find that the assaults took place in the 5-6 minutes of private prayer time and that this was before the ‘hive of activity’ described by the other witnesses began,” so that strictly speaking they do not assert that this hiatus began immediately after Mass, nevertheless, have no recourse to such there-and-back-again fancies at one time mooted by the Crown. Were they thinking along such lines we feel that they would have done well (a) to inform every one of their thinking, and (b) to meet some of the obvious objections.

Let us conclude here. We cannot think that the appellant judges were unaware of the desperate contortions of the Crown in their search for a spare six minutes. It seems to us that the Crown try everything not to run into that most explosive of conclusions, that the allegations cannot have been true for there was simply no opportunity for the crime.

The fundamental problem, though, is that the altar servers returned to the sacristy, including those bringing back the mitre and crozier. The so-called hiatus must of necessity either have been before this return or else after it. Both possibilities must be rejected. If it is said that the hiatus was before the return then a consideration of the time taken for the procession shows that the hiatus would have elapsed by the time the choirboys reached the sacristy. This is true regardless of whether the procession was quick or slow as the altar servers who would bring the hiatus to an end were in the very same procession as the choirboys.

However, if it is said that the hiatus began after the altar servers returned then at least two problems arise. The first concerns the whereabouts of the altar servers, for as we have shown, the idea that they were dismissed to a room nearby is untenable. The second problem concerns the fact that the hiatus was terminated by several others, not just altar servers. Strictly speaking, the hiatus was only ever in the sanctuary, and not in the locale of the alleged assault.

Obviously, the contortions and distortions of the Crown cannot have gone unnoticed by the majority. With this in mind the reader may care to take a microscope to the relevant passages that we have already critiqued. I argued that the glaring omission in their treatment was a complete failure to address just when the altar servers returned, how long the procession took. However, it can also be noted how difficult it is to pin the majority down as to whether the hiatus was before or after the return – this notwithstanding the fact that they appear to locate it immediately after Mass, something they are careful never to state explicitly. The reason is clear enough. They consider the matter first with the left eye by putting their hands over their right, and then with their right eye by putting their hands over their left. Unfortunately for them, they are totally blind in both eyes.

i https://angelusnews.com/news/world/former-melbourne-cathedral-workers-doubt-pell-abuse-could-have-occurred/

END
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A great contribution from Chris S Friel.

Nevertheless, despite ‘the stunt’, the time required for opportunity still didn’t actually add up. The jury -and the appeal Judges also- were all conned into thinking the timing did make sense. They were all unable to keep track of the numbers because the Jury had been told that J gave the only evidence of where they were not, with respect to the availability of the room and as it was believable evidence from ‘a witness of truth’ no less and that ‘if you believed him you would have no trouble convicting’ Pell then there was no requirement to dig too deeply into the actual and plentiful evidence that did contradict J! He had said the room was empty and the prosecution then fudged and told people that this was the only evidence, so the others that had to be somewhere were where the prosecution had without any evidence placed them. The jury was asked to conclude that as indicated by them -even if they were forced to withdraw because there was NO evidence for this- logically that is where they all were.

The jury ought to have retained their doubt. The Majority ought to have seen right through the stunt.

I just want to add that it’s my understanding that the tail of the procession that arrived about 1 minute or so after the head of that steadily moving continuous line of Catholics included priests; and that they did not have duties to ‘clean up’ back in the Sanctuary but rather just had their de-vesting to attend to and then after whatever small talk at the end of another mass occurred amongst themselves, make their way back into the common corridor to then go their way for Sunday afternoon. Now sacred vestments don’t get dumped in a washing basket like a bunch of footy guernseys by teens that then might run for the door these priests are altogether more ponderous. They have specific procedures to follow. The garments are carefully and very respectfully treated and put away appropriately by those that are wearing them – except for the Bishop who when he eventually gets there has a helper to assist him take them off and put them away and who is as Master of Ceremonies supposed to as his job description not leave his Bishops side!

Self evidently all this other devesting also takes time including that spent in that corridor that prevents the room being available for the vile attacks that were alleged. The Adult altar servers (and as I understand it that is all there was but I’m now not sure how I got that impression), would then have after each finished his particular ‘hive of activity’ tasks in the sanctuary then end his tasks by coming back through the corridor into the sacristy and then start to de-vest as well. Having devested they all then had to go out through that same corridor to go home or wherever else for the rest of the Sunday activities.

There never was any available time for offending and so we may conclude that this incident is entirely delusional (where it is not just plain lies, for example changing the story from Pell locked to Pell ‘blocked’ the door is more than delusion).

‘What is to be done’ after the High Court acquits Pell? The dramatic events are less than 5 months away. A fightback could be spectacular or people could just be relieved and the usual suspects who were up to their necks in this terrible beat up be allowed to sneer at Pell’s luck, at having the wealth to get him off etc.

If there is to be an exposure it ought not just be a job for Andrew Bolt, Miranda Devine, Greg Craven, Gerard Henderson and the other usual suspects from the right who are in the position to publish. see https://www.heraldsun.com.au/blogs/andrew-bolt/more-doubts-over-pell-case-paul-kelly-and-guy-rundle/news-story/914ef9fdad71a39f7ec822e62fb99f40 The genuine Left ought to show up as part of the bigger picture of exposing this MSM pseudoleft that has in 2019 so ‘jumped the shark’ with their hysteria.

Democrats ought to speak up now and go public with our challenge to that MSM hysteria. We well know ‘where the broom does not reach, the dust will not vanish of its own accord’.

The new religion is now built up to sufficient strength to simply shout ‘denier’ and effectively silence people with their de-platforming methods. They now hunt for ‘witches’ and every day they find us, denounce us and silence us. Pell is just the most prominent ‘climate denier’.

2020 is a great opportunity for a prize-fight. Happy New year to all fighters for democracy.

Czar Vlad the Self Important has a track record that fits the old saying ‘when your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail’. That’s exactly his history; from smashing Grozny right through to today when it’s Libya’s 2nd turn.

The first go-round in Libya was over these last 4 years and was much like his first go in Syria. In Syria it was all behind the scenes support of a very long term Russian ally (that bought lots of weapons and hosted russia’s only mediteranian naval facility) and so it has been with Haftar the anti democratic military thug vying for control of Libya.

Now we are informed in the MSM that 1,000 ‘private mercenary’ russian special forces are deployed in Libya. They are the ‘plausibly deniable’ troops that the russian’s put first into almost any conflict and just the other day they have been denied by Putin. Call me a cynic but I think if Putin says they are not there we can safely assume they are!

Just recall the hundreds of Russians that the US air force killed in Syria back in February 2018. They had crossed the Euphrates heading towards the north eastern oil fields. A blatant effort to test US resolve over a deconfliction line – being that very river. Big mistake for them, but not for Vlad who had just used them for his test of the US. https://www.newsweek.com/euphrates-massacre-200-russians-left-dead-proxy-battle-us-806798 Putin could just shrug his shoulders and explain it away as nothing to do with him! Because, he explained, it was just some foolish contractors off on a spree, he thus didn’t have to respond in any manner that was face saving or showed strength of leadership. He didn’t have to react and take any action that perhaps could be dumb and escalate events in an uncontroled manner. He didn’t have to take any action at all. This method allows Putin to shug his ‘powerful russian shoulders’ and then bide his time for doing something else where and when new opportunities present; and to be sure, they will present soon enough in this region.

The trouble with all this democracy stuff is that if people support democratic transformation of the world there are deadly consequences to face. Nothing this good comes for free as the saying goes. If elections are enabled then conservatives will come to power where they have mass support and in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) that will result in Islamists coming to power! Erdogan is exactly a case in point! Morsi was another such case and so is the situation in Libya. The people of the region are as religious (and more so) than were Australians prior to WW1. There is nothing surprising about who they will vote for.

The struggle for first stage democracy is the struggle for elections that will elect the Islamists and some of them may even then turn into or out to be islamofascists. That can’t be helped if you are a democrat. Struggle within the ranks of the believers is the only way to move forward as we have seen with our own western history. There is no skipping of stages and modernity being dropped on the world without the struggle being among the people themselves. No liberal democrat can prevent a conservative from winning an election by refusing to hold them.

Here we are at the close of 2019 and the glaring reality of the modern western world is that the policies of the pseudoleft are as anti democratic as any open right winger in the US foreign policy establishment. They would rather the elections weren’t held in the MENA rather than accept that Islamists will win them because they currently have the support of the masses. Consider how Tony Abbott was quite happy to see Sisi overthrow Morsi the islamist on 3/07/13! Given the context of the Syrian slaughter that was then underway, a more pathetic demonstration that open conservatives had learned as little about the world as had their pseudoleftist mirror images is hard to imagine.

The pseudoleft and ‘realist’ right both hold the masses in contempt. They share a view of the war that was launched to specifically liberate the Iraqi masses. The pseudoleft and open rightists say it was the war against Iraq! They even think that it must have been for oil and has thus failed because the Iraqi people still control the oil. They say it was a disaster and even that it was a mistake! But while these ‘lefts’ and open rights are in fierce agreement nevertheless they both know the liberation can not be undone by them. They know the revolution no matter how backward this society is, is off and running and not just for Iraq but well beyond. The Iraqi masses are now engaged and working through the political and economic struggles that can’t just disappear because people have a right to vote and form political parties and own and run news services, news-papers TV and radio stations and make quite humble blog posts etc. The terror regime was over time smashed! The mechanized army was smashed quickly. The underground baathist army has had revolutionary war fall on it! Baathists fight now off the back foot and democrats are in the ascendant position. This is the horror that Baathists face! They are the hunted they are the desperate ones they are the doomed. The Iraqi masses now have the opportunity to advance to our (pathetic) western standards!

Now what about Libya?

My prediction is that (if heard by then) that Pell will be out by ANZAC day!

Two High Court judges have considered Pell’s application just on the written submissions alone. They considered factors such as whether their hearing of an appeal was a matter of public importance, whether there is a matter of law to clarify or if it’s just ‘in the interests of the administration of justice’ and they decided not to decide! They chose instead to drag the full bench in on this very first decision, and as I have said I think this has been a very wise approach.

The 2 J’s have put the matter of even if the High Court ought to hear this appeal before the full bench. This approach brings the matter on far sooner (it keeps this case out of the queue that is already established without privileging the Cardinal). If they had accepted the appeal and set it down for a hearing of the full bench it would have joined the queue and that would add perhaps a year of extra jail time to be served by this obviously innocent man.

‘On 17 September, Pell sought special leave to appeal to the High Court of Australia, the final court of appeal in Australia.[236][9][237] On 13 November, two justices of the High Court referred the decision on leave to appeal to a full-court “for argument as on an appeal”.[23][24]

On 19 November 2019, most of the High Court appeal timeline was set. Pell’s lawyers were ordered to submit by 8 January 2020 reasons why Pell’s conviction should be overturned. Prosecutors will then have until 5 February to submit reasons why the conviction should be upheld. Pell will then be ordered to respond by 26 February. The hearing is likely to take place around a month after these procedures’ [238]

So the hearing is probably going to occur in April.

From reading around the legal journalists etc., I am now confident that enough people have ‘got it’. Enough of the evidence came out with Mark WeinbergJ dissent and also in the majority’s faulty reasons to conclude that the ABC driven case has finally fallen in a heap.

Everyone involved in the procession had to be somewhere at the time it ended and that made the offending impossible not just highly improbable. This case is worse than the Chamberlain case because it is demonstrably senseless for anyone who can count to 6. I now say Pell will win 7 nil and be let out immediately, but having lost 6-0 myself in my HC case….

There was simply no opportunity for the rapes to have occurred; it was therefore not open to the jury to reach a guilty verdict. This case has had a correct verdict already written by the dissenting J Mark Weinberg. The other 2 just can’t count and have disgraced themselves.

Frankly, if the trial judge Kidd J had been doing his job correctly he ought to have instructed the jury to acquit Pell. Kidd J simply dropped the ball! These 2 High Court judges read MWj and fully understand that there was no opportunity to commit the crimes and the police ought to have known this as well! If you can count you can work this case out. The police were criminally negligent in spending millions of dollars and causing such hardship to an obviously innocent individual that they were out to get and so were the judges with the possible exception of the magistrate!

The ABC can count as well. The management of the ABC has let the vilest assault on Pell get going and keep going despite the accusations not adding up! Milligan, Marr and Minchin etc are all partially responsible for what has unfolded. ABC management and staff ought to be held to account as well but don’t hold your breath.

The current Victorian Premier Andrews ought to be shamed for his stand against Abbott as well, but don’t look in that direction either!

I can feel the wagons circling already. Stuff Xmas I can’t wait for ANZAC day!
….
BTW as Morrison sensibly sticks to his guns there is no sign of that clearly hysterical panic on the climate alarmist front stopping in Australia and people will recall that Pell is a bad man on this pseudo-left front as well!

Anyway, with drought and fires and the ABC in full hysterical flight, all that can save us is saint Greta, or better still a local 15year old just to go one better! Fortunately with her method of travel Greta won’t be traveling down-under anytime soon, so we need a local child leader.

While we wait for our local saint this list of predictions is a good reference for sinners. https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2018-10-11-manhattan-contrarian-quiz-climate-tipping-points-edition

The following was a comment I posted elsewhere (I have made slight corrections here)

High Court grants leave for George Pell appeal

‘1st an important correction. The 2 J’s of the HC have not accepted the appeal but very cleverly have put that question before the full bench (and that can be 7 or Just 5 j’s). The important point is that this brings the matter on in the fastest manner possible.

Before explaining why I will just state baldly that it is self-evident at this point that Pell’s conviction is unsafe. Further than that the now supposedly proven offending was literally impossible to have taken place. The complainant is either a mentally troubled person or a liar, I think the evidence is for the former. Now to the why.

1/The location was not empty for the required offending.

2/The complainant could not get there from his ‘starting point’ (the back gate very near where the choir separate from the others in the procession altar servers & priests. Not possible even if he was running (back around and into and then in the cathedral) with his alleged other ‘victim’ still wearing his dress like choir uniform. The altar servers can not vanish at any point and always took about 6 minutes for the procession after they got back they bowed to the cross and then had duties that kept the sacristy a literal hive of ‘activity.’ https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2019/10/pells-new-appeal-and-this-hiatus-this-gp/

3/The only Sundays that were available for the allegation were the 15th and 22nd, and the 15th had a very good 3rd witness -McGlone- that placed Pell out front of the Cathedral for the period, as Pell and Portelli had said was his practice and what is good politics!

13yr olds would remember what happened just before Xmas when they were in the 1st year of their 2 year stint. Xmas is a very big event for Christians, and just to be clear I’m an atheist even something of an anti-theist as well as being a revolutionary leftist so I have little in common with Pell and his whole world view.

4/ Before I was able to understand the impossible timeline I had concluded that this case was NOT making any sense and had read up on some of Milligan’s articles about ‘the Kid and the Choirboy’ and I had listened to Marr’s podcast ‘The Reckoning’. In the latter, we were told by the young woman who attended ALL court days that the ‘victim’ had told his brother and sister about the event on his grandmother’s 80th birthday while drunk in the back of the car being driven home. Now here is where we are forced to speculate because the evidence is not transparently presented. It is evident to me that this incident was both after the other man’s death and must have been conveyed to both ‘the Kids’ mother and then to the police. SANO police then approached the grieving mother and her ex and tried their level best to get more evidence but got nothing. The ‘kid’ was only later convinced to give a formal statement to the police. It seems that the mother who had been concerned about the mental state of her son now had a reason for all the trouble and was out to get Pell as was SANO.

Now the upshot of all this is that the HC will hear this and they will find in Pell’s favor and he will be out by the end of May at the latest I would think. But that ought not to be where this case ends. The police ought to be investigated and face the consequences of putting a case together that they ought to have known did not have an opportunity to have happened. Then Milligan and the ABC ought to be exposed for what they have been up to also Marr and his puppet (who is herself currently writing a book about this).

There are still people that think Lindy killed her baby and we must remember that even the HC got her case wrong! But there is no way that people can’t count the tick tick time that shatters this complaint. It is the work of a troubled mind that did not even know what he was talking about and had to change his story as they are to this very day with the locked door being now changed to the blocked door in the latest reprint of Milligan’s book. But that patch up just makes it worse because then the offending had to take place in the corner and Pell could not have even discovered the red wine swigging boys (proven to be white wine) until he got right into the hive of activity area called the after mass sacristy.

The police have caused millions of dollars of public funds to be wasted and Pell has been persecuted for something that never happened.

Even when this rotten case is overturned none of us will be safe until what led to this is dealt with. But that is for another time…’

The timeline for the HC appeal is now set but the secret evidence is now thanks to the Supreme Court Appeal sufficiently out in the open and it is laughable!

Here is the big conclusion from Keith Windshuttle

The timeline published here shows that the hypothesis of the Appeal Court majority, that there was a hiatus period during which Potter waited for private prayers to end in the cathedral, during which time the priests’ sacristy was occupied solely by Pell and the two choirboys, is wrong.

The Ferguson–Maxwell scenario made two mistakes. It neglected to factor into its own assumptions the six minutes needed for the procession, including the altar servers, to move from inside the cathedral to its outside rear gate, and then into the priests’ sacristy; and it put aside what the altar servers told them they did once the procession was over.

The timeline shows that the altar servers, especially those who headed the procession, would have got to the priests’ sacristy before the two boys. They took a more direct route to that room than the choirboy, who said he and his friend backtracked externally from the toilet corridor to the south transept door before re-entering the cathedral and following the internal route to the priests’ sacristy, a route Ferguson and Maxwell accepted as true [par 203].

My informant about the cathedral says that, starting from the rear gate, it would take the altar servers sixteen seconds (twenty-two paces) to go along the toilet corridor to the priests’ sacristy. However, using the choirboys’ alternative route via the south transept doors, it would have taken them one minute sixteen seconds (115 paces) to go from the rear gate to the sacristy. The altar servers went there directly and, finding the door unlocked, as the two judges assure us it was, would have gone in exactly one minute before the boys arrived.

So there was no time available in that room after the Mass for the six minutes of sexual abuse to take place. As the defense rightly argued, the scenario described by Pell’s accuser is not only the subject of reasonable doubt, it is extremely improbable it ever happened.

Keith Windschuttle is Editor of Quadrant.

https://quadrant.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/timeline-1.png

https://quadrant.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/timeline-2.png

Now Keith ought to have added -just to kick the shit out of these 2 breathtakingly incompetent appeal court judges- that if the altar servers etc had found the sacristy locked then so would have any choir boys but also that they would be standing there waiting to finish work and would have then said to 2 wayward choir boys what the hell are you 2 doing here? The altar servers had work to do before they could devest and go home! What the hell do these incompetent judges think they were going to do with the stuff they were carrying that is stored in that sacristy? These judicial morons are not fit for the jobs that they are doing and they ought to resign or be removed!

I wonder if Premier Andrews can now see this looming 7-0 HC train wreck! The word Acquitted on all the front pages! At some stage, he will have to face up to the Catholics and they ought to kick the shit out of him for what he said about Abbott who was not trying to do anything other than visit a friend in jail (who he happened to also believe was innocent). What sort of rat is Andrews?

No choice but to run for their lives.

Artillery is for destroying a military opponent or any ‘legitimate target of war’ and I’m always glad to hear of any people running away from artillery directed at military forces operating near them. Naturally directing such fire at civilians is a war crime and so is systematically bombing hospitals from the air. When that bombing is the reality, plausible denial is sought. Putin is a criminal perpetrator and is bombing hospitals as policy. This has been a continuation of Assad’s policies. Yet even reckless aerial bombing really is the same as directing artillery fire at civilians. The HIRISE coalition doesn’t have any credibility remaining over refugee-making issues like hospital bombing. Quite simply Putin is a war criminal assisting Assad who is another war criminal and Steve obviously knows this just as well as I do. So my question is; what is the plan to stop these criminals from committing their ongoing crimes? It can’t possibly be to declare that the criminally conducted war is over and that these criminals won! Any declaration that the war is over just permits a return to their smaller scale, day by day normal crimes. It’s no plan to stop the war criminals.

So what is or ought to be the ‘western’ plan to stop them committing crimes? After all, even people like Steve are not opposed to revolution or so he proudly says; and we are to understand by that, not opposed to a revolution for democracy, meaning very broadly, almost across the political and cultural swamp of the middle east. So we are to understand that Steve is all for the draining of that swamp, that is to say, the changing of the politics and culture from brute tyranny to liberal democracy at some stage 1 level. (whatever that exactly means for their region). The west had to start somewhere and so will they. It won’t look like the current west anymore than a trip back in time would take us to some good old days.

What such ‘support’ for revolution means (at a minimum) is acceptance of democratic elections under a constitution that protects the minority from the oppression of a majority in the manner of the Iraqi constitution, and then the ongoing struggle to make those words a living functioning reality. All pretty basic stuff for people who say ‘And this doesn’t mean I’m against communism or against revolution it just means I’m against stupid.’ sic We all remember that Jefferson owned slaves, and there are demonstrations, riots, and killing in Iraq right now!

Now I have often objected to actions from people who while nominally on my side do things that are ‘stupid’, one only has to go back a couple of days and see how deadly and obviously harmful such rotten actions can be. I called it out straight away but that didn’t stop Steve from making use of the same crime to attack the whole war. Democrats are opposed to all such crimes but we can’t forget those bigger crimes that set the stage for these other crimes. Those bigger crimes have driven ½ the population of Syria out of their homes and they haven’t stopped yet! Ultimately 500,000 deaths stem from the crime of a tyranny holding on to power when the peaceful revolution made its clear demands. And what have NATO leaders been doing to end the big HIRISE crimes? Other than killing ISIS not much!

Now having killed enough ISIS thugs Trump would like to take his troops and go home but his military advisors have told him that he actually has to go back in and so now the whole world hasn’t got a clue what will happen next. This is a very confusing period for anyone.

But the PKK ought to know that their old strategy is now in tatters, even if their western cheer squad has (as usual) no clue what is happening and wait to be told what to think. ISIS has worked out the same thing for its strategy, and Al Qaeda, who told them from the start that they would fail with their adventurous land grab strategy, can now shake their heads as they themselves go deeper underground to continue to hide among the good Muslims! That has always been their method for Syria and it is very sound. What the pseudo-left can’t deny is that there is such a thing as good Muslims and that they constitute the current majority in all the countries of the Middle East that is going to go through any democratic revolution. These good Muslims must come to power from any such democratic process. So consequently there will be deep Islamofascist sleepers within these political formations. That really can’t be stopped and must be constantly countered. That is just how the world works. People very often pretend one thing and work towards another just look at al Sisi saluting his political leader not long before he staged a coup and arrested him!

The enemy fights back and that is why such a democratic revolution is protracted despite any wish that it was not so. They have often won in the past and will always have a fightback of some sort.

Now, what of the Turkish, Erdogan-style Islamists? These people have waged a struggle for democracy against exactly the enemy coup type militarists etc., for decades. Just what are these Islamists up to?

They have to work to keep the good Muslims from further radicalizing, while fully understanding that they are committed to Islamic norms; and that includes some notion of Jihad because that is the culture that they are in.

Now this is when it gets complicated and westerners have to look to what Erdogan has done at home as an indication of what his intentions are next door. He ordered the Army in for this 4th occasion and so that is now both a very big footprint of territory and a large army. The Turks have on every occasion they deployed made a great show of the number of troops being sent in! The great size of these deployments is almost right out there on full display. A bit like Mao along the lines of if you need 10 send 20 or 30 and quite unlike the Rumsfeld method. Not quite as plain, but for a keen observer like me something like the demonstrations breaking out in Lebanon that are now on show. Don’t go asking for proof that they are the biggest army, because it is just an assertion that I make with no intention of proving.

Rather than Erdogan, it is Putin who is the well-known liar that once even ½ fooled the ½ theorists that used to post their thinking about Syria at this site. They gave up posting about Syria and I gave up annoying them about their foolishness. But now Steve is making the assertion that the very big military forces commanded by Erdogan are in a coalition with Islamofascists. He wants me to ‘…recognise that Turkey and IS were in an informal alliance.’ He is asserting that perhaps the vilest style of Islamofascist that we have seen since well…ever really, and that is up against some stiff competition – and Erdogan are mates! This accusation is commonly made by ‘the usual suspects and to be expected even from the MSM and I have an answer.

We, that is everyone that has ever been positively contributing to this site have opposed such vile creatures that we term Islamofascists since well before 9/11. We have ALSO always stood up in opposition to all those pseudo-leftist ‘stop the war coalitions’ and all their ‘hands off’ and never unite lines. The track record is now over a very long time. All of us have supported armed revolution to overthrow oppressors.

I have always had consistent ‘rotten’ Maoist politics that are founded on support for the underlying democratic revolution. We have often argued that one can’t be a communist without first being a revolutionary democrat and I have never stopped learning about and thinking about Syria even though I haven’t posted much recently. From my studies, it is apparent that HIRISE is the issue the western world has to overcome in order to stop the crimes that Steve ought to call first-line ‘stupid’, rather than focus on the second tier crimes that will eventuate even as we try our best to ensure they do not.

The second tier will nevertheless happen because there are weak link allies on the democrat side and also enemies concealed within. That is the nature of not just our war but all revolutionary war. What the Assad-HIRISE has been up to for all these years is not an accident and near-miss collateral damage but targeted terror bombing.  HIRISE is waging a terror war and driving off the Syrian people who wanted to live free of the current undemocratic tyranny. Refugees and Rubblestan were both obviously created as policy! The second-tier crimes that happen from the democrat’s side are not in the interests of the Islamist democrat types that Erdogan has shown himself to be over decades of struggle. That is the answer.

Back in 2011 Syrian soldiers who would not fire on their own people formed the FSA and ran for their lives for the protection of the Turkish border and the other borders as well. But Turkey is where they are principally based. Then they started to fight back and that is why the animation looks as it does. The first green territory was very often right on the border. It was the ‘green team’ because it was never just soldiers that ran for their lives who formed the FSA and then fought back. It was the masses that came out from Friday prayers who were subsequently shot down in their peaceful demonstrations who formed the majority of those that fought back. They didn’t just accept orders from any FSA, composed as it was of former regime soldiers anyway! They stood up separately and made their own revolution. They have negotiated from their own POV and relative strength and not just accepted orders. Civil war complications from the very start were the reality for Syria and understood to be so from the very start of the resistance by any experienced western observer.

By 2019 however; through a protracted and massive struggle, Turkey has helped build (shelter, equip and train) a force with sufficient discipline that now has the ‘mass’ to pull into its orbit many other smaller rebel groups as it goes forward under that Turkish protection with Turkish supplied arms, etc.  This force is now called the Syrian National Army and that name spells out what it is designed to do in the future rather than what it is doing now.

What the SNA is doing now is taking shelter from HIRISE bombing under the protection of a massive mechanized army that is very capable of defeating the HIRISE professionals it faces off against. In reality, HIRISE is most assuredly battle-hardened but still not comparable to the fully integrated Turkish armed forces it faces. Turkey is a better fighting force in all respects in my opinion and no one ought to doubt, up to whatever task might come its way and also is strategically placed to quickly throw the Assad backing Syrian Arab Army (SAA) out of Aleppo for just one example of what it could do if all this goes pear-shaped.

Arthur has long held the Russian deployment in contempt and I have always agreed with that view in the strategic sense. A paper tiger that Mao depicts. Tactically though it is still a real tiger. But I don’t doubt this puffed-up bunch of terror bombers will become that paper tiger and in the not too distant future.

The Syrian rebels that are going to defeat Putin were once mostly reluctant freedom fighters; they were mostly everyday Islamic believers who had no choice but to organize with the only people they could trust, and just as often could not trust – because Syria was a terror police state with spies and informants everywhere! As often as not trust could only be established when under fire when your real comrades are fighting for their lives with you. That is the reality of civil war generally. It is a universal truism that applies from Ireland to China and everywhere in between.

The conclusion is that people have to learn how to make a revolution on the job and with the raw materials that they have to hand and in Syria they have and are, learning the most with the Turkish government!

Erdogan knows he faces a fascist warmongering coalition led not by Assad who he holds in obvious utter contempt, but now by Putin who is a puffed-up fascist and not much more than a strategic incompetent destroying relations with all his neighbors in a vain attempt to turn back the clock to the old era of Russian superpower status. He is well overstretched and Turkey is just stepping up to its task and that task is to help the Syrian peoples make their revolution against the Putin-led HIRISE troops.

Over the last couple of weeks, this running away from artillery has been happening in an enclave in the Nth East of what used to be Syria. The media has presented this advance as an attack on the Kurds, but Erdogan has explained for years that this territory is run by the PKK, and the western world has long designated them as a terrorist organization – which the Turks have every right to protect themselves from and continue their war against.

The history of the PKK is not now at issue, nor the former practices of the Turkish terror regimes of the past.

Today the issues and solutions are not what they were when the PKK formed up to fight all those decades ago. The new reality must be correctly identified or the whole war will be misunderstood and progressive westerners will not know what is going to happen next.

For several years now this enclave has been colored yellow on maps and has been expanding. It is essentially controlled by the PKK, with only an SDF fig leaf for plausible denial. The Turkish government and Syrian National Army they back are not buying this cover story. This ‘Rojava’ had also contained 3 smaller Assad enclaves colored pink. The pink is now spreading and butting up against SNA green and there is shooting between them. So now, with the Turkish-led action the whole enclave is ‘in play’, and there are currently reports of at least one small Russian force coming under direct fire, from which they withdrew and then told the world it never happened, but it was caught on film!

So what is likely to happen? Will Assad get back control of all this Yellow territory (including the oil) or will the Syrian National Army under the protective wing of the Turkish military steadily take over at least most of it and then another period of regrouping drag on?

These are fundamental questions. How will the democratic revolution make progress in Syria if Assad makes the gains that the HIRISE forces are currently enabling?

Turkey is a democracy and so is led by a reasonably conservative Islamist party. Almost every county in this region would be if the democratic revolution is underway to that stage 1 level, and that, Steve, is what I am advocating as a supporter of democratic revolution.

Fascists are making war and I want to know how they are to be defeated by democrats.

Erdogan now the most important political leader in the world.

A long time ago I put that heading up and then shrugged my shoulders and didn’t write anything under it – but given all the current drama I had better spell out, just for the record, what I think is underway now.

4 years after the Russian intervention the world is now watching as a VERY large mechanized army is being inserted in part of what was Syria. They are on the opposite side to those Russians! Many people have failed to notice that this is the biggest picture in this complex development. Most yabbering in the MSM notice only that the Kurds have a big problem and forget that the whole picture of the region must be considered.

What I have termed HIRISE (Hezbollah, Iran, Russia, Iraq (Shia militias) Syria (undemocratic Assad), and Egypt (undemocratic militarists) is going to be the big loser when all this settles down and it will settle down with a FSA Islamist footprint.

The PKK/SDF do not have to join with Assad and his HIRISE suporters. They don’t have to go up against the Turks and the FSA. They have had choices for many years and they have not been willing to make those choices in the interests of genuine democracy. They have not shared power with the FSA but worked willingly with the root of all problems Assad. It is they who have been ethnically cleansing areas and not sharing power with the FSA so this fight was bound to come to them. People should remember that they are as often as not young ‘Turks’ and ‘Iraqi’ Kurds. They are very often non Syrian players just as they demonstrably were not when the Peshmerga turned up to fight ISIS in Kobani. They were correct to show up then and they would do well not to fight now. They are Kurds from the region being given the chance to join with the FSA and stand united against the undemocratic Assad supporting HIRISE. The region is at war.

The Turks for their part are going to continue to make a bigger footprint in Syria and that footprint will resemble current Turkey (a place that has genuine democracy and consequently naturally an Islamist government that is at war with a) islamofascists and b) Kurdish nationalists/separatists. The current Turkish government did not start either war and they have no real choice but to be at war with this Kurdish movement and no choice but to make war to end the HIRISE footprint. The genuine peace effort (despite the coup attempt and historical ill will across Turkey that can be wound back by more democractic practice) can be resumed. Kurdish oppression is still apparent in large parts of the population but change was underway and can be resumed with good will and an end to the armed struggle. I think that good will is on offer in Istanbul and other parts of Turkey and ought to be grabbed with both hands by the Kurd leadership but I think that it will not be and there will be yet another setback.

The refusal to remove themselves to the east of the Euphrates and allow the FSA to occupy that Arab territory was the indicator of what this would lead to. The young Kurds have been very badly led and sadly they will pay a terrible price for that poor leadership. It is very sad to see this slaughter of people I so admire and instinctively side with. But the Kurdish nation can not be liberated at the expense of the Arab peoples that constitute the vast bulk of the Syrian peoples. They must deal with the FSA not Assad.

There is even now a way forward for the Kurds and that is with a genuine democratic process and that process genuinely is being regionally led by Erdogan who is clearly opposite to HIRISE and the PKK in all its forms including as the SDF. The Kurds are not democratic yet but I hope that they will take that turn. The same turn that is required of the masses in Iran and in Egypt and so on. The region requires democratic revolution rather than nationalist border wars that the Kurds must back down from. The YPG etc and the SDF is just a PKK ruse. The SDF ought be made real.

The SDF has made war on the FSA just as the HIRISE troops have. They have collaborated with the HIRISE and are scrambling to do so now but it won’t work. The Turks are moving too fast for the HIRISE and are prepared to spread the war out from Idlib if they start being attacked by them so this is a push and shove moment.

We could say ‘I don’t blame the Kurds at the moment’ but the long term problem is that there can be zero democracy while millions of Syrian’s are displaced and not permitted to return to a safe country and that must be a democratic country. They can’t return if ‘Assad’ remains. HIRISE is no solution and is a fascist preserving enclave that has to be overthrown. It is a long term project.

Only Turkey and NATO who, apart from Trump (and who can tell with ga ga Trump) do not yet support the Turks, can do that liberation in anything like a realistic time frame. But with Russians involved that timeframe is not short.

The Turks have upped their involvement just as I said they would be eventually forced to do. They have taken this next move at about the right time and the people who will benefit from it are the returning Syrians who can only return to democracy. They have shown that they can take control of Islamist Syria and control the Islamofascists. They can’t however return people to paddocks and little towns so big cities must come on the agenda next.

The Kurds are not very happy but they have played their side and are still sitting in Manbij so they have given zero ground and now want to invite Assad and the Russians into Manbij. It ain’t going to happen.

The Kurds ought to have pulled out years ago and made some other substantial consessions to the Turks and re-established a genuine peace process that had been underway till the Syrian Civil war brought it back from deaths door.

This advance into Syria is the Free Syrian Army backed by democratic Islamists!

The Turkish military are under the control of the genuinely democratic and elected government of Turkey and they are the best in a rotten region.

The Islamist revolutionary fighters can best be controlled by this force.

What makes this a great problem for the HIRISE is that the US military is STILL very much around and in great demand now apparently. This lurking force is not going to let any significant territory fall to ‘Assad’.

HIRISE is the big loser from this.

This move forward is going to shake things up and despite the ABC/BBC commentary stability is not to be hoped for.

Below I have ‘corrected’, rearranged and reposted the stream of anti-communist attacks by Steve dumped on the Pell thread in a particularly gross manner. It is particularly gross considering the previous effort on my part devoted to dealing with the WW2 policies of the USSR, and the assessment also made by other communists of my ilk and background of the 70% correctness of Stalin’s overall efforts to make revolution.

This dump of anti-communist bile is particularly notable at the time of the 30th anniversary of the Tiannanmen Square massacre by Deng and his anti- Mao capitalist roaders – that really did turn out to be fascists as Mao said they would. And also on the 75th D-day commemorations where the western imperialists scrambled to prevent the Red Army from overrunning all of Germany etc., (and perhaps liberating France as well).

The distraction of the trials remains a distraction whatever the guilt or innocence of all or any of the various accused.

A gigantic war was planned by very many powers that hated the USSR and wished to see it destroyed. That plan would inevitably cost tens of millions of lives. Yet Stalin is the constant baddie that must be focused on by Steve when all this does is hide the mass-murdering war planners and I do not speak of the Japanese. http://thediplomat.com/2012/08/28/the-forgotten-soviet-japanese-war-of-1939/

Nor do I speak of the Poles, Hungarians, Finns and all the other bordering countries who were well known to be actively plotting to destroy the USSR.

I am also not referring to the Germans or the Italians either as their hatred and goals are also very well understood by sensible people.

I am referring primarily to Britain, France and the U.S.A.!

‘But war is inexorable. It cannot be hidden under any guise. For no “axes,” “triangles” or “anti-Comintern pacts” can hide the fact that in this period Japan has seized a vast stretch of territory in China, that Italy has seized Abyssinia, that Germany has seized Austria and the Sudeten region, that Germany and Italy together have seized Spain — and all this in defiance of the interests of the non-aggressive states. The war remains a war; the military bloc of aggressors remains a military bloc; and the aggressors remain aggressors.

It is a distinguishing feature of the new imperialist war that it has not yet become a universal, a world war. The war is being waged by aggressor states, who in every way infringe upon the interests of the non-aggressive states, primarily Britain, France and the U.S.A., while the latter draw back and retreat, making concession after concession to the aggressors.

Thus we are witnessing an open re-division of the world and spheres of influence at the expense of the non-aggressive states, without the least attempt at resistance, and even with a certain connivance, on their part.
Incredible, but true.’

Steve claims to be a supporter of the Chinese Revolution, but actually he is still just a garden variety Trotskyite who can’t stand the fact that he is now a cruise missile something or other. Steve can’t move in any direction without condemning the terrible communists, that he insists despite our credentials, are really and fundamentally rotten anti-democrats. Yet his ‘democrats’ were planning mass murder on a gigantic scale.

Stephen Owens June 2, 2019 at 3:59 pm‘OK you are correct about the Chamberlain case and you might be right about the Pell case…’ Well why not leave it at that then? We won’t have long to wait till the 3 judges deliver their acquittal soon enough.

‘…but ‘there is the Moscow Show trial case and I’m sure you are wrong in the position that you have held for decades on that case. Lets recap that case.’

Let’s not; because for a start you have verballed me. I have long held the view that Stalin was just the best out of a fairly rough lot and that Trotsky in particular was utter rubbish as has been ALL the sects that has been spawned with any good words to say about the man. BUT I am pretty close to that exact view with respect to anything descending from Stalin and Mao AS WELL so it gets us…not very far!

Just because I have made some effort to come to grips with the Pell trial that is no excuse to start out on Stalin and the pact all over again.

My position that ‘organized western communists became almost wall to wall rubbish (and were pretty useless in WW2 as well as they flipped and flopped about with little real understanding or independent thought) is not and never was towing any party line. As it happens, the other night in Rundle Mall I ran into exactly the sort of views I am talking about. They were just down from the vegan activists that I am not well disposed to either. Fruitcake city! It was not long before the old CPA hack now greenie was praising Putin and Assad!! Yep I kid you not. Total fuckwittedness.

The well known view from all and even garden variety Maoists, is that Stalin was at best 70% correct in his work that ended 3 years before I was born. I have never paid much attention to the show trials and have only commented on them in an oblique manner. I have said that 5th column activities are a known part of the fascists tool box and played a role in other countries invaded by the Germans and that all such activities were crushed in the USSR (along with anybody that got in the way and yes a great many innocent people among them). That is why Stalin is so criticized by the political trend that I have descended from.

But instead of the Moscow trials, I have extensively studied and subsequently explained to Steve why the efforts of Stalin to prevent the war planned by the imperialist capitalist governments was sound strategy but Steve has not referred to my extensive work and has instead posted another content free comment as if he were saying something that refutes my extensive work, when clearly it does nothing to further the foolish position he apparently still holds and simply restates.

‘Stephen Owens June 8, 2019 at 9:23 am https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/German-Soviet_Boundary_and_Friendship_Treaty_28_September_1939
A friendship treaty with Nazi Germany is stupefying, as George Orwell commented at the time. Communists went from the greatest opponents of fascism to questioning whether the Gestapo really existed.’

Actually communists fought under a brilliant strategist and after huge effort won the second world war (D-day for example was just a welcome side show). I remind Steve again that WW2 was (prior to it breaking out and unfolding as it did) being planned by the capitalists as a war designed to destroy the USSR and their up and coming imperialist competitors!  Stalin systematically explained their efforts at the 18th congress and I have never seen a worthwhile refutation of his analysis.

The imperialists are the ones who were the real live capitalist monsters that were actively working to kill multi millions of people! That is the reality that most urgently requires widespread understanding and is being concealed yet again for another generation with these 75th D-day shows. The anti- communist focus is wrong, despite Orwell and Trots from Hitchens through to the most loony insisting that Stalin is the big issue. He is not and never could be when the people that pretend to be democrats were the ones actively planning mass murder and the destruction of the USSR!

That main point aside; somebody shot Kirov!

There is no reason, that I’m aware of, to suspect Stalin of the attack.

Stalin like every other revolutionary had enemies and as Lenin could tell us from experience, they often try to kill you.  Stalin was by the mid 1930s dealing with the looming reality of the biggest war of all time being planned by the capitalists as a present for the USSR.  His job was to make sure it did not happen and all this reflection on history and the trials still requires the perspective that must put 16,000,000 ahead of 16.  Stalin having gone through WW1 and the civil war and the revolutions and the exiles in Siberia , in the big picture sense, knew what was coming!

Steve says;
‘Nikolayev takes a pistol to the Smolny Institute. He is detected attempting to smuggle the gun in but instead of prison he is released and the pistol is given back to him. Later he tries again and gets past the guard of this one of the most secure buildings in the Soviet Union. He makes his way to the 3rd floor and finds 2 people in the corridor Kirov and Chekist Borislov. Niklayev shoots Kirov in the head. He and Borislov are taken into custody unfortunately theres an “accident” and Borisov dies in police custody. Nikolayev confesses and 104 prisoners (non Bolsheviks) are executed for their part in the crime. Then something strange happens. Stalin personally interrogates Nikolayev and discovers that Stalin’s opponents are to blame that the left opposition is in fact working for the Nazi’s. Upshot the trial of the 16. No witnesses by this time. Nikolayev has been executed. No evidence that the jew Trotsky is in the pay of Hitler as asserted during the trial, just confessions. Some of the confessions are clearly false. The accused confessed to meeting in a hotel which was demolished years before the meeting. The accused confessed to taking an international flight but when records are checked no plane lands that day. How you can be so righteous in you position re Pell but so ‘tow the party line’ in the case of the 16 is and always has been beyond me.’

I’m not happy with the word ‘righteous’ and I just don’t tow party lines very well.  I have proved to be an independent thinker that just happens to think very differently to Steve Owens.  Even though we are now united cruise missile enthusiasts, quite sure that war must be made on Assad and Putin, and that Kurd’s ought not try to take over Arab territory, and rather that they ought to continue to pursue a peaceful path forward to more democracy in Turkey.  They have a political partner that has a track record of taking on the anti- democrats that are well understood to have been in power in Turkey since WW2 at the least.

EGYPT is not making democratic progress and the reason is that the Islamist MB would be elected – were elected and so there was a coup by the anti- democrats supported by… Trots no less!!

Steve says, June 3, 2019 at 10:51 pm Most journalists covering the trial were convinced that the confessions were statements of truth. The Observer wrote: “It is futile to think the trial was staged and the charges trumped up. The government’s case against the defendants (Zinoviev and Kamenev) is genuine.” (26) The New Statesman agreed: “It is their (Zinoviev and Kamenev) confession and decision to demand the death sentence for themselves that constitutes the mystery. If they had a hope of acquittal, why confess? If they were guilty of trying to murder Stalin and knew they would be shot in any case, why cringe and crawl instead of defiantly justifying their plot on revolutionary grounds? We would be glad to hear the explanation.” (27) The defendants demanded the death penalty for themselves and this raises no questions in your mind?’

I could and would agree that these issues raise doubts and questions but they do not alter my view of the wisdom of Stalin’s strategy in dealing with the broad plan to destroy the USSR.  The pact is not what you think or propagandise against but rather something else signed after Japan was first fought and set back on it’s heals.  Stalin as a revolutionary with all his flaws had a lot on his plate but he made no error in making sure the war did NOT start as was planned by the people that ruled in the west.

‘Stephen Owens June 6, 2019 at 11:15 pm So Patrick humor me. You are 100% sure that Pell is innocent and 100% sure that Lindy was innocent and you reached these conclusions before their trials began.’

In the case of Pell I did not!  I did put effort into the matter long after his trial.

‘You are also convinced that Trotsky was guilty of conspiring with Hitler despite the complete lack of evidence that this was the case.’

I am not convinced that he was ‘conspiring with Hitler’ I am only convinced that he was working against Stalin and that his policies were a constant disaster particularly in opposition to collective security!

Look at how you have become utterly muddled over your current dilemmas precisely because you did not grasp this issue early in life.

NOW YOU SUPPORT-

No Fly Zone war against Baathist Iraq (retrospectively),

and united front war against Baathists and other fascists

and our ruling elites waging war against ISIS / Al Qaeda types

and NOW you demand that the US imperialist go to war against the Libyan tyrant,

but you still can’t see how bankrupt you are over Kuwait as but one clear example of a stupid double standard!

‘Don’t you think that now that you are giving attention to mistrials that you revisit your conclusion that the Moscow trials were fair and above board. Please don’t use silence as your defense after all these years of putting the case for the defendant’s guilt silence would be an embarrassment for you. (please if you do reply, stick to the topic).’

This ancient trial is your issue, not mine, but to the extent that you throw in anti-non aggression pact crap yet again as if you never got an answer from my POV and despite having had your views extensively dealt with is to the extent that people can see what you are really on about.

I do not have the expertise to comment at length on the trials.

‘Stephen Owens June 8, 2019 at 9:14 am Of course the Moscow show trials were shown to be fraudulent many years ago. Eric Blair aka George Orwell pointed this out at the time of the Hitler/Stalin border and friendship pact asking if Trotsky was in league with Hitler now would be the perfect time to produce the documentary evidence from the Nazi archives.’

I don’t think that any amount of work in this field is going to stop your anti-communist dead end, from being your basic stand that must be contrasted with the above type of analysis

‘When the Red army over ran Berlin that would have been the perfect time to produce the evidence from the Nazi archives. When the Soviet Union fell and archives became open to scholars that would have been the perfect time to produce the hard evidence but none was produced because none existed the whole Moscow show trials were a sham but we know this don’t we?’

Big efforts were being made to do utterly vicious Promethean Movement vandalism work within the USSR so some people (that a sizeable chunk of the population supported) were up to no good from a revolutionary communist POV.

I have other issues and priorities such as demonstrating just how stupid people can be when it comes to strategy and the Soviet non aggression pact in particular.

Obviously I am not as impressed by Orwell as either Hitchens was or you are, but it would be far better for you to deal with Hitchens’ revolutionary perspective on draining the swamp just to remind yourself that what you are up to is truly a total diversion!

Stephen Owens June 8, 2019 at 3:48 pm Orwell taking the piss out of the Moscow show trials by presenting the London show trials. ‘Mr Winston Churchill…Chamberlain and the rest of his gang are no more than a set of Bolsheviks in disguise.’

Fancy Stalin trying to get the 18th congress to understand the connections of events as they looked in march 1939. Just before a certain event that was to cast a very big shadow got going in the east!

http://thediplomat.com/2012/08/28/the-forgotten-soviet-japanese-war-of-1939/

‘The fact that the fighting at Nomonhan coincided with the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact was no coincidence. While Stalin was openly negotiating with Britain and France for a purported anti-fascist alliance, and secretly negotiating with Hitler for their eventual alliance, he was being attacked by German’s ally and anti-Comintern partner, Japan. By the summer of 1939, it was clear that Europe was sliding toward war. Hitler was determined to move east, against Poland. Stalin’s nightmare, to be avoided at all costs, was a two-front war against Germany and Japan. His ideal outcome would be for the fascist/militarist capitalists (Germany, Italy, and Japan) to fight the bourgeois/democratic capitalists (Britain, France, and perhaps the United States), leaving the Soviet Union on the sidelines, the arbiter of Europe after the capitalists had exhausted themselves. The Nazi-Soviet Pact was Stalin’s attempt to achieve his optimal outcome. Not only did it pit Germany against Britain and France and leave the Soviet Union out of the fight – it gave Stalin the freedom to deal decisively with an isolated Japan, which he did at Nomonhan. This is not merely a hypothesis. The linkage between Nomonhan and the Nazi-Soviet Pact is clear even in the German diplomatic documents published in Washington and London in 1948. Recently revealed Soviet-era documents add confirming details.

Zhukov won his spurs at Nomonhan/Khalkhin Gol – and thereby won Stalin’s confidence to entrust him with the high command in late 1941, just in time to avert disaster. Zhukov was able to halt the German onslaught and turn the tide at the gates of Moscow in early December 1941 (arguably the most decisive week of the Second World War) in part by deploying forces from the Soviet Far East. Many of these were the battle-tested troops he used to crush the Japanese at Nomonhan. The Soviet Far Eastern reserves – 15 infantry divisions, 3 cavalry divisions, 1,700 tanks, and 1.500 aircraft – were deployed westward in the autumn of 1941 when Moscow learned that Japan would not attack the Soviet Far East, because it had made an irrevocable decision for southward expansion that would lead to war with the United States.’

(Called the Nomonhan Incident by the Japanese and the Battle of Khalkhin Gol by the Russians).

Two-front war against Germany and Japan WAS avoided by Stalin! The British and the French (for what they were worth as it turned out despite having the largest army on paper) were dragged into fighting while resisting all the way till the Germans forced the fight on them.

The ‘appeasers’ and their supporters have hidden their real position of active and massive war mongering from most people in the west and while Stalin is not read nor understood they will get away with this. They will do so with the active collaboration of Trots who ought to know that their focus achieves this outcome for the apologists for the appeasement policies of the worlds dominant ruling class imperialists of that bygone era.

As we currently see right across the globe there is a dead end in this pseudoleft that is already apparent as issues like Libya, Egypt, Syria, Mali and on and on keep demonstrating.

My advise to Steve is to stop running away to hide in history but rather systematically deal with what is now a VERY big change in where in 2019 Steve stands from the bad old days in ISO land. You are NOT with the loons in Rundle Mall who think themselves left and support Putin and Assad.

Steve now critically supports the deployment of the US, British, French and other western forces to the MENA region!

Steve advocates draining the swamp theory as the strategy for democratic revolution not just in the MENA region but across the globe!

Just remember that if there is backsliding (and there often is by our ruling classes) that will not change what must be done to defeat the anti democrats and spread democracy.  The forceful overthrow of tyranny will be required as there is NO other way forward.

As we see in Hong Kong ‘the capitalist roaders will know no peace’ and democracy is the way forward for the communist revolution!  The ruling capitalists in their ‘communist party’ will not give up their dictatorship!  They will impose their terror until they are stopped by the coming revolution for a new new democracy.

It is right to rebel!

The Victorian Police went after Pell from 2013 with their ‘Operation Tethering’. Nothing turned up until April or so 2014 after a funeral. I think it was not one of the accusations that are now ALL dismissed or dropped it was the only one that in the end broke through and secured the conviction.

The one complaint – that has Pell a convicted pedophile and 2 time child rapist in the sacristy of the Cathedral after Sunday Mass, in full regalia mind!- came from a longer process of being put in shape, and only became a ‘formal statement to the police at June 18, 2015.  That is when the (now) only complainant gives his statement to SANO. Note this is over a year after the funeral of the heroin user who never made any complaint, and it was several months after the complainant talked of the issues to the Grieving Mother (GM).

What happened was that a 31 yr. old man died on April 8, 2014 of a heroin overdose without alleging any historical rape was committed against him or his friend and having told his own mother on 2 separate occasions that he had not been abused in any way at all. He did not tell of any abuse ever.  He never brought such matters up with anyone despite a huge financial incentive for him to do so if it had happened.

We are to believe that 2 boys were supposedly raped and back singing without being missed by the rest of the choir, or dropping a note, let alone bursting out in tears.  Pell is in jail awaiting sentencing.  (he got 6 years for this crap).

ABC journo Milligan got her man!

Why was this GM and her ex husband (EX) approached by Vic. police from SANO?

According to Milligan, the GM was serving customers at work when she received a telephone call from a detective from Victoria police. … He wanted to know if her son had told her about anything that he’d borne witness to or experienced during his time at St Patrick’s or St Kevin’s….GM was shocked. And said ‘Oh, I don’t know anything about that one, you know, I have no knowledge,’” she remembers though on Milligan’s word, that Detectives from Taskforce SANO, then [despite ‘I have no knowledge’] came to take a statement from the GM that had no knowledge.  GM said she was completely in the dark about what had happened. After the police went to see GM, they also visited her EX. “Nothing shocks me; I’ve seen a lot of stuff,” [EX] explains. “But that did shock me. But then, when I mulled it over, in the back of my mind, I’m thinking, ‘That’s making sense.’” … Apparently the visit, which police only expected to take an hour, took five. EX gave the police the medical reports and other documentation about his son and signed a statement. [Yet he too knew nothing; so also had nothing relevent to say in any police statement.  They were more than just fishing.

Something was the ‘that’ brought along by the Victorian Police that shocked him]. What was the THAT? It has to be information that could have only come from one source – the eventual complainant- that obviously was not at that point prepared to make a FORMAL statement.

Time moves on and GM says according to Milligan; ‘One evening, some time after the detectives took the statement [from her], the future complainant, happened to come by when GM was on the late shift. The shop was empty. She decided to have the conversation with him…. “I just asked him if I could ask him what happened… I didn’t want to bring back bad memories for him.”…But (the complainant) understood immediately. “He said, ‘No, no, ask me.’ I asked him if my son was a victim and he said, ‘Yes.’” The complainant then told her what he says happened with the archbishop.

Now remember; Milligan says…

The mother had asked her son. Not just once. … “I asked [him], I can’t remember the words I used, whether he was touched up, or played with, and [he] told me ‘no’.” The boy shrugged. She says shrugging was something her son would sometimes do when he didn’t want to talk about things. “I never said anything to anybody,” she says. “And then, again, after a while, I asked him and again he told me ‘no’.

BUT the future complainant;

“He told me that himself and [my son] used to play in the back of the church in the closed-off rooms,” she says….And um, they got sprung by Archbishop Pell and he [Pell] locked the door and he made them perform oral sex.” Milligan reports that (the complainant) still remembered the incident so clearly. Being picked up afterwards by his parents. Staring out the car window on the way home.’

The complainant told GM according to Milligan’s account, that her son’s funeral was the breaking point for him. It plunged him into despair and regret. His own mother was very concerned about his well being. He had not been coping since his friend’s death.

Milligan then reports ‘He decided that he had to come forward, he had to say something.’

But it was June 18, 2015: That the complainant gives his polished statement to SANO.

GM is NOT the very first to hear of the allegations from the eventual complainant months before he gives his formal statement to SANO he must have talked to the police already; the formal statement came later.

‘And um, they got sprung by Archbishop Pell and he locked the door and he made them perform oral sex.’ was what Milligan reported that a dead man’s mother was told by another 30 plus year old man 17 odd years after the event. Yet in later evidence the ‘door’ was not locked because the place was the sacristy and it has multiple doors. It is now a feature of this notorious case that the implausibility leapt further up the scale with the 2 boys oral rapes happening while anyone could walk in through multiple open doors. If a pedophile behaved like this he wouldn’t last very long. But that is not how the story started. It started in an explanation to a dead man’s mother that Pell locked the door. The police know there is a conflict in this.

Brennan says; ‘The complainant’s evidence related to events that occurred back in 1996 or 1997 when he was a 13-year-old choir boy at St Patrick’s Cathedral Melbourne. Most other witnesses had been choir boys, altar servers or Cathedral officials in 1996 when Pell first became archbishop of Melbourne. The complainant claimed that the first event, involving four charges, occurred after a solemn Sunday Mass celebrated by Pell in the second half of 1996. It was common ground between the prosecution and the defence that the dates to which these four charges must be attributed were 15 December 1996 or 22 December 1996. These were the dates on which the first and second solemn Sunday Masses were celebrated by Pell in the Cathedral after he had become archbishop in August 1996. The Cathedral had been undergoing renovations and thus was not used for Sunday Masses during earlier months of 1996.

The complainant said that he and another choir boy left the liturgical procession at the end of one Sunday Mass and went fossicking in the off-limits sacristy where they started swilling altar wine. The archbishop arrived unaccompanied, castigated them, and then, while fully robed in his copious liturgical vestments, proceeded to commit three vile sexual acts including oral penetration of the complainant. The complainant said that the sacristy door was wide open and altar servers were passing along the corridor. The complainant said that he and the other boy then returned to choir practice. The choir was making a Christmas recording at that time.’

Just remember that on July 16, 1996: Auxiliary Bishop George Pell is appointed Archbishop and we are to believe that 5 months later he is raping 2 boys after mass in the 1st or 2nd mass at the reopened repaired Cathedral and in his full regalia with the doors now wide open to boot! Then it’s off back to choir practice and none of the other members of the choir noticed a couple of ridiculously traumatised singers!

It is completely implausible for 2 children, 2 boys of 13 yrs to conceal such a traumatic attack and sing on like larks. That is what was supposed to have happened. No other member of the big choir (quite a few of them adults) spotted anything wrong at all.  It was many years later when they were asked but no one recalled anything.

The one complainant had gone to the funeral having been contacted and invited by the dead man’s mother. Months later he dropped in on her and he told her a story, perhaps to comfort her who knows or cares. This complainant has been caught up in a web of accusations that only started after our only independent other witness had died. The one complainant said it was the funeral that pushed him over the top into outing Pell for the crimes he committed against them! Yet the only evidence we have is that he didn’t formally step forward till much later.

He just wanted justice according to Milligan.

Nevertheless, this started with a little story to a grieving mum about why her son went off the rails from an event behind locked doors!

This ‘pillar of his community’ entered his thirties without thinking to protect other 13 year old boys.

So one more point;

The heroin user in this story died having used since he was about 14 years of age and never once telling anyone that he was orally raped etc., WITH another witness of the same age who was also raped.

If it were true then this user had very strong evidence; almost an open and shut case for a trial against Pell and subsequent compensation from the church.

But this man who was obviously always desperate for money never sought to use this story as either an excuse for his lifestyle and some sympathy, or (most importantly) didn’t try to get hold of that bucket of money. He never once said Pell’s crazed attack ruined my life and never once expressed any fears for choirboys.  He and his friend supposedly were raped side by side in full view of each other and could stand in court and tell the world the truth of the matter and a) get this ‘monster’ dealt with and b) protect other choirboys and c) get hold of a little matter of some compensation.

The Catholic church had been pumping out sums of money to victims of various pedophile priests and brothers for all these last 25 years or so. Significant sums have been paid to the victims so why not get some for yourself if you were so outrageously attacked by what has to be nothing but a mad man quite capable of doing it after every mass?

Why not protect all the other little boys over the course of the next 16 years?

It never happened is why.

Decades ago a dingo as they can and do, killed a baby.  Yet that didn’t stop any madness and let the parents grieve, it only started the next level of madness!   It did so mostly because two church cranks were involved that people didn’t like the look of!  Nothing made sense in that crazy case and I think we have a similar situation underway with high flying Cardinal Pell.

No one – that counted – believed the mother and the father.  Pure madness broke out and infected all levels of the police and judicial system with the mass media driving the hysteria.  Lindy and Pastor Michael were convicted and thus began a merry-go-round of shame for the Australian justice system. Many ordinary Australians came to believe that the baby’s name, Azaria, meant sacrifice in the desert…

Cardinal Pell has also been convicted of what amounts to a highly improbable, even totally insane attack – almost in public view, in 1996. The story is bizarre and highly unbelievable. In fact, as politically incorrect as this may be, I call bullshit!

That same form of sacrifice in the desert hysteria from all those years ago has driven the Pell case and hyperdrive hysteria is what we are seeing as the conviction became public. Pell could not get a fair trial and the Victorian police appear to have been caught up in some kind of vendetta – actually advertising for complaints.

For all manner of reasons I think Pell is a sick creep, BUT  the evidence to convict on the 5 charges just doesn’t add up to beyond a reasonable doubt as I think Frank Brennan and George Weigel demonstrate.  And here is a partial timeline from a US report.

This case of two children being vilely molested was never tried when there was another person alive to swear that such an event happened.  ‘April 8, 2014: One of the molested choirboys dies of a heroin overdose without alleging the crime and having told his mother he had not been abused.’   That is convienient for our one actual complainant and I would bet that our complainant knew he was dead.  After all they were teen friends that had sleepovers (yet apparently never again talked about one of them being orally raped out of the blue in front of the other).  Gimme a break.  The Australian culture in 1996 was well aware about this type of molestation stuff.  Neither came forward when they could have relied on the other to bring this child rapist to book.  Only much later and after one has no role can he be brought along as another ‘witness’.  But the inclusion now only harms the credibility of the complaint because yet another adult male let a child rapist get away with it for years rather than get backed up and deal with the monster!  By the time they were 23 the rapist had been free for 10 years and perhaps raping children after every mass.  Neither man thought they had any duty to protect other choir boys and to get this scoundrel put away.  The pair carried on with life after the witnessed rape and did nothing at all about it till 8 years later and the only other witness dies.

I suspect, as a result of watching a bloke on a current affairs program….

Probably this  ‘July 27, 2016: Pell issues a statement denying sexual abuse allegations made on an Australian Broadcasting Corp. current affairs program.’

…who told of an incident at a pool in Ballarat in 1970s in a very convincing manner.  That Pell has been up to no good way back then.  But clearly nothing that could convict has been found and put before a court over this.  The prosecution kept that case going and only now after it has helped do damage have they dropped it.  This is a typical stunt.  Those now dropped charges for that – or some similar incident created a background of suspicion and no doubt hatred for some.

Pell was thereafter up against it until his defence team finally dropped the ball in the second trial.

‘June 18, 2015: The surviving choirboy gives his first statement to Sano detectives outlining criminal allegations against Pell.’

This date has to be checked because it was in…

‘Dec. 23, 2015: Sano makes a public appeal for information relating to allegations of sexual offences in Melbourne while Pell was archbishop from 1996 until 2001.’

Weigel I think, says he came forward from that advert?  Either way it’s only actually one person who gave evidence.

This single ex Choir boy’s evidence was never brought up till at least 19 years after the ‘events’.   Two men had grown into middle age without a thought of protecting any other 13 year old choir boys!!

This complaint arose in the publicity for the police general inquiry ‘Sano’ or was advertised for.  No other stuff against him has stood up fit for trial.  All the Sano work was done in the context of an hysterical public mood against Pell and the entire Catholic Church.  The stuff that was brought to the magistrates was almost totally thrown out but not this junk.  And just this that apparently even the magistrate admitted she could not convict with resulted in this conviction.

Frankly ‘we were just swilling the wine when he came along and stuck his hard one in my mouth and so we went back to choir practice and never spoke of it again’  has to be doubted.  I am not surprised that the complainant has now disappeared and wants to be left alone.  I’m not surprised that the first jury went 10-2 FOR an acquittal.

I am surprised by the unanimous second jury!  But court decisions tend to go all over the place in my experience.  The turn around is not astounding if people recall the great film ’12 angry men’.  A leader in a jury can and will often lead the rest.  But the evidence does not hold holy water.

The assertions are so improbable that Pell was entitled to scoff at them in his police interview.  The evidence was not treated with any scepticism by the police and procecutors but for a functioning jury evidence must be beyond a reasonable doubt and Pell is supposed to be the beneficiary of any doubt.  Proof beyond a reasonable doubt?  No.

The vile pseudoleft, red necks, greenie types and open rightists could not however care less about guilt or inocence.  The frenzy at the time of his trial is like what came down on poor old Lindy C all over again.  They are all now howling like the pack of dingoes they are.

In this case Pell is also a dingo but not all dingoes got to eat the baby!  This conviction had to have been appealed.

To protect the likes of Lindy and the rest of us, any unsafe verdict must not stand despite any gut wish to cheer on a conviction for Pell!  His apeal ought to be upheld and this Dingo ought to be set free to scurry off back to Rome.

A Death in the Family
Having volunteered for Iraq, Mark Daily was killed in January by an I.E.D. Dismayed to learn that his pro-war articles helped persuade Daily to enlist, the author measures his words against a family’s grief and a young man’s sacrifice.
By Christopher Hitchens October 3, 2007 12:00 am

I was having an oppressively normal morning a few months ago, flicking through the banality of quotidian e-mail traffic, when I idly clicked on a message from a friend headed “Seen This?” The attached item turned out to be a very well-written story by Teresa Watanabe of the Los Angeles Times. It described the death, in Mosul, Iraq, of a young soldier from Irvine, California, named Mark Jennings Daily, and the unusual degree of emotion that his community was undergoing as a consequence. The emotion derived from a very moving statement that the boy had left behind, stating his reasons for having become a volunteer and bravely facing the prospect that his words might have to be read posthumously. In a way, the story was almost too perfect: this handsome lad had been born on the Fourth of July, was a registered Democrat and self-described agnostic, a U.C.L.A. honors graduate, and during his college days had fairly decided reservations about the war in Iraq. I read on, and actually printed the story out, and was turning a page when I saw the following:
“Somewhere along the way, he changed his mind. His family says there was no epiphany. Writings by author and columnist Christopher Hitchens on the moral case for war deeply influenced him … “

I don’t exaggerate by much when I say that I froze. I certainly felt a very deep pang of cold dismay. I had just returned from a visit to Iraq with my own son (who is 23, as was young Mr. Daily) and had found myself in a deeply pessimistic frame of mind about the war. Was it possible that I had helped persuade someone I had never met to place himself in the path of an I.E.D.? Over-dramatizing myself a bit in the angst of the moment, I found I was thinking of William Butler Yeats, who was chilled to discover that the Irish rebels of 1916 had gone to their deaths quoting his play Cathleen ni Houlihan. He tried to cope with the disturbing idea in his poem “Man and the Echo”:
*Did that play of mine send out
Certain men the English shot? …
Could my spoken words have checked
That whereby a house lay wrecked?*

Abruptly dismissing any comparison between myself and one of the greatest poets of the 20th century, I feverishly clicked on all the links from the article and found myself on Lieutenant Daily’s MySpace site, where his statement “Why I Joined” was posted. The site also immediately kicked into a skirling noise of Irish revolutionary pugnacity: a song from the Dropkick Murphys album Warrior’s Code. And there, at the top of the page, was a link to a passage from one of my articles, in which I poured scorn on those who were neutral about the battle for Iraq … I don’t remember ever feeling, in every allowable sense of the word, quite so hollow.

I writhed around in my chair for a bit and decided that I ought to call Ms. Watanabe, who could not have been nicer. She anticipated the question I was too tongue-tied to ask: Would the Daily family—those whose “house lay wrecked”—be contactable? “They’d actually like to hear from you.” She kindly gave me the e-mail address and the home number.

I don’t intend to make a parade of my own feelings here, but I expect you will believe me when I tell you that I e-mailed first. For one thing, I didn’t want to choose a bad time to ring. For another, and as I wrote to his parents, I was quite prepared for them to resent me. So let me introduce you to one of the most generous and decent families in the United States, and allow me to tell you something of their experience.

In the midst of their own grief, to begin with, they took the trouble to try to make me feel better. I wasn’t to worry about any “guilt or responsibility”: their son had signed up with his eyes wide open and had “assured us that if he knew the possible outcome might be this, he would still go rather than have the option of living to age 50 and never having served his country. Trust us when we tell you that he was quite convincing and persuasive on this point, so that by the end of the conversation we were practically packing his bags and waving him off.” This made me relax fractionally, but then they went on to write: “Prior to his deployment he told us he was going to try to contact you from Iraq. He had the idea of being a correspondent from the front-lines through you, and wanted to get your opinion about his journalistic potential. He told us that he had tried to contact you from either Kuwait or Iraq. He thought maybe his e-mail had not reached you … ” That was a gash in my hide all right: I think of all the junk e-mail I read every day, and then reflect that his precious one never got to me.

Lieutenant Daily crossed from Kuwait to Iraq in November 2006, where he would be deployed with the “C,” or “Comanche,” Company of the Second Battalion of the Seventh Cavalry Regiment—General Custer’s old outfit—in Mosul. On the 15th of January last, he was on patrol and noticed that the Humvee in front of him was not properly “up-armored” against I.E.D.’s. He insisted on changing places and taking a lead position in his own Humvee, and was shortly afterward hit by an enormous buried mine that packed a charge of some 1,500 pounds of high explosive. Yes, that’s right. He, and the three other American soldiers and Iraqi interpreter who perished with him, went to war with the army we had. It’s some consolation to John and Linda Daily, and to Mark’s brother and two sisters, and to his widow (who had been married to him for just 18 months) to know that he couldn’t have felt anything.

Yet what, and how, should we feel? People are not on their oath when speaking of the dead, but I have now talked to a good number of those who knew Mark Daily or were related to him, and it’s clear that the country lost an exceptional young citizen, whom I shall always wish I had had the chance to meet. He seems to have passed every test of young manhood, and to have been admired and loved and respected by old and young, male and female, family and friends. He could have had any career path he liked (and won a George C. Marshall Award that led to an offer to teach at West Point). Why are we robbed of his contribution? As we got to know one another better, I sent the Daily family a moving statement made by the mother of Michael Kelly, my good friend and the editor-at-large of The Atlantic Monthly, who was killed near the Baghdad airport while embedded during the invasion of 2003. Marguerite Kelly was highly stoic about her son’s death, but I now think I committed an error of taste in showing this to the Dailys, who very gently responded that Michael had lived long enough to write books, have a career, become a father, and in general make his mark, while their son didn’t live long enough to enjoy any of these opportunities. If you have tears, prepare to shed them now …
In his brilliant book What Is History?, Professor E. H. Carr asked about ultimate causation. Take the case of a man who drinks a bit too much, gets behind the wheel of a car with defective brakes, drives it round a blind corner, and hits another man, who is crossing the road to buy cigarettes. Who is the one responsible? The man who had one drink too many, the lax inspector of brakes, the local authorities who didn’t straighten out a dangerous bend, or the smoker who chose to dash across the road to satisfy his bad habit? So, was Mark Daily killed by the Ba’thist and bin Ladenist riffraff who place bombs where they will do the most harm? Or by the Rumsfeld doctrine, which sent American soldiers to Iraq in insufficient numbers and with inadequate equipment? Or by the Bush administration, which thought Iraq would be easily pacified? Or by the previous Bush administration, which left Saddam Hussein in power in 1991 and fatally postponed the time of reckoning?

These grand, overarching questions cannot obscure, at least for me, the plain fact that Mark Daily felt himself to be morally committed. I discovered this in his life story and in his surviving writings. Again, not to romanticize him overmuch, but this is the boy who would not let others be bullied in school, who stuck up for his younger siblings, who was briefly a vegetarian and Green Party member because he couldn’t stand cruelty to animals or to the environment, a student who loudly defended Native American rights and who challenged a MySpace neo-Nazi in an online debate in which the swastika-displaying antagonist finally admitted that he needed to rethink things. If I give the impression of a slight nerd here I do an injustice. Everything that Mark wrote was imbued with a great spirit of humor and tough-mindedness. Here’s an excerpt from his “Why I Joined” statement:

Anyone who knew me before I joined knows that I am quite aware and at times sympathetic to the arguments against the war in Iraq. If you think the only way a person could bring themselves to volunteer for this war is through sheer desperation or blind obedience then consider me the exception (though there are countless like me).… Consider that there are 19 year old soldiers from the Midwest who have never touched a college campus or a protest who have done more to uphold the universal legitimacy of representative government and individual rights by placing themselves between Iraqi voting lines and homicidal religious fanatics.

And here’s something from one of his last letters home:
I was having a conversation with a Kurdish man in the city of Dahok (by myself and completely safe) discussing whether or not the insurgents could be viewed as “freedom fighters” or “misguided anti-capitalists.” Shaking his head as I attempted to articulate what can only be described as pathetic apologetics, he cut me off and said “the difference between insurgents and American soldiers is that they get paid to take life—to murder, and you get paid to save lives.” He looked at me in such a way that made me feel like he was looking through me, into all the moral insecurity that living in a free nation will instill in you. He “oversimplified” the issue, or at least that is what college professors would accuse him of doing.

In his other e-mails and letters home, which the Daily family very kindly showed me, he asked for extra “care packages” to share with local Iraqis, and said, “I’m not sure if Irvine has a sister-city, but I am going to personally contact the mayor and ask him to extend his hand to Dahok, which has been more than hospitable to this native-son.” (I was wrenched yet again to discover that he had got this touching idea from an old article of mine, which had made a proposal for city-twinning that went nowhere.) In the last analysis, it was quite clear, Mark had made up his mind that the United States was a force for good in the world, and that it had a duty to the freedom of others. A video clip of which he was very proud has him being “crowned” by a circle of smiling Iraqi officers. I have a photograph of him, standing bareheaded and contentedly smoking a cigar, on a rooftop in Mosul. He doesn’t look like an occupier at all. He looks like a staunch friend and defender. On the photograph is written “We carry a new world in our hearts.”

In his last handwritten letter home, posted on the last day of 2006, Mark modestly told his father that he’d been chosen to lead a combat platoon after a grenade attack had killed one of its soldiers and left its leader too shaken to carry on. He had apparently sounded steady enough on the radio on earlier missions for him to be given a leadership position after only a short time “in country.” As he put it: “I am now happily doing what I was trained to do, and am fulfilling an obligation that has swelled inside me for years. I am deep in my element … and I am euphoric.” He had no doubts at all about the value of his mission, and was the sort of natural soldier who makes the difference in any war.

At the first chance I got, I invited his family for lunch in California. We ended up spending the entire day together. As soon as they arrived, I knew I had been wrong to be so nervous. They looked too good to be true: like a poster for the American way. John Daily is an aerospace project manager, and his wife, Linda, is an audiologist. Their older daughter, Christine, eagerly awaiting her wedding, is a high-school biology teacher, and the younger sister, Nicole, is in high school. Their son Eric is a bright junior at Berkeley with a very winning and ironic grin. And there was Mark’s widow, an agonizingly beautiful girl named Snejana (“Janet”) Hristova, the daughter of political refugees from Bulgaria. Her first name can mean “snowflake,” and this was his name for her in the letters of fierce tenderness that he sent her from Iraq. These, with your permission, I will not share, except this:

One thing I have learned about myself since I’ve been out here is that everything I professed to you about what I want for the world and what I am willing to do to achieve it was true. …
My desire to “save the world” is really just an extension of trying to make a world fit for you.

If that is all she has left, I hope you will agree that it isn’t nothing.

I had already guessed that this was no gung-ho Orange County Republican clan. It was pretty clear that they could have done without the war, and would have been happier if their son had not gone anywhere near Iraq. (Mr. Daily told me that as a young man he had wondered about going to Canada if the Vietnam draft ever caught up with him.) But they had been amazed by the warmth of their neighbors’ response, and by the solidarity of his former brothers-in-arms—1,600 people had turned out for Mark’s memorial service in Irvine. A sergeant’s wife had written a letter to Linda and posted it on Janet’s MySpace site on Mother’s Day, to tell her that her husband had been in the vehicle with which Mark had insisted on changing places. She had seven children who would have lost their father if it had gone the other way, and she felt both awfully guilty and humbly grateful that her husband had been spared by Mark’s heroism. Imagine yourself in that position, if you can, and you will perhaps get a hint of the world in which the Dailys now live: a world that alternates very sharply and steeply between grief and pride.

On a drive to Fort Knox, Kentucky, and again shortly before shipping out from Fort Bliss, Texas, Mark had told his father that he had three wishes in the event of his death. He wanted bagpipes played at the service, and an Irish wake to follow it. And he wanted to be cremated, with the ashes strewn on the beach at Neskowin, Oregon, the setting for his happiest memories of boyhood vacations. The first two of these conditions had already been fulfilled. The Dailys rather overwhelmed me by asking if I would join them for the third one. So it was that in August I found myself on the dunes by an especially lovely and remote stretch of the Oregon coastline. The extended family was there, including both sets of grandparents, plus some college friends of Mark’s and his best comrade from the army, an impressive South Dakotan named Matt Gross. As the sun began to sink on a day that had been devoted to reminiscence and moderate drinking, we took up the tattered Stars and Stripes that had flown outside the family home since Mark’s deployment and walked to his favorite spot to plant it. Everyone was supposed to say something, but when John Daily took the first scoop from the urn and spread the ashes on the breeze, there was something so unutterably final in the gesture that tears seemed as natural as breathing and I wasn’t at all sure that I could go through with it. My idea had been to quote from the last scene of Macbeth, which is the only passage I know that can hope to rise to such an occasion. The tyrant and usurper has been killed, but Ross has to tell old Siward that his boy has perished in the struggle:
*Your son, my lord, has paid a soldier’s debt;
He only lived but till he was a man;
The which no sooner had his prowess confirm’d
In the unshrinking station where he fought,
But like a man he died.*
This being Shakespeare, the truly emotional and understated moment follows a beat or two later, when Ross adds:
*Your cause of sorrow
Must not be measured by his worth, for then
It hath no end.*

I became a trifle choked up after that, but everybody else also managed to speak, often reading poems of their own composition, and as the day ebbed in a blaze of glory over the ocean, I thought, Well, here we are to perform the last honors for a warrior and hero, and there are no hysterical ululations, no shrieks for revenge, no insults hurled at the enemy, no firing into the air or bogus hysterics. Instead, an honest, brave, modest family is doing its private best. I hope no fanatical fool could ever mistake this for weakness. It is, instead, a very particular kind of strength. If America can spontaneously produce young men like Mark, and occasions like this one, it has a real homeland security instead of a bureaucratic one. To borrow some words of George Orwell’s when he first saw revolutionary Barcelona, “I recognized it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for.”

I mention Orwell for a reason, because Mark Daily wasn’t yet finished with sending me messages from beyond the grave. He took a pile of books with him to Iraq, which included Thomas Paine’s The Crisis; War and Peace; Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged (well, nobody’s perfect); Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time; John McCain’s Why Courage Matters; and George Orwell’s Animal Farm and 1984. And a family friend of the Dailys’, noticing my own book on Orwell on their shelf, had told them that his own father, Harry David Milton, was “the American” mentioned in Homage to Catalonia, who had rushed to Orwell’s side after he had been shot in the throat by a Fascist sniper. This seemed to verge on the eerie. Orwell thought that the Spanish Civil War was a just war, but he also came to understand that it was a dirty war, where a decent cause was hijacked by goons and thugs, and where betrayal and squalor negated the courage and sacrifice of those who fought on principle. As one who used to advocate strongly for the liberation of Iraq (perhaps more strongly than I knew), I have grown coarsened and sickened by the degeneration of the struggle: by the sordid news of corruption and brutality (Mark Daily told his father how dismayed he was by the failure of leadership at Abu Ghraib) and by the paltry politicians in Washington and Baghdad who squabble for precedence while lifeblood is spent and spilled by young people whose boots they are not fit to clean. It upsets and angers me more than I can safely say, when I reread Mark’s letters and poems and see that—as of course he would—he was magically able to find the noble element in all this, and take more comfort and inspiration from a few plain sentences uttered by a Kurdish man than from all the vapid speeches ever given. Orwell had the same experience when encountering a young volunteer in Barcelona, and realizing with a mixture of sadness and shock that for this kid all the tired old slogans about liberty and justice were actually real. He cursed his own cynicism and disillusionment when he wrote:
*For the fly-blown words that make me spew
Still in his ears were holy,
And he was born knowing what I had learned
Out of books and slowly.*
However, after a few more verses about the lying and cruelty and stupidity that accompany war, he was still able to do justice to the young man:
*But the thing I saw in your face
No power can disinherit:
No bomb that ever burst
Shatters the crystal spirit.*

May it be so, then, and may death be not proud to have taken Mark Daily, whom I never knew but whom you now know, and—I hope—miss.

Qatar crisis will Trump sell out democracy in the old realist style?

Some people have pointed out that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) is central to the cultural and political ‘swamp’ that delivers terrorists to Macron led France and the rest of us westerners.   Is the KSA still run by Assad type mass murdering tyrants in the making?   It is true they are the born to rule rats that own the KSA but no doubt they occasionally worry about when their Saudi Nasser will emerge and dispose of them.  After all they know there used to be a Shah in Iran and a King in Iraq and Egypt.  They keep their military strong but perhaps not too strong.  They are similar to the Syrian and the military thugs of Egypt in their hatred of democracy and a free press.  They have fallen out over Syria because of the sectarian divide.  But they have always done business in the past.  With Egyptian support they are making war in Yemen and bringing on a mass murder from starvation there as a result.

Not much has been said at Strangetimes about this war but it has reached catastrophe levels lately and is regularly in the MSM.  Clearly it’s part of the sectarian region wide war and the great Islamic divide.  There is no analysis that I am aware of -nothing any left can be proud of- that people have brought to my attention over these last few years. NADA.  I, having kept focused mostly on Syria, know little about it. But I wonder if Yemen is now going to drag in the West.

The rulers of the KSA regularly kill their political opponents and are none to keen on a western style free press.  Half their own country is in effect enemy territory with a sullen oppressed Shia population that this leadership in Wahhabi style hate.  Brutal in that Wahhabi tradition, as Ayaan Hirsi Ali points out they are very much Daesh style in killing those in their way, right down to the public head lopping.

These born to rule rats, started demanding that democracy in Qatar be wound back in the manner that the Egyptians have and that the Turks have resisted!   Together with the UAE born to rule and their propped up Sunni rulers of Shia in Bahrain they sprung a crisis on the US over Qatar. Trump may have wanted to go the way of the old realists that he so admires but the Turks under Erdogan stepped in as the regional leaders of the democratic changes and said NO.

Consider the list of actionable demands that the US forced the KSA led anti democrats to deliver.  The 13 demands in full.

1  Curb diplomatic ties with Iran and close its diplomatic missions there. Expel members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards and cut off any joint military cooperation with Iran. Only trade and commerce with Iran that complies with US and international sanctions will be permitted.

2  Sever all ties to “terrorist organisations”, specifically the Muslim Brotherhood, Islamic State, al-Qaida and Lebanon’s Hezbollah. Formally declare those entities as terrorist groups.

3  Shut down al-Jazeera and its affiliate stations.

4  Shut down news outlets that Qatar funds, directly and indirectly, including Arabi21, Rassd, Al-Araby Al-Jadeed and Middle East Eye.

5  Immediately terminate the Turkish military presence in Qatar and end any joint military cooperation with Turkey inside Qatar.

6  Stop all means of funding for individuals, groups or organisations that have been designated as terrorists by Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt, Bahrain, the US and other countries.

7  Hand over “terrorist figures” and wanted individuals from Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt and Bahrain to their countries of origin. Freeze their assets, and provide any desired information about their residency, movements and finances.

8  End interference in sovereign countries’ internal affairs. Stop granting citizenship to wanted nationals from Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt and Bahrain. Revoke Qatari citizenship for existing nationals where such citizenship violates those countries’ laws.

9  Stop all contacts with the political opposition in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt and Bahrain. Hand over all files detailing Qatar’s prior contacts with and support for those opposition groups.

10  Pay reparations and compensation for loss of life and other, financial losses caused by Qatar’s policies in recent years. The sum will be determined in coordination with Qatar.

11  Consent to monthly audits for the first year after agreeing to the demands, then once per quarter during the second year. For the following 10 years, Qatar would be monitored annually for compliance.

12  Align itself with the other Gulf and Arab countries militarily, politically, socially and economically, as well as on economic matters, in line with an agreement reached with Saudi Arabia in 2014.

13  Agree to all the demands within 10 days of it being submitted to Qatar, or the list becomes invalid.

So the military coup leaders from Egypt and the born to rule reactionaries of the KSA are demanding that the Muslim Brotherhood types be sold out.  Well most of this is what Trump would either want or think ‘he’ could live with; but this is not good for the big picture of draining any regional swamp and that much is clear.  The Turks stepped in.

The peoples of the gulf are all no doubt siding with Qatar because they are mostly Shia people that hate their KSA overlords like in Bahrain where the US led by Obama  let the Arab spring be crushed by the KSA army rolling in and keeping the people in their place.

Importantly both Turkey and Iran are going to back Qatar so the ‘parting of the ways’ is next.

The people of Kuwait are going to side with the country of Qatar but I wonder what the rulers of Kuwait will do in the longer run?

The Shia led government of Iraq is going to back Qatar -if Qatar at least does more over Al Qaeda and other Sunni terrorists and that will be required by everyone so they will IMV make a big show of stepping up over this issue.

Democracy is the solution and that now requires Muslim Brotherhood type Islamist governments like Turkey and what was previously won or almost won in Egypt.

The new leader of the KSA is quite obviously ‘modernising’ and at a rapid rate but he has a big job ahead.    What ever he does the swamp is not going to remain static and the blatant oppression of the Shia peoples is central.  BUT the big fly in all this is still Syria where the HIRISE dominated by the ‘Shia’ are the big problem led and protected from the West by Russia.

The West has now clearly had a gut full of Russia so more complex revolution is on the way.

Assad’s troops are – one year on from the ineffective Trump cruise missile attacks – again using chemical warfare and consequently bringing on some form of western attack. What will it be?  Well we can guess that it will be more effective because the last attack was not meant to be effective and Trump has been insulted when he was talking about going home!

So IMV

1. Trump has no choice other than to do something more this time.

The HIRISE cow was obviously not interesting in stopping Assad’s mob from doing this kind of attack and we ought to assume that the main players rather than attempt to block it, accept this latest build up of chemical actions (there had been a steady build up over a few smaller attacks) as some necessary cost of doing business. After all didn’t HIRISE accept the price last year and didn’t it all blow over and they continue to make substantial gains ever since? The whole world saw that the attacks were ineffective and at least most of the world have been able to admit that the counter revolutionary HIRISE cow has made those gains in the intervening period.

The Assad policy of building rubblestan and sending refugees north in the tens of thousands are the policies that have been there all along.  HIRISE has enabled that war to continue. The territory opportunistically re-controlled in the last year -as Daesh was destroyed by the US led cow – absolutely against the will of that western cow – has been substantial and the control manpower has been found and the ‘ethnic’ clearing systematic in some areas but not along the Euphrates.  Sufficient HIRISE troops to hold the current footprint that they have established ARE on the ground provided they don’t go up against a Western US led cow.  The HIRISE are weakest along the Euphrates and ought never have been permitted to occupy this territory in the first place.  But Trump was not then interested in the punch up that he has now become interested in.

2. Now even just because of the explicit Russian threat there will be more than just cruise missiles and the attacks will unfold over some time rather than the short sharp and useless stunt of last year.  I also note that even more A10’s were the other day sent to Incirlik and McCain is clear  https://www.nbcnews.com/video/mccain-calls-for-us-airpower-in-syria-43835971887 but that was 6 years ago.

3. The longer this goes on and the closer to their so called ‘vital interests’ this is seen to come the more sure we can be that the Russians will either shoot something down or hit some launch site or it will be humiliated as unable to stand up to the US/West.  Obviously it is therefore now in a lose, lose situation so how will it choose to lose least is the question that Trumps advisor’s must consider? There is no good option.

The context of all this is that Putin’s audacity has continued to the point where the West has even had a chemical attack carried out in Britain. In order to achieve what? was the question that people were pondering before they apparently shrugged and moved on.  (North Korea’s dictator carried out a spectacular poisoning against a 1/2 brother and got away with it.) Trump recently indicated the US led cow had done the job and he was wanting to go home! That was not a possible choice at this stage so we can ask why, but because it is Trump it becomes imponderable.  The point is this problem of Vlad and his HIRISE mates is worse now than last year and it was bad then.

4. It follows that the world is now caught in a spiral where nobody planned to be.  The West led by Trump is going to strike – that is for sure – and if the Russians hit back directly the US will escalate.  It would therefore be better for the US/West to attack the other members of the HIRISE cow and hope the Russians don’t get silly or that if they do they fail on every occasion.  I can hope but can’t see how they will.

I conclude that in the McCain context of a fightback position being adopted by the Donald something like the opportunity to drive the enemy back across the Euphrates where the US killed a couple of hundred Russian ‘contractors’ recently and thus start the attacks on the Iranians must be a big temptation.

What do Marxists make of current developments in and around Syria?

Since direct Russian intervention in Syria was sprung on the world in 2015, sufficient events have unfolded to permit a general stock-take. There has been 15 months of very ‘strange times’ so where do the issues currently stand?

I presume a rethink of what I called the 1/2 theory – is self evidently required because Obama is departing his leadership role without any ability to claim success for his policies (even being publicly blamed by Kerry for being the real problem for why the US finds itself where it currently does) and short of a lucky bomber Assad will still be around!

Turkey has just declared that they are about to force the Kurds out of the (‘SDF’ Manbij pocket) http://syria.liveuamap.com/en/2016/24-december-pres-erdoan-says-al-bab-phase-about-to-be-completed

Pres. Erdoğan says Al Bab phase about to be completed in Syria, next step will be Manbij and then Raqqa. More than just send Kurds east of the Euphrates I think, because the Turks are also declaring that no new state will be permitted in northern Syria http://syria.liveuamap.com/en/2016/24-december-erdogan-no-ways-to-establish-any-new-states-in;  and that after Manbij they are going to Raqqah.

http://syria.liveuamap.com/en/2016/24-december-sdf-released-many-civilians-in-manbij-sdf-arrested,  is being reported.
http://syria.liveuamap.com/en/2016/24-december-erdogan-i-informed-the-us-russia-and-iran-that

The coming period will however see more than just the liberation of all territories in both Iraq and Syria controlled by Daesh. Complexity is being heaped upon more complexity and a wider war is still not unthinkable.

The September 2015 intervention required urgent analysis from those of us that have developed and argued consistently for our ‘draining the swamp theory’. It was analysed – and with very different conclusions drawn.

That period of flat out disagreement can now be summed up. Barry, Dave and Arthur thought that what was unfolding would end the regime and end the war. That theory collapsed in the face of what I have called the HIRISE Coalition of the Willing – Hezbollah, Iran, Russia, Iraq (shia militia), Syria (Assad +), Egypt – war making.  What next?  What do people now say is happening? Are there any sites where a serious and respectful discussion is taking place? Are there any Main Stream Media (MSM) articles that others want to draw attention to?

Just for starters; if the Turks are soon going to Raqqa how are they going to get there?  Literally what will be the route of the Turkish forces if they have come to blows with the SDF/Kurds in the Manbij pocket?  I hope the Kurds back out of this but it’s not very promising at this point.  I think the Turks are already facing a HIRISE red line west of the Euphrates. I hope the US can get a deal done at this late stage to bring them south east of the river.  But the Turks are serious about no ‘new state’ in the nth and everyone knows Assad can’t rule in peace so after Daesh territory is removed from the map over the next few months or if the fight breaks out with the Kurds after a few months more, what comes next?

We have been asked to put this up for critical discussion.  We are in no sense promoting a criminal like Kissinger.

With Russia in Syria, a geopolitical structure that lasted four decades is in shambles. The U.S. needs a new strategy and priorities.

By  Henry A. Kissinger  Oct. 16, 2015 7:18 p.m. ET

The debate about whether the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action with Iran regarding its nuclear program stabilized the Middle East’s strategic framework had barely begun when the region’s geopolitical framework collapsed. Russia’s unilateral military action in Syria is the latest symptom of the disintegration of the American role in stabilizing the Middle East order that emerged from the Arab-Israeli war of 1973.

In the aftermath of that conflict, Egypt abandoned its military ties with the Soviet Union and joined an American-backed negotiating process that produced peace treaties between Israel and Egypt, and Israel and Jordan, a United Nations-supervised disengagement agreement between Israel and Syria, which has been observed for over four decades (even by the parties of the Syrian civil war), and international support of Lebanon’s sovereign territorial integrity. Later, Saddam Hussein’s war to incorporate Kuwait into Iraq was defeated by an international coalition under U.S. leadership. American forces led the war against terror in Iraq and Afghanistan. Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf States were our allies in all these efforts. The Russian military presence disappeared from the region.

That geopolitical pattern is now in shambles. Four states in the region have ceased to function as sovereign. Libya, Yemen, Syria and Iraq have become targets for nonstate movements seeking to impose their rule. Over large swaths in Iraq and Syria, an ideologically radical religious army has declared itself the Islamic State (also called ISIS or ISIL) as an unrelenting foe of established world order. It seeks to replace the international system’s multiplicity of states with a caliphate, a single Islamic empire governed by Shariah law.

ISIS’ claim has given the millennium-old split between the Shiite and Sunni sects of Islam an apocalyptic dimension. The remaining Sunni states feel threatened by both the religious fervor of ISIS as well as by Shiite Iran, potentially the most powerful state in the region. Iran compounds its menace by presenting itself in a dual capacity. On one level, Iran acts as a legitimate Westphalian state conducting traditional diplomacy, even invoking the safeguards of the international system. At the same time, it organizes and guides nonstate actors seeking regional hegemony based on jihadist principles: Hezbollah in Lebanon and Syria; Hamas in Gaza; the Houthis in Yemen.

Thus the Sunni Middle East risks engulfment by four concurrent sources: Shiite-governed Iran and its legacy of Persian imperialism; ideologically and religiously radical movements striving to overthrow prevalent political structures; conflicts within each state between ethnic and religious groups arbitrarily assembled after World War I into (now collapsing) states; and domestic pressures stemming from detrimental political, social and economic domestic policies.

The fate of Syria provides a vivid illustration: What started as a Sunni revolt against the Alawite (a Shiite offshoot) autocrat Bashar Assad fractured the state into its component religious and ethnic groups, with nonstate militias supporting each warring party, and outside powers pursuing their own strategic interests. Iran supports the Assad regime as the linchpin of an Iranian historic dominance stretching from Tehran to the Mediterranean. The Gulf States insist on the overthrow of Mr. Assad to thwart Shiite Iranian designs, which they fear more than Islamic State. They seek the defeat of ISIS while avoiding an Iranian victory. This ambivalence has been deepened by the nuclear deal, which in the Sunni Middle East is widely interpreted as tacit American acquiescence in Iranian hegemony.

These conflicting trends, compounded by America’s retreat from the region, have enabled Russia to engage in military operations deep in the Middle East, a deployment unprecedented in Russian history. Russia’s principal concern is that the Assad regime’s collapse could reproduce the chaos of Libya, bring ISIS into power in Damascus, and turn all of Syria into a haven for terrorist operations, reaching into Muslim regions inside Russia’s southern border in the Caucasus and elsewhere.

On the surface, Russia’s intervention serves Iran’s policy of sustaining the Shiite element in Syria. In a deeper sense, Russia’s purposes do not require the indefinite continuation of Mr. Assad’s rule. It is a classic balance-of-power maneuver to divert the Sunni Muslim terrorist threat from Russia’s southern border region. It is a geopolitical, not an ideological, challenge and should be dealt with on that level. Whatever the motivation, Russian forces in the region—and their participation in combat operations—produce a challenge that American Middle East policy has not encountered in at least four decades.

American policy has sought to straddle the motivations of all parties and is therefore on the verge of losing the ability to shape events. The U.S. is now opposed to, or at odds in some way or another with, all parties in the region: with Egypt on human rights; with Saudi Arabia over Yemen; with each of the Syrian parties over different objectives. The U.S. proclaims the determination to remove Mr. Assad but has been unwilling to generate effective leverage—political or military—to achieve that aim. Nor has the U.S. put forward an alternative political structure to replace Mr. Assad should his departure somehow be realized.

Russia, Iran, ISIS and various terrorist organizations have moved into this vacuum: Russia and Iran to sustain Mr. Assad; Tehran to foster imperial and jihadist designs. The Sunni states of the Persian Gulf, Jordan and Egypt, faced with the absence of an alternative political structure, favor the American objective but fear the consequence of turning Syria into another Libya.

American policy on Iran has moved to the center of its Middle East policy. The administration has insisted that it will take a stand against jihadist and imperialist designs by Iran and that it will deal sternly with violations of the nuclear agreement. But it seems also passionately committed to the quest for bringing about a reversal of the hostile, aggressive dimension of Iranian policy through historic evolution bolstered by negotiation.

The prevailing U.S. policy toward Iran is often compared by its advocates to the Nixon administration’s opening to China, which contributed, despite some domestic opposition, to the ultimate transformation of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. The comparison is not apt. The opening to China in 1971 was based on the mutual recognition by both parties that the prevention of Russian hegemony in Eurasia was in their common interest. And 42 Soviet divisions lining the Sino-Soviet border reinforced that conviction. No comparable strategic agreement exists between Washington and Tehran. On the contrary, in the immediate aftermath of the nuclear accord, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei described the U.S. as the “Great Satan” and rejected negotiations with America about nonnuclear matters. Completing his geopolitical diagnosis, Mr. Khamenei also predicted that Israel would no longer exist in 25 years.

Forty-five years ago, the expectations of China and the U.S. were symmetrical. The expectations underlying the nuclear agreement with Iran are not. Tehran will gain its principal objectives at the beginning of the implementation of the accord. America’s benefits reside in a promise of Iranian conduct over a period of time. The opening to China was based on an immediate and observable adjustment in Chinese policy, not on an expectation of a fundamental change in China’s domestic system. The optimistic hypothesis on Iran postulates that Tehran’s revolutionary fervor will dissipate as its economic and cultural interactions with the outside world increase.

American policy runs the risk of feeding suspicion rather than abating it. Its challenge is that two rigid and apocalyptic blocs are confronting each other: a Sunni bloc consisting of Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States; and the Shiite bloc comprising Iran, the Shiite sector of Iraq with Baghdad as its capital, the Shiite south of Lebanon under Hezbollah control facing Israel, and the Houthi portion of Yemen, completing the encirclement of the Sunni world. In these circumstances, the traditional adage that the enemy of your enemy can be treated as your friend no longer applies. For in the contemporary Middle East, it is likely that the enemy of your enemy remains your enemy.

A great deal depends on how the parties interpret recent events. Can the disillusionment of some of our Sunni allies be mitigated? How will Iran’s leaders interpret the nuclear accord once implemented—as a near-escape from potential disaster counseling a more moderate course, returning Iran to an international order? Or as a victory in which they have achieved their essential aims against the opposition of the U.N. Security Council, having ignored American threats and, hence, as an incentive to continue Tehran’s dual approach as both a legitimate state and a nonstate movement challenging the international order?

Two-power systems are prone to confrontation, as was demonstrated in Europe in the run-up to World War I. Even with traditional weapons technology, to sustain a balance of power between two rigid blocs requires an extraordinary ability to assess the real and potential balance of forces, to understand the accumulation of nuances that might affect this balance, and to act decisively to restore it whenever it deviates from equilibrium—qualities not heretofore demanded of an America sheltered behind two great oceans.

But the current crisis is taking place in a world of nontraditional nuclear and cyber technology. As competing regional powers strive for comparable threshold capacity, the nonproliferation regime in the Middle East may crumble. If nuclear weapons become established, a catastrophic outcome is nearly inevitable. A strategy of pre-emption is inherent in the nuclear technology. The U.S. must be determined to prevent such an outcome and apply the principle of nonproliferation to all nuclear aspirants in the region.

Too much of our public debate deals with tactical expedients. What we need is a strategic concept and to establish priorities on the following principles:

• So long as ISIS survives and remains in control of a geographically defined territory, it will compound all Middle East tensions. Threatening all sides and projecting its goals beyond the region, it freezes existing positions or tempts outside efforts to achieve imperial jihadist designs. The destruction of ISIS is more urgent than the overthrow of Bashar Assad, who has already lost over half of the area he once controlled. Making sure that this territory does not become a permanent terrorist haven must have precedence. The current inconclusive U.S. military effort risks serving as a recruitment vehicle for ISIS as having stood up to American might.

• The U.S. has already acquiesced in a Russian military role. Painful as this is to the architects of the 1973 system, attention in the Middle East must remain focused on essentials. And there exist compatible objectives. In a choice among strategies, it is preferable for ISIS-held territory to be reconquered either by moderate Sunni forces or outside powers than by Iranian jihadist or imperial forces. For Russia, limiting its military role to the anti-ISIS campaign may avoid a return to Cold War conditions with the U.S.

• The reconquered territories should be restored to the local Sunni rule that existed there before the disintegration of both Iraqi and Syrian sovereignty. The sovereign states of the Arabian Peninsula, as well as Egypt and Jordan, should play a principal role in that evolution. After the resolution of its constitutional crisis, Turkey could contribute creatively to such a process.

• As the terrorist region is being dismantled and brought under nonradical political control, the future of the Syrian state should be dealt with concurrently. A federal structure could then be built between the Alawite and Sunni portions. If the Alawite regions become part of a Syrian federal system, a context will exist for the role of Mr. Assad, which reduces the risks of genocide or chaos leading to terrorist triumph.

• The U.S. role in such a Middle East would be to implement the military assurances in the traditional Sunni states that the administration promised during the debate on the Iranian nuclear agreement, and which its critics have demanded.

• In this context, Iran’s role can be critical. The U.S. should be prepared for a dialogue with an Iran returning to its role as a Westphalian state within its established borders.

The U.S. must decide for itself the role it will play in the 21st century; the Middle East will be our most immediate—and perhaps most severe—test. At question is not the strength of American arms but rather American resolve in understanding and mastering a new world.

Mr. Kissinger served as national-security adviser and secretary of state under Presidents Nixon and Ford.

http://www.wsj.com/article_email/a-path-out-of-the-middle-east-collapse-1445037513-lMyQjAxMTI1MjE2NzIxMDcwWj

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/wall-street-journal/us-needs-new-plan-for-middle-east/story-fnay3ubk-1227573426194

From the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR)
October 1 2015
For those on Face Book the SOHR has a regular update on clashes and casualties etc..

“Daesh is a force of darkness, it bears no relation to Islam and the humanity, and we appeal to our Arab brothers, who left their villages and towns, to go back home”.

“The war may continue for ten years; it is the nations’ game on my the land of my country, where the victim in this war is my people”.

In these words, Siban Hammo the general commander of People’s Defense Units (YPG) concluded his interview with SOHR.

People’s Defense Units, known by YPG too, established a military force in the last four years, where the number of its fighters reached to 50000. The nucleus formation began in the Syrian Jaziar with the end of 2011, where it was able to achieve victories against “Islamic State” as well as its clashes with the regime forces, Jabhat al- Nusra (al- Qaeda in Levant) and Islamist factions in successive periods. It military formations have distributed in three main region where the Democratic Union Party (PYD), which is combined with People’s Defense Units (YPG) within the Democratic Society System, declared the establishment of 3 districts of al- Jazira, Efrin and Kobani in the late January 2014.

YPG has gained world-wide fame during IS attack on Ayn al- Arab (Kobani) and seizing more than 356 towns, villages and farms that guided to the military alliance between YPG and US-led coalition. SOHR could interview the general commander of YPG Siban Hammo, where the main points on the Kurdish and Syrian arena in general.

First of all, how do identify YPG?

“best definition of it is its name People’s Defense Units, its fundamental pillar is the young Syrian Kurdish men who are militarily disciplined, while its mission is to protect the people in Rojava in all its constituents under these deadly mess in the cantons of Rojava”. Rojava is an expression for the regions inhabited mostly by Kurdish people in Syria.

Is it faction from the Krilla forces – the military wing of PKK? And does it fight on Turkish territories with PKK?

“YPG is a military force belongs to the Democratic Self- Management in Rojava, and it is fighting in fierce battles to protect its regions, so YPG has no interest to open a front with Turkey expanding to hundreds of kilo meters, this is a military suicide, and what is said on the contrary of this is meaningless and does not merit a response.

What is your response to the accusations of recruiting children?

“We have issued a lot of statement in response to these allegations but it seems that some people insist on repeating this just to defame the good reputation gained by YPG, we all know who recruit children as fighters and suicide bombers by the name of Jihad.”

What is the relationship between the Self- Defense Forces, which was announced some time ago, and YPG? Is it an attempt to increase YPG personnel obligatorily? And is it a permanent or temporary step?

“The Self- Defense is a step to organize a permanent protection, where the society in all its constituents protects its self, and to that time YPG stays the most experienced in defending our areas. For this reason, the Self- Defense is a goal we seek to reach to, and its first step was YPG.”

Now, let talk about the hottest event, what is the story behind the last clashes in al- Sheikh Maqsoud in Aleppo?

“To answer this question, we have to see the whole picture, provocations have started by attacking our areas in the villages of Deir Ballout and Diwan as well as kidnapping civilians and banditry; the last one was the attempt of arm-twisting by their attack on the neighborhood of al- Sheikh Maqsoud believing that it is the weakest link because it is far from the center of gravity Efrin and due to the difficulties of ensuring logistic support, as the neighborhood besieged for more than a week and the humanitarian situation there is so bad specially because the neighborhood is inhabited by more than 250000 civilians from all society constituents.

We also draw attention to the point that the national members in the opposition were disturbed about this attack on the neighborhood of al- Sheikh Maqsoud, I, in turn, wondered and would you like you to wonder like me, who benefit from this attack? And who benefit from opening a front against the kurds? What is the advantages?

“Simply, Jabhat al- Nusra, al- Soltan Morad Brigade and Ahrar al- Sham Movement are agents for another force in fighting Kurds, and this force or the third-party gave them the orders to open this front.”

What is the prospect of the battle in Aleppo, is it a defensive or offensive measure?

“From our side, the battle is defensive, we respond to the sources of fire and protect the outskirt of the neighborhood. But if the same situation continue surely we are going take more stringent measures, and we are going to change the battle into the offensive position, I do not say that we are going to control more areas but I assure that we are going to hurt them and targeting their held areas.”

Do you think that Ahrar al- Sham, Jabhat al- Nusra, al- Zinki and other factions may alley themselves to attack Efrin?

“Jabhat al- Nusra believe in Bay’ah (in Islamic terminology, is an oath of allegiance to a leader) and does not believe in alliances simply because it does not believe in partnership, it endeavors to control all the factions exist in its-held areas whether by force or enticement by lining the pockets.

In addition, it is practically controls Nour al- Din Zinki Movement, part of al- Shamiyyah Front like al- Sham Legion and even with Soqor al- Jabal battalions supported by US. However, anyone refuses to join Jabhat al- Nusra is going to be assassinated as what happened to Hazem Movement, the Syrian revolutionaries Front and the Division Jabhat al- Nusra is unveiling the reality of its method that is assassination or control, and after that it will mobilize against Efrin. Here, I want to add something, it saddened us that there are some people in the Free Syrian Army who do not differ from Jabhat al- Nusra in their actions.”

Is the truce in Kefrayya and al- Fu’ah in the countryside of Idlib will have negative effect on Efrin particularly on Atmah and Jandirs front?

“We do not count very much on this agreement as it is a periodical and tactical one, we hope to be a success to alleviate the humanitarian suffering of civilians, women and children on both sides. However, as realistic reading, we do not expect it to be a success especially after a lot of breaches occurred in the past 2 days. Concerning Jabhat al- Nusra, we are enemies and what made the situation getting worse is the declarations issued by it several times that when they finish fighting in al- Fu’ah they are going to attack Efrin. Regardless al- Zabadani – al- Fu’ah agreement, the war between us has been declared for a time sometimes directly and sometime indirectly.”

How do you evaluate the current the situation in al- Hasakah, and what is your goal in the area?

“From the military aspect, the situation from al- Hasakah to Kobani is a defensive one. So, after expelling Daesh from al- Hasakah, Kobani and Tal Abyad our units are deployed defensively to repel any possible attack carried by IS militants.

“We view al- Hasakah as a nucleus of the new democratic Syria. For this reason, we are working on establishing joint councils includes Kurds, Arabs and Syriacs, and on increasing the communication among all constituents. So, the success of our project in al- Hasakah is the motivation to fine similar solution that could be applied on the whole Syria where Syria will be free and democratic for all people.

What about the ongoing military actions in the countryside of Ayn al- Arab (Kobani)?

“The military operation in the countryside of Kobani is under the military operation room of Burkan al- Forat that includes YPG and some factions of the Free Army, so this operation is going to continue until we reach al- Raqqa and expel Daesh from it. YPG is committed to providing all kinds of support to the factions of the Free Army affiliated to the military operation room of Burkan al- Forat in order to defeat Daesh and retake al- Raqqa.”

Were you going to achieve these glory victories in Ayna al- Arab (Kobani) without US-led coalition support?

“To be realistic, we cannot deny the role offered by US-led coalition in Koabani battle but frankly speaking, I confirm that the legendary resistance and courage of our fighters as well as their ability to scarify their blood were behind these victories. So, US-led coalition had an important role but it is not the basic one.

Under these victories, there are some parties accuse you of seeking to secede from Syria in order to establish a Kurdish entity.

“These are false accusations, the Turkish government underlies them where it tries to portray any Kurdish strife as if it is a secessionist movement. Rather, those who repeat these accusations should communicate with us and see our project, then they will discover that our main project for Syria is establishing a pluralist parliamentary democratic system, and that it is Syrian project par excellence for all the constituents of Syrian people. It is the real guarantee for the unity of Syria, so stop repeating Erdogan speech like parrots. I would like also to ask them, is the stay of Daesh in Jarablos and the countryside of Aleppo is a guarantee for the unity of Syria?!”

What is your response about that YPG displaces the Arabs from their regions?

Frankly speaking, we got bored of these blatant lies and falsehoods, we issued a formal statement about that, as well as many human rights organizations have refuted these allegations. In war, it is very normal that the civilians will leave the clashing areas towards safer places, and that what happened in all the clashing areas in Syria from Horan to Qameshlo, but those who have been disturbed by our victories and tolerance and humanity turned to confuse what we have achieved. In addition, we have repeatedly launched appeals for the citizens to return to their homes, and allow me to reiterate the call from your rostrum to all citizens on order to come back to their homes.”

Too much talk about your relation with the regime especially after al- Hasakah clashes, how do you explain this relation if any?

“These accusations are the same of accusations of seeking to secede, so those who repeat such accusations have closed their minds on two ways, whether to be with me or with the regime. I said to them we the are the third line. Our revolution against injustice and tyranny has its own special way that is nor similar to anything. We are convinced of the impossibility of the military solution for the Syria crisis but it should be a cultural, intellectual and political one. Therefore, we depend on ensuring protection to the citizen who will build new democratic Syria; the peaceful Syria. We are friends of people and friends of all those who want democracy and equality.

Earlier, you held a truce with Jabhat al- Nusra and other Islamist factions, if there is any mediation are you going to hold a truce with “Islamic State”?

“Our conviction is that Daesh is a force of darkness, it bears no relation to Islam and the humanity, even it is criminal force established to destroy all what is human. In my opinion, there is no big difference between Jabhat al- Nusra and Daesh but the war with al- Nusra is a little bit complicated because there are a lot of Syrians in its ranks and because there are some parties attempting to burnish its image on media. As for the truce, there was no truce between only Jabhat al- Nusra and us but it always was with several factions and Jabhat al- Nusra was signing with them on the truce.”

Lastly, what is your vision for the realistic solution of Syria crisis?

Unfortunately, what is happening in Syria, we can call it clashes of titans; it is more like a third world war, where the major powers are fighting to divide the zones of influence in the world.”

“The solution is not in the hand of Syrian now, it is related with the contesting powers, we see it a war of change of maps, divisions, agreements and mentalities that are hundreds years old. Syria is also a conflict center and the solution of disputes will be on its land. Unfortunately, our point of view is that the war may take dozens of years, and all what the Syrian people can do is having the will and the attempt to achieve a joint project that protects them, reduce the losses and help them to promote strongly at the end of war.”

“The war will not stop in Syria but it will extend to all the Middle East and my extend more than that, and then will see a reverse migration from all countries towards Syria which will be the safest country.”