"Oh noes A nuvva terra alert." (shriek - piss pants etc.)

 If it's not one idiot, it's another, and if it's not completely fabricated (Bush and Co), then it's totally false.

What am I talking about?

The fucking stupidity and pointlessness of "Terror Alerts."

And here, Julie Bishop has her turn - again, for the 75th time this week.

http://news.smh.com.au/breaking-news-national/terror-threat-higher-in-3-states-bishop-20140929-3gv6d.html

Terror threat higher in 3 states: Bishop

You know - really?

What gets up my arse is the utter insipidity - the monthly moron quota of bullshit gets exceeded in like 3 seconds or less.

Why does this stupid shit annoy the piss out of me?

Well I will tell you.

Saying there is a terror alert in 3 states in Australia - well that is about as empty headed as bullshit comes.

OK for instance, if the bureau of metrology says there is a UV alert of 13 or you fry and die in 10 minutes at noon...

Then that alert applies EVERY WHERE.....

Because the sun shine is everywhere.

That makes sense.


But saying there is a terror alert in three states......

Well people letting off bombs - lets just say... that happens to be a highly localised event.

Say 5 people plan to let off a bomb in a crowded area like a diner section in a shopping centre....

Well that affects those people who are also planning to eat at that shopping centre, at the time that the bomb is planned to be let off - say when it's really crowded - like at lunch time - 12 noon till 1pm...

It doesn't affect people coming there for breakfast, morning tea, the day before or after etc., etc..

Although shocked and distressed and assorted injuries etc., a smallish bomb probably won't kill or seriously injure many people beyond a 20 or 30 meter radius...

It doesn't affect people dining, working, shopping, etc., 1Km away, 5 Km away, 50 Km away, 500Km away......

It's a highly localised event.

So I am thinking, "Why don't you idiot ministers and staff and ASIO etc., cut all the bullshit out and either announce who the people are, what they are planning to do, what they are planning to do it with and where they are planning to do it - or just shut the fuck up...."

This idiot statement "All of Victoria / NSW / Qld - is on a terror alert - for an assumed effective blast diameter of say 60 meters....

I also figured out a way to remove pi from equations for fast and reasonably accurate surface areas of circles... 0.73 is the multiplier of the square...

That is about 60 x 60 x 0.73 =  2630 meters square.

OK to save this becoming incomprehesibly HUGE in terms of square meters, we shall stick to square Kilometers.

Qld has 1 723 936 square Km

NSW has 800 628 square Km

Vic has 227 010 square Km

 OK so a small and effective bomb has a blast diameter of 60 meters, that is about 0.002628 square kilometers - or the area of about 4 basket ball courts made into a square....

Ok my calculator is fucking up on this....
Round up / down - accurately approximate....

The area of Queensland divided by the area of 4 basket ball courts in square kilometers.

1700000/0.0026 = 653846153.846

So if your living in Queensland and a bomb with a blast diameter of 60 meters goes off, there is 653,846,153 million equivalent sized areas in Queensland that will not be affected by the bomb blast.

 There are 307,933,845 other places the same size as four basket ball courts in NSW that will not be affected by the blast.

And like wise, it's 87,311,538 other places in Victoria of equivalent area as the blast, that won't be affected by the bomb....

Assuming that bomb, kills 20 to 30 people, in a really packed area... and there are about 120 reasonably badly injured people along with that....

 

87,311,538 + 307,933,845 + 653,846,153 - roughly rounded off = 1.7 billion to one - for all the other 60 meter diameter areas in the eastern three states that will not be affected by the blast.....

So why am I expected to go and shit bricks with another bullshit terror alert - when the odds are statistically so fucking improbable of anyone getting killed or injured?

So Julie Bishop and ASIO etc., don't waste my time with your American arse licking PR crap.

Meanwhile our idiot ministers continue to turn Australia into an ever worsening branch of the USA's corporate oil and banker run surveillance state.....

Yes lets celebrate Australia Day with the fanciful notion that for every 10 litres of fuel we buy, there is one more dead person in Iran, Iraq, Nigeria, etc., etc., etc., who was killed so "we" (the good guys?) could steal it and use it with impunity, based upon a tax payer funded military who works for the corporations masking as a government, who make record profits and pay no taxes in the USA.

And after the awards, you can go back to hiding behind your doors, hoping that the recreation of Hitlers Germany, doesn't result in your door getting kicked in and you disappearing - without recourse to anything.

Because this is what we now have in the United Nazi State of Australia.

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The Night and Fog Edict

- or Hitlers WWII game of making people disappear without a trace forever...


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nacht_und_Nebel

Nacht und Nebel (German for "Night and Fog" – a direct reference to a "Tarnhelm" spell, from Wagner's Rheingold) was a directive (German: Erlass) of Adolf Hitler on 7 December 1941 that was originally intended to winnow out all political activists and resistance 'helpers', "anyone endangering German security" (die deutsche Sicherheit gefährden) throughout Nazi Germany's occupied territories.^[1]

Three months later Armed Forces High Command Feldmarschall Wilhelm Keitel expanded it to include all persons in occupied countries who had been taken into custody and were still alive eight days later; they were subsequently handed over to the Gestapo.^[2]

The decree was meant to intimidate local populations into submission by denying friends and families of the missing any knowledge of their whereabouts or their fate.

The prisoners were secretly transported to Germany, vanishing without a trace. In 1945, the seized Sicherheitsdienst (SD) records were found to include merely names and the initials NN (Nacht und Nebel); even the sites of graves were unchronicled. To this day, it is not known how many thousands of people disappeared as a result of this order.^[3]


The International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg held that the disappearances committed as part of the Nacht und Nebel program were war crimes which violated both the Hague Conventions and customary international law.^[4]

The wikipedia entry has all the pictures etc...



<sup>Background

Heinrich Himmler

Even before the Holocaust gained momentum, the Nazis had begun rounding up political prisoners from both Germany and occupied Europe. Most of the early prisoners were of two sorts: they were either prisoners of personal conviction (belief), political prisoners whom the Nazis deemed in need of "re-education" to Nazi ideals, or resistance leaders in occupied western Europe.[5] Up until the time of the "Night and Fog" decree, prisoners from Western Europe were handled by German soldiers in approximately the same way other countries did: according to national agreements and procedures such as the Geneva Convention.[6] Hitler and his upper level staff, however, made a critical decision not to conform to what they considered unnecessary rules and in the process abandoned "all chivalry towards the opponent" and removed "every traditional restraint on warfare."[7]
On 7 December 1941, Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler issued the following instructions to the Gestapo:

"After lengthy consideration, it is the will of the Führer that the measures taken against those who are guilty of offenses against the Reich or against the occupation forces in occupied areas should be altered. The Führer is of the opinion that in such cases penal servitude or even a hard labor sentence for life will be regarded as a sign of weakness. An effective and lasting deterrent can be achieved only by the death penalty or by taking measures which will leave the family and the population uncertain as to the fate of the offender. Deportation to Germany serves this purpose."[8]</sup>

(see my foot notes on this one at the end)


<sup>Wilhelm Keitel


On 12 December, Keitel issued a directive which explained Hitler's orders:
 Efficient and enduring intimidation can only be achieved either by capital punishment or by measures by which the relatives of the criminals do not know the fate of the criminal.

He further expanded on this principle in a February 1942 letter stating that any prisoners not executed within eight days were  to be transported to Germany secretly, and further treatment of the offenders will take place here; these measures will have a deterrent effect because - A. The prisoners will vanish without a trace. B. No information may be given as to their whereabouts or their fate.

The Night and Fog prisoners were mostly from France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Norway.[9] They were usually arrested in the middle of the night and quickly taken to prisons hundreds of miles away for questioning, eventually arriving at concentration camps such as Natzweiler, Esterwegen or Gross-Rosen, if they survived.[10] Up to 30 April 1944, at least 6,639 persons were captured under the Nacht und Nebel orders.[11] Some 340 of them may have been executed. The 1955 film Night and Fog, directed by Alain Resnais, uses the term to illustrate one aspect of the concentration camp system as it was transformed into a system of labour and death camps.

Rationale

The reasons for Nacht und Nebel were many. The policy, enforced in Nazi-occupied countries, meant that whenever someone was arrested, the family would learn nothing about the person's fate. The people arrested, sometimes only suspected resistors, were secretly sent to Germany and perhaps to a concentration camp. Whether they lived or died, the Germans would give out no information to the families involved.[12] This was done to keep the population in occupied countries quiet by promoting an atmosphere of mystery, fear and terror.[13][14]

The program made it far more difficult for other governments or humanitarian organizations to accuse the German government of specific misconduct because it obscured whether or not internment or death had even occurred, let alone the cause of the person's disappearance. It thereby kept the Nazis from being held accountable. It allowed across-the-board, silent defiance of international treaties and conventions – one cannot apply the requirements for humane treatment in war if one cannot locate a victim or discern that victim's fate. Additionally, the policy lessened German subjects' moral qualms about the Nazi regime, as well as their desire to speak out against it, by keeping the general public ignorant of the regime's malfeasance and by creating extreme pressure for service members to remain silent.[15]
 
Treatment of prisoners
 
Original artifact. Brown boxcar with light creating shadows from upper right corner.
Replica of a Holocaust train boxcar used by Nazi Germany to transport Jews and other victims during the Holocaust.

The Nacht und Nebel prisoners' hair was shaved and the women were given a convict costume of a thin cotton dress, wooden sandals and a triangular black headcloth. According to historian Wolfgang Sofsky, "Prisoners of the Nacht und Nebel transports were marked by broad red bands; on their backs and both trouser legs was a cross, with the letters “NN” to its right. From these emblems, it was possible to recognize immediately what class a prisoner belonged to and how he or she was pigeonholed and evaluated by the SS."[16] The prisoners were often moved apparently at random from prison to prison such as Fresnes Prison in Paris, Waldheim near Dresden, Leipzig, Potsdam, Lübeck and Stettin. The deportees were sometimes herded 80 at a time with standing room only into slow moving, dirty cattle trucks with little or no food or water on journeys lasting up to five days to their next unknown destination.[17]

An average day for the prisoners was to be awakened at 5:00am and made to work a twelve-hour day with only a twenty-minute break for a scant meal. When the Allies liberated Paris and Brussels, the SS decided on revenge while they still could and many of the Nacht und Nebel prisoners were moved to concentration camps such as Ravensbrück concentration camp for women, Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp, Buchenwald concentration camp, Schloss Hartheim, or Flossenbürg concentration camp.[18]

At the camps, the prisoners were forced to stand for hours in freezing and wet conditions at 5:00 every morning, standing strictly to attention, before being put to work all day. They were kept in cold and starving conditions many with dysentery or other illnesses and the weakest were often beaten to death, shot, guillotined, or hanged, while the others were subjected to torture by the Germans.[19] When the inmates were totally exhausted, after having worked for 12 hours a day, or if they were too ill or too weak to work, they were then transferred to the Revier ("Krankenrevier", sick barrack) or other places for extermination. If a camp did not have a gas chamber of its own, the so-called Muselmänner, or prisoners who were too sick to work, were often killed or transferred to other concentration camps for extermination.[19]

Results

The execution of guards of the Stutthof concentration camp on July 4, 1946. (left to right) Barkmann, Paradies, Becker, Klaff, Steinhoff.

The body of Wilhelm Keitel after being hanged

The result, even early in the war, was the facilitating of execution of political prisoners, especially Soviet military prisoners, who in early 1942 outnumbered the Jews in number of deaths even at Auschwitz.[20] As the transports grew and Hitler's troops moved across Europe, that ratio changed dramatically. The Night and Fog Decree was carried out surreptitiously, but it set the background for orders that would follow and established a "new dimension of fear."[21] 

As the war continued, so did the openness of such decrees and orders. It is probably correct to surmise, from various writings, that in the beginning the German public knew only a little of the insidious plans Hitler had for a "New European Order". As the years passed, despite the best attempts of Goebbels and the Propaganda Ministry with its formidable domestic information control, there can be little doubt from diaries and periodicals of the time that information about the harshness and cruelty became progressively known to the German public.[22]

Soldiers brought back information, families on rare occasion heard from or about loved ones, and allied news sources and the BBC were able to get through sporadically.[23] Although captured archives from the SD contain numerous orders stamped with "NN" (Nacht und Nebel), it has never been determined exactly how many people disappeared as a result of the decree. Hesitant if not outright skeptical at first to believe reports coming in about the atrocities being committed by the Germans, Allied doubts were pushed aside when the French entered the Natzweiler-Struthoff camp (one of the Nacht und Nebel facilities) on 23 November 1944 and discovered a chamber where victims were hung by their wrists from hooks so as to accommodate the process of pumping Zyklon-B gas into the room.[24] Keitel later testified at the Nuremberg Trials that of all the illegal orders he'd carried out, the Night and Fog Decree was "the worst of all."[25] In part because of his role in carrying out this decree, Keitel was hanged in 1946.

Text of the decrees
 
Directives for the prosecution of offences committed within the occupied territories against the German State or the occupying power, of 7 December 1941.

Within the occupied territories, communistic elements and other circles hostile to Germany have increased their efforts against the German State and the occupying powers since the Russian campaign started. The amount and the danger of these machinations oblige us to take severe measures as a deterrent. 

First of all the following directives are to be applied:
 
 I. Within the occupied territories, the adequate punishment for offences committed against the German State or the occupying power which endanger their security or a state of readiness is on principle the death penalty.
 II. The offences listed in paragraph I as a rule are to be dealt with in the occupied countries only if it is probable that sentence of death will be passed upon the offender, at least the principal offender, and if the trial and the execution can be completed in a very short time. Otherwise the offenders, at least the principal offenders, are to be taken to Germany.
 III. Prisoners taken to Germany are subject to military procedure only if particular military interests require this. In case German or foreign authorities inquire about such prisoners, they are to be told that they have been arrested but that the proceedings do not allow any further information.
 IV. The Commanders in the occupied territories and the Court authorities within the framework of their jurisdiction, are personally responsible for the observance of this decree.
 V. The Chief of the High Command of the Armed Forces determines in which occupied territories this decree is to be applied. He is authorized to explain and to issue executive orders and supplements. The Reich Minister of Justice will issue executive orders within his own jurisdiction.[26][27] 


My Footnotes:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_rendition</sup>

Background

By 2005, critics alleged that torture was used against subjects with the knowledge or acquiescence of the United States (a transfer of anyone to anywhere for the purpose of torture is a violation of US law). In addition, some former detainees claimed to have been transferred to other countries for interrogation under torture, such as the Australian citizen Mahmdouh Habib. In December 2005 Condoleezza Rice (then the United States Secretary of State) stated that:^[3]

“the United States has not transported anyone, and will not transport anyone, to a country when we believe he will be tortured. Where appropriate, the United States seeks assurances that transferred persons will not be tortured."

The United States' Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) runs a global apprehension and incarceration operation of suspected terrorists, known as “extraordinary rendition”, which began under the Bill Clinton administration and developed further under the George W. Bush administration after the 9/11 attacks. From 2001 to 2005 CIA officers captured an estimated 150 people and transported them around the world.^[4][5][6][7]
Under the Bush administration, rendered persons were reported to have undergone torture by the receiving countries. Journalists, civil and constitutional rights groups, and former detainees have alleged that this occurred with the knowledge or cooperation of the administrations of the United States and the United Kingdom.^[8]
The revelations about the US program prompted several official investigations in Europe into alleged secret detentions and unlawful inter-state transfers involving Council of Europe member states. A June 2006 report from the Council of Europe estimated 100 people had been kidnapped by the CIA on EU territory (with the cooperation of Council of Europe members), and rendered to other countries, often after having transited through secret detention centers ("black sites") used by the CIA, some located in Europe. According to the separate European Parliament report of February 2007, the CIA has conducted 1,245 flights, many of them to destinations where suspects could face torture, in violation of article 3 of the United Nations Convention Against Torture.^[9] A large majority of the European Union Parliament endorsed the report's conclusion that many member states tolerated illegal actions by the CIA, and criticized several European governments and intelligence agencies for their unwillingness to cooperate with the investigation.


http://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/reports/globalizing-torture-cia-secret-detention-and-extraordinary-rendition

Globalizing Torture is the most comprehensive account yet assembled of the human rights abuses associated with CIA secret detention and extraordinary rendition operations. It details for the first time what was done to the 136 known victims, and lists the 54 foreign governments that participated in these operations. It shows that responsibility for the abuses lies not only with the United States but with dozens of foreign governments that were complicit.


http://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/sites/default/files/globalizing-torture-20120205.pdf



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http://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/voices/20-extraordinary-facts-about-cia-extraordinary-rendition-and-secret-detention

20 Extraordinary Facts about CIA Extraordinary Rendition and Secret Detention

February 5, 2013   by Jonathan Horowitz & Stacy Cammarano   Open Society Justice Initiative   27 comments

20 Extraordinary Facts about CIA Extraordinary Rendition and Secret Detention

After the 9-11 attacks against the United States, the Central Intelligence Agency conspired with dozens of governments to build a secret extraordinary rendition and detention program that spanned the globe. Extraordinary rendition is the transfer—without legal process—of a detainee to the custody of a foreign government for purposes of detention and interrogation.

The program was intended to protect America. But, as described in the Open Society Justice Initiative’s new report, it stripped people of their most basic rights, facilitated gruesome forms of torture, at times captured the wrong people, and debased the United States’ human rights reputation world-wide.
To date, the United States and the vast majority of the other governments involved—more than 50 in all—have refused to acknowledge their participation, compensate the victims, or hold accountable those most responsible for the program and its abuses. Here are 20 additional facts from the new report that expose just how brutal and mistaken the program was:

1. At least 136 individuals were reportedly extraordinarily rendered or secretly detained by the CIA and at least 54 governments reportedly participated in the CIA’s secret detention and extraordinary rendition program; classified government documents may reveal many more.
2. A series of Department of Justice memoranda authorized torture methods that the CIA applied on detainees. The Bush Administration referred to these methods as “enhanced interrogation techniques.” “Enhanced interrogation techniques” included “walling” (quickly pulling the detainee forward and then thrusting him against a flexible false wall), “water dousing,” “waterboarding,” “stress positions” (forcing the detainee to remain in body positions designed to induce physical discomfort), “wall standing” (forcing the detainee to remain standing with his arms outstretched in front of him so that his fingers touch a wall five four to five feet away and support his entire body weight), “cramped confinement” in a box, “insult slaps,” (slapping the detainee on the face with fingers spread), “facial hold” (holding a detainee’s head temporarily immobile during interrogation with palms on either side of the face), “attention grasp” (grasping the detainee with both hands, one hand on each side of the collar opening, and quickly drawing him toward the interrogator), forced nudity, sleep deprivation while being vertically shackled, and dietary manipulation.
3. President Bush has stated that about a hundred detainees were held under the CIA secret detention program, about a third of whom were questioned using “enhanced interrogation techniques.”
4. The CIA’s Office of Inspector General has reportedly investigated a number of “erroneous renditions” in which the CIA had abducted and detained the wrong people. A CIA officer told the Washington Post: “They picked up the wrong people, who had no information.  In many, many cases there was only some vague association” with terrorism.
5. German national Khaled El-Masri was seized in Macedonia because he had been mistaken for an Al Qaeda suspect with a similar name. He was held incommunicado and abused in Macedonia and in secret CIA detention in Afghanistan. On December 13, 2012, the European Court of Human Rights held that Macedonia had violated El-Masri’s rights under the European Convention on Human Rights, and found that his ill-treatment by the CIA at Skopje airport in Macedonia amounted to torture.
6. Wesam Abdulrahman Ahmed al-Deemawi was seized in Iran and held for 77 days in the CIA’s “Dark Prison” in Afghanistan.  He was later held in Bagram for 40 days and subjected to sleep deprivation, hung from the ceiling by his arms in the “strappado” position, threatened by dogs, made to watch torture videos, and subjected to sounds of electric sawing accompanied by cries of pain.
7. Several former interrogators and counterterrorism experts have confirmed that “coercive interrogation” is ineffective. Col. Steven Kleinman, Jack Cloonan, and Matthew Alexander stated in a letter to Congress that that U.S. interrogation policy “came with heavy costs” and that “[k]ey allies, in some instances, refused to share needed intelligence, terrorists attacks increased world wide, and Al Qaeda and like-minded groups recruited a new generation of Jihadists.”
8. After being extraordinarily rendered by the United States to Egypt in 2002, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, under threat of torture at the hands of Egyptian officials, fabricated information relating to Iraq’s provision of chemical and biological weapons training to Al Qaeda. In 2003, then Secretary of State Colin Powell relied on this fabricated information in his speech to the United Nations that made the case for war against Iraq.
9. Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded at least 83 times by the CIA. FBI interrogator Ali Soufan testified before Congress that he elicited “actionable intelligence” from Zubaydah using rapport-building techniques but that Zubaydah “shut down” after he was waterboarded.
10. Torture is prohibited in all circumstances under international law and allegations of torture must be investigated and criminally punished. The United States prosecuted Japanese interrogators for “waterboarding” U.S. prisoners during World War II.
11. On November 20, 2002, Gul Rahman froze to death in a secret CIA prison in Afghanistan called the “Salt Pit,” after a CIA case officer ordered guards to strip him naked, chain him to the concrete floor, and leave him there overnight without blankets.
12. Fatima Bouchar was abused by the CIA, and by persons believed to be Thai authorities, for several days in the Bangkok airport. Bouchar reported she was chained to a wall and not fed for five days, at a time when she was four-and-a-half months pregnant. After that she was extraordinarily rendered to Libya.
13. Syria was one of the “most common destinations for rendered suspects,” as were Egypt and Jordan. One Syrian prison facility contained individual cells that were roughly the size of coffins.  Detainees report incidents of torture involving a chair frame used to stretch the spine (the “German chair”) and beatings.
14. Muhammed al-Zery and Ahmed Agiza, while seeking asylum in Sweden, were extraordinarily rendered to Egypt where they were tortured with shocks to their genitals.  Al-Zery was also forced to lie on an electrified bed frame. 
15. Abu Omar, an Italian resident, was abducted from the streets of Milan, extraordinarily rendered to Egypt, and secretly detained for fourteen months while Egyptian agents interrogated and tortured him by subjecting him to electric shocks. An Italian court convicted in absentia 22 CIA agents and one Air Force pilot for their roles in the extraordinary rendition of Abu Omar.
16. Known black sites—secret prisons run by the CIA on foreign soil—existed in Afghanistan, Lithuania, Morocco, Poland, Romania, and Thailand.
17. Abd al Rahim al Nashiri was secretly detained in various black sites. While secretly detained in Poland, U.S. interrogators subjected al Nashiri to a mock execution with a power drill as he stood naked and hooded; racked a semi-automatic handgun close to his head as he sat shackled before them; held him in “standing stress positions;” and threatened to bring in his mother and sexually abuse her in front of him.
18. President Obama’s 2009 Executive Order repudiating torture does not repudiate the CIA extraordinary rendition program.  It was specifically crafted to preserve the CIA’s authority to detain terrorist suspects on a short-term, transitory basis prior to rendering them to another country for interrogation or trial.
19. President Obama’s 2009 Executive Order also established an interagency task force to review interrogation and transfer policies and issue recommendations on “the practices of transferring individuals to other nations.” The interagency task force report was issued in 2009, but continues to be withheld from the public. It appears that the U.S. intends to continue to rely on anti-torture diplomatic assurances from recipient countries and post-transfer monitoring of detainee treatment, but those methods were not effective safeguards against torture for Maher Arar, who was tortured in Syria, or Ahmed Agiza and Muhammed al-Zery, who were tortured in Egypt.
20. The Senate Select Intelligence Committee has completed a 6,000 page report that further details the CIA detention and interrogation operations with access to classified sources. However, the report itself remains classified.