By David Murray
August 05, 2007 12:13am
THE army is investigating an online video that shows binge drinking and a person parading in a Ku Klux Klan outfit on what appears to be Australian Defence Force property.
The footage, titled "My experience in the Australian Army", shows young men, some in uniform, in a contest to drink alcohol through a long plastic hose they call the "super tube of death".
Several drinkers, whose faces are clearly seen, stagger off and vomit over the railing of a demountable-style building called "Block 651".
The image of a person in a KKK-like outfit is flashed up repeatedly during the video to the amusement of the party.
Defence condemnation
Defence chiefs condemned the video as "abhorrent" and have ordered Provost Marshal investigators to go through the footage frame-by-frame.
"The Australian Defence Force does not tolerate or condone the actions of the people in this video," said Defence spokesman Brigadier Andrew Nikolic.
Serving soldiers could be sacked if found to have been involved in the video, Brigadier Nikolic said.
"The Provost Marshal is currently inquiring into the video to confirm the extent of its linkage to Defence," he said.
"If it is found serving Defence members were responsible for its production and posting on the Internet, they may be subject to disciplinary and or administrative action."
The investigation was launched after The Sunday Mail alerted Defence to the video's presence on the Internet video site YouTube.
The demountable buildings and surrounding geography suggests the video was shot at Robertson Barracks at Palmerston near Darwin, where soldiers have previously faced investigations for drug use and gun running.
'Who is protecting us?'
The army would not confirm where its investigation was focused, but did not deny there were similarities in the video to army property.
The video opens with a distasteful scene shot in a toilet that carries the caption: "When the s..t goes down, who is protecting us?"
Another scene shows a message in fridge magnets which says: "Block 651. Maggot by midday."
Soldiers are permitted to drink in moderation on Defence bases while off duty, but face alcohol and drug testing while on duty.
Brigadier Nikolic said new education campaigns about excessive drinking had ensured there was "not a culture of binge drinking in the military".
"The sort of behaviour we saw in the video is irresponsible consumption of alcohol and is not something condoned in the Australian Defence Force," he said.
Ku Klux Klan revisited
The filming of a person in a white-hooded klan outfit in the "Block 651" video recalls the notorious 2004 photograph of Australian soldiers in KKK regalia standing in front of black recruits at Townsville's Lavarack Barracks.
Black soldiers at Lavarack told investigators that their equipment had been defaced with graffiti and they had been given racist nicknames.
The Klan was a racist body notorious for lynching blacks in the US South.
If confirmed as an army party, the "Block 651" video - which has since been taken off by YouTube, possibly at the Army's request - will be the latest embarrassing glimpse of the Australian military to reach the Internet.
Footage of skylarking Australian soldiers recklessly pointing guns at each appeared on YouTube in September and sparked an investigation and threats of sackings.
Another online video showed a soldier pointing a pistol at a fellow Digger dressed in Arab headdress.
quarta-feira, agosto 15, 2007
YouTube shows Aussie Ku Klux Klan 'soldiers'
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YouTube mostra “soldados” Australianos do Ku Klux Klan
Por David Murray
Agosto 05, 2007 12:13am
As forças armadas estão a investigar um vídeo online que mostra uma festa de beber e uma pessoa a desfilar com um traje do Ku Klux Klan no que parece ser uma propriedade da Força de Defesa Australiana .
O filme , intitulado "A minha experiência nas Forças Armadas Australianas", mostra homens jovens, alguns em uniformes, num concurso de beber bebidas alcoólicas através de um longo tubo de plástico a que chamam "super tubo da morte".
Vários dos que bebem, cujos rostos se vêm claramente, saem do palco e vomitam para cima de uma cerca de um edifício de tipo desmontável chamado "Bloco 651".
A imagem de uma pessoa num traje tipo KKK é mostrada repetidas vezes durante o video para diversão dos que estão na festa .
Condenação da Defesa
Os chefes das forças de Defesa condenaram o video como "anormal" e ordenaram aos investigadors do Provost Marshal para verem as imagens uma a uma .
"A Força de Defesa Australiana não tolera nem alinha com as acções das pessoas neste video," diss o porta-voz da Defesa Brigadeiro Andrew Nikolic.
Soldados no activo podem ser despedidos se se descobrir que estiveram envolvidos no video, disse o Brigadeiro Nikolic.
"O Provost Marshal está correntemente a investigar o vídeo para confirmar a extensão da sua ligação com a Defesa," disse.
"Se se descobrir que membros da Defesa no activo foram responsáveis pela produção e colocação na Internet, podem estar sujeitos a acção disciplinar e ou administrativa."
A investigação foi lançada depois de o The Sunday Mail ter alertado a Defesa para a presença do video' no site YouTube.
Os edifícios desmontáveis e a geografia circundante sugerem que o video foi filmado nas Robertson Barracks em Palmerston perto de Darwin, onde previamente soldados enfrentaram investigações sobre drogas e armas.
'Quem é que nos está a proteger?'
As forças armadas não confirma onde estão focadas as investigações mas não negou as semelhanças no video com propriedades das forças amadas.
O video começa com uma cena de mau gosto filmada numa casa de banho com a citação : "Quando a m. desce, quem é que nos está a proteger?"
Uma outra cena mostra uma mensagem em magnéticos de geladeira que dizem: "Bloco 651. Vermes pelo meio-dia ."
É autorizado aos soldados beberem com moderação nas bases da Defesa quando estão ora de serviço, mas enfrentam testes de álcool e drogas quando estão em serviço.
O Brigadeiro Nikolic disse que novas campanhas de educação acerca de consumo em excesso de alcool tinham assegurado que não "há uma cultura de festas de bebida nos militares".
"O tipo de comportamento que vemos no video é o consumo irresponsável de alcool e que não é tolerado na Força de Defesa Australiana," disse.
Ku Klux Klan revisited
A filmagem de uma pessoa num carapuço branco klan no vídeo "Bloco 651" lembra as famosas fotos de 2004 de soldados Australianos em trajes do KKK de pé em frente de recrutas brancos nas Lavarack Barracks em Townsville.
Soldados negros em Lavarack disseram aos investigadores que os seus equipamentos tinham sido desfigurados com graffiti e que lhes tinham dado alcunhas racistas.
A Klan foi uma organização racista famosa por linchar negros no sul dos USA.
Se for confirmada a participação das forças armadas, o vídeo "Bloco 651" video – que foi removido pelo YouTube, possivelmente a pedido das forças armadas - será o último reflexo embaraçoso dos militares Australianos a chegar à Internet.
Filmagens de actos desatinados de soldados Australianos a apontar armas una aos outros de forma imprudente apareceram no YouTube em Setembro desencadearam uma investigação e ameaças de despedimentos.
Um outro vídeo online video mostrava um soldado a apontar uma pistola a um camarada vestido com um traje Árabe na cabeça.
An Australian soldier stands by as a Timorese woman walks by in Dili....he says....."check out that bung" speaking about the woman who is walking around with a Blues Rugby League T-Shirt; "Hey Davo! Bungs go for the Blues too you fucking losers...cockroaches and bungs on your side...losers!" they all laughed. They must have been from Queensland.
Another one: Australian UNPOL officers having coffee inside, not even bothering to invite their PNTL companions inside into the air conditioning. I was sitting next to them and my appearance porbably made them think I could understand English as I had been speaking tetum to the staff and Portuguese to friends. "What's that fucking lazy black #$@% doing now?" One of them asks to his friend as a PNTL companion sitting outside walks up to greet a freind who is also sitting inside the coffee shop.
Just a sample of the type of we have running around this country. This is how they treat their "black" people so they just carry on the same.
I am Australian and visited East Timor last month. I am disgusted with the way Australia and Australians are behaving. I was ashamed at the blatant and not so blatant racism shown towards Timorese whilst I was there by my fellow Australians. They are only there for the money and do not care about the people or the country. After all our government's have doen to rob these people of their rights and wealth over the last 30 years....I am ashamed to be Australian.
New Matilda Magazine writes on the KKK Sldier story and the phenomenon it represents in Australian Society:
It's Brutal, John, But Is It Art?
By: Sunday Francis-Reiss
Wednesday 15 August 2007
One of the most influential art movements in recent history was anti-war, and was made by people who refused to see themselves as artists. From 1915-1923, the Dadaists created work based on their conclusion that the world had gone mad, and that war was craziness incarnate. They felt that if society were to continue in the direction it was heading, they wanted no part of its beliefs or traditions — particularly its artistic traditions.
Using an early form of shock art, the Dadaists confronted society with humour and irreverence — see Marcel Duchamp’s famous Mona Lisa redrawn with moustache — obscenities and everyday objects repositioned as art — see Duchamp’s sculpture Fountain, a urinal with his signature on the bottom.
The Dadaists intended to provoke, shock and outrage. Art — along with everything else in the world — had no meaning, they believed.
We now have some strange entrants to this influential artistic tradition and its succeeding movements.
Army officials have been quick to disown it, but the video recently released on — and swiftly pulled from — YouTube, showing soldiers in a Northern Territory barracks getting rotten drunk and dressing in Ku Klux garb, is part of an emerging trend of soldiers using media to express themselves. Recall the video that appeared on YouTube last September, which showed Australian soldiers pointing guns at one another, and more notoriously the 2004 photos that showed soldiers dressed in KKK outfits at a Townsville barracks.
Yes, there’s a pattern emerging. And it’s brutal, John, but is it art?
Have a look at what our soldiers have been doing in their spare time. They play with elements of military and cult culture, history, ritual and costume. They use poses and tableaux — often consciously performing for the camera — and even add music and employ editing techniques.
The videos embrace facets of performance art and new media, through their use of film, photography and sound, which could be considered the postmodern equivalent of the assemblage, collage and photomontage techniques employed by the Dadaists.
But essentially, what we have here are voluntarily participating individuals actively creating reflections of their world — with its constraints, values, and activities. Just because that culture might be ‘abhorrent,’ as one military spokesman put it, or brutish or crude or ignorant, does not mean it should be disowned.
What these videos and photographs illuminate is that individuals are craving ways to interpret and express the bizarre reality that is military service. It does not matter that they probably don’t view themselves as artists, in fact it’s rather Dada if they don’t: Dada was officially not a movement, and the artists were, of course, not artists.
In our post-pomo world it is, after all, the audience who decide what art is. For example, Shakespeare would not have considered himself a canonical writer, and Aboriginal rock painters didn’t paint with White cultural theorists as their intended audience.
At this point it must be said that incidences like the 2004 Abu Ghraib images, of Muslim men being variously humiliated and tortured by foreign troops, should not be considered in this category. Exploitation of non-complicit individuals is not okay and cannot be defended. It should also be noted that in reproducing the images the Western media were active participants in the torture and dehumanisation that occurred.
What politicians have described in the latest video as ‘letting off steam’ (that is, drinking until vomiting) could otherwise be interpreted as catharsis. The famously exiled but now highly valued Austrian artist Hermann Nitsch, part of a group known as the Vienna Actionists, created works that involved the mass slaughter of animals. Nitsch was responding to the sensory overload of the World War II bombings, propaganda and militarisation of cities in his childhood. His primeval rituals were performances intended to discharge suppressed energy that individuals, through societal constraints, pent up.
Punk art, which also incorporated senseless violence, such as artists putting nails through their bodies or vomiting and defecating onstage, was a reaction to the disillusionment of the times, for which the Vietnam War was partly responsible. The do-it-yourself ethos of Punk is reflected through the hand-held cameras and cut-up style of the soldiers’ videos.
Censorship has always been a companion of art, and it is likely that the trend of expressions by soldiers will be stymied. US military bans instated earlier this year blocked the use of YouTube, MySpace and other websites from military computers, sometimes the only channels of communication open to soldiers on active duty abroad. Bandwidth was cited as the primary reason, but puzzlingly (or not) no gaming sites were banned from use.
John Howard has instead decided to capitalise on the airing of the controversial vids as a way to lure new recruits. Last week he released his own YouTube clip promoting a Defence Force ‘gap year’ for young Australians.
Perching oh-so-casually on a boardroom table, Howard implores youngsters to take the ‘great experiences’ and ‘skills for life’ that a year in the Defence Force offers. Traditionally the gap year — a British concept — involves school leavers heading overseas, binge-drinking and taking photos. Clever timing means that Howard’s sober presentation will reach young audiences while the original clip is still fresh in mind.
The horrific realities of war have inspired some great, often brutal, and usually confronting works of art. Often, these works have challenged contemporary perceptions of what art can be, and they have frequently involved base, unrefined and visceral objects and actions to express something beyond — or beneath — words.
This current movement shows military service personnel portraying their realities — be they boring, inhumane, or otherwise — through public forums such as YouTube. It may not have produced any pieces of aesthetic or conceptual brilliance, but it is art nonetheless. We may not like the culture or attitudes being depicted, but it would be ignorance for us to deny them.
About the author:
Sunday Francis-Reiss is a Sydney-based writer and activist.
AND ITS THESE PEOPLE WHO ARE IN EAST TIMOR. WATCH OUT GUYS!!!
War on Error: The Scales of Justice
By: Bruce Haigh
Wednesday 25 July 2007
The Australian Federal Police’s (AFP) presentation of the facts in the Mohamed Haneef case has been sloppy to the point of scandalous. Statements to the court relating to the whereabouts of Haneef’s SIM card are errors that might lead some to believe this sloppiness is in fact due to partisanship.
Not that this should come as a surprise. By default or design, the broad parameters of policy covering AFP operations have increasingly been set by the National Security Committee of Cabinet, chaired by the Prime Minister, John Howard.
The Minister nominally responsible for the AFP is the Minister for Justice, but under the umbrella of the so-called ‘war on terror,’ it is the Prime Minister who has come to oversee and direct the activities of the AFP. More often than not the AFP Commissioner channels information to, and seeks advice and direction from, the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet.
This evolution is not healthy for Australian democracy. No police force should be influenced, motivated or directed by partisan political objectives. Yet that is the position the AFP now finds itself in.
There is scant Parliamentary oversight of the activities of the AFP. It is subjected to few of the normal checks and balances one might expect in a democracy over a large armed force. For instance, the activities of the Defence Force are subjected to close scrutiny by the Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs and Defence. A similar Senate Committee should be established to oversee the activities of the AFP.
The lack of Parliamentary oversight can be partly explained by the rapid expansion of the AFP over the past 30 years, and the incorporation of duties and activities not envisioned at inception. For the Government to use the AFP as if its major duty is to fight the war on terror is not good enough — and has led to abuses of power and process, as well as an unhealthy blurring of the lines between partisan politics and the national interest.
It is due to these structural and reporting weaknesses that the AFP urgently requires investigation and reform.
A judicial inquiry into the AFP would focus on a number of issues, beginning with the unusual relationship it appears to have developed with its Indonesian counterparts.
The Indonesian military and police have been involved in a number of illegal activities, including logging, mining, the gem trade, prostitution and people smuggling. It is ridiculous for AFP Commissioner, Mike Keelty, to expect anyone with any knowledge of Indonesia to believe his claims that the cessation of people smuggling has been brought about merely through co-operation between Australian and Indonesian police.
Keelty has refused to speculate on a likely connection between Jemaah Islamiyah and the Indonesian military (and, through them, the Indonesian police). Contact exists between Pakistan military intelligence and fundamentalist groups in Pakistan, and there is no reason why such contact would not exist in Indonesia in order to assist mutual political outcomes from time to time.
The strangeness of the relationship makes it all the more necessary to examine the shopping of the Bali Nine to the Indonesian Police by the AFP.
The AFP should also be examined over its close ties with the Department of Immigration, which appear to have driven decisions leading to the unauthorised detention of Australian nationals, and most recently Indian national Mohamed Haneef.
The role of the AFP in the Solomon Islands should be examined too, to ascertain why it was given primacy over the Department of Foreign Affairs. It’s not appropriate in a democracy that a police force should have the principle role in formulating important aspects of foreign policy. Nor is it appropriate that the head of the AFP make critical statements about another country.
The role of the AFP in relation to other Australian security services needs to be defined in order to bring to an end turf wars which waste effort and resources.
The Haneef case has exposed to the broader public and media what others have known about the AFP for some time.
The AFP’s use of the Department of Immigration and its laws to fulfill the political agenda of this Government must be examined if we are to preserve the rule of law in Australia.
The Howard Government has used the war on terror to increase its power at the expense of democracy. It has allowed, indeed actively encouraged, the perversion and misuse of Australian institutions and branches of the public service, the police and military. Some, such as Keelty, have gone along with or assisted these regressive changes.
There are moral and ethical reasons why Rudd and his team should front Howard on Haneef, but if they haven’t the heart, they should keep in mind that an unreformed AFP with Keelty as its head might prove to be a hostile force working against a Labor agenda.
After all, the AFP has received its political training, mandate and money from Howard.
About the Author
Bruce Haigh is a retired diplomat who has observed police forces and judicial systems in apartheid South Africa, Pakistan, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Sri Lanka, the UK and Australia over the last six decades.
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