The Guardian 24 August, 2005
Culture and Life
by Rob Gowland
A tidal wave of obfuscation
The Sydney Morning Herald on August 3 got a lot of mileage out of a story on how Australian Red Cross was allegedly misusing tsunami-dedicated funds (spending the money on administration including fancy cocktail parties for donors, etc).
The Red Cross denied that tsunami funds were being used in this way, but the Herald had a field day all the same.
AID/WATCH Australia issued a press release noting that "NGOs are generally doing far better than the government in their delivery of aid". AID/WATCH called on the Herald to "refocus the spotlight on the real story", which they said was the fact that "the Australian government has put their relationship with the Indonesian government before the welfare of the people of Aceh".
While AID/WATCH agreed that "public accountability for aid NGOs is vital", they asked why the same spotlight is not being held up to the Australian government aid program?
They noted that "seven months after the tsunami the Australian Red Cross states it has allocated 52 percent of its tsunami funds directly to tsunami-affected areas".
The Australian government on the other hand has allocated just 22 percent and the majority has been outside tsunami-affected areas.
"Despite claims that NGOs are spending exorbitant amounts on lavish cocktail parties instead of aid projects, development NGOs operate under the Australian Council for International Development (ACFID) Code of Conduct where the average percentage of any emergency appeal spent in administration is a mere ten percent.
"This ten percent involves project planning, monitoring and evaluation — the key to successful aid programs. Currently the average of the large aid agencies for tsunami administration (Oxfam, Red Cross, World Vision, Care Australia and Caritas Australia) is around 2-3 percent."
Like the old saying goes, don’t let the facts get in the way of a good story.
"Operation Garden Plot"
In the English romantic comedy Love Actually, the British PM (played by Hugh Grant) questions one of his female assistants about her love life. She tells him she has just broken up with her boyfriend because he said she was fat and that "no one would want anyone with thighs like huge tree trunks. Not a nice person, actually."
A sympathetic Grant offers to have the ex-boyfriend murdered. "The SAS do an excellent job — trained killers are just a phone call away."
Grant’s character is trying to impress a young lady for whom he has the hots, but in reality the leaders of supposedly "democratic" countries have at their disposal increasingly large numbers of trained killers, in the form of paramilitary forces.
In the upcoming ABC documentary series Real Life Water Rats, Tasmania’s Marine Rescue unit takes a boatload of helmeted, machine-gun toting paramilitaries in bullet-proof vests on an "anti-terrorist" exercise to intercept and board a fast travelling launch.
The heavily armed men are from the Tasmanian police Special Operations Group. I have no doubt that, like all such "SWAT" teams, their training is more concerned with subduing their target than with protecting people’s democratic rights.
And of course, it would never occur to our government leaders to use such teams to actually suppress our democratic rights, now would it? Or would it?
Tom Burghardt, the editor/publisher of the Anti-fascist Bulletin, edited a book in 2002, a collection of essays on the theme Police State America. Among the essays in it is one by Frank Morales entitled "US Military Civil Disturbance Planning: the War at Home".
In his contribution to Burghardt’s book, Morales wrote: "Under the heading of ‘civil disturbance planning’, the US military is training troops and police to suppress democratic opposition in America.
"The master plan, Department of Defense Civil Disturbance Plan 55-2, is code-named ‘Operation Garden Plot’. Originated in 1968, the ‘operational plan’ has been updated over the last three decades, most recently in 1991.
"The plan was activated during the Los Angeles ‘riots’ of 1992, and more than likely during the … anti-WTO ‘Battle in Seattle’."
Morales has no doubts as to the purpose of such a plan: "US ‘armed forces’ and ‘elite’ militarised police units are being trained to eradicate ‘disorder’, ‘disturbance’ and ‘civil disobedience’ in America."
He notes that they are able to operate under conveniently flexible Pentagon doctrines with such revealing names as "military operations in urban terrain" and "operations other than war’. The better to fulfil their purpose they are equipped with high-tech weaponry, some identified as lethal and some as "less than lethal’ (how sweet).
Morales postulates that "it may very well be that police/military ‘civil disturbance’ planning is the animating force and the overarching logic behind the incredible nationwide growth of police paramilitary units, a growth which coincidentally mirrors rising levels of police violence directed at the American people, particularly ‘non-white’ poor and working people."
And he may very well be right.