Bill Clinton, September 10, 2001: I could have killed Bin Laden once but called it off because of civilian casualties

BillClinton,September10,2001:Icouldhave

UnitedNationsprobablynonetoopleasedwithAustralia’s

United Nations probably none too pleased with Australia’s new, less climate-change-minded budget plan

posted at 2:41 pm on May 23, 2014 by Erika Johnsen

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Last September, Australians gave their progressive Labor Party the boot after six years of national government dominance and instead ushered their conservative-lite Liberal Party into power. Their new prime minister, Tony Abbott, promised to reduce government expenditures and streamline the bureaucracy amidst a slowing economy and high taxes, with an especial emphasis on reducing the country’s green-energy commitments and unpopular carbon tax. Last week, Abbott released his budget proposal amidst a flurry of controversy, but he did take a pretty sizable axe to some of Australian green groups’ most treasured areas of government spending:

Australia’s conservative coalition is set to cut more than 90 percent of the funding related to global warming from their budget, from $5.75 billion this year to $500 million, over the next four years.

Environmentalists and leftist politicians in the country protested the move by conservative Liberal Party Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s governing coalition to slash funding for climate programs, arguing such funding for green energy and reducing carbon dioxide emissions were necessary to stop global warming.

But Abbott’s government shot back, saying that the country needed to reduce the size of government and improve the economy.

“The coalition government acknowledges the role of renewable energy in Australia’s energy mix,” said Industry Minister Ian Macfarlane. “There is over $1 billion in funding for existing renewable projects to be completed over the coming years.”

The budget is coming under plenty of fire from the opposition, but the new Australian government has been more than up front with voters and with the United Nations about their disinclination to eagerly participate in the ever-elusive “global climate treaty,” a.k.a. mutual impoverishment pact, that the UN is trying to scrape together (especially not one that relies on “socialism masquerading as environmentalism” in which wealthier countries voluntarily shrink their own economies while redistributing funds that will supposedly be for climate-change mitigation to poorer countries). Abbott has proposed an alternative plan to the carbon tax that would provide taxpayer funded grants to companies and projects that reduce emissions, but that isn’t nearly enough for the international globalist-environmentalist set, which is getting pretty bent out of shape about the signals Australia’s budget proposal is sending. Via Bloomberg:

Australia’s program to rein in pollution is losing momentum, the latest in a series of setbacks for the international effort to tackle global warming. …

The shift in Australia comes just ahead of a series of global climate talks set for later this year. The UN is aiming to craft an agreement in 2015 that would include 190 nations. That pact would limit emissions in both industrialized and developing nations for the first time. Yet China and India have signaled their reluctance to join without broad participation from richer industrial nations, including Australia.

“It feels like a 180-degree turn for Australia,” said Jake Schmidt, director of international climate policy at the New York-based Natural Resources Defense Council. “That’s the hardest thing for the international community to take.” …

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has asked world leaders to bring plans for action on climate to a summit in New York in September. The U.S. and China, the world’s two biggest polluters, have started diplomatic coordination on the issue, and Europe is expanding the world’s biggest carbon market.

“Australia risks being embarrassed by global leaders who are determined to take action, like German Chancellor Angela Merkel and U.S. President Barack Obama,” said Kobad Bhavnagri, the Sydney-based head for Australia research at Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

I’m sure they’ll be devastated.

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Tags: Australia, carbon, economy, green energy, renewables, taxes, United Nations

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Officials“loweringexpectations”onFlight370,warnanswers

Officials “lowering expectations” on Flight 370, warn answers may never come

posted at 3:21 pm on April 2, 2014 by Ed Morrissey

Will the families of those lost on Malaysia Air Flight 370 ever get an answer to the big question — what happened? After almost a month of looking for the wreckage and clues to the flight’s disappearance, officials in Malaysia and Australia have begun tempering expectations about the success of the search efforts. We may never know what happened, or find enough of the wreckage to make that determination:

A police investigation may never determine the reason why the Malaysia Airlines jetliner disappeared, and search planes scouring the India Ocean for any sign of its wreckage aren’t certain to find anything either, officials said Wednesday.

The assessment by Malaysian and Australian officials underscored the lack of knowledge authorities have about what happened on Flight 370. It also points to a scenario that becomes more likely with every passing day – that the fate of the Boeing 777 and the 239 people on board might remain a mystery forever. …

Police are investigating the pilots and crew for any evidence suggesting they may have hijacked or sabotaged the plane. The backgrounds of the passengers, two-thirds of whom were Chinese, have been checked by local and international investigators and nothing suspicious has been found.

“Investigations may go on and on and on. We have to clear every little thing,” Inspector General Khalid Abu Bakar told reporters in Kuala Lumpur. “At the end of the investigations, we may not even know the real cause. We may not even know the reason for this incident.”

That will understandably enrage the survivors of Flight 370, but it raises questions for the airline industry beyond this particular incident. Most people believed that such a disappearance was all but impossible in the modern age of air traffic control and satellite communications. The inability to provide any answers at all — and the inability to quickly determine where the plane actually went — has likely undermined confidence in air travel, Clive Irving wrote earlier this week:

No accident in the history of aviation has so spooked people around the world. It’s like the old Bermuda Triangle phobia but many times worse —how can a large state-of-the-art jet with an impeccable record vanish without trace?

Amazement that this is possible is turning into outrage. The public has realized that there are serious gaps in the technology used to track flights. They are rightly angered to discover that we still have to devote huge resources to finding the airplane’s black box when the same critical data could be in the hands of investigators now but for the failure to adopt live streaming.

It’s also been infuriating to watch the ineptitude—or worse—of the Malaysian authorities as they attempt to manage the grief of the families of those missing and repeatedly build hopes that wreckage has been found and then have to confess that it hasn’t.

Yahoo’s Danielle Wiener-Bronner argues that Flight 370 will change the future of flying — or it had better do so, anyway:

In order to win back some of the confidence that has built up over years of relative safety (consider that nearly 1.3 million people die in car accidents every year) the aviation industry will likely have to adopt some new standards in response to this latest tragedy. Even as they are still unsure what, if any, measures could have prevented it.

In tandem with its positive report on Tuesday, IATA said it is creating a task force to make recommendations on how to improve aircraft tracking by the end of the year. IATA General Director Tony Tyler said, “in a world where our every move seems to be tracked, there is disbelief that an aircraft could simply disappear. Accidents are rare, but the current search for 370 is a reminder that we cannot be complacent on safety,” adding “we cannot let another aircraft simply vanish.” …

Last week, Joe Kolly, the research and engineering director for the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), said the group is examining live-streaming some flight data recorders, removing the need to search for a plane’s black box in the event of a crash. According to Kolly, “You’re looking for what is the most important information… We have our staff involved in technical meetings and discussions and working groups on just what type of data you would need… what are the rates at which those data need to be transmitted, [and] what is going to trigger the data download.”

That would be an expensive proposition, and would be too overwhelming for real-time reactions to in-flight incidents. In the US alone, thousands of commercial flights take place every day, with so few incidents as to make this impractical, even if remote intervention would make any difference at all. But it would make recovery of the so-called “black boxes” a moot point after an incident, and might in this case have made the search efforts a lot more accurate from the first moments of awareness of the incident.

The article also notes that a $10 software upgrade would have improved the search effort, but wasn’t mandated, and better passenger screening and international data-sharing should have taken place, too. The latter doesn’t appear to have played a role in the incident (as far as is known now, of course), and Malaysian officials dispute the necessity of the former. All of these propositions are generally applicable to the industry, but until we find out more about what really took place, none of them address the why of Flight 370′s disappearance. We may have to resign ourselves to the fact that this mystery may never be solved at all.

Tags: Australia, Flight 370, Malaysia, mystery

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Malaysia:Flight370wentdowninsouthIndian

Malaysia: Flight 370 went down in south Indian Ocean – with no survivors

posted at 10:41 am on March 24, 2014 by Ed Morrissey

Malaysia’s prime minister held a press conference today to positively affirm what most have concluded over the last several days — that Flight 370 was lost at sea in the Indian ocean, and that there are no survivors from the flight. The government of Malaysia offered the press conference as a way to get ahead of the rumor mill:

New satellite data revealed that missing Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 “ended” in the south Indian Ocean, Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak said today.

“This is a remote location, far from any possible landing sites. It is therefore with deep sadness and regret that I must inform you that, according to this new data, flight MH370 ended in the southern Indian Ocean,” Razak said at a news conference.

However, prior to the press conference, Malaysia Air chose a rather odd way to inform the families:

Malaysia Airlines sent this text message to family members of those on #Flight370 before the briefings. pic.twitter.com/HSZhdPUf4D

— CNN Breaking News (@cnnbrk) March 24, 2014

The families of passengers aboard the missing Malaysia Airlines jet have been sent text messages telling them that the plane been “lost.”

“We have to assume beyond reasonable doubt that MH370 has been lost and that none of those on board have survived,” the message said. “We must now accept all evidence suggests the plane went down in the southern Indian Ocean.”

Katie Harbath asked on Twitter, “This can’t seriously be what the airline sent the families[?]” Apparently so, although the airline had called an emergency meeting in Beijing to discuss it with the families — complete with paramedics on hand:

Shortly before Razak’s announcement, relatives of the passengers were booked on charter flights to take them to Australia, sources told  Sky News. An emergency meeting between families and Malaysia Airlines officials took place in Beijing, Razak said. Paramedics were on scene there, according to Sky News.

“For them, the past few weeks have been heartbreaking. I know this news must be harder still,” Razak said.

The government has determined that the last known position of Flight 370 was over the southern Indian ocean near Perth, although an explanation of that conclusion has not yet been offered. Several days ago, the search efforts started concentrating in that area, which suggested at the time that investigators had found more data to track the plane’s course. The discovery of debris by Chinese and Australian planes has apparently given enough confirmation to Malaysia’s government to declare that they are no longer operating in rescue mode.

Razak credited a new analysis of satellite data for reaching the conclusion:

Malaysia’s Prime Minister Najib Razak says new analysis of satellite data in the search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 indicates that the plane went down in the Southern Indian Ocean.

The analysis was provided by British satellite company Inmarsat and UK Air Accidents Investigation Branch, Razak said.

“Based on their new analysis….MH370 flew along the southern corridor and that its last position was in the middle of the Indian Ocean west of Perth,” Razak said Monday. “This is a remote location, far from any possible landing sites. It is therefore, with deep sadness and regret, that I must inform you that according to this new data that flight MH370 ended in the southern Indian Ocean.”

That may answer the question of what. It still doesn’t answer the question of why, and unless the black box is found, we may never know that answer. With the plane so far off course and no particular reason for it being so, though, the possibilities of catastrophic failure and disaster look at least a little more likely than deliberate action.

Tags: Australia, China, Flight 370, Malaysia, mystery

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Video:China,AustraliaspotdebrisinFlight370

Video: China, Australia spot debris in Flight 370 search area

posted at 8:41 am on March 24, 2014 by Ed Morrissey

Reports from both China and Australia show debris floating in the general vicinity of the potential “southern arc” of Malaysia Air Flight 370, now lost for more than two weeks as the Eastern Hemisphere searches frantically for any clues to its disappearance. China spotted a number of “suspicious objects” floating in a different area of the southern arc than where satellite data suggested debris might be found, and Australia’s search planes spotted other signs of debris as well:

Observers on a Chinese search plane on Monday spotted some “suspicious objects” in the southern Indian Ocean — two large floating objects and many smaller white ones — as the search for the missing Malaysian Airline flight entered its third week.

Separately, crew on an Australian plane were able to see two objects, one circular and one rectangular, in another section of the 42,500-square-mile stretch of the southern Indian Ocean where observers have tried for days to find some sign of the vanished passenger jet.

Until now, possible plane debris has only been seen on satellite images, making Monday’s developments a potentially significant breakthrough for the massive search-and-rescue operation, one of the largest in aviation history.

CNN has some remarks from Malaysia official reacting to these finds, as well as reporting that no trace of the airplane has yet been found on the theoretical “northern arc,” which would have taken Flight 370 into central Asia:

The US Navy was unable to find the objects that the Chinese search team reported. However, the Austrialian find was separate from the Chinese report, and everyone will return to the search after the weather clears. The US team will bring a black-box locator out in case they are near an impact point:

Speaking to the Reuters news agency several hours later, an AMSA spokesperson said a U.S. Navy P-8 Poseidon aircraft was sent to investigate the Chinese reports, but the “P-8 was unable to relocate the reported objects.”

According to AMSA, the items seen by the Australian flight crew were “separate to the objects reported by the Chinese Ilyushin.” …

Rain was expected to hamper the hunt Monday for debris suspected of being from the missing Malaysia Airlines jet, as the United States prepared to move a specialized device that can locate black boxes into the south Indian Ocean region.

The U.S. Pacific command said it was sending a black box locator in case a debris field is located. The Towed Pinger Locator, which is pulled behind a vessel at slow speeds, has highly sensitive listening capability so that if the wreck site is located, it can hear the black box pinger down to a depth of about 20,000 feet, Cmdr. Chris Budde, a U.S. Seventh Fleet operations officer, said in a statement.

Until the objects can be retrieved, it’s impossible to know whether any of this exists, and whether it relates to Flight 370 or some other debris. The Australian PM took care yesterday to remind people that even if the debris exists, it could be from “anything.” Hopefully, search teams will soon catch up to enough of it in order to certify it or rule it out of the investigation.

Tags: Australia, China, Flight 370, Malaysia, mystery

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Australia on their renewable-energy mandates: We’re kinda’ over it

Australiaontheirrenewable-energymandates:We’rekinda’over

DidtheNSAviolateattorney-clientprivilegeindomestic

Did the NSA violate attorney-client privilege in domestic surveillance?

posted at 11:01 am on February 16, 2014 by Ed Morrissey

Technically no, but if the latest revelations from Edward Snowden are true, perhaps only technically. One document from the Snowden trove provides a glimpse at how the NSA could get around FISA safeguards on domestic intelligence-gathering by partnering with an allied nation to get the information NSA could not legally collect. But did it? The Australian Signals Directorate offered to share data it collected on an American law firm that represented another government in a trade dispute, the New York Times’ James Risen and Laura Poitras report, and may have compromised attorney-client privilege — but did the NSA bite? The answer is far from the lead (via Instapundit):

A top-secret document, obtained by the former N.S.A. contractor Edward J. Snowden, shows that an American law firm was monitored while representing a foreign government in trade disputes with the United States. The disclosure offers a rare glimpse of a specific instance in which Americans were ensnared by the eavesdroppers, and is of particular interest because lawyers in the United States with clients overseas have expressed growing concern that their confidential communications could be compromised by such surveillance.

The government of Indonesia had retained the law firm for help in trade talks, according to the February 2013 document. It reports that the N.S.A.’s Australian counterpart, the Australian Signals Directorate, notified the agency that it was conducting surveillance of the talks, including communications between Indonesian officials and the American law firm, and offered to share the information.

The Australians told officials at an N.S.A. liaison office in Canberra, Australia, that “information covered by attorney-client privilege may be included” in the intelligence gathering, according to the document, a monthly bulletin from the Canberra office. The law firm was not identified, but Mayer Brown, a Chicago-based firm with a global practice, was then advising the Indonesian government on trade issues.

On behalf of the Australians, the liaison officials asked the N.S.A. general counsel’s office for guidance about the spying. The bulletin notes only that the counsel’s office “provided clear guidance” and that the Australian agency “has been able to continue to cover the talks, providing highly useful intelligence for interested US customers.”

The foreign government represented by the American firm was Indonesia, according to the NYT’s transcript of the top-secret communication. The State Department describes Indonesia in fairly glowing terms as an American ally:

Indonesia’s democratization and reform process since 1998 has increased its stability and security, and resulted in strengthened U.S.-Indonesia relations. In 2010, Presidents Obama and Yudhoyono inaugurated the U.S.-Indonesia Comprehensive Partnership, which has fostered consistent high-level engagement on issues related to democracy and civil society, education, security, climate and environment, energy, and trade issues, among others.

The document does not provide any clue as to whether the NSA took up the offer from the ASD. If it did, though, it would have violated FISA laws as well as the legal privilege accorded attorney-client communications in the US — in principle, anyway. That won’t make American law firms very happy with the Obama administration, as it may tend to make things a little difficult with client recruitment, or at least in hardening communications. As Risen and Poitras note, though, that protection is actually quite limited when it comes to intelligence operations.

It’s not the first suggestion that NSA used its partnerships to conduct end runs around FISA. Last June, the revelation of the involvement of the UK’s GCHQ opened up that possibility. As I noted at the time, the sharing of the surveillance capabilities made a “criss-cross” arrangement possible, akin to the plot of Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train. What makes this even more curious is that it doesn’t appear to have had any national-security import, but instead offered merely diplomatic and trade advantages to the US — if we took up the offer at all.

This isn’t part of the massive data trawling operation that made headlines. It looks more like standard spycraft from Australia, not data-trawling from the NSA, and a partnership-building offer that may or may not have been accepted. That doesn’t make it any better, but it’s not exactly news — except for the possible intrusion on attorney-client privilege, which as I wrote above wouldn’t make trial lawyers too happy with the White House if it took place. And to the extent that this implicates NSA in economic espionage, it’s going to further erode our standing with allies who find themselves targeted by those efforts … even if those allies conduct exactly the same kind of industrial espionage themselves.

The Lawfare blog calls this mostly overblown, though, and look to the story below the jump:

For starters, it is important to emphasize that the Times story does not involve NSA spying. It doesn’t involve any remotely-plausible suggestion of illegality. It doesn’t involve any targeting of Americans. And it doesn’t involve any targeting of lawyers either.

The facts the story reports are these:

• The surveillance in question was conducted by the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD), not NSA.
• The surveillance targeted Indonesian government officials engaged in trade talks with the United States.
• The surveillance apparently took place overseas. (There is no suggestion in the story that the surveillance took place inside the United States.)

In other words, a foreign intelligence service was conducting surveillance against another foreign government, which was in communication with a U.S. law firm.

Deep in the story, write Benjamin Wittes and Jane Chong, one sees rather clearly that the NSA applied the practice of minimization when this arose:

Piece all this together, and it sounds like NSA probably asked the Australians to observe practices similar to what would have been the rules had the surveillance been conducted by NSA itself, at least with respect to those materials the ASD meant to share with NSA. Judging from the fact that the Australians managed to share information in a “highly useful” fashion, it appears they complied with this request—which was presumably the reason they sought the guidance in the first place.

So what would those rules have been? The key is minimization. When the U.S. conducts this sort of surveillance under FISA Section 702 (the minimization rules under Executive Order 12333 probably differ somewhat), NSA cannot target anyone for Section 702 collection—not even foreign persons overseas—without a valid foreign intelligence purpose.

There’s less here than meets the eye, conclude Wittes and Chong. It’s less Strangers on a Train, and more like playing footsie.

Tags: Australia, Edward Snowden, espionage, indonesia, NSA

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Australianministers:We’vehadjustaboutenoughof

Australian ministers: We’ve had just about enough of this “socialism masquerading as environmentalism”

posted at 4:51 pm on November 11, 2013 by Erika Johnsen

Back in September, the relatively conservative Liberal Party swept to power in the Australian national elections, booting the Labor Party out of the hot seat and bringing in brand-new Prime Minister Tony Abbot. He campaigned on promises of rolling back some of Australia’s profligately expensive green commitments and streamlining the government’s bureaucracy, and he immediately got to work by scrapping the country’s Climate Commission and freezing renewable energy funding.

The oh-so-august bureaucrats gathering in Warsaw, Poland for yet another United Nations climate conference this week usually turn up their noses at such tacky, backwards notions as fiscal sustainability, but Australia is already putting the word out that they have no intention of participating in whatever globalist, redistributive, and ostensibly “green” cockamamie scheme the UN comes up with next.

The Australian reports:

Federal cabinet has ruled that Australia will not sign up to any new contributions, taxes or charges at this week’s global summit on climate change, in a significant toughening of its stance as it plans to move within days to repeal the carbon tax.

Cabinet ministers have decided to reject any measures of “socialism masquerading as environmentalism” after meeting last week to consider a submission on the position the government would take to the Warsaw conference. …

The Australian has seen part of the document and it declares that, while Australia will remain “a good international citizen” and remains “committed to achieving the 5 per cent reduction” by 2020 of the 2000 levels of emissions, it will not sign up to any new agreement that involves spending money or levying taxes. …

The decision hardens the nation’s approach to the UN’s negotiations amid a renewed push from less-developed countries this week for $100 billion a year in finance to deal with climate change.

That money quote is from the government’s official pre-conference position-outlining document, by the way. Boom.

The Australians did leave the door open to reviewing their “commitment in 2015 in light of the science and international developments,” but only if all other major economies make the same level of commitment — but they don’t really expect that to happen, and caution that their future spending and commitments on reducing carbon emissions will be conditional upon “fiscal circumstances.”

As I mentioned last week, even the European Union is reevaluating their various countries’ commitments to pursuing renewables subsidies in light of continuing economic struggles, expensive power bills, and malingering debt problems. It’s kind of bizarre how relentlessly subsidizing noncompetitive products and technologies always seems like a great idea, until fiscal reality and economic backlash lead to a policy retrenchment and suddenly those technologies don’t have the price efficiency or innovative chutzpah to continue to thrive on their own — no?

Tags: Australia, climate change, environmentalism, green energy, taxes, United Nations

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