Investigate, November 2005

INVESTIGATE

November 2005:

Islamic Threat

Election Cover Up

Fetal Tissue

Erebus

Issue 58

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INVESTIGATE BREAKING NEWS

NOVEMBER 2005

ISLAM’S PACIFIC AGENDA Let’s get it straight: the Islamic terrorists who blew up Bali have no intention of stopping there. As SCOTT ATRAN discovers in our exclusive interview with Abu Bakar Ba’asyir, it’s not about Iraq, it’s not about Afghanistan, it’s about converting the West to Islam, by force.

AUSCHWITZ AT AUCKLAND UNI? It’s the gruesome little cousin of stem cell research, and it’s happening at the University of Auckland thanks to a loophole in our ethics laws. Should NZ students be allowed to conduct experiments like these? IAN WISHART has more

THE STORY THEY DIDN’T PUBLISH It was an election night result that hung on a knife edge, after a campaign of controversy and Brethrengate. So why did the media hold back when an internet blog published new information – ten days before the election – on Helen Clark’s role in Doonegate? IAN WISHART investigates

THE LAST SUNSET Acclaimed Zimbabwean author IAN HOLDING goes to lunch with Investigate to talk about Mugabe, mayhem and a million dollar a month salary. And yes, there was a tape recorder on the table

RETURN TO EREBUS On the eve of the 26th anniversary of the Erebus disaster, aviation correspondent STUART MACFARLANE aims to set the record straight about the tragedy that took 257 lives

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EDITORIAL AND OPINION

INVESTIGATE vol

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Editorial The voice of the people Payback time Zero Tolerance Prosser goes metaphysical Town vs Country Ian Wishart Female Trouble

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FOCAL POINT

EDITORIAL

Welcome to Troy, bring in the horse

A

strange thing happened as the latest issue went to press: Bali got bombed again. And at the same time I was into the process of responding to a reader – an Ahmed Zaoui supporter – who couldn’t understand why New Zealand and Australia should feel “threatened” by Islam.

The opportunity to re-litigate this issue is too timely to pass up, so we’ve obtained the exclusive Australasian rights to an interview with Jemaah Islamiyah’s Abu Bakar Ba’asyir, carried out just a few weeks ago. If you know a caring & sharing, sandal wearing liberal, buy an extra copy of this issue (and go in the draw to win $1,000 cash) and force them to read it. For their sake!

The problem is simple. Social liberalism is the dominant political and popular There is a fundamental misunder- culture in the West. Social standing on the part of western liberals assume that if they leave others alone liberals about the fate that awaits they’ll be left alone themthem as Islamofascism spreads selves. Alternatively, they believe they can make friends with everyone because, hey, everyone’s liberal, right?

Thus, they think nothing of throwing open the immigration floodgates to all-comers. For the most part, the closest a liberal gets to a Middle Eastern experience is in a café. They assume Muslims all come here to make great coffee and kebab takeaways, or ferry the Ponsonby set between café and kebab joints in a taxi.

This misconception is largely perpetuated by an ignorant media. The mistake many western liberal media commentators make is that they go to liberal western Muslims for comment on Islamic issues. Liberal western Muslims, like liberal western media, are despised by the rising tides of angry young men on the Arabian peninsula whose zeal is spreading the real Islam like wildfire from Africa to Asia and even in the Pacific. The kids who blew up the London underground were the 6, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, November 2005

sons of liberal western Muslims. Yet they were boys captivated by the Sword of Islam being preached in the madrassas of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.

Closer to home, al Qa’ida trains Jemaah Islamiyah’s Indonesian martyrs in secret camps in the Philippines – as reported by Investigate’s Matt Thompson on location earlier this year.

There is a fundamental misunderstanding on the part of western liberals about the fate that awaits them as Islamofascism spreads. Sure, Indonesia may at this point be largely Sufi Muslim (a more mystical, less violent branch of Islam), but the tide in the world’s largest Islamic nation is already turning, in favour of fundamentalist Wahabbism.

Where was Zaoui on the Bali bombing? Publicly silent.

Islam is not a religion of peace. Not in the western sense of the word. And Islamic fundamentalists don’t hate the west because of Iraq or Afghanistan. They hate the west because it is currently the dominant world civilization.

Don’t get me wrong. Most Muslims living in the west are moderate and peaceful folk. Some of them read Investigate and I value their thoughts and opinions – I welcome them as fellow New Zealanders. But to assume that, simply because Mohammed and Yasmin next door are a great couple, therefore the threat from Islamic fundamentalism is overrated would be making a mistake of Trojan proportions.

As commentator Mark Steyn wrote in the Spectator a year or so back, modern western liberals do stupid things with good hearts, but in doing so they’re “sleepwalking to national suicide” because they truly cannot see what is coming over the horizon toward them. Civilisations stand or fall on Rubicons like this one. Lazy, corrupt and decadent, the West at face value stands absolutely guilty of much of what Islamofascists accuse us of. But here’s the ironic kicker - it is western liberals, not Christians, that Islam loathes the most.

November 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM,

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VOX POPULI

COMMUNIQUES DIVORCING HER PARENTS The child rape story in your October issue refers. It is most disturbing to read yet another Investigate exposé illustrating how far the Labour Government and its deviant lackeys have sanctioned the undermining of family values in just six years.

Sadly, I read your article on the day it was confirmed we are to suffer another three years of such government. In fact the moral and ethical standards set by governmental agencies is likely to degenerate even further in the next three years, given the partners Labour is seeking to have join them on the Treasury benches.

Bruce Hill, via email

CHILD SEX IS OK When we talk about rape of a woman by a man, we must first establish what is rape. Rape is when the woman is forced to have sex and is beaten up and/or injured in the process. When the woman willingly has sex and enjoys it, it is not a rape whether she is 14 or 64 years old.

The parents of Megan – Murray and Donna – are a failure. Instead of giving their daughter love, support and understanding, they reported her to CYF which was the act of ultimate betrayal. Shame on Murray and Donna.

As well, Murray and Donna reported Megan’s situation to the police and insisted on the prosecution of her partner for Statutory Rape. Megan was not forced to have sex, was not beaten up or injured and money was not involved. Statutory Rape is a figment of legal imagination when there is no victim.

In the end the counselling industry was right; Murray and Donna were detrimental to Megan’s wellbeing.

Instead giving their daughter love, support and understanding at a time when for the first time she went through a basic human experience, they turned it into something dirty and reported Megan to authorities.

Murray and Donna failed to understand the modern world; that the children of today mature earlier than the children of yesterday. This is a worldwide phenomenon 8, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, November 2005

and whether we like it or not, the world is the way it is.

Murray and Donna should repay the taxpayers all the cost incurred by the police, the court and CYF. I wish Megan all the best.

Joanna Sanders, Wellington

RAPE IS RAPE I am a Double degree qualified Counsellor, a member of two Professional Associations, a qualified Clinical Supervisor, and the Director of a Private Counselling Practice. On reading last month’s Investigate lead story (“The child who is divorcing her parents”) I was reminded of just how appalled I felt when I first heard “Donna” and “Murray’s” story. Yes, Donna and Murray are my clients, and prior to the story breaking, I had the opportunity to both meet them, and assess their daughter “Megan” for myself. Donna and Murray have a “gag” order on them at the moment, imposed by the fascist cabal that is the “Family” Court. Donna and Murray thus cannot write a letter to the editor – however, I can.

The tragic litany of toxic, incompetent “therapeutic” interventions as detailed in the article that has beset this family almost beggars my professional and personal belief.

Fact: a 14 year old girl (Megan) was statutorily raped by two men under Sections 132-135 (inclusive) of the Crimes Act 1961. This set of laws protects females under the age of 16 years from sexual intercourse and indecency. As the age of consent in New Zealand is 16, it is illegal to have sexual relations with a girl under this age even if it is consensual sex. The maximum penalties for having sex with a minor thus range from 7 to 10 years imprisonment, and rightly so.

Fact: Unqualified and incompetent counsellors were not only contracted by NZ’s largest child welfare agency (CYFS) to provide intervention services, the therapeutic insanity which the Rosa Counselling Trust then attempted to pass off as ‘counselling’ resulted in them validating the crime, whilst arrogantly undermining primary parental care and support. If any of these counsel-

lors have a Clinical Supervisor who would endorse such work, then both the agency staff and the Supervisor are extremely dangerous practitioners, and in my professional opinion must be avoided by both clients and the Counselling industry alike.

Fact: Church leadership from the a local church and staff from the local high school collaborated with this manifest abuse of a minor by shielding both Megan from appropriate care, and the perpetrators from the natural consequences of their criminal actions. This was achieved by staff from both organisations stepping way beyond their pastoral boundaries of competence, and cheerfully fostering a family split. The fact that none of the leadership or staff from either the church or the high school appear to receive external Pastoral supervision outside the church and school for their work is a sad and oft quoted pre-cursor for spiritual and positional abuse. In my professional opinion, such abuse has most certainly occurred in this case, perpetuated by a school and a church, which are two organisations that most reasonable people would think were safe for minors. Not so.

Fact: The national body (the New Zealand Association of Counsellors – NZAC) charged with ensuring practitioner accountability and “best practice”, proved itself to be nothing more than a paper tiger, woefully inadequate as a professional scrutineer, and itself dreadfully afraid of membership accountability. When confronted with overwhelming evidence to the contrary, it colluded with a member’s denial of abusive practice by default, and then vilified the parents who made the original complaint! How in the world can the New Zealand public now place their trust in ANY Counsellor who displays the letters NZAC after their name? This case (once again) proves that the monogram “NZAC” is meaningless in terms of being able to maximise client safety, support, and competent care with NZAC member practitioners.

Fact: Recent Governments and the anti-family legislation they rubber stamped have set this social service train wreck in motion, through their misguided and ideologically twisted championing of “children’s rights”. This has resulted in the State becoming the de-facto parent of the child, effectively replacing the biological Mum & Dad. A sufficient number of New Zealand voters have contributed to this awful state of affairs through their support of what a United Nations spokesperson called “the worlds’ first feminist state”. Yes, she was talking about New Zealand, and particularly the current Labour Government and its associated leadership appointments.

It is clear to me that in order for the public of New Zealand to be safe when employing the services of Counsellors (or indeed anyone in the helping professions), such personnel must have first undergone a rigorous, comprehensive and externally audited registration process, backed up by enforceable de-registration procedures that would preclude future practice once de-registered. While such a process is not a guarantee of professional accountability or competence, I am of the opinion that it would serve the New Zealand public better than selfappointed industry quangos such as the NZAC. With regard to the various politicians and Government funded agencies who have (and continue to have) perpetuated this mess, I find cause to re-visit the truth of the adage that states “the Government a country ultimately gets is the Government a country ultimately deserves”.

Donna, Murray, Megan, and their family surely deserve much better than this – thankfully for them, the power to change the status quo still lies with the individual. So, if you are an individual, and you are as appalled as I am about this whole sorry mess, don’t just sit there reading this – do something about it. If you don’t, then next time the family nightmare that they have experienced could well be yours.

Steve Taylor (MNZCCA, DAPAANZ) B. Couns., B. Alc.D.S., Cert. Clinical Supervision, Cert. Management Supervision, Director, 24-7 Counselling & Clinical Supervision Services Ltd

INTELLIGENT LIFE IN THE VOID? Congratulations. While I have enormous sympatpthy (sic) for both the girl and her parents and understand the limitations and bias of government institutions and the legal system, your article was not really anymore an expose of these as a shallow vehicle for the narrow polical (sic) bias of the authors.

Do they want to help the girl(s), change the culture, or just push their stupid right wing barrow? I can palpably feel the froth landing on the keys.

Then I went to the linked site (under construction – so it isn’t real and I cannot make a comment!) – only to find it is basically a Bush/US Navy site! I had already lost any respect for your independence and now find you are puppets....losers...I pity you....give up now and stop pretending to represent free thought... you don’t Andy Void, via email WISHART RESPONDS

Andy, I realise Void is a pen name (which we’ll make an exception for in this case because of the entertainment value). How appropriate. The Bush/Navy rubbish you got when you were redirected to the Network Solutions construction site for The Briefing Room was simply NetSol plugging its own ads in there because its advertising search engine assumed “Briefing Room” was military. You’re obviously new to the internet, otherwise you’d recognise a Network Solutions dot.com construction page, so we’ll let you off.

POINT OF CLARIFICATION I was pleasantly surprised to see you covered Murray’s story. However I am concerned by the impression created by the partial quote from my email. I have not seen the information that NZAC Ethic’s committee received – so I have only heard Murray’s side of the story. Murray’s story suggests that the NZAC acted with flagrant disregard to its own code of Ethics and Practice. I am strongly hoping that this is not the case which is why I have encouraged Murray to seek resolution.

In my email I was acknowledging Murray’s experience – which is one of institutional and counsellor abuse, and suggesting means and methods of resolution so if there is another side to the story this can be heard as well. I would appreciate you correcting the impression that I assume that the NZAC routinely ignores it’s own ethical and practice guidelines.

Steven Dromgool, MNZAC, Auckland

PHOEBE, YOU NEED COUNSELLING U r a horrible, horrible person! Putting that load of b/s in a magazine.

Get over the fact that ur precious daughter was a dirty slut and leave us all alone!

TXT message from Phoebe to Donna

STATUTORY RAPE IS A CRIME You may be interested to get hold of a copy of the last Childrenz Issues magazine (from Otago University). A Ph.D student, Kaye McKenzie of Gore, has discovered that out of 150 substantiated physical abuse cases and 150 substantiated sexual abuse cases, CYFS chose in fewer than 25% of these cases to interview the child victim. Obviously CYFS have no interest in discovering whether a crime has been committed against a child even though this is society’s first level of protection.

I have unearthed papers where the Hon. Steve Maharey asked the Government whether there is a set threshold at which an investigation of abuse must begin. The answer was that there is no general threshold, each area throughout the country uses its discretion to decide what there threshold will be (in order to remain within both financial and arbitrarily low numbers caps).

This explains why children are “unallocated” for months while suffering STDs and living with abusers while other children who have November 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM,

9

clearly alleged abuse verbally are “accidentally” prioritised as the lowest category for investigation.

Judge Mick Brown said in his review of CYFS that he would consider that any lowering of the CYFS thresholds would constitute breach of statutory duty.

He would feel sickened to realise that there is no effective threshold.

In 1997 a University of Otago student was allowed by Dunedin CYFS to compromise a group of children giving evidential interviews at CYFS by arriving at the interviews without the parents’ prior permission and trying to “persuade” parents to sign research consents. The parental complaints have never been formally acknowledged as a serious complaint, nor fully investigated, nor CYFS’ actions explained.

As is usual for the Labour government, CYFS now claim the videotaped interviews are lost or destroyed and that the University of Otago holds the only copy which they claim to own. Ms. Clark has assured the parents that waiting months for evidence interviews then being lied to to obtain a research consent from them is okay as far as process goes. The Children’s Commissioner has turned a blind eye to these goings on. This issue is now before the Ombudsman’s Office.

I believe that abuse and statutory rape are crimes. We need mandatory reporting so the true incidence of these crimes is seen. No 21 year old should consider this okay. We also need to have the police investigate all crimes against children and get CYFS back to working with neglect cases. If they refuse to investigate or assist children, don’t rely on them to apply the law to defend the children. CYFS has a joint agreement with the police saying that where diagnostic or evidential interviews are given to children the interview “MUST’ be videotaped “UNLESS IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO DO SO”. CYFS don’t even meet their own agreement. To a lay person like myself it looks as though CYFS itself might be seen as failing to provide the necessaries of life when they arbitrarily leave cases unallocated while encouraging young girls to be victimised by older men.

Why isn’t the Children’s Commissioner on the side of children with normal caring parents? Children need society’s protection until they are old enough to make wise decisions. I would never consider that having to discuss the “choice” of whether to adopt or abort with a child under 16 in any way meets that child’s needs to grow up with healthy attitudes and emotions.

And why is it that the Pill, which has supposedly liberated women, is now oppressing us? The men in this story certainly weren’t caring about STDs or pregnancy or even asking themselves what they were doing having sex with little girls. What appears to Megan to be daring and romantic now won’t appear that way in a few years time. And how will she feel when she realises she was just a notch along with many others before and later? These men are predators who deserve jail.

Sandra Libeau, Southland

WE KNOW THE FAMILY My husband and I are close family friends of “Donna” and “Murray”.

We have known them for 28 years. We know “Megan’s” grandparents and uncles and aunts on both sides of the family. She comes from intelligent, close-knit and caring roots. Her parents’ struggle to save her from the effects of a traumatic and psychologically damaging experience, and reconcile with her, are a reflection of their strong sense of family and moral values.

I read your article with admiration for the accuracy of the facts, as I have lived through the ordeal with Donna and Murray as it has unfolded.

I admire Donna and Murray for their tenacity in fighting a system where perfect strangers are allowed to rip a family apart, slander their characters and cause untold psychological damage to the fragile mind of their teenage daughter.

10, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, November 2005

The disgust that I feel for the misguided Rosa counselors and a justice system that gives minors more rights than parents (in this case, truly caring parents) is nothing compared to what I feel about the actions of a liberal Christian church and its “pastor”, whose actions cruelly cut Megan off from her parents – Donna and Murray – who are the only people who truly care about her and love her. An institution that aids in the decimation of family relationships is an abomination and insult to the fundamental Christian values of love, forgiveness and reconciliation.

Further to this, as a parent and teacher, I am alarmed that a state school could assist and sanction a minor to ‘divorce’ herself from her family – the essence of her identity. This in itself reflects how sick and heartless the cornerstones of society have become. That the amoral and immoral amongst us, however disguised (educators and spiritual leaders), are empowered and in fact aided and abetted by the law to destroy families, is frightening!

Donna and Murray have now been silenced by the law. They have lost their right to be guardians of their daughter, without just cause or reason, and have been gagged from speaking out against the people who are systematically destroying their family and the psychological well-being of their child. This is madness and a reflection of a ‘sick’ society.

The fact that pedophiles (guilty beyond doubt in my view) are let loose and not held accountable for their criminal acts and that perfectly good and caring parents are treated like criminals is beyond belief. How can one feel anything but contempt for such a system.

If I had not personally known the people involved in this tragedy, I would not have believed the facts of this story. As it is, not only have I walked through each chapter of this dreadful tale with Donna and Murray, as it has unfolded, but I know their family history and roots, their commitment and dedication to their children and their intelligence and integrity as human beings.

My heart goes out to them and other victims of our unjust socialist system and my deepest prayer is that in the greater scheme of things, some good will emerge from the ashes of this devastating and destructive experience. I have this personal message to express publicly: Murray: Your tenacity and instinct to protect and reclaim your daughter in the face of great loss is admirable Donna: Your heartache and disbelief at the loss of your only daughter, one who you so desperately wanted to bring into the world, is tragic and I empathise and connect with your pain as would most mothers. My deepest wish is that one day Megan will understand just how much you care.

Megan: Your parents love you more than you can imagine and are the best friends you could ever wish to have. Your other friends will come and go, but nobody will care more about you than Donna and Murray. Their unconditional love will be your healing. Don’t wait too long to embrace it.

Jenny, devastated friend, Auckland (full name and address supplied)

MEGAN’S STORY The latest issue of Investigate prompted some searching thoughts.

Firstly, your article on “Megan” moved me to deep concern. Are our rights as Christian parents being increasingly usurped by the might and the laws of an atheistic and increasingly amoral State?

Currently it is my right to discipline my child with fair, reasonable and loving force. However if Section 59 of the Crimes Act is repealed, an accusation of abuse brought against me for the crime of disciplining my son would become sufficient grounds for CYFS to take him from me, regardless of whether or not I was prosecuted. How can I then as a Christian father defend my child from legitimized kidnapping, and my family from aggressive destruction?

Upon attending school, the rights of my child will be upheld as sacred, and my rights as a parent overruled. God forbid that any child of mine should be prescribed contraceptives, or advised to have an abortion, by any State-funded person or institution, without acknowledgement of my prevailing rights as their parent, moral guardian and principal caregiver! Nevertheless, it seems that our laws dictate otherwise.

Should my child request counselling, I will have no right to vet the counsellor and ensure that my child receives sound advice based upon Christian principles. Advice is the foundation of my child’s future choices; I want the best advice for my child. Each counsellor’s advice, though, is only as good as his or her personal and professional principles; and sometimes those principles are either morally destitute or wholly amoral. If the first advice given to my child is “do what you want, stand for your rights, get up and go”, then there will be little hope of furthering the Christian principles of love, commitment and compromise.

This brings me to my second point. From whence does such social nihilism arise? In his letter to the Editor, Michael Moore blamed God; but as you correctly state, moral evil originates in human self will. (Yes, God subjected man to futility – in context, the futility of keeping the Law of Moses – Romans 8:20; but only because Man first sinned – Gal 3:16. If Eve and Adam had not sinned, there would have been no need for the frustration of law, and no opening for the exercise of grace).

When the serpent tempted Eve in Eden, what was Eve’s response? Self gratification (the fruit looked good to eat), and self aggrandisement (it would make her as wise as God). God did not tempt her to eat, or step in to prevent the act; nor did the serpent force her to eat. Afterward, the serpent was punished for telling lies, while Adam and Eve were punished for willful disobedience.

It was Eve’s own action, and Adam’s after her, that brought sin and death into the world. God allows others to tempt us, and allows us the loose reins of free will, so that we may prove our character by our actions; but all the time he is still holding the reins.

Who then, or what, is Satan? Two premises are possible: that Satan is a collective personification of human self will, or that Satan is a fallen angel. If the latter is true, in spite of a complete lack of unequivocal Scriptural proof, then all angels in heaven can hold, nurture and act upon sinful thoughts, in denial of the integrity of Divine unity; while the consequent implications for our own future state are most discouraging. If the former is true, then all blame for sin is sheeted directly home to man, where it truly belongs.

Jesus taught us (Mark 7:20) and James reiterated (1:14) that the source of all moral evil is the corrupt reasoning of man himself. Temptation comes from within and from without, and our response to its stimulus determines our ultimate actions. Our bitterest enemy is indeed that most powerful and personal of devils, individual self will.

Your article on the Kinsey Report was a classic confirmation of this truth. Moral evil arises from the heart of man, and from this very source has come the moral decadence and social nihilism that has usurped parental authority and deified self will. Which brings us back around to Megan’s story.

Roger Evans, Kerikeri

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A LACK OF ACCOUNTABILITY The latest (October) issue is a rather sombre one in the stories of “Megan”, Kinsey (a rather tenuous but real connection here, yes?) and the state of Britain. The worst one, and closest to home, of course, is that of the 14 year-old undergoing statutory rape. A really tragic tale but, unfortunately, just a symptom of a malaise affecting the whole of our society from the very top down.

The first problem is that everybody knows just how everyone else should behave – and this works on all sides of society’s spectrum.

From the Government down, the attitude seems to be “Do it my way, or else.” In some strata of society, the “or else” becomes very physical.

In the poor family involved, the “or else” is thinly disguised as “Good for the youngster.”

Why do we have to put up with people who know nothing about the real situation steamrollering citizens around to their method, merely “because we can.”

The second major problem is the complete lack of accountability in the people concerned. There appears to be no-one to bring these people to task and make them answer for the upset they have caused. This, of course, is allied to a lack of both personal integrity and intestinal fortitude in saying, “Yes, we made a mistake, now how can we rectify it?”

It reminds me of when I was teaching a class of fourth formers in the workshop. One of them started to do something dangerous and I shouted, “Hey, you.” He immediately swung around and pointed but unfortunately for him, there was no-one there he could pass the blame on to!

This is endemic in the Governmental cabinet. When anything goes wrong anywhere, the faceless but extremely numerous bureaucrats in the relevant department are saddled with the blame, never the minister supposedly in overall charge of that office. It is, obviously, much easier to pass the blame on to an unnameable individual than to take on a responsibility for which that minister is getting very well paid. I recently had occasion to ask a person who should have been well in the know about such matters a very general question as to the effectiveness of a department very active in their field of expertise. The answer was, “I couldn’t possibly comment on that.” Have we really become so coweringly politically correct that we are too afraid to ask the hard questions in public? This does not in any way include Investigate – long may you keep on asking those questions and bringing the given answers to our attention. As I write, the make-up of our Government is very much hanging in the balance. I just pray that we do not have to put up with another three years of this Godless administration.

Keith Gregory, Taupiri

AN AHMED FAN My name is Richard Mayes, I am a volunteer with the group organised

by Deborah Manning to assist Ahmed Zaoui at the Dominican Priory.

I would like you to know that you are the very reason that I ever became involved in the Zaoui case in the first place.

Back in July 2003, prior to the Refugee Status Appeals Authority decision in Mr Zaoui’s favour, I tuned into Radio Pacific one night where I heard you lambasting Mr Zaoui as a terrorist. The tone of your comments disturbed me greatly, especially considering that you had professed to be a Christian. What I heard coming off the airwaves that night told me that something was wrong, and I should not accept what you were saying at face value. This was in fact the very first time I had ever heard of Ahmed Zaoui, although by that time he had been in the country several months.

As you expected, my jaw did drop when I saw your editorial with the unlikely and quite frankly weird acronym “FAZWOP”. Maybe it was intended to sound like some new Islamic terrorist organization. Maybe it’s the beginning of a new dance craze, “do the FAZWOP …” – or, the reaction of those who still vehemently argue for Zaoui’s deportation – “Free Ahmed 12, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, November 2005

Zaoui? Wishart’s On Prozac” (or “P”). Personally speaking, I’ll accept whatever concessions from you we can get, and I am pleased that you now advocate for Mr Zaoui receiving “the refugee status he so desperately craves.”

This statement is in fact incorrect, as Mr Zaoui received refugee status on 1 August 2003. What he desperately craves and hopes for is a normal life that has so far been denied to him primarily on the basis of dubious (to put it politely) national security legislation that violates basic principles of a democratic society, the right to justice which has been legislated away by politicians in national security law. Also, it is highly misleading to state that it has taken nearly four years to sort the case out – it’s actually been two years and ten months. December 2002-September 2005 constitutes four (calendar) years to a jaundiced eye. A good tactic for stirring up the naysayers.

However, looking further at your editorial, it is obvious that this is a grudging concession – you further denigrate Mr Zaoui by calling him a “middle-aged mullah from the Middle East,” and have previously referred to him sarcastically as “Ahmed Mandela”. Would you like to be termed a caustic conservative from the Christian churches, for example? I think probably not. What really still disturbs me is your statement that “by rights, the government should have done a much better job in reining in its daft Refugee Status Appeals Authority” – what is the problem with a legally appointed, supposedly independent review tribunal that rejects in excess of 80 percent of all appeals to it? It is essentially a very conservative body. Suddenly, after making one decision that the government doesn’t like, but didn’t have the guts to challenge (through a High Court review), and via politicians, the media and talkback hosts, it’s open season on the RSAA. Also, you state “by rights, the law should allow for the security agencies to simply veto applications by any foreign national, refugee claimant or otherwise, where it is perceived they may be a threat to this nation.”

Just on some faceless bureaucrat’s say-so? By whose “rights?” If you are not already familiar with it, I would suggest you read the Identity (Citizenship and Travel Documents) Bill and see how the kind of thinking you propose has now been extended to ordinary New Zealand passport holders. It might possibly happen to you if you print an article in Investigate magazine that you may wish to promote overseas, but which the government doesn’t like.

I know you have previously criticized the conditions of detention Mr Zaoui was subjected to, and I recently saw an interview on “Eating Media Lunch” where you were asked who you would choose as a babysitter between Helen Clark and Ahmed Zaoui. Your unexpected response indicated to me a definite change in attitude which I welcomed.

In the true spirit of Christian forgiveness, an unconditional “Free Ahmed Zaoui without penalty” should be sufficient. To say, “let him swear allegiance to our flag, and our values, and promise on threat of deportation back to Algeria never to do anything that would harm the majority cultures of this country” is hardly without penalty and borders on xenophobia. As a Christian, do you see Islam posing a threat to your values? Are you referring to “values” which can deny a person the right to freedom or a fair trial?

By the way, in your editorial, perceived is spelt as “percieved”. I always remember the rule from school, “i” before “e” except after “c” (exceptions “seize” and “weird”). Funny how I noticed that mis-spelling – my late mother’s first job in her native Ukraine was a proof-reader on a newspaper. Incidentally, both she and the newspaper’s editor wrote anti-Nazi articles. While she managed to escape, the editor ended up paying with his life. And my mother and Ahmed Zaoui have something in common – they both fled oppressive regimes who could have killed them, and they both had to use false documentation to do it. My mother actually fled from two regimes, those of Adolf Hitler (under Nazi occupation) and Joseph Stalin under whom, at 9 years of age, she experienced the “terror famine”, where food was used as a weapon against people perceived a threat to those in control. I feel I owe her something.

Richard Mayes, Auckland

WISHART RESPONDS

I’ve become so used to seeing young Ahmed on the cover of my magazine, or a poster somewhere, or on TV, that I’ve become kind of attached to the idea of him sticking around. Must be the Stockholm Syndrome.

Tackling some of your points, however, my criticism of the Zaoui case, although Zaoui clearly personifies it, is less about Ahmed the man than it is about the situation he has created. Like it or not, the rise of militant Islam is the biggest security threat to the world today. I’m on Hizb ut Tahrir’s international mailing list, I know what the Islamofacscists think and what their goals are. A year before 9/11 this magazine broke the story of Arab terrorists using NZ as a meeting and planning point, and we revealed then that al Qa’ida was infiltrating the Pacific with the goal of helping foment an Islamic superstate.

It has been too easily forgotten in this debate that it was Algerians in NZ who are suspected to have been helping prepare for an al Qa’ida style attack on Sydney during the 2000 Olympics.

So when an Algerian Islamic leader arrives in NZ, of all places in the world, carrying the mysterious baggage of fraternising with people who ended up in al Qa’ida, it does raise questions of how good NZ’s national security systems are and whether our refugee systems are up to speed with modern geopolitics.

Much has been made of the issue of due legal process in Ahmed’s case. I have been a crime beat journalist throughout my career. I’ve covered many trials, both complex and simple. New Zealand’s legal system has little to do with justice, and much to do with sophistry and debating skills on technical legal points. I have seen murderers go free on technicalities in my time.

So when lawyers like Deborah Manning rail on Ahmed’s behalf on technical legal grounds, I recognise the enthusiasm of youth but also the approach of The Lawyer. Don’t get me wrong, Deborah has done a good job on Ahmed’s behalf.

But truth in issues of national security is rarely if ever determined in a courtroom. There are things intelligence agencies are privy to that lawyers and judges can never be. Scoring legal points in a courtroom might be an easy slam dunk, but

the Crown is fighting this with one hand tied behind its back.

But regardless of Zaoui’s past, it is time to recognise that he’s here to stay. Let him bring in his family. Let them enjoy a Kiwi summer together. Let them enjoy the Christmas spirit this year. If the spooks think Ahmed is a concern they can keep an eye on him..

KINSEY WAS A QUACK Congratulations on yet another excellent Investigate article. The exposé on Alfred Kinsey in your October 2005 edition was well researched and brought a truthful and timely rebuttal to the Kinsey mania that has gripped the media and pop-psychology since the release of his flawed research (if you can call it that).

This film was nothing more than a propaganda movie for those who seek scientific legitimacy for their own deviant sexual modalities.

Kinsey was a broken and psychologically unwell person who often resorted to physical self-harm and other damaging behaviours to deal with personal stresses and problems in his life. Sadly, as is common today, instead of receiving the appropriate support and treatment, his dysfunction was celebrated in the media, and his erroneous philosophies were embraced in academic circles.

Kinsey’s flawed research has been used by lobby groups and militant minorities to force legislation changes in laws surrounding divorce, abortion, marriage, homosexuality, sex education, and more. Kinsey’s influence has been far-reaching and it is hard to find any aspect of society that has not been targeted or infected by his gravely disordered sexual science.

Thank you again for your important examination of the man behind the myth, and, to borrow a phrase from Chris Banks, the “junk science” he espoused.

Brendan Malone, Family Life International, Auckland

November 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 13

SIMPLY DEVINE

MIRANDA DEVINE

Watch out girls, these guys have had a gutsful and it’s payback time

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atherings of Sydney’s North Shore mothers lately abound with tales of private school girls who perform oral sex on boys as readily as the previous generation used to “pash”. Girls as young as 13 are reduced to maneater Paris Hilton as their role-model, eschewing a couple of generations of feminist achievement for the art of playing dumb.

Once it was fathers who had to lock up their daughters. But these days mothers worry about protecting their sons from sassy Amazons in “Gosford” skirts who SMS with offers of threesomes.

“Women propose to men, women proposition Even innocuous movie comedies men, have one-night of the moment such as Wedding stands with men,” Rebecca Crashers and The 40 Year Old Virgin Huntley, author of a combook on Generation document a growing disconnec- ing Y, The World According To tion between men and women Y, has said. “But for men it’s all about what they can’t do and they are scared of that.” Scared maybe, but evidence is mounting of a frightening backlash from men, with an increase in reported sexual assaults, including allegations against high-profile sportsmen, and a reported rise in workplace sexual harassment.

For growing numbers of women the solution is to drop out of a hostile dating scene chronicled in Sky newsreader Jacinta Tynan’s new book Good Man Hunting. They would rather be “Quirky Alones” and retain their dignity.

But if finding a husband in Sydney is an ordeal for single 30-something women from Paddington such as Tynan, men, it seems, are just as disillusioned with the opposite sex.

“My single male friends have dumped [George Street bar] the Establishment and the nightclub scene and are seriously thinking about trying to meet girls at Hillsong,” says Rodney, young bachelor around town, only half tongue-in-cheek.

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Some men complain post-feminist women are too aggressive and predatory, care little about their feelings and treat them like sperm donors once they (the women) hit 30.

Others gorge themselves on the sexual smorgasbord on offer, but gain little emotional fulfilment. Their open disregard for the fairer sex is startling.

The misogyny of rapper Eminem is well-known: “Put anthrax on a Tampax and slap you till you can’t stand.”

He defines a popular culture in which women are attracted to men who don’t respect women.

But even innocuous movie comedies of the moment such as Wedding Crashers and The 40 Year Old Virgin document a growing disconnection between men and women.

The latest oeuvre of the backlash is New York writer Neil Strauss’s book The Game: Penetrating The Secret Society Of Pickup Artists.

It boils down to a cold-blooded guide for lovelorn men on how to “game” women, exploit their insecurities and trick them into sex. If looking for Mr Right means women discard less desirable men along the way, this is Mr Wrong fighting back.

One of Strauss’s techniques is the “neg” in which the man hides a casual insult in what appears to be a compliment.

“Your nails look nice, are they real?”; “I like your skirt. I just saw another girl wearing the same one a moment ago.”

Another strategy is to show interest in a woman and suddenly turn your back on her and talk to another woman.

Another is to practise repeated rejection on a woman until you break her spirit. Respect and honesty are nowhere.

Strauss, a self-confessed nerd in his early 30s, who reportedly has had his teeth capped, Lasik eye surgery in order to ditch the specs and shaved his head to hide the bald spots, and wears fake tan and elevator shoes, offers himself as the master seducer.

He claims to have slept with hundreds of women just by applying manipulative psychological techniques to the seduction game. Now he is imparting his “pickup artist” formula to any man who nature meant to be unlucky in love. It is every woman’s nightmare.

November 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 15

LAURA’S WORLD

LAURA WILSON Tempering the mainstream

ero Tolerance’ is a core Act philosophy, judging by their election billboards. The Exclusive Brethren find tolerance equally repulsive, so much that they have come out of hiding to denounce our Labour-inspired licentious society, citing particular atrocities like the Greens’ proposal to teach criminals Art. The thinking behind ‘Zero Tolerance’ seems to be that powerful deterrents such as long prison sentences and, when necessary, the death penalty, will make the criminal mind think twice before violating law and order.

Crime is the bane of every society. Without doubt, had the concrete rock dropped from an Auckland overbridge landed on my I would want that boy in a prison brother’s car, killing him, with high walls and cold, concrete tolerance toward the rockthrower would have been cells. Not in a warm common-room the very last thing on my experimenting with watercolours mind. I would have desired his suffering to be long and hard. I would equally have wanted the suffering of his kin and his friends.

Had the youth’s skin been brown, I would have spread my dislike to all Hoody-wearing, brown-skinned males slouching down the street. I would want that boy in a prison with high walls and cold, concrete cells. Not in a warm common-room experimenting with watercolours.

Nothing makes one develop right-wing sentiments faster than being a victim of crime. Eye for an eye justice is a natural response and must be tempered by the dispassion of the Courts for one very good reason; results.

Our Justice System must be as results-oriented as any other area of our life.

Beneficial action is defined by its good results. Spending too much time on the couch results in a saggy gut, so we battle our natural desire for inertia to get up and exercise, knowing that trim, taught muscles will increase our quality of life.

16, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, November 2005

So should we desire the suffering of criminals? Absolutely! But suffering that brings the right results, which ultimately is the transformation from an inwardly sick person drawn to commit crime, into a well person repelled by the notion of harming others.

The other option breeds utterly bleak results for all society. Punishment without re-education (which may well include art classes!) makes an already sick individual sicker, and increases his danger to society. The lock-emup-and-throw-away-the-key attitude satisfies short-term cravings for revenge, but has dismal long-term results.

Which nation is Act using as an example of lowered crime rates due to increased penalties? America has one of the least tolerant penal codes, including the “Three Strikes” policy which sees third-time offenders put behind bars regardless of how minor the offence. What results is not reduced offending, but the world’s largest, most costly and overburdened prison system, with an ever increasing intake of new and repeat offenders.

Of all people in the world currently behind bars, 25% are in America. The phrase ‘Zero Tolerance’ was coined in America, where evidence shows the full equation reads; Zero Tolerance = Zero Solution. But then solutions are clearly not popular things with voters, as recent electioneering showed here in NZ. One party screamed for more money to help diabetes sufferers, now in epidemic proportion. Another party said 90% of diabetes was preventable through dietary changes, a medical truism but an absolute affront to people who would rather not be blamed for the state of their own health.

One party said we must reduce petrol tax so the fuel crisis isn’t felt so harshly by Kiwi drivers. Another party said the fuel crisis is here to stay, and it’s time to promote alternative fuels and means of getting around.

That one a lead balloon for constituents who want to hear that they are good, honest kiwi battlers who don’t need to change a thing in their lives.

The fuel crisis is real, as is the health crisis, as is the

“It is a brave government indeed that tackles homosexuality, prostitution, fossil fuel decline and prison reform, because they’re vote-losing issues. Making people’s lifestyles more comfortable wins votes, but the ongoing crises snowball into the laps of successive governments, who further postpone them. This paves the way for angry groups like Act to point the finger at tolerance, and demand a return to draconian measures”

criminal crisis. All are on the increase, but no one wants to be told that they have to do something about it. Everyone wants a politician to tell them they are innocent, and promise to provide more fuel, more doctors and more prisons to keep the nasties out of sight.

It is election suicide to tell the truth. We can outlaw homosexuality if the glorified ‘mainstream’ find it distasteful, but nothing on earth is going to stop one percent of humanity being born gay. One percent is an awful lot of people to deny equal rights and sweep under the carpet, but Kiwi mainstreamers have shown it is still their preferred option, given the horrified response to the Civil Unions Bill.

Election winning is all about making the most attractive promises, a bit like a marriage proposal where a potential spouse promises to do even more of the cooking, taking out the garbage, buying expensive dinners and providing for every conceivable need, when in fact what they intend to do is stop you smoking, watching so much telly and eating on the couch.

It is a brave government indeed that tackles homosexuality, prostitution, fossil fuel decline and prison reform, because they’re vote-losing

issues. Making people’s lifestyles more comfortable wins votes, but the ongoing crises snowball into the laps of successive governments, who further postpone them. This paves the way for angry groups like Act to point the finger at tolerance, and demand a return to draconian measures.

A tougher approach to crime would necessitate more aggressive policing, including gun carrying. But without a doubt research shows that the criminal element will only ever up the ante, not disappear into the shadows. As attractive as it is, a less tolerant, punitive rather than redemptive handling of criminal behaviour will not dissuade further crime (if the U.S.A. is anything to go by) but increase it.

One wonders who the treasured ‘Mainstream’, so glorified by National, actually are once you subtract homosexuals, beneficiaries, non-Christian immigrants, solo parents, environmentalists, prostitution workers (and their clients), drug takers, feminists and anyone who’s fallen foul of the law. These ‘fringe-dwellers’ all pay taxes too, and should realize their collective strength added up against the glorious white middle class.

November 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 17

EYES RIGHT

RICHARD PROSSER The Creator and the created

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nvestigate, as our esteemed editor has said, is not a Christian magazine; rather, it is a magazine pub-lished by Christians. I believe this makes for a good balance. There is much healthy and informed debate within these pages, and a solid promotion of ideas which are ethically sound, yet without a corresponding attempt to ram any particular belief system down anyone’s throat.

I have largely stayed out of the Evolution versus Creation debate, more because it has not been central to my brief of right-of-centre political comment, than because I haven’t had an opinion on it.

However I believe that the contentious nature of the subject is less about a difference between belief in God and belief in Science, than it is about a difference between belief in God and I believe that God did create indi- belief in Religion.

Whomever and whatvidual human consciousness as an ever God may eventually extension of God’s self, and that in prove to be, and I would that there is not so doing, God allowed for the possi- contend a single person alive today bility of man opposing God who actually knows, it is certainly true that Religion is a human creation, and that the acceptance of religious tenets is – or should be – a matter of choice made from understanding. It is the same ability to make choice from understanding which drives our democracy; supported, one would hope, by a foundation of the same ethical constructs which give validity to the platform of morality promoted by religious faiths.

I have given this subject much thought over the years.

For the record, I don’t practise or follow any organised religion, though if I were contemplating doing such, I think it fair to say that it is unlikely that my first choice would be Islam. On top of that, in my experience and observation, the Christian ethos is as fine as any I have encountered, and better than many, and when it is genuinely practised, it is a privilege to behold, and a hum18, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, November 2005

bling experience.I think the problem with religion is that it is, by its very nature, both doctrinaire, and subject to interpretation. This paradox is what prevents many adherents to many religions from finding the Truth they so honestly seek.

I do believe there is a God. I do believe that God has intelligence and perception and purpose, and that God manifested or created both the Universe as we perceive it, and the consciousness with which we perceive it, and did so for a Greater Purpose.

I have no real idea as to what that purpose might be; I can only speculate that God created the Universe as part of God’s own progression towards personal development. I suspect this because the sheer size, complexity, and inter-related nature of manifested creation would seem to rule out any kind of random accident, though I admit that this assumption may simply indicate that I have reached the limits of my human ability to contemplate infinity, and in this case, the infinity of possibility.

And I suspect it because of the way in which life, and consciousness, and experience, give back learning and understanding to God, in the same way as they draw those things from God. I believe that this is what is meant, by teachings from all religions, which suggest that we are God and that God is us.

So our greater purpose and God’s greater purpose are one and the same; to grow and develop and learn and understand, much as is the relationship between any parent and their children. Indeed there are many parallels, in the experience of human earthly life, with the interpretations of various scriptures, made by many of those who are learned of religion.

I believe that the Truth is out there, if we will but see it.

The signs and the patterns are everywhere; from the cycle of life, death, and rebirth in Nature, to the rise, experience, and fall, of societies and nations within humanity.

Likewise, the microcosm and the macrocosm of creation are startlingly similar, with the protons, neutrons, elec-

trons, and subatomic particles of atoms and molecules, being the infinitesimal mirror of the stars, planets, and galaxies of the greater Universe.

I do not believe that these similarities are coincidental.

Nor do I believe that creation and evolution are mutually exclusive.

Far from it. It is quite possible that if creation is what God did, then evolution is how God did it. Why, is quite another question. But we do know that dogs and seals have a common ancestor, and that cows and whales are likewise related in antiquity; that birds are the descendents of dinosaurs, and that penguins are in the process of turning themselves into something between a fish and a cetacean.

It is equally possible that man and the apes were of the same stock, once; how and why the separation came about we may only speculate.

I believe it was by direct and deliberate intervention. Whether such intervention came in the form of a thunderbolt from the sky, or via the mechanism of some alien race, or by any other means, is probably unimportant. I believe it was intelligently directed, and in pursuit of a greater purpose.

We know that our DNA differs from that of chimpanzees by only two percent, and from that of sheep by less than 3%, insofar as we are able to map the genome; on a cautionary note, according to our best science, a peach and a nectarine have identical DNA, despite the fact that, to this layman, they appear quite different.

In any event, for a God capable of creating a Universe of galaxies, and atoms, and independently conscious beings, employing methodology such as having aliens tweak around with DNA, would appear to be child’s play.

Perhaps God was waiting for the Earth to be ready for the human consciousness which was to be created, and perhaps even, at the same time waiting for God’s self to be ready for the reciprocal learning which would come from the expression and development of that same consciousness.

It is that consciousness, and its real or perceived independent nature, which I believe is at the nub of human development, and of humanity’s relationship with God. Some philosophies hold that individual human consciousness is an illusion, and that what we perceive as independent self-awareness is simply a splinter of the mind’s eye of God. I used to believe so. I now believe something different. I believe that God did create individual human consciousness as an extension of God’s self, and that in so doing, God allowed for the possibility of man opposing God. At the same time, the independent consciousness of man has the opportunity to return to God; and when individual man does this, by choice and from understanding, man and God will be one again, and both will achieve higher development.

But that understanding, and subsequent choice, must come from individual learning. Each and every human must discover the Truth for themselves, by whatever journey is appropriate for them. Here is where I think organised religion is found wanting; the interpretation of the purpose will, by definition, always be someone else’s Truth. Perhaps it even detracts from the personal development of God; perhaps many different individual experiences, over many different journeys of man, and who knows, perhaps even over more than one earthly lifetime, are necessary for God and man to achieve God’s purpose.

And if I see a parallel between God’s necessary experience of many human lifetimes, and man’s necessary experience of God, then perhaps it lies in man’s experience of many different aspects of God. Many cultures throughout history have assigned many different Gods to the various aspects of life. Most have also accepted the existence of a single Supreme God, though it is true that not all have perceived the many Gods as being aspects of the One, in the same way that the Oneness of God and Man is not always understood. I don’t for a moment believe that my Norse and Celtic ancestors were acting against the interests of God, when they worshipped their Gods of the Soil, the Waters, the Woodlands and Forests, Fertility, Fire, Metalworking

and War. I believe that such interpretation of different aspects of God, and of God’s creation, were a necessary part of the journey then, and for some, they remain a necessary part now.

Perhaps this is why my personal politics lie to the right of the centre.

I regard socialism and religion as being very similar. They both involve relinquishing responsibility for one’s own journey, they both retard individual development, and in so doing, they both deny people the opportunity to discover the Truth. In this, I believe that the bookburning fundamentalists of the American Midwest are as far from the Truth as are the car bombers of Baghdad.

Certainly we should help our fellow man, but we cannot live his life for him. Denying him the opportunity of individual experience and learning, as we do through welfarism and the other socialist practices of the Nanny State, do not help the individual. Likewise, though we may guide our fellow man to the beginning of his journey to God, we may not map his path, nor define the Truth for him before he finds it for himself. Without the understanding which comes from discovery, he may not make his choice freely. And that helps nobody.

Undoubtedly there is suffering on the course of man’s journey, and lots of it, including much which appears pointless and unjust. I do not know why this is so. Perhaps it, too, is a necessary part of the experience of both God and man. Perhaps on some of our journeys, if we have more than one, there is more suffering, and on others, more enjoyment. Perhaps we learn through suffering. I would guess that we don’t get to find out for certain until the journey’s end.

And as for that other journey, the one which God is on, and what may happen beyond it, speculation of such is way beyond me. I am a mere mortal, and I don’t pretend to be able to comprehend that far into infinity; though I’m sure that if I keep looking, the Truth will eventually find me.

I do think it fair to say two things. Firstly, there is a way of living our lives which is better for collective humanity and for the greater purpose, and that is the way of the individual; and secondly, none of this is here by accident.

November 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 19

LINE ONE

CHRIS CARTER Town vs Country

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f there is anything at all to be learned from our recent foray into what we now laughingly call our political process, it must be the clearest possible sign that we have seen for years as to the enormous chasm that plainly now exists between New Zealand’s provincial and urban communities.

The post election Sunday Star Times contained one of the best double-spread graphics to illustrate this that I’ve ever seen. A map of NZ almost entirely blue, with a smattering of urban red representing the areas captured by the Labour Party.

Yet this phenomenon of an almost equal division in political philosophy as borne out by this rural/urban split, then starts to beThe main producers of wealth in come some what compliThe eventual formathis country, and undoubtedly the cated. tion of a working governhardest workers, are almost entirely ment is finally determined found in rural New Zealand in secret, by virtue of a series of meetings held between those parties sharing between them around 80% of the popular vote, and a hodge-podge of parties representing all manner of what are laughingly described as special interest groups. Perhaps more accurately you could call them simply a collection of small canine tails that, joined together by secret accommodation, end up wagging the larger political dog, i.e. National or Labour.

The town and country split? Pretty simple when you come to think about it. The main producers of wealth in this country, and undoubtedly the hardest workers, are almost entirely found in rural New Zealand. The academics, bureaucrats, service industries, retail outlets, car dealers and massage parlours etc. are city based. One group produces wealth; the other group spends it, with the voting patterns of this last election showing just that fact, in spades. The most worrying aspect of this peculiar MMP system, is that somehow we seem to have convinced ourselves that it’s even slightly demo20, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, November 2005

cratic. This despite the inevitability our country’s government ends up containing within it horse-traded Ministers or associate Ministers from fringe groups. They end up with enormous powers to influence all of our lives that in no way at all are any true reflection of any support that they originally received during the General Election.

Even worse is the other iniquitous situation, under MMP, where it is now plainly impossible for any voters in any electorate to get rid of a Member of Parliament even if that person is a blithering idiot or indeed without any redeeming virtues of any kind. They simply, after having been unceremoniously dumped by their disgusted constituents, slide right back into the public trough by dint of having, no doubt, sufficiently damning evidence of all kinds of political naughtiness filed away somewhere, to earn them a good place on the “Party List”. Which, in essence, means that, short of ever being actually caught doing something particularly horrendous, these well-considered-to-be-useless old party hacks can suck away there on the public tit for as long as they please.

This of course, in the general scheme of things, is pretty much a side issue for any of those thus returned to Parliament. They rarely get back on to the front bench, which is just as well for, after all, room just has to be made, does it not, for the crop of pay-off ministers, most, if not all of whom, coming as they do directly from the party lists of these minuscule special interest parties, nobody knows.

And beyond eventually finding out that he or she appears to be as mad as a March Hare, we citizens of this otherwise very pleasant little country have had neither any say in, nor control over, the process that has placed these nitwits in such positions of unbridled power.

I was just trying to think a couple of days back of any other business or institution in this country where the shareholders, boards of directors whatever, found it absolutely impossible to fire or to simply unload, plainly incompetent people. Certainly, upon reflection, one is bound to observe that perhaps the political system that has evolved here in New Zealand mirrors more closely

than we might perhaps be prepared to admit our society’s developed love affair in many aspects of our lives, with the apparent need to spread the blame. We never seem to run the risk of any individual or small group ever having to front up and face the consequences of their actions. Rule by committee, my Dad always used to call it. Like, a decision is taken (sometimes) and when things turn out OK the Chairman basks in the kudos, things turn to custard and sheer numbers make it almost impossible to affix any blame to anyone individual.

Of course we have further developed this ultra-liberal approach to decision making into an antipodean art form have we not? Scarcely any regulatory board, council, government department, hospital, school, you name it, seems able to function without the enormous safety net that is now provided by legions of consultants” sub-committees, steering committees or advisers. And oh yes, not forgetting of course the ever increasing requirement to hold an enquiry at the drop of a hat, and if necessary an enquiry into that enquiry...all of which removes almost entirely the actual need for anyone at all in any real position of authority from ever having to take meaningful responsibility for anything.

Which brings us back by a somewhat circuitous route to Parliament itself. Pray tell me when it last was that any of the recent Ministers of the Crown actually took any responsibility at all for the appalling mess that their portfolios had plainly become. Health, for instance, during the watch of the Mrs Mop-like Annette King, has become in recent times simply a colossal soak-hole for hundreds of millions of tax dollars whilst achieving far from a perceivable improvement in waiting lists. Quite the reverse now plainly applies.

Then we had the 111 emergency service scandal, the appalling drop in police response times, and the enormous drop in police morale that all has come about during the tenure of Mr George Hawkins, a no doubt delightful sort of a feller but nevertheless in cahoots with his

politically-appointed mate the Police Commissioner. When it comes to spinning a tale as to why none of the foregoing is anything to do with them, they should both win the Pinocchio prize for nasal enhancement in my view.

Take Labour’s number one verbal thug and sometime Minister of “Education”, the grammatically challenged Mr Trevor Mallard. In fact, take him anywhere. Good God, just how bad does our school system have to get under this wretch’s command before he’s soundly caned and then expelled forever? Mrs King may well have a penchant for tossing millions at her portfolio to cover up her totally inept managerial abilities, but our Trevor, in this regard, is in a class of his own.

Hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars being spent on halfwitted courses that never in a student’s life time will ever gain them a job or even a meaningful life! So, when Trevor blows even his enormous budget on just about every piece of new-age nonsense that his sandal-wearing officials and fellow party hacks can dream up, then it’s off we go to shut down a whole heap more rural schools to drum up even more money to toss down the educational gurgler!

And to be honest I really can’t be bothered running through the whole front bench of Helen’s Horrors because with very few exceptions most of them have now demonstrated beyond any reasonable doubt their monumental unsuitability to run anything much more complicated than a brace of parking meters. However it is also true that at least the political party to which they belong received around 40% of the party vote, albeit a city-based vote. The small, dare I say rump voter who favoured the Greens, Winston first, Jim’s party of one, Pita’s Maori Quartet, etc - they and they alone are the electoral winners in this latest political farce, that if nothing else, I suppose, will at least produce sufficient of a confusing mess to ensure that the New Zealand tradition of confusion preventing blame will most surely continue to prosper.

November 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 21

TOUGH QUESTIONS

IAN WISHART Understanding fundamentalism

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hey’re just another raving bunch of fundamentalists! Now there’s a phrase you’ll hear on talk radio if you listen hard enough. Fundamentalist.

The very word, in its modern context, sounds kind of hick, kind of backwoods Kentucky. Kind of downtown Mecca. It is used, primarily, as a pejorative – an insult against those deserving of the label ‘fundamentalist’. Heck, I’ve even taken a liking to it myself as a means of describing diehard secular humanists: atheist fundamentalist fruitbats.

But what does ‘fundamentalist’ really mean? It means somebody with a strong worldview. Somebody who is confident that they understand the world and their place in it, and therefore somebody You see, there is no one in not likely to be swayed your home or office who, from that worldview easily.

A fundamentalist is somedeep down, is not a religious one who believes in the refundamentalist of some kind ality of objective truth.

At a shallow level, every single one of us is actually a religious fundamentalist. That’s because whatever you believe about the universe and your own place in it, your belief is a faith-based one even if you are an atheist scientist. You may fervently believe that life is a product of random evolution and natural selection. But in a billion lifetimes you will never be able to absolutely prove it. You may believe that God created the earth in six days, but this too is ultimately a matter of faith. You may believe in reincarnation, karmic destiny and the alleged wisdom of Shirley Maclaine and whatever she’s channeling this month. This too is a matter of belief.

You may believe that “fundamentalism” should be discouraged by the government, perhaps even banned, because it threatens your own ideals of tolerance and good vibes. But you too would be guilty of fundamentalism, of imposing your own desire not to be exposed to someone else’s beliefs above another person’s right 22, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, November 2005

to listen to free speech. You see, there is no one in your home or office who, deep down, is not a religious fundamentalist of some kind. Once you scrape away the layers and the distractions, you are left with a person’s core beliefs about how the world is or how it should be.

You might be a gay fundamentalist, or a green fundamentalist, or a New Age fundamentalist. Every time you stand up and venture an opinion on how things should be, you are vocalizing your fundamentalism.

So is that wrong? No. To deny our inherent rights to our fundamental beliefs is to deny that which makes us human, rather than slaves.

How then, do we tackle fundamentalism that manifests itself in a bad way, like Islamic fundamentalism?

Only by recognizing that while everyone is fundamentalist, not all fundamental beliefs are right. Once upon a time, it was an established religious belief to conduct human sacrifice, even cannibalism. Should we shy away from confronting such evils just because we might offend a cannibal? Clearly not. Is the evil of cannibalism any less evil if we’re dealing with an army of 100,000 cannibals instead of 10? Does the fact that something evil is popular make it inherently right all of a sudden? Does something suddenly become inherently good just because we’re too afraid to fight it, or does our response really only prove the weakness of our own particular fundamentalism in the face of a stronger fundamentalism?

Evil triumphs when good men do nothing, the saying goes. The truth is, though, that if they did nothing then they were not truly good.

We are all fundamentalists. Nothing wrong with that.

But not all fundamental beliefs are created equal.

Here’s a cold hard truth, however. The only hope for disarming Islamic fundamentalism lies in the advance of Christian fundamentalism. Passion of the Christ was a huge hit in the Arab world, because it was the first time they’d seen forgiveness, instead of eye-for-an-eye. Mel Gibson struck a bigger blow for world peace in one movie, than all the Middle Eastern summits put together.

November 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 23

DIARY OF A CABBIE

ADRIAN NEYLAN Female trouble

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he other night an all-too-rare thing happened in the cab: two young women separated from their group of girlfriends near Darling Harbour and climbed in the back, and by the time we reached the Harbour Bridge one passenger received a text message from another of their group.

Nothing unique about that, except that the passenger then called her friend back, quizzing her: ‘Did you get a cab? Are you in it now? Who with? Why? Well, I’m not hanging up until you get home. Why? You’re drunk in a taxi by yourself, stupid – I don’t care if it’s a short trip…’ And so on.

This was a commendable example of drinking companions looking out for She staggered off into the strung- each other; all too often are shanghaied to out, drunken throng to make her cabbies act as chaperones by deown way home. That she wore what fault to vulnerable and ina Sydney Muslim cleric recently toxicated young women.

My passenger continued: deemed ‘rape attire’ only made my ‘Are you paying the fare alarm bells ring louder now? Okay, I’ll hang up when you’re inside...No, only when I hear Jeremy’s voice’.

After she had hung up I quizzed the women over the phone call. ‘Do you guys often receive unwanted advances from cabbies?’, I asked.

‘Yes, all the time’, they responded. I wondered if they were exaggerating. ‘Then why don’t we hear more of it in the press or from police reports?’ Without hesitation they said, ‘Probably because the girls are so drunk they don’t recall it next morning’.

‘Where did you learn to use that phone technique – at school or from your parents?’. ‘Neither’, they said, ‘it’s just common sense’. Unfortunately, their ‘common sense’ is all too often uncommon.

Earlier this year, I carried three young women from 24, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, November 2005

King Street Wharf to Surry Hills, via Potts Point. It was early morning as the Potts Point resident decided to grab a kebab in Kings Cross, then walk home. As I pulled over by the famous Coke sign, my headlights illuminated a tough looking bloke standing on the kerb, nonchalantly urinating against a barrier.

Yet seeing this, my passengers allowed their drunken friend to alight the cab alone. She staggered off into the strung-out, drunken throng to make her own way home.

That she wore what a Sydney Muslim cleric recently deemed ‘rape attire’ only made my alarm bells ring louder.

Before departing I instinctively hesitated, questioning her friends, ‘Are you sure she’s going to be alright? She’s really pissed.’

‘Yes’, they replied, ‘it’s only a short walk to her apartment – she does it all the time’.

Last Friday, just before midnight, a drunken schoolaged girl dressed as a high-class hooker in fishnets, stiletto heels, and miniskirt was poured into the back seat by two thirty-something female companions.

The two older women gave me the girl’s address, then deserted her. She was now effectively my problem. Sure enough, within two blocks she was barfing into a plastic bag, and after stopping to allow her to finish vomiting into the gutter, she recovered enough to direct me to her suburb. Barely.

On arrival, she had me stop in a street lined on one side by a park. She flicked me a $20 note and before I could thank her for the $5 tip, she had disappeared into the dark and deserted park.

At this point I could do nothing for her, and I reluctantly pulled away.

I’m almost certain a day will come when on commencing work, I’ll be responding to a common taxi broadcast: ANY DRIVER CARRY FEMALE – 2AM TODAY, OXFORD STREET TO (SUBURB) – CONTACT SGT. JONES, POLICE H.Q. Some girls just don’t get it.

Read more of Adrian the Cabbie at www.cablog.com.au

November 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 25

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ISLAM’S MESSAGE TO THE WEST We’re coming to get you Earlier this month the terror group Jemaah Islamiyah hit Bali again.

Now, in this exclusive interview for Investigate magazine in New Zealand and Australia, given shortly before the latest bombings, alleged terror leader Abu Bakar Ba’asyir tells TAUFIQ ANDRIE and SCOTT ATRAN there’s no place to hide from militant Islam in the Pacific, and no hope of peace. Ever.

November 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 27

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his interview was conducted on August 13 and 15, 2005 from Cipinang Prison in Jakarta. Questions were formulated by Dr. Scott Atran and posed for him in Behasa Indonesian by Taufiq Andrie. The interview took place in a special visitor’s room, where Ba’asyir had seven acolytes acting as his bodyguards, including Taufiq Halim, the perpetrator of the Atrium mall bombing in Jakarta, and Abdul Jabbar, who blew up the Philippines ambassador’s house. The transcript follows the short introduction below.

In this interview, the alleged terrorist leader Abu Bakar Ba’asyir provides his justification for waging jihad against the West. He also explains the calculus of suicide bombers and discusses his interpretation of Islam concerning war and infidels. Despite accusations that he is head of the al-Qa’ida-linked Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) terrorist organization and has planned the most lethal terrorist attacks in Southeast Asia, Ba’asyir has only been convicted on conspiracy charges in the 2002 attack on a Bali nightclub that killed 202 people. His 30-month sentence for his role in that bombing, which included scores of Australian tourists among the casualties, was recently reduced by four months and 15 days.

Just outside the visitor’s cell is Hasyim, who runs Ba’asyir’s daily errands. Hasyim is a member of Majlis Mujahidin Indonesian (MMI), the country’s umbrella organization for militant Islamist groups headed

by Ba’asyir. Like many Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) members, including Ba’asyir and JI founder Abdullah Sungkar, Hasyim originally came from Darul Islam, a post-independence group banned by the Suharto regime that has operated semi-clandestinely in Indonesian society much as the Muslim Brotherhood has in the Middle East.

In 1993, Sungkar split from DI, bringing with him most of the Indonesian Afghan Alumni that he and Ba’asyir had sent to fight the Soviets. Until Suharto’s downfall in 1998, Sungkar and Ba’asyir expanded their network of Islamist schools from exile in Malaysia, funnelling students to training camps in Afghanistan and the Philippines, and expanding JI’s influence across Southeast Asia. After Sungkar’s death in 1999, Ba’asyir became “Emir” of JI – a position and organization whose existence he publicly denies but for which there is overwhelming evidence, including from current and former JI members Dr. Atran has interviewed. Although Sungkar himself established direct ties with bin Laden, it is under Ba’asyir’s stewardship that JI has adopted key aspects of al-Qa’ida ideology and methods, targeting the interests of the ‘far enemy’ (the U.S. and its allies) with

28, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, November 2005

suicide bombings (Bali, Marriot Jakarta, Australian Embassy, Bali again) in support of global jihad.

Referred to as Ustadz (“teacher”), Ba’asyir is surrounded by visiting family and students who offer him a daily assortment of news magazines and foods, especially dates, his favorites. His disciples tend to be well-educated, often university graduates, and they wash his clothes.

Ba’asyir’s wife visits him once a month, and Ustadz offers to share the food she prepared with his prison mates, including Christians. He is a lanky, bespectacled Hadrami (a descendent from the Hadramawt region of Yemen, like bin Laden and Sungkar) who fasts twice a week, on Mondays and Thursdays. He is 66 and seemingly in good health.

Dressed in a white robe, red sarong and white cap, he is sitting on a wooden chair, one foot up perched on the edge. He exudes politeness and is all smiles, with a strong voice and easy laugh he answers questions as if teaching.

Q: You say that it is fardh ‘ain [an individual obligation] for Muslims to wage jihad against Infidels.

A: There are two types of infidels. The infidel who is against Islam and declares war on Islam is called kafir harbi [enemy infidel]. The second type

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is kafir dhimmi [protected infidel]. These are people who don’t fight against Islam, but don’t embrace it either and basically remain neutral.

Q: When in Cipinang, did Ustadz meet Father Damanik? [1] Is he kafir dhimmi?

A: Yes, I was visited and was respected by him. I have a plan, if Allah allows me, to pay a visit to his house. That’s what I call “muamalah dunia,” daily relations in the secular life. Because al-Qur’an sura 60 verse 8 says that “Allah encourages us to be kind and just to the people who don’t fight us in religion and don’t help people who fight us” so we are encouraged by Allah to be good and just to them. It means that we can help those who aren’t against us. On these matters we can cooperate, but we also have to follow the norms of Shari’ah. If Shari’ah says not to doing something, then we shouldn’t do it. Shari’ah never prohibited business in the secular world except in very minor things.

So it is generally allowed to have business with non-Muslims. We can help each other. For example, if we are sick and they help us, then if they become sick, we should help them. When they die we should accompany their dead bodies to the grave though we can’t pray for them.

ON NO PLACE TO HIDE

“Islam must win and Westerners will be destroyed. But we don’t have to make them enemies if they allow Islam to continue to grow so that in the end they will probably agree to be under Islam. If they refuse to be under Islam, it will be chaos. Full stop. If they want to have peace, they have to accept to be governed by Islam” November 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 29

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ON EXPANSION INTO THE WEST

“When Islam is strong, we come to the infidel’s country...to watch over it so that the infidel cannot plan to ruin Islam. There is no infidel who wouldn’t destroy Islam if they were given even a small chance” Q: What is the principle of Hudaybiyah [the covenant between prophet Muhammad and the People of the Book]?

A: Hudaybiyah means different things according to the legal situation. When Islam is strong, we come to the infidel’s country, not to colonize but to watch over it so that the infidel cannot plan to ruin Islam. Everywhere, infidels conspire to ruin Islam. There is no infidel who wouldn’t destroy Islam if they were given even a small chance.

Therefore, we have to be vigilant.

Q: What are the conditions for Islam to be strong?

A. If there is a state, the infidel country must be visited and spied upon. My argument is that if we don’t come to them, they will persecute Islam. They will prevent non-Muslims converting to Islam.

Q: Does being a martyr mean being a suicide bomber?

A: As I explained [the day before] yesterday, there are two types of infidel terms for suicide: first, those who commit suicide out of hope30, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, November 2005

lessness, second, those who commit suicide in order to be remembered as a hero. Both are types of suicide and there is no value in it.

In Islam there are also people who commit suicide out of hopelessness and we call this killing oneself. But if a person defends Islam, and according to his calculations must die in doing so, although he works hard in life, he will still go and die for Islam.

The consideration is: “if I do this, will Islam benefit or lose? If I must die and without my dying Islam will not win, then my dying is allowed.” Because to die in jihad is noble. According to Islam, to die is a necessity because everyone dies. But to seek the best death is what we call “Husn ul-Khatimah,” and the best way to die is to die as a shaheed [martyr].

Q: Is it acceptable to postpone a martyrdom action in order to make the hajj [pilgrimage to Mecca]?

A: A martyrdom action cannot be postponed in this case because jihad is more important than making the hajj. For example one of most revered ulema, Ibn Taymiyya, was asked by a rich person: “O Sheikh, I have so much money but I’m confused about donating my money because there are two needy causes. There are poor people who, if I don’t help, will die of starvation. But if I use the money for this purpose, then the Jihad will lack funding. Therefore, I need your fatwah [religious decision] O Sheikh” Ibn Taymiyya replied: “Give all your money for jihad. If the poor people die, it is because Allah fated it, because if we lose the Jihad, many more people will die.”

There is no better deed than jihad. None. The highest deed in Islam is jihad. If we commit to jihad, we can neglect other deeds. America wants to wipe out the teaching of jihad through Ahmadiyah [an Islamic school of thought that believes that Pakistan’s Mirza Ghulam Ahmad is the Prophet Muhammad’s successor]. Through this organization, America works. Why? Because Ahmadiyah prohibits its followers to undertake jihad because [they argue] jihad is the teaching of Christians. This organization originates from India. Its headquarters are in London, funded by America. Ahmadiyah is America’s tool to destroy Islam, including JIL [Jaringan Islam Liberal, Islamic Liberal Network], an NGO in Jakarta that advocates a liberal form of Islam. It is funded by USAID. Q: So is the idea to postpone is not allowed in any circumstances, even in order to visit sick parents?

A: No, no. If we are in jihad, the jihad must come first. Unless jihad is in [the state of] fardh kifayah [a collective duty, for the nation]. If jihad is in [the state of] fardh ’ain [an individual duty], jihad must be number one. There is no obligation to ask permission from one’s parents. But even if jihad is still in the fardh kifayah state, such as jihad to spy on infidel countries, Muslims don’t require their parent’s permission.

Q: Can a martyrdom action be permanently abandoned if there is a good chance that the martyr’s family would be killed in a retaliation action? similarly if the community where the martyr is from will also experience retaliation and casualties?

A: That is the risk and the consequence of jihad. If the martyr’s family understands Islam deeply, they will obtain many rewards. Their reward will come, if they understand. A martyr must have ikhlas [sincerity]. The parent who understands this concept must be thankful to Allah. This is the spirit of jihad that most scares the infidels. This is a moral force. According to General De Gaulle, moral force is 80% and actual action only 20% [of successful combat]. For infidels the motivation is to be a hero or [to die for] the nation. Some are even encouraged to drink [alcohol] so that they can become brave. Russia was badly defeated in Afghanistan. [Afghanistan] is different than Eastern Europe which could be conquered in only a month or two. Russians thought [that they could conquer] Afghanistan in two weeks maximum because its people were backward, isn’t that right? That was

Russia’s calculation based on their experience in Eastern Europe. But Afghanistan fought Russia back with their aqidah [by following Islamic doctrine] in the way of jihad. I’ll tell you a story so that you’ll understand. There was an Afghan mother who made cakes. She asked her children to distribute the cakes to the mujahideen. One by one her children were hit by shells on their way to deliver the cakes. When the mujahideen informed her they said : “Dear mother, please be strong because your children are martyred.” [The mother replied]: “I’m not crying for my children but I’m crying because I don’t know who’ll bring my cakes to the mujahideen.” Then one of the mujahideen agreed to replace her children. So, this is the spirit of jihad. You find ikhlas and willingness. Prophet Muhammad said: “I want to make jihad then die, then live again, then do jihad again, then live again, then jihad – for ten times.” This is because of the noble status for Muslims who became shaheed.

Q: Do you think the community which believes in martyrdom actions cares if the martyr only manages to blow up himself/herself and fails to kill any of the enemy?

A: No, [provided that] the ni’at [intention] to be a shaheed must be for Allah. During battle it is different. Istimata is also different. Still, the whole notion revolves around martyrdom. But in places like London and in America there must be other calculations. In battle it is best to cause as many casualties as possible.

Q: Do you think God favors or cares more for the martyr who manages to kill 100 enemies or one enemy?

A: The value [nilai] and reward [pahala] is the same.

Q: In regard to the global condition, what kind of things can the West, especially America, do to make this world more peaceful. What kind of attitudes must be changed?

A: They have to stop fighting Islam, but that’s impossible because it is “sunnatullah” [destiny, a law of nature], as Allah has said in the Qur’an. They will constantly be enemies. But they’ll lose. I say this not because I am able to predict the future but they will lose and Islam will win. That was what the Prophet Muhammad has said. Islam must win and Westerners will be destroyed. But we don’t have to make them enemies if they allow Islam to continue to grow so that in the end they will probably agree to be under Islam. If they refuse to be under Islam, it will be chaos. Full stop. If they want to have peace, they have to accept to be governed by Islam.

Q: What if they persist?

A: We’ll keep fighting them and they’ll lose. The batil [falsehood] will lose sooner or later. I sent a letter to Bush. I said that you’ll lose and there is no point for you [to fight us]. This [concept] is found in the Qur’an. The other day, I asked my lawyer to send that letter to the [U.S.] embassy. I don’t know whether the embassy passed on my letter to Bush [telling him], “You are useless, you’ll lose.” There are verses in the Qur’an that say, “You spend so much money yet you’ll be disappointed.” The verse is clear so I’m not some one who can predict the future but I get the information from Allah, so I’ll never be sad because I believe the time will come. Still, I feel that the Ummah [Muslim community] has a problem now. If the Ummah loses the [current] battle it isn’t because of Islam. A Muslim, as long as he is not “broken” [and remains committed to Allah’s rule] will get help from Allah.

Q: How about using nuclear weapons by Muslims, is it justified?

A: Yes, if necessary. But the Islamic Ummah should seek to minimalize [the intensity of the fighting]. Allah has said in verse 8 chapter 60 that we should equip ourself with weapon power – that is an order—but preferably to scare and not to kill our enemy. The main goal is to scare them. If they are scared they won’t bother us, and then we won’t bother them as well. But if they persist, we have to kill them.

In this way, Prophet Muhammad sought to minimalize the fighting.

Q: In your personal view, what do you think of bombings in our

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ON BANNING RADICAL ISLAM

“If there is a state, the infidel country must be visited and spied upon…if we don’t come to them, they will persecute Islam. They will prevent non-Muslims converting to Islam” homeland, namely the Bali, Marriott and Kuningan bombings?

A: I call those who carried out these actions all mujahid. They all had a good intention, that is, Jihad in Allah’s way, the aim of the jihad is to look for blessing from Allah. They are right that America is the proper target because America fights Islam. So in terms of their objectives, they are right, and the target of their attacks was right also. But their calculations are debatable. My view is that we should do bombings in conflict areas not in peaceful areas. We have to target the place of the enemy, not countries where many Muslims live.

Q: What do you mean by “wrong calculation,” that the victims included Muslims?

A: That was one them. In my calculation, if there are bombings in peaceful areas, this will cause fitnah [discord] and other parties will be involved. This is my opinion and I could be wrong. Yet I still consider them mujahid. If they made mistakes, they are only human beings who can be wrong. Moreover, their attacks could be considered as self-defense.

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Q: Does that mean you think they didn’t attack?

A: No, they didn’t attack because they defended themselves. They shouldn’t be punished. In Bali where 200 people died, it was America’s bomb. That was a major attack and Amrozi [the Bali plotter who bought the explosives] doesn’t have the capability to do that. [2] Q: Did Amrozi tell you this himself ?

A: He himself was surprised to see the explosion. When he said that it was Allah’s help he was right but he didn’t make that bomb. America did. There is much evidence to this effect and so the police dare not continue their investigations. According to England’s expert, that bomb was not Amrozi’s bomb. You should ask Fauzan. He knows this subject. That bomb was a CIA Jewish bomb. The Mossad cooperates with the CIA. [3] I had an exchange of views with the police and they didn’t say anything. I said to them, “You are stupid to punish Amrozi if he really knows how to make such a bomb. You should hire him to be a military consultant, because there is no military or police person [in Indonesia] who can make such a bomb.” However, when I asked Ali Imron [4] in the court he said: “Yes, I did it” I believe him [that he made one of the smaller bombs that went off]. A bomb expert from Australia said that anyone who believes that Amrozi and friends made that [bigger] bomb is an idiot; [this is also the opinion of] a bomb expert from England whose comments I read in a magazine. If Amrozi really did make that bomb, he deserves the Nobel Prize. So, the death penalty is not fair.

Q: I want to ask your opinion of Nasir Abas’s book where he said that you are the Emir of JI? [5] A: This is a traitor, a betrayer. I was in Malaysia and I had a jama’ah [congregation] the name of which was Jama’ah Sunnah. We just studied Islam.

Q: Were you aware that Nasir Abas was your student?

A: Yes, I was. But he was not the only one there; he also studied with Ustadz Hasyim Gani. I joined his group. He died. I think Nassir Abas’s book is [written] on orders from the police and for money.

Q: According to you, the book is incorrect, especially on Jemaah Islamiyah and you being its Emir?

A: This is not a court and the real court has failed to prove it. [6] Q: What was Nasir Abas’s motivation in writing that book?

A: I don’t know. But basically he got orders from the police and received some money. I think that was his motivation. He doesn’t have the courage to meet me. If I meet him, I’ll send him to do jihad in Chechnya or to the Southern Philippines so that Allah will accept his remorse [taubah]. He invented his own story.

Q: I heard that Nasir Abas came here. Did he meet you?

A: No, he came here to meet others.

Q: If I may know, when was the first time you heard the name al-Qa’ida?

A: After the police questioned me; during the time I was filing a law suit against TIME magazine. Do you remember when I did that?

They wanted me to take 100 million rupiah to stop the case but I didn’t. But I don’t know anymore about the case. During that time, I was under suspicion but I wasn’t arrested. That was the first time I heard the name al-Qa’ida. [7] A policeman from the intelligence section whose name I forget interrogated me from morning until afternoon.

He asked about that name [al-Qa’ida]. That was the first time I heard of it. Before, I never heard of it. I went to Pakistan but I didn’t hear that name. I went there to accompany my son [8] and meet some Arabs but I never heard that name.

Q: How about Shaykh Osama bin Laden?

A: I heard his name a long time ago. I read his writings, saw his tapes and met Arabs in Pakistan who talked about him when I accompanied my son, Abdur Rahim. Who didn’t know Osama? He was a mujahid against the Soviets and he had his own military that he funded by 32, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, November 2005

ON THE BATTLE TO COME

“It is true there will be a clash of civilizations. The argumentation is correct that there will be a clash between Islam and the infidels. There is no [example] of Islam and infidels, the right and the wrong, living together in peace” himself. He was a hero who America also praised. He was then also supported by America. America was piggybacking on him because America didn’t have the courage to fight against the Soviets. They were afraid of the Soviets and they relied on the Afghans.

Q: Have you ever met him?

A: No, no. I want to though. After my release, I hope I can meet him. [9] Q: Where will you find him?

A: If he still exists—but how could I? On Osama, my stand in court was clear. I have sympathy for his struggle. Osama is Allah’s soldier.

When I heard his story, I came to the conclusion that he’s mujahid, a soldier of Allah.

Q: So you will always be on his side?

A: Many say this and Osama is right. His tactics and calculations may sometimes be wrong, he’s an ordinary human being after all. I don’t agree with all of his actions. He encouraged people to do bombings. I don’t agree with that. He said that JI followed his fatwah. His fatwah said that all Americans must be killed wherever they can be found, because America deserves it. Therefore [according to bin Laden] if Muslims come across Americans, they have to attack them. Osama believes in total war. This concept I don’t agree with. If this occurs in an Islamic country, the fitnah [discord] will be felt by Muslims. But to attack them in their country [America] is fine.

Q: So it means that the fight against America will never end?

A: Never, and this fight is compulsory. Muslims who don’t hate America sin. What I mean by America is George Bush’s regime. There is no iman [belief] if one doesn’t hate America. There are three ways of attacking: with your hand, your mouth and your heart.

Q: Does this mean America’s government? Its policies?

A: If its citizens are good that’s fine, especially the Muslim citizens.

They are our brothers. Non-Muslims are also fine as long as they don’t bother us. A witness at my trial, Frederick Burks, wrote that he’s against Bush. [10] Q: How can the American regime and its policies change?

A: We’ll see. As long as there is no intention to fight us and Islam continues to grow there can be peace. This is the doctrine of Islam.

Islam can’t be ruled by others. Allah’s law can’t be under human law.

Allah’s law must stand above human law. All laws must be under Islamic law. This is what the infidels fail to recognize, that’s what America doesn’t like to see. You should read a book, “The Face of Western Civilization” by Adian Husaini. It’s a good book, a thick one. The conclusion of the book is that Western scholars hold an anti-Islamic doctrine. It is true there will be a clash of civilizations. The argumentation is correct that there will be a clash between Islam and the infidels.

There is no [example] of Islam and infidels, the right and the wrong, living together in peace.

FOOTNOTES 1. Father Rinaldy Damanik is the leader of the Christian community in Poso District, Sulawesi where violence between Muslims and Christians led to hundreds of deaths on both sides between late 1998 and 2002 (and where intermittent violence continues to this day). I interviewed Father Damanik in his home in Tentena on August 10, 2005. It turns out that Father Damanik shared the same jail cell block successively for some months (September 2002 – January 2003) with Reda Seyam (legendary Al-Qa’ida film-maker), Imam Samudra (the JI computer expert condemned to death for planning the meetings and choosing the targets for the Bali bombings) and Ba’asyir.

Damanik befriended all three. There are smiling photos of Reda and Damanik together, and Samudra and Ba’asyir have both confirmed their warm feelings toward Father Damanik. Damanik used to call Ba’asyir “Opa” (grandfather) and Ba’asyir’s wife would bring gifts of food to Damanik. They discussed injustice, Shari’ah, faith in God, suicide attacks and opposing America. According to Damanik, they found much agreement on the sources of injustice but disagreed strongly over the means to overcome it.

2. Amrozi bin Nurahasyim was sentenced to death by an Indonesian court for having plotted the bombing of the Sari Club in Kuta, Bali along with Imam Samudra and Amrozi’s older brother, Mukhlas.

3. The story about the CIA-Mossad conspiracy is widespread among JI leaders and foot soldiers and (usually with a laugh) used to illustrate that that JI is itself a concoction of “Jewish Intelligence.”

4. Ali Imron, the younger brother of Mukhlas and Amrozi, was sentenced to life in prison for the Bali bombings after having expressed remorse for his role in the attacks.

5. Muhammad Nasir bin Abas, who trained Bali bombers Imam Samudra and Ali Imron, received his religious instruction from Sungkar and Ba’asyir in Malaysia before they sent him in 1991 for three years to Towrkhan military camp in Afghanistan. He became a top JI military trainer but also gave religious instruction.

In April 2001 Ba’asyir appointed Abas head of Mantiqi 3, one of JI’s strategic area divisions, which covered the geographical region of the Philippines and Sulawesi and was responsible for military training and arms supply. Abas turned state’s evidence in Ba’asyir’s trial, outlining the structure of JI and Ba’asyir’s position as Emir. But Abas refused to openly condemn Ba’asyir or accuse him of ordering any terrorist operations, always respectfully referring to Ba’asyir as Ustadz. In July 2005 Abas published Membongkar Jamaah

ZUMA

Islamiyah (Unveiling Jamaah Islamiyah). The first part of the book details JI’s organization, ideology and strategy. The second part is a rebuttal to Samudra’s own book, Aku Melawan Terroris, and what Abas believes to be a tendentious use of the Quran and Hadith to justify suicide bombing and violence against fellow Muslims and civilians.

In between my interviews with Ba’asyir I interviewed Abas, who says that he quit JI over Ba’asyir’s refusal to condemn or contain the operations and influence of Riduan Isamuddin (aka Hambali). In January 2000, Hambali hosted a meeting in an apartment owned by JI member Yazid Sufaat in Kuala Lumpur that included 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and 9/11 highjackers Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hamzi. As Abas tells it, Hambali, who was JI’s main liaison with Al-Qa’ida and a close

friend and disciple of Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, was given control of Mantiqi 1, which covered the geographical region of Malaysia and environs and was strategically responsible for JI finances and economic development. But Hambali was dissatisfied being saddled with the “economic wing” (iqtisod) and wanted to play a more active role in the conflict zones. The then-leader of Mantiqi 3, Mustafa (now in custody) blocked Hambali from muscling in on his area but Hambali was able to send fighters to fight Christians in Ambon (Maluku) in 1999, which was under Mantiqi 2 (covering most of Indonesia and strategically responsible for JI recruitment and organizational development). Encouraged by success in heating up the Maluku crisis, Hambali decided first to extend his (and al-Qa’ida’s) conception of jihad to all of Indonesia (including the 1999 bombing of November 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 33

the Atrium Mall in Jakarta, the August 2000 bombing of the Philippines Ambassador’s house, and 17 coordinated Church bombings on Christmas eve 2000) and then to “globalize” the jihad by enlisting suicide bombers to hit Western targets and interests (including a failed plot to blow up Singapore’s American, Australian and Israeli embassies in December 2001, and the successful 2002 Bali bombings and 2003 suicide attack on Jakarta’s Marriott hotel). Although Abas argues that JI shouldn’t be outlawed because many in JI reject Al-Qa’ida’s vision of global jihad, in fact JI’s infrastructure and leadership continue to protect (with safe houses) and condone (as “self-defense”) efforts by the likes of masterbomber Dr. Azhari bin Hussain and his constant sidekick, JI’s top recruiter Nurdin Nur Thop, who some tell me recently established a suicide squad, called Thoifah Muqatilah, for large actions against Western interests.

6. According to Abas, JI’s essential organization and ideology is outlined in a set of general guidelines for the Jemaah Islamiyah Struggle (Pedoman Umum Perjuangan al-Jamaah al-Islamiyah, PUPJI), a 44-page manual that contains a constitution, outlines the roles of office bearers and gives details of how meetings must be organized (e.g., about what to do if a quorum cannot be obtained in the leadership council). The guidelines declare that anyone who adheres to fundamental Islamic principles that are devoid of corruption, deviation (e.g. Sufism) or innovation, can take the bayat (oath of allegiance) to the Emir of JI and become a JI member.

Although JI would be, in principle, open to anyone who meets these conditions, in fact only carefully selected individuals, including the Mantiqi leaders, were allowed to take the bayat and obtain copies of the PUPJI. Such individuals generally (but not always) would have undergone previous training in Afghanistan or graduated at the top of their class in courses that Sungkar and Ba’asyir designed for JI recruitment (though designation of courses as JI was unknown to potential recruitees).

Abas fulfilled both conditions. Although many people (including some Afghan Alumni I have interviewed) think of themselves as JI, or are not certain of whether or not they belong to JI, Abas insists that if they did not formally take the bayat they are considered sympathizers or supporters of JI but not members (just as some prisoners at Guantánamo are sincerely uncertain as to whether or not they belong to al-Qa’ida if they did not formally take the bayat to Bin Laden).

Abas says the PUPJI was drafted by a committee, including Ba’asyir, and then formally approved by Sungkar as the basis for JI. When

asked about the PUPJI in an earlier (untaped part of the) interview, Ba’asyir claimed, on the one hand, that the PUPJI manual was planted by police and intelligence services but, on the other hand, that it contains sound principles modeled on the doctrine of the Egyptian Islamic Group (Gama’at Islamiyah). Abas says that the manual also contains elements of Indonesia’s military organization, particularly in regard to the ranking of personnel (binpur) and responsibility for territory (bintur). He adds that although the PUPJI allows the JI to conduct itself as a “secret organization” (tanzim sir) - and conceal its doctrine, membership and operations from public view – it does not allow the practice of taqiyyah (dissimulation) to extend to lying to the (Muslim) public (another reason Abas gives for his leaving JI).

7. Other members of JI who openly

34, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, November 2005

acknowledge sympathy with bin Laden and Qa’ida say much the same thing. For example, I interviewed the JI member who founded the first mujahidin training camp in 2000 for the conflict in Poso, Sulawesi. He had earlier been sent by JI founder Abdullah Sungkar during the Soviet-Afghan War to train in Abu Sayyafs’s Ihtihad camp in Sada, Pakistan and to study with Abdullah Azzam, Bin Laden’s mentor and the person who first formulated the notion of “Al-Qa’ida sulbah” (“the strong base”) as a vanguard for jihad. This JI member also acknowledges hosting Khalid Sheikh Muhammad at his home in Jakarta for a month in 1996. Yet, he claims never to have heard of “al-Qa’ida” applied to a specific organization or group headed by Bin Laden until 9/11.

8. Ba’asyir sent his younger son, Abdul Rahim, to the Afghanistan border during the

Soviet-Afghan war to spend time under the wing of Aris Sumarsono (aka Zulkarnaen, who became JI’s operations chief) later enrolling Rahim in an Islamic high school in Faisalabad, Pakistan. Seeking a stricter salafist education for his son, Ba’asyir directed Rahim in the mid-nineties to Sana’a, Yemen, to study under Abdul Madjid al-Zindani (like Abdullah Azzam, Zindani was a legend among self-proclaimed “Afghan Alumni” who fought the Soviets). By 1999, Rahim was in Malaysia and soon under Hambali’s stewardship. Abdul Rahim now operates freely in Indonesia (reports in August 2005, place him in Aceh, heading a new charity, Camp Taochi Foundation) but he is suspected of having taken over JI’s contacts with Al-Qa’ida remnants after Hambali’s capture.

9. Ba’asyir’s statement that he never met bin Laden is contradicted by testimony from other JI members, both free and in custody. In the following letter (authenticated by Indonesian intelligence) dated August 3, 1998 and addressed to regional jihadi leaders, Ba’asyir and Sungkar state they are acting on bin Laden’s behalf to advance “the Muslim world’s global jihad” (jabhah Jihadiyah Alam Islamy) against“ the Jews and Christians:” Malaysia, 10 Rabiul Akhir 1419 [August 3, 1998] From: Abdullah Sungkar and Abu Bakar Ba’asyir To: Al Mukarrom, respected clerics, teachers (ustadz), sheikhs All praises upon God who has said: “The Jews and Christians will never be satisfied until you follow their way of worship” Al Baqarah: 120 Praise and peace upon Prophet Muhammad who has said: “If I’m still alive, I’ll surely expel the Jews and Christians out of the Arabian peninsula” And may God bless us and any of his followers who want to follow his orders.Respected clerics, teachers and sheikhs. This letter is to convey a message from Sheikh Osama Bin Laden to all of you. We send you this letter because we can’t visit and see you directly. However, we send our envoy, Mr. Ghaus Taufiq [a Darul Islam commander in Sumatra], to bring this letter personally to all of you. We also attach Bin Laden’s written message in this letter and Bin Laden also sends these messages to all of you: 1. Bin Laden conveys his regards (Assalamu’ alaikum Warahmatullahi Wabarakatuh) 2. Bin Laden says that right now, after “Iman” (to believe in God), the most important obligation for all Moslems in the world is to work hard to free the Arabian Peninsula from the occupation of Allah’s enemy America (Jews and Christians).

This obligation is mathalabusy syar’i (a consequence of the shari’ah) that every Moslem must not consider this obligation to be a simple matter. Prophet Muhammad, although he was sick, ordered the Muslim Ummah to

prioritize their obligation to expel the infidels from the Arabian Peninsula. Therefore, as the Prophet has said, the Muslim Ummah must take this obligation seriously. It is very important for the Muslim world to work very hard to free the Arabian Peninsula from colonization by the infidel Americans.

If we can free the Arabian peninsula as masdarul diinul Islam (the source of Islam) and makorrul haromain (Holy Mecca) from occupation by the infidel Americans, Inshallah (God willing) our struggle to uphold Islam everywhere on God’s land will be successful.

Stagnation and the difficulty in upholding Islam at present stems from the occupation of the Arabian Peninsula by the infidel America.

This great struggle must be put into action by the Ummah (Muslim community) all over the world under the leadership and guidance of clerics in their respective countries. Under such leadership, we will prevail.

The first step of this struggle is issuing fatwah (Islamic edict) from clerics all over the world addressed to the kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The edict must remind the King what Prophet Muhammad said about the obligation for the Muslim Ummah to expel the infidels from the Arabian Peninsula. Otherwise, this world will suffer a catastrophe. These edicts will give strong encouragement and influence to the King of Arabia. This is the message from Osama bin Laden conveyed to all of you.

Sheikh Osama bin Laden really wants to visit all clerics and Islamic preachers everywhere in the world to share his views so that there will be a common understanding about this momentous struggle. In the end, we will have similar movements simultaneously across the world. However, Bin Laden realizes that the situation outside his sanctuary is not presently safe. He also awaits your visit with his deep respect so that this great struggle may proceed. These are Bin Laden’s messages that we

convey to all of you.

We take this opportunity to explain certain facts about Bin Laden: • At present, Sheikh Osama stays in Afghanistan, in the Kandahar area, under the protection of Taliban • He doesn’t oppose either the Taliban or Mujahideen. He’s trying to unify both groups.

From his camp in Kandahar, Bin Laden organizes plans to expel infidel America from the Arabian Peninsula by inviting ulemas and preachers from all over the world. In this camp, Bin Laden is accompanied by a number of Arab mujahideen, especially those who previously fought in Afghanistan. Bin Laden and these mujahideen prepare to form “jabhah Jihadiyah Alam Islamy” (The global jihadi coalition in the Moslem world) to fight against America. The above information is about Sheikh Osama Bin Laden that you should know.

If you have the time and commitment to visit Sheikh Osama, Inshallah, we can help you meet him safely.

We praise God to all of you for your attention and cooperation.

Jazakumullah khoirul jaza (Thanks to God the best thanks) Wassalamu’alaukim, Your brother in Allah Abdullah Sungkar Abu Bakar Ba’asyir 10. Frederick Burks appeared at Ba’asyir’s trial testifying that he had interpreted at a 2002 meeting about Ba’asyir between an envoy of President George W. Bush and Indonesia’s then-president Megawati Sukarnoputri. Burks said the unidentified envoy accused Ba’asyir of involvement in a series of church bombings in Indonesia in 2000 and asked for the cleric to be secretly arrested and handed over to US authorities. Megawati declined, he said.

i November 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 35

FETAL DISTRESS Is it ethical to eexperiment xperiment on aabor bor ted humans? borted

It’s the hidden side of medical research. A massive industry harvesting pieces of dead children for experiments, or transplanting into animals. IAN WISHART discovers the University of Auckland has imported body parts from American babies for a research project, and asks some hard questions: 36, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, November 2005

T

here are puddles of water in the gloomy corridors of Auckland University’s School of Medicine, leftovers from a spring rainstorm and some bad building maintenance on this grey September afternoon. This nondescript urban edifice, now in the shadow of the new Auckland Hospital extensions, houses dark secrets. Or so Investigate has been told.

“They’re doing an undergraduate presentation next week in the Department of Optometry and Vision Science,” a source in Auckland’s optometry community confides in a cryptic email. “Thought you might be interested to investigate a research project involving tissue from aborted fetuses.”

Optometry. Eye doctors. Hardly the first branch of medicine that springs to mind as the cutting edge of macabre experimentation. But inside the Cole Lecture Theatre, safely sheltered from the weather and the waterlogged corridor, fifty or so medical students have filled the room almost to capacity as teams of fourth-year undergrads present the results of this year’s main research projects.

An American woman holds court, a scientific Mistress of Ceremonies taking clear pleasure in parading her protégés to their medical colleagues as they make audio-visual presentation after presentation.

She is Dr Keely Bumsted O’Brien, and this is her baby, so to speak.

Across the road, in the big hospital’s emergency rooms and oncology units, specialists, intensivists, nurses and registrars are working frantically to save the living. Here, in the School of Medicine, it turns out O’Brien’s team has been dissecting the dead. And not just any dead.

“The title of the project,” tipped our source, “is ‘Photoreceptorassociated gene expression in human fetal and embryonic chicken retina’.

As far as I am aware this project is unlikely to have received regional ethics approval from the Ministry of Health. The tissue has been obtained from elective abortions in the United States and was transported here for the experiments. This may be the first research of its kind in New Zealand and I am sure the public are quite unaware of it.”

Just how did body parts from a group of aborted American infants end up in New Zealand for students to conduct experiments on? To find the answers, we began investigations in the United States, and a controversy that blew up there six years ago.

It was an interview that shocked America. An Insider, spilling the beans on massive malpractice to a reporter on ABC’s 20/20. Only this time, it wasn’t Big Tobacco in the gunsights, it was the US abortion industry, exposed as harvesting the organs from aborted babies.

According to former abortion clinic technician Dean Alberty, clinics were harvesting eyes, brains, hearts, limbs, torsos and other body parts for sale to the scientific market: laboratories wanting to test new drugs or procedures, or researchers trying to find the causes of genetic disorders or discover new ways of treating disorders like Parkinsons.

To make matters doubly embarrassing for authorities, the trafficking was taking place inside abortion clinics run by Planned Parenthood, the US affiliate of New Zealand’s Family Planning organization.

Alberty worked for a Maryland agency called the Anatomic Gift Foundation, which essentially acted as a brokerage between universities and researchers seeking body parts, and the abortion clinics providing the raw material. Alerted by the clinics about the races and gestations of babies due to be aborted each day, AGF technicians would match the offerings with parts orders on their client lists. Alberty and his colleagues would turn up at the abortions that offered the best donor prospects to begin dissecting and extracting what they needed before decay set in.

“We would have a contract with an abortion clinic that would allow us to go in...[to] procure fetal tissue for research. We would get a

generated list each day to tell us what tissue researchers, pharmaceuticals and universities were looking for. Then we would go and look at the particular patient charts—we had to screen out anyone who had STDs or fetal anomalies. These had to be the most perfect specimens we could give these researchers for the best value that we could sell for.

“We were taking eyes, livers, brains, thymuses, and especially cardiac blood…even blood from the limbs that we would get from the veins” he said.

Alberty told of seeing babies wounded but alive after abortion procedures, and in one case a set of twins “still moving on the table” when clinicians from AGF began dissecting the children to harvest their organs. The children, he said, were “cuddling each other” and “gasping for breath” when medics moved in for the kill.

Alberty had been asked by a pro-life group, Life Dynamics, to provide information about activities in the clinics, and the issue caused enough national scandal to see an episode of ABC’s 20/20 devoted to it in March 2000.

On that programme, as in this magazine, the imagery was highly sanitized so as not to upset sensitive viewers. The closest 20/20 got to screening images of trafficked human fetal tissue was a pea-sized fragment of unidentifiable tissue in a glass Petri dish.

Life Dynamics founder Mark Crutcher later told media: “We are sympathetic to the explanation offered by the ABC producer who told us after the show that the network could not broadcast footage of dismembered babies, baggies full of tiny human eyes or any other accurate footage of the ‘commodity’ being sold by the baby parts merchants. But this should have been stated in the programme.

Showing scientists poking at slivers of flesh in a Petri dish through a microscope was deceptive and it dehumanizes this debate.”

In America, late-term abortions are permitted, even up to 30 weeks gestation. It’s a three day procedure and involves forcing the mother to go into labour but killing the baby with a spike to the base of the skull before it leaves the birth canal. Even so, according to Alberty, it wasn’t unusual out of the 30 or 40 late-term abortions each week to see several babies born alive on the operating table before clinicians could perform the procedure.

“They were coming out alive. The doctor would either break the neck or take a pair of tongs and basically beat the foetus until it was dead.”

Alberty’s testimony was verbal, and in many cases it was challenged by abortion providers who questioned his motives and accused him of “embellishing” the sordid details of the abortion industry. But Alberty the whistleblower wasn’t alone. Another former clinic manager, Eric Harrah, gave a video interview disclosing live births as the abortion industry’s “dirty secret”: “It was always very disturbing, so the doctor would try to conceal it from the rest of the staff.”

One incident in particular haunts him. The clinic had begun inducing a woman 26 weeks pregnant, but sent her overnight to a nearby motel to await the full procedure in the morning. Instead, in the middle of the night she gave birth to a child and was brought back to the abortion clinic with the baby wrapped in a towel.

“I was in the scrub room when I saw the towel move,” says Harrah.

“A nurse said, ‘Eric, you’re just tired. It’s three in the morning.’ Then we both looked and a little baby’s arm raised up out of the towel and was moving like a newborn baby. I screamed and ran out. The doctor came in and closed the door and when we went back in to process the baby out of the clinic into the lab, [the baby] had a puncture wound in his chest.”

In the United States, trafficking in baby parts for profit is a criminal offence. But to get around the problem, universities and researchers pay a fee – not for the parts themselves but for the “cost of extraction”.

Thus, there are different fees depending on the amount of work involved. And shipping and handling is extra.

November 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 37

Harvesting fetal tissue is not yet illegal in the US. In fact, the programme at five major universities including the University of Washington is part funded by the US National Institutes of Health. It is the University of Washington that has been supplying Keely Bumsted O’Brien at the University of Auckland, with some of her eyeball retinas of aborted children.

T

he reality of the ethical boundaries wasn’t lost on the students gathered in the Auckland School of Medicine lecture theatre when fourth year undergrads Tim Eagle and Kimberly Taylor wrapped up their presentation on genetic testing the eyeballs of chicken embryos and human fetuses. They told the audience they’d used tissue from a 10 week human embryo, a 12 week and a 16 week foetus. When Keely Bumsted O’Brien called for questions from the audience, the first was an ethical one, from a female student somewhere up the front of the crowded auditorium. Had Eagle and Taylor, she wondered, run their project past the Auckland University Ethics Committee?

“We have ethical approval under Keely as referee, which is obvious by itself. Her current ethical approval worked for what we were doing so we basically used hers, which was obtained as far as we’re aware from America,” Taylor responded.

When Investigate rang O’Brien to clarify, she confirmed her teams were working on something big.

“There’s a large ongoing project, and I don’t think I need to tell you when and where I actually do specific things. Are you aware that importation of human tissue into New Zealand does not require any sort of permit?,” she countered.

Apparently, she’s right. Under current New Zealand law, you can import body parts to your heart’s content as long as you do it in a biosafe manner. But what about seeking approval from the Ministry of Health’s Northern Region Ethics Committee? Surely there must be laws governing the carrying out of experiments on aborted human infants in the name of science?

“No,” says O’Brien emphatically, “because you’re not required to, because it’s tissue, not alive.”

In other words, thanks to a loophole in New Zealand law, it is perfectly legal to conduct experiments on aborted human embryos.

For all we know, there may be dozens of experiments being carried out on aborted children in research labs throughout New Zealand. The fetal eyes, O’Brien says, arrive in the country having been “snap frozen cryogenically” just minutes after death, then placed in formaldehyde.

So who supplies Auckland University with infant eyeball retinas?

O’Brien repeatedly talks of the “organizations” that supply her, but names only one, the University of Washington.

“These organizations, like for example the University of Washington has a tissue programme. The UOW oversees the collection of tissue, they have their own ethics committee. So they have to be overseen by another committee. So to use fetal human tissue in NZ I have to go through the local ethics committee, and in addition the tissue that I’m gathering has to be gathered under a separate ethics protocol. That ethics protocol is overseen by the ethics committee that’s on site.”

When Investigate suggests that the body parts could be coming in without mothers even realizing their aborted baby had been harvested moments after death, O’Brien is outraged.

“Working with human fetal tissue is not taken lightly. You have to have respect for the donation of the tissue. Now the child obviously cannot give consent, it’s the mother that’s giving consent.”

“Do you think they’re asking these women, ‘do you mind if we keep the baby for medical research?’,” we ask.

“You absolutely have to! You absolutely positively have to! Do your homework man! You simply cannot take fetal tissue from an aborted

38, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, November 2005

foetus without informed consent from the mother. Oh my goodness, I’m shocked to hear you suggest that. I’m upset and shocked that you suggest that. Totally off base.”

But is it really off base? O’Brien insists that women seeking abortions are asked to sign consent forms authorizing the use of their dead babies for medical research. It leads to a terse exchange with Investigate.

“There is an informed consent form that the mother signs. She is not coerced, she is not paid any money. She is informed of all of her options. That informed consent was part of my approval that was produced and shown to the ethics committee here [in Auckland].”

Great, we thought. So O’Brien actually knew the names of the mothers involved and had presented copies of their consent to her peers?

“Absolutely not! That is so unethical! All I know is that the tissue was donated by the mother, and the mother has signed an informed consent form.”

But hang on, we asked, how do you know, if you don’t have a signed form with a name on it?

“I don’t keep those records on site.”

No, but somebody must.

“Yes, they are kept by the organization that coordinates the donation.”

So what, physically, does O’Brien have that proves there’s been informed consent from the mother?

“You cannot collect the tissue without informed consent from the mother. It is unethical for the organization that coordinates the collec-

LEFT: Keely Bumsted O’Brien, pictured at Yale University. ABOVE: O’Brien’s University of Auckland optometr y class during the fetal research presentation tion of the tissue to provide me with any sort of information that might link it back to the mother.”

In other words, there’s no signed paperwork for O’Brien or the ethics committee to see. It’s done on trust. To Investigate’s knowledge, O’Brien has never seen a signed informed consent form.

So for all you know, we pushed her, it could be somebody in an office somewhere chucking out these forms on a word processor saying ‘yeah, we do all this’ and of course they don’t. “If you’ve never seen a signed copy, how do you know?”

And when Investigate went searching, those are exactly the kind of discrepancies we began to find. Like this extract from the Seattle Post Intelligencer newspaper in the wake of a congressional visit to the University of Washington lab: “Women who agree to the use of their aborted babies for research sign a simple “informed consent” document at the abortion clinic, which includes no information on where the particular “donation” will be sent or how it will be used. This oversight is inconsistent with the regulation requiring “informed” consent, according to a physician familiar with research protocols, and could be problematic for the University of Washington laboratory.”

The newspaper also discovered other discrepancies in the University of Washington paperwork, such as the University letting outside labs fill in forms instead of doing the paperwork themselves. Nor was the University of Washington doing the actual organ harvesting at the

abortion clinics, so the University itself was one step removed from the informed consent process in terms of verifying whether the consent was genuine. In other words, the University of Washington’s ethical oversight could not have included whether the tissue was harvested ‘ethically’, because the University has never been in a position to know.

The congressmen went away sufficiently concerned that six separate pieces of legislation were drafted to combat the harvesting of tissues.

But with a change in administration, those bills went onto the backburner.

Then there’s the issue of the other ‘organisation’ O’Brien refers to but doesn’t name. Investigate traced two scientific papers published by O’Brien in the past 24 months. One, “Expression of photoreceptorassociated molecules during human fetal eye development”, was published in the journal Molecular Vision in 2003 and can be found on the internet through a Google search. In the paper, O’Brien discloses she used body parts supplied by the University of Washington, but also by a private broking firm like the controversial Anatomic Gift Foundation referred to earlier; this one is named Advanced Bioscience Resources, or ABR, and is based in California. After Anatomic Gift Foundation was sprung thanks to the testimony of insider Dean Alberty, Advanced Bioscience Resources moved to fill the fetal tissue power vacuum. In an industry now estimated to be worth around $2 billion globally, ABR is believed to be a major player, particularly as it’s November 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 39

TIGER BY THE TAIL: US illusionist Roy Horn, accompanied by long time par tner Siegfried Fischbacher, walks with the aid of a crutch after stem cell treatment following a tiger attack two years ago. ZUMA prepared to supply organs harvested from second trimester late-term abortions, which the University of Washington refuses to do.

Investigate has confirmed that an early second trimester baby was dissected for the Auckland University study, making ABR the likely supplier to O’Brien. And O’Brien has used babies up to the fetal age of 22 weeks, according to her published studies.

Her Molecular Vision paper describes how experiments were “prepared from snap frozen intact human fetal eyes ranging from fetal week 9 to fetal week 19…labeling was performed in a large number of eyes within an age group.”

There is no disclosure in the internet version of the paper how many eyes were harvested for the experiments. At least ten babies from fetal weeks 9 to 22 are known to have been harvested for O’Brien’s second scientific paper we found, published in Investigative Ophthalmology and Visual Science in August 2004. Again, suppliers were both ABR and the University of Washington. One paper on eyes supplied by ABR describes how the baby’s eyes are “enucleated” from the skull – medical talk for being scooped out with a knife.

Although she was working at the University of Auckland at the time, O’Brien has told Investigate the experiments detailed in her published papers were carried out “elsewhere”.

And what do we know of Advanced Bioscience Resources? According to O’Brien, her suppliers operate with transparent ethical rules and committees. But Advanced Bioscience Resources appears far from transparent. At least one American news report says the company has 40, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, November 2005

refused to comment on its body parts trade, making it impossible to ask whether ABR’s practices comply with federal US law.

“We’re a biotechnology firm, we don’t talk to the press,” a company spokeswoman is quoted as saying on another occasion.

Investigate has confirmed that ABR supplied aborted baby brains to be injected into mice, as part of experiments creating a part human/ part mouse chimera. The genetically-engineered mice have been given – all courtesy of aborted fetuses from ABR – a human immune system, a human fetal thymus, liver and lymph node. The mice are then infected with HIV as part of AIDS research.

The US National Institutes of Health, which funded the grisly harvesting and experiment, has refused to provide any written proof that ABR holds informed consent forms, nor has the NIH confirmed that mothers were told by ABR that organs from their dead babies would be transplanted into genetically-engineered mice.

ABR has also supplied baby hearts for transplantation into pigs, and fetal stem cells.

We asked O’Brien whether she felt modern scientists were stepping into a dark pedigree.

“Do you see a correlation between the boundaries of science and experimentation on humans in this area, and the dreams of Nazi Josef Mengele and others back in World War 2 and the kind of experiments they were conducting?”

“No.” Mengele had taken particular interest in dissecting live infants for medical experiments.

“You see no correlation?”

There was a pause as O’Brien drew in her breath. “What you’re trying to get me to say is that research on human fetal tissue is morally and ethically wrong, and I’m not going to say that. Because obviously I’m working on the tissue. I think the information to be gained is extremely valuable and it’s not something taken in lightly. I don’t think the information I use can be interpreted and used for eugenics. The reason that we have ethics committees is so we don’t have a scientific free for all.”

Other ethicists, like Paul Ramsey in the US, disagree however.

“Far from abortion settling the question of fetal research, it could be that sober reflection on the use of the human foetus in research could unsettle the abortion issue.”

Are human children, ask ethicists, any less-deserving of protection from medical experiments and execution than animals?

Pittsburgh-based researcher Suzanne Rini, who interviewed Ramsey and whose 1995 book Beyond Abortion: A Chronicle of Fetal Experimentation brought to light a body parts trade that’s existed since the 1950s, believes the very fact that scientists need the elixir of youth from fetuses may be the ethical catch-22 that kills the abortion industry. On the one hand, she says, medical researchers try to argue the foetus is not a live person. On the other, whether it’s a cure for Parkinson’s, diabetes, Huntington’s, MS or a range of other disorders, medical researchers claim the life in fetuses is the only thing that can save adults. But only if you kill the foetus first.

University of Auckland’s Deputy Vice Chancellor, Research – Tom Barnes – says it is ethical under current NZ law to harvest organs from fetuses for the sake of improving the lives of adults.

“As you know [Keely’s] research is looking at eyes. She’s trying to solve the problem of macular degeneration which is a disease that affects 60% of more of people who are 70 years old or over. She’s also trying to solve some problems to do with eye disease in younger people as well.”

It is a modern, relativistic idea that you can sacrifice the few for the good of the many. Indeed, this was one of the justifications Hitler used in whipping up hatred against Jewish, Gypsy and gay minorities.

In 21st century form, the argument is more subtle: that if a cure for crippling diseases can be found by harvesting fetal organs from abortions, or growing human embryos in the laboratory for stem cell harvesting, then the deaths of those infants are justifiable because of the perceived greater good to the community at large.

Indeed, O’Brien makes a similar appeal when we ask what the ultimate benefit of dissecting children’s eyeballs is: “You achieve knowledge, so that you can start to try and find therapies to help people regain their vision, or intervention so that you can help people who have congenital abnormalities that we might be able to fix them.

“Obviously I don’t think there should be a blanket ban on the use human fetal tissue because I think the information that you get out of the use of human tissue is very valuable in trying to help people.”

But is that a valid line of reasoning that justifies made-to-order abortions?

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t the Nuremberg War Crimes trials, evidence was presented of horrific scientific experiments being performed on captives in the concentration camps. The Nazi medics on trial attempted to justify it by saying the test subjects were due to die anyway and the knowledge gained would benefit the rest of humanity.

Needless to say, the Nazis were shot down in the courtroom (and later simply shot outside it) and Nuremberg issued a declaration condemning the role of the medical profession in experimentation and slaughter of innocents.

University of Auckland’s Keely Bumsted O’Brien resents modern scientists being likened to Hitler’s gruesome genetic engineers, and points out that when Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Brain Research recently discovered it possessed the brains of many Down’s Syndrome people slaughtered by the Nazis, the Institute did the decent thing.

“Rather than use [the brains for research], it was the decision of the Director to give those brains a decent burial. Which one could argue might be the ethical way to do it, if they were gathered by the Nazis in an unethical way dealing with eugenics. Now I don’t compare what I do to eugenics.”

But Investigate challenged O’Brien on her example.

“There is an arguable case that in 50 or a hundred years time society will look back and say the current Western practice of mass abortion was a similar sort of thing to what the Nazis did and they’ll look at it the same way, what’s your response to that?”

“I don’t think they will,” exclaims O’Brien. “And I think we take much more care in how we carry out the research than the Nazis did.”

It is clear to Investigate after an hour long interview with O’Brien that she is sincere in her beliefs, and she makes special mention of the fact that she respects the humanity of the tissue. She also attends an annual memorial service, she says, that the medical school has for the cadavers and tissue used during the year. Nonetheless, our inquiries into the baby parts business give no reason to think that the harvesting of organs in America from dead or dying infants is done more humanely than the Nazis did.

For a start, the death toll alone from abortion far eclipses anything Hitler was able to achieve. In fact, one estimate of the abortion tally in the West in the past 30 years is that more than 58 million lives have been lost. Once you kick in the figures for the rest of the world including China, more people have been killed by abortion in the past 30 years than in all wars in recorded history. For the record, international studies like a 1999 paper from International Family Planning perspectives suggest 46 million lives a year are taken throughout the world.

At the Mayfair Women’s Clinic in Aurora, Colorado, staff admitted

TERMINATED GENES: California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger greets suppor ters of fetal stem cell har vesting, and those hoping for miracle cures as a result. KRT under cross examination in court that they had so many aborted babies to get rid of that clinician Dr James Parks used to put the bodies of larger babies (up to week 22) into meatgrinders so the remains could be reduced to the consistency of toothpaste and flushed down sinks.

Leaked documents from inside abortion clinics have hit the headlines across the US, and they make dark reading. They’re order forms from scientists to agencies like Advanced Bioscience Resources, instructing what parts they need and how to get them.

“Dissect fetal liver and thymus and occasional lymph node from fetal cadaver within 10 (minutes of death).” “Arms and legs need not be intact.” “Intact brains preferred, but large pieces of brain may be usable.”

Or this, from a scientist studying the “Biochemical Characterization of human type X Collagen,” who requests “Whole intact leg, include entire hip joint, 22-24 weeks gest.”

The harvesting technician is asked to “dissect by cutting through symphasis pubis and include whole Illium [hip joint]. To be removed from fetal cadaver within 10 minutes.”

Another, from University of Colorado’s Gary J. Miller, a professor of pathology, seeks the prostate glands of 24 fetuses from the first and second trimesters. The glands, he says in his request to Anatomic Gift Foundation on November 10, 1998, are “To be removed and prepared within 5 minutes ... after circulation has stopped.”

According to World magazine in the US, which broke the story, other specifications state that they are to be “preserved on wet ice,” “picked up immediately by applicant,” have “low risk no IV drug abuse or November 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 41

known sexually transmitted diseases,” and no prescription medications used by “donor” mother. The contract is signed both by Dr. Miller and, for the Regents of the University of Colorado, by “Sharon Frazier, Director of Purchasing.”

O’Brien refuses to believe there is anything dodgy about the fetal tissue harvesting operations in the US. “I have to put my faith in the fact that the organizations that I’m obtaining tissue from are obtaining it in an ethical manner.”

But let’s look at that more closely. The American Society For Cell Biology, an association of cell biologists, lobbied hard against regulating the fetal tissue harvesting industry, including a suggestion that researchers should have to “verify that the tissue was obtained properly”. This condition, and others, were regarded as too onerous for the scientists to accept.

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one of the many articles and papers Investigate has read on the issue suggest that the abortion clinics or tissue harvesting organizations are subject to ethical oversight committees. In fact, the Anatomic Gift Foundation, which is similar to ABR, openly puts the onus on its clients – the researchers – to get ethical approval before they make an organ purchase application. Investigate has found no evidence that AGF or ABR are themselves audited by anyone.

And how ethical is the behaviour of another big fetal tissue provider (until it was sprung in the ABC 20/20 programme), Opening Lines?

A division of Missouri and Illinois-based Consultative and Diagnostic Pathology Inc, Opening Lines made no bones about the fact it was in business to make money. A 20/20 producer, posing as a potential investor in the 11 year old company, visited its founder, pathologist Dr Miles Jones.

Jones, unaware he was being recorded on a hidden video camera, explained how his company obtained fetal parts from clinics across America for shipment to research labs. “It’s market force,” Dr. Jones told the producer about how he sets his prices. “It’s what you can sell it for.” He said he was looking to set up an abortion clinic in Mexico in order to get more fetal tissue by luring women in with cut-price abortions.

“If you control the flow — it’s probably the equivalent of the invention of the assembly line.”

As to the financial benefits of his business, Jones was brutal about the demand from researchers: “If you have a guy that’s desperate for, let’s say, a heart, then he’ll pay you whatever you ask,” he said.

“That’s trading in body parts. There’s no doubt about it,” Arthur Caplan, director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Bioethics, told the Alberta Report newspaper after reviewing Jones’ statements.

The Opening Lines corporate brochure reads more like a supermarket advertisement than an ethical, dignified approach to the death of a baby.

“The freshest tissue prepared to your specifications and delivered in the quantities you need it.”

Despite compiling a baby parts price list and charging fees, an FBI investigation concluded that Opening Lines had broken no laws in what it had done and how it had done it. So if the American ethical rules are tough, there’s been no evidence of it to date.

Then there’s the question of whether the University of Auckland Human Ethics Committee is tough enough in demanding proof of informed consent in cases like O’Brien’s. You’ll remember O’Brien is insistent that she could not provide the University of Auckland with copies of the informed consent because it would be unethical for her to know the identities of the mothers who’d signed them.

“It is unethical for the organization that coordinates the collection of the tissue to provide me with any sort of information that might link it back to the mother.”

42, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, November 2005

Contrast O’Brien’s statement with this extract from the ethical guidelines imposed on fetal tissue research by the University of Texas at Houston: “An investigator proposing to use fetal tissue must complete an application form for full [Ethics Committee] review and approval. The application must include a copy of the consent form used to obtain consent for donating the tissue. [Ethics Committee] must be assured that the woman donating tissue has been given an opportunity to understand the procedures, any possible risks to her privacy and well-being, and to assure that she has an opportunity to give free and informed consent to the donation.” [emphasis added] Additionally, the University of Texas requires that the consent form cannot be generic, and must relate to the actual research project that is planned, with “a short description of the reasons for the research.”

While O’Brien claims it would be unethical for her to know the donor or talk to them, the University of Texas requires its researchers to include on the woman’s copy of the consent form “the name and telephone number” of the researcher, so that the donor can make contact, ask further questions, and even withdraw their consent.

Implicit in this is that the researcher must take ethical responsibility for the collection of the tissue, and should know who the donor is. Both of these aspects corroborate the comments made about the flawed informed consent procedures of the University of Washington earlier in this report.

It is clear from O’Brien’s interview with Investigate that none of the women donating their dead babies’ eyeballs would have been able to reach her to withdraw their consent or ask questions.

But Investigate didn’t leave the issue there. Despite the fact that Advanced Bioscience Resources refuses to give media interviews, we obtained the cellphone number of its President, Linda Tracy, and we rang it. What we obtained is a world exclusive:

Jones, unaware he was being recorded on a hidden video camera, explained how his company obtained fetal parts from clinics across America for shipment to research labs. “It’s market force,” Dr. Jones told the producer about how he sets his prices. “It’s what you can sell it for.” He said he was looking to set up an abortion clinic in Mexico in order to get more fetal tissue by luring women in with cut-price abortions

“We’re just doing a story on fetal tissue use over here in NZ, and one of the suppliers is ABR, and people tell us you guys are subject to ethical committee oversight, would that be right?”

“Who are you with again?”

“Investigate magazine.”

“OK, I don’t give any information to magazines or interviews to anyone.”

But just as Tracy was about to do what she’d done so many times before to American journalists – hang up – we reminded her that negative publicity could affect her business, and she had a responsibility to put her side of the story.

“In this particular case, the researcher says that the suppliers such as yourself are subject to ethical committee oversight. I’m trying to find out who is responsible for ethical oversight in terms of ABR, would it be you or is it the researcher who must seek approval?”

“Both.”

“What committee do you people report to, how does it work?”

“Well, we are overseen by the IRS, the Internal Revenue Service. As a non-profit organization we have guidelines to abide by, but that’s about the only regulatory committee that we are subject to.”

So much for ethical oversight. Is there, we asked, an external ethical committee that Advanced Bioscience Resources reports to or which oversees its baby harvesting operation?

“No.” What about the actual extraction of eyeballs and other fetal tissue, who carries that out?

“It is our responsibility to collect the tissue,” confirms Linda Tracy.

“So you’re in control of the process all the way through?”

“No.” This ‘ethical oversight’ is getting more fascinating by the minute.

Which part of the process, we asked, was outside ABR’s control?

“The [abortion] clinic consents the patient.”

“And then the clinic provides you with the consent?”

“Yes.” “Is there any possibility that the clinic may not properly consent the patient, the clinic may take the view ‘we’re never going to see the patient back through here, they’re never going to know’, and they’ll just write out the forms. How do you know the clinic is doing the informed consent properly?”

“We just have to trust them,” says ABR’s Linda Tracy.

Don’t forget, the abortion clinic gets paid money for providing ‘office space’ to the harvesters, and has a financial interest in the success of harvesting as an industry.

Keely Bumsted O’Brien may have expressed “shock” and outrage when Investigate suggested the harvesting programmes could be ethically shonky, but the evidence now appears pretty damning.

Not only is there no ethical oversight of the abortion clinics, there is none on the companies doing the fetal tissue harvesting either. All the way through, the process appears to be done purely on “trust”.

And just how good is the actual informed consent process that the ethics committees rely on? According to the University of Texas, informed consent forms had to spell out what kind of research was specifically planned.

We asked ABR whether, for example, donating ‘mothers’ would be told their child’s organs would be used for eye studies, or for transplantation into animals for experiments?

“The law requires that we always state that it is possible that it may be used for important stem cell research, and if the patient asks specifically what it might be used for then that is explained to her verbally. The consent itself is somewhat generic except for the pluripotent stem cell use.” [our emphasis] Based on Linda Tracy’s interview with Investigate, it now appears November 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 43

certain that no donating mother gave informed consent for her baby’s body parts to be transplanted into human/mouse hybrids, or injected into the veins of rats. Little wonder the US Government National Institutes of Health refused to release informed consent forms from ABR regarding those projects.

There was another aspect we wanted to clarify: O’Brien’s insistence that it would be unethical for her to see a donating mother’s consent form.

“Are those forms available to researchers if they need them for ethical approval?”, we asked Tracy.

“Yes.” Naturally, all these discoveries raised more questions than answers.

We went back to the University of Auckland’s Tom Barnes, the man the university’s ethics committee reports to.

“Keely does have ethical approval from the University of Washington to do this and that ethical approval is current and has gone through their prescribed procedures.”

Barnes explained that the project is a collaboration with the University of Washington’s Anita Hendrickson, who was apparently the principal point of contact with tissue harvesters.

But Barnes was not aware that University of Washington’s ethical procedures were found wanting, as referred to earlier in the Seattle PostIntelligencer report.

“I’m sorry, I can’t comment on that,” reflected Barnes. “I’d have to know exactly what the situation is before I comment.

“In terms of what this university knows, we have the ethical approval from Washington, and also the proposal has been examined by our ethics committee de novo [as if for the first time] as well.”

When we pointed out that neither University of Washington nor ABR had directly sought informed consent from women and instead relied on abortion clinics to get it, Barnes said the University of Auckland had to trust the paperwork in front of it.

“As I say, I understand the ethical approvals were granted over there and we have paperwork that backs that up. Whatever happened over there I can’t comment on.”

We explained to Barnes the stringent ethical conditions imposed on informed consent forms by the University of Texas, and asked whether he was satisfied that the University of Auckland’s ethical rigours were tough enough.

“Let me say that our ethics committee operates under guidelines that are set nationally, and those guidelines are approved by the HRC. I believe we have an ethics committee that is absolutely committed to research being done in the correct way and I believe they do an excellent job of that.”

Having said that, says Barnes, the University of Auckland will ponder Investigate’s allegations that the US ethical process is flawed.

And what about the overall ethical issue of whether human infants should be experimented on at all? Barnes says it is legal under current New Zealand law, and proposed new rules to control it have not yet come into effect. When we again raise the comparison with Auschwitz, Barnes rejects the analogy.

“I think that’s entirely inappropriate.”

“How?” “Well it’s a totally different situation.”

“How?” “If you accuse, by default, Keely of behaving like somebody in a Nazi death camp, I do think that’s unfair. If the issues you’ve raised about ethical approval in America are resolved satisfactorily, if the mothers are in fact giving informed consent for the use of their tissue, that’s really quite different to somebody who’s in a Nazi death camp being experimented on,” says Barnes.

But doesn’t the answer, we pointed out, really turn on whether the fetus is the ‘mother’s tissue’ to dispose of in the first place?”

44, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, November 2005

“We make sure we fall within the ethical guidelines as they are laid down,” says Barnes. “Whether those guidelines are flawed or not or whether they’ll change or not is a matter for the future, and in the meantime we have to operate within those constraints.

“To be honest with you, I think that that [whether a foetus is an individual human life or just part of the mother] is a broader debate which would have to take place in the country at large.”

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t’s a good point. Researchers talk of the baby simply being “the mother’s tissue”, but advances in DNA mean we now know the foetus has its own unique DNA and tissue, and is not merely an extra piece of maternal flesh. The mother, in real scientific terms, can no more “own” the foetus on such grounds than she can “own” her older children and consent to their execution and vivisection. Is it time for renewed public debate?

It’s an argument that the University of Auckland is sympathetic to.

“You have to sort of balance the tremendous potential of this research to solve some absolutely debilitating problems – people being blind for years and so on. So we do the best we can at balancing all these factors within the guidelines and the law as it stands, and we contribute to and take part in that ethical debate and we will abide by what comes out of that ethical debate. We’re not trying to cover anything up.

“If the result of that debate that you’re referring to is that it’s unethical to work with this kind of tissue, then we wouldn’t do. No question.”

Another who shares that view is Steven Bamforth, a Canadian geneticist harvesting fetal tissue at the University of Alberta for his research colleagues. Every day, his job entails sifting through aborted remains, searching for recognizable eyes, hearts, livers and other organs sought after by universities.

“The humanity is always before us,” Dr. Bamforth told Alberta Report magazine recently. “If society said this research is not acceptable, of course, we would immediately desist. It’s not something that I do happily.”

Nor does the “helping older people with their health” excuse carry water with Christopher Hook, of Illinois’ Centre for Bioethics and Human Dignity.

He told World magazine the exploitation of pre-born children was “too high a price regardless of the supposed benefit. We can never feel comfortable with identifying a group of our brothers and sisters who can be exploited for the good of the whole. Once we have crossed that line, we have betrayed our covenant with one another as a society, and certainly the covenant of medicine.”

In New Zealand, the issue of conducting medical experiments on dead bodies – both adult and fetal – is currently the subject of an ethics committee review by the Ministry of Health. Keely Bumsted O’Brien was one of those who made submissions to hearings prior to the issue of a draft report last year, Review of the Regulation of Human Tissue and Tissue-based Therapies, available on the web.

The 131 page document records a majority of submissions believe research should be prohibited on bodies where the wishes of the deceased were not known prior to death, even if the family give their consent post-mortem. As a foetus cannot express its wishes, such a restriction could impact on the use of fetal tissue, especially if society eventually reaches a decision that a foetus is a human life.

Even so, the document also notes growing unease at the use of fetal tissue for experiments, and the fact that it currently falls outside of the regulations, and the Ministry is now considering giving fetal tissue fresh ethical protection. How far it goes will depend, ultimately, on public debate.

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PRICE LIST FOR BODY PARTS (US$) Opening Lines Fee for Ser vices Schedule > age greater than < age same or less than Unprocessed Specimen (> 8 weeks) $ 70 Unprocessed Specimen (< 8 weeks) $ 50 Livers (< 8 weeks) 30% discount if significantly fragmented Livers (> 8 weeks) 30% discount if significantly fragmented Spleens (< 8 weeks) $ 75 Spleens (> 8 weeks) $ 50 Pancreas (< 8 weeks) $100 Pancreas (> 8 weeks) $ 75 Thymus (< 8 weeks) $100 Thymus (> 8 weeks) $ 75 Intestines & Mesenter y $ 50 Mesenter y (< 8 weeks) $125 Mesenter y (> 8 weeks) $100 Kidney-with/without adrenal (< 8 weeks) $125 Kidney-with/without adrenal (> 8 weeks) $100 Limbs (at least 2) $150 Brain (< 8 weeks) 30% discount if significantly fragmented Brain (> 8 weeks) 30% discount if significantly fragmented Pituitar y Gland (> 8 weeks) $300 Bone Marrow (< 8 weeks) $350 Bone Marrow (> 8 weeks) $250 Ears (< 8 weeks) $ 75 Ears (> 8 weeks) $ 50 Eyes (< 8 weeks) 40% discount for single eye $ 75 Eyes (> 8 weeks) 40% discount for single eye $ 50 Skin (> 12 weeks) $100 Lungs & Heart Block $150 Intact Embr yonic Cadaver (< 8 weeks) $400 Intact Embr yonic Cadaver (> 8 weeks) $600 Intact Calvarium $125 Intact Trunk (with/without limbs) $500 Gonads $550 Cord Blood (Snap Frozen LN2) $125 Spinal Column $150 Spinal Cord $325

$150 $125

$999 $150

November 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 45

SHOWDOWN

Have NZ internet bloggers caught the mainstream media in a cover-up?

On the night, New Zealand’s election result hung on a thread. Is this the story that could have swung it for National? A story the mainstream media refused to cover? IAN WISHART profiles the rise of a blogsite and its power to embarrass big media

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n cyberspace, no one can hear you scream, which is probably just as well for 20 or so of New Zealand’s top political journalists after an internet blog site stumbled across what appears to be a major cover-up for Labour by members of the mainstream media. Overseas, it was bloggers – amateur newsgatherers and commentators posting articles to their own websites – who took the scalps of major media entities like the New York Times over the Jayson Blair fake reporting case, or CBS News supremo Dan Rather over his organisation’s dodgy investigation of George Bush’s military service.

In the latter case, Rather’s team based a story around what turned out to be forged National Guard documents, and got fatally burned.

“The yeomen of the blogosphere and AM radio and the Internet took [CBS’s 60 Minutes II] down,” wrote Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal. “It was, to me, a great historical development in the history of politics in America. It was Agincourt.”

Or, as US conservative blogger “Rrrod” put it so succinctly on FreeRepublic.com, the site that led the attack, “NOTE to old media scum…We are just getting warmed up!”

In New Zealand, there’s a similar mood afoot. With Labour re-elected against a sizeable swing to the right on election day, public suspicion that socially-liberal journalists in the mainstream media have been overly kind to Labour is only set to grow. So imagine the controversy if Investigate could show that the mainstream media had a chance to broadcast a story of Brethrengate proportions about Labour, before the election, and chose not to run it?

Well, that’s exactly what we appear to have found. What follows is an Investigate story based on documents originally published on September 8, 2005 on the NZ blogsite Sir Humphrey’s (http://sirhumphreys.blogspot.com), a week and a half before the election. Ironically, through one of the Universe’s quirky little twists of fate, it was also a year to the day since Dan Rather published his owngoal on George Bush.

Under the heading, “Proof Clark knew the contents of the PCA [Police Complaints Authority] report before she talked off the record to the SST [Sunday Star Times]”, Sir Humphrey’s began to dump dozens of pages of documents released under the Official Information Act on the Doonegate affair: Labour’s railroading of former Police Commissioner Peter Doone.

Although the documentation was available to those in the know, no one in the media had joined all the dots. So the blog site decided to take it directly to the great unwashed themselves, uploading the documents, and summaries of the main points.

Sir Humphrey’s explained that it was releasing the two official police reports carried out on whether Doone had tried to prevent a constable from breath-testing his partner Robyn during a traffic stop on election night, 1999, in Wellington.

The first report, written by Doone’s subordinate Rob Robinson – the man who subsequently took over Doone’s job – was highly critical of the police boss. It was details in the Robinson report that Helen Clark allegedly relied on when she mislead the Sunday Star Times into publishing a careerdestroying story on the police commissioner.

46, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, November 2005

NZ HERALD November 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 47

However, what Sir Humphrey’s found was that not only did the second report, the PCA investigation, contradict the Robinson report, but Helen Clark knew that when she tipped off the SST. In brief, before we begin our own investigation, here’s what the Sir Humphrey’s blog said on September 8, under the heading “Summary Points”: 1. PCA report found neither Doone nor his partner (the driver of the car) were intoxicated.

2. Helen Clark had the PCA report before the 11th January 2000.

3. Clark leaked selected parts of the superceded Robinson report to the Sunday Star Times between the 10th and 16th of January 2000.

See the Brief of Evidence of SST reporter Oskar Alley [released on the site]. On the basis of Clark’s leaks, the SST ran a front-page story claiming Peter Doone had used his position as Police Com missioner to intimidate a rookie cop and avoid a breath test.”

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ou should now be getting a feel for just how serious Sir Humphrey’s pre-election document drop was politically. Should the mainstream media have been interrogating Helen Clark with the same intensity they had been interrogating Don Brash that week over the Brethren pamphlets? You be the judge as you read what follows.

Although the story of Doonegate broke earlier this year, the release of the documents on Sir Humphrey’s was the first time all the documents relating to the case had been placed in the public domain. It should have resulted in a media feeding frenzy, but there was none.

So how had Doonegate arisen? The first media mention of it was Friday December 3, 1999, on the Holmes show on TV1, almost a week after the incident had taken place. Somehow, TVNZ had been tipped off that the Police Commissioner had “exchanged pleasantries” with a police patrol during a traffic stop on election night the previous Saturday – the election that brought Labour to power.

Oskar Alley’s brief of evidence discloses that the SST picked up on the story for its December 5 edition on the front page, “basically repeating the fact that the Holmes show had reported this matter”.

“By that stage,” says Alley, “it had also become apparent, from a statement released by Police Headquarters dated 3 December 1999, that Deputy Commissioner Rob Robinson was investigating the incident as a result of inquiries made by TVNZ’s Holmes show.”

Alley says his own involvement escalated in mid December that year, when he spoke to “a senior Wellington lawyer who had some direct involvement in the matter [who] spoke to me ‘strictly off the record’ saying that ‘Doone should be facing charges over this’, urging me to keep investigating because there was a very good story in this, saying that in the sources’ [note the plural] view Peter Doone had acted highly inappropriately”.

Alley does not disclose the identity of the “senior Wellington lawyer” or who, exactly, the lawyer was acting for in order to have some “direct involvement”.

However, Investigate has discovered from a Cabinet briefing paper released on the blog site that Labour’s incoming Prime Minister had been briefed on 3 December 1999, the same day the Holmes programme later went to air with the first media report of the incident. Additionally, the new Police Minister received a full briefing from Deputy Commissioner Rob Robinson on December 10. In other words, Labour was well across Doonegate long before a “senior” lawyer came forward to urge the SST to dig deeper.

On 14 December, Alley attended a police Christmas Party where he spoke to several people “employed at Police Headquarters” who disclosed fresh details to him about the case, such as the fact that the car had been stopped because its headlights were not turned on, and that both the Commissioner and his partner had been at a corporate function that evening and stopped off at a restaurant on the way home.

48, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, November 2005

Alley says the police sources he spoke to were adamant that the driver of the car should have been breath-tested as standard procedure.

On the same day, December 14, Rob Robinson’s preliminary report had been completed and delivered, and the more in-depth Police Complaints Authority investigation was well underway.

Among those interviewed by the PCA was another police officer who’d seen Doone and Robyn Johnstone at the corporate function: “It was my impression the last time that I saw them that neither of them were intoxicated or unfit to drive. I do not think that Robyn Johnson had in fact had much to drink and I also gained the impression that she was the designated driver.”

The PCA also heard analysis from doctor about the likely levels of alcohol in Robyn Johnstone’s blood (two to three small glasses of wine, with food, over several hours), and found they were likely to be “well below the legal driving limit, at levels unlikely to be associated with any significant intoxication or impairment of judgement or behaviour”.

The PCA head, Judge Neville Jaine, concluded, “The only evidence available to the Authority leads to a conclusion that at the time of driving the blood alcohol level of Ms Johnstone did not exceed the legal driving limit.”

NZ HERALD

This information was in the Government’s hands by December 29.

Regardless, the heat really started to go on in the New Year, with an SST lead story on January 9 2000 headlined “Labour considers sacking Doone”. According to Alley, much of the information for this story was actually provided by the paper’s political editor at the time, Ruth Laugeson, who’d interviewed key but unnamed members of Helen Clark’s staff.

The following week, Alley published a front page lead of his own, the first story to allege that Doone told the young constable “That won’t be necessary” in reference to breath-testing. For Labour, this was the silver bullet with which they hoped to dispatch the Police Commissioner.

“The first information I received about Peter Doone allegedly using the words ‘that won’t be necessary’ came from an anonymous phone call to me,” says Alley, “on about Tuesday 10 or Wednesday 11 January 2000..[the caller] said something along the following lines: … ‘I know the constable involved. Are you aware that Peter Doone said to that constable ‘That won’t be necessary’ on the night in question?’

“Of course, an anonymous phone call on its own is not a reliable enough source, so that week I contacted a Senior Government Advisor in the Police Sector [who] confirmed that he was told that our informa-

So how had Doonegate arisen? The first media mention of it was Friday December 3, 1999, on the Holmes show on TV1, almost a week after the incident had taken place. Somehow, TVNZ had been tipped off that the Police Commissioner had “exchanged pleasantries” with a police patrol during a traffic stop on election night the previous Saturday – the election that brought Labour to power

November 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 49

tion and the words ‘that won’t be necessary’ were correct…[and] he also told me, which was something I did not know at the time, that the constable who spoke to Peter Doone on the night in question was holding a sniffer device, which I understood was [for breath testing].”

Adopting the Woodward & Bernstein three source rule, Alley decided to approach Prime Minister Helen Clark.

“By the time I approached the Prime Minister, both the Robinson and PCA reports into the matter would have been completed, signed off and handed to appropriate government members,” says Alley in his brief.

“The Prime Minister made it clear that she had seen both reports.”

Alley says he specifically rang Clark – as the person with both reports in front of her – to check whether the claims about the sniffer being visible and Doone’s alleged response – “that won’t be necessary” – were included in the report Clark was holding.

“The Prime Minister confirmed that I was correct that the Constable had a sniffer device in his hand to test for alcohol; and included in the comments Peter Doone made to the Constable, with regards to the breath test, Peter Doone said ‘that won’t be necessary’.

“The Prime Minister specifically said ‘…you’re not wrong’.”

In her own brief of evidence, published on the blog site, Helen Clark

member whether it was in my hand or my pocket. When I got out of my car, I had no intention of breath testing anyone at that stage. I only grabbed the sniffer from the car in case I needed it. I recall that I did not even mention EBA (excess blood alcohol) procedures or breath testing to the Commissioner.

“The article also said that the Commissioner said in response ‘That won’t be necessary’. At no stage did the Commissioner say that to me.

“There is no truth to either of those statements reported in the Sunday Star Times.”

The Prime Minister, then, told a national newspaper that the reports in front of her contained a phrase that was absolutely damning in its implication that the Commissioner of Police had improperly intervened to prevent a breath test. Yet the phrase does not appear in those reports, and is denied by the police officer it was allegedly said to.

Not only did the Prime Minister say it once. She was contacted again

by Alley on the 15th of January, and also by the paper’s editor Sue Chetwin, and repeated her assertions that Doone used those words.

Naturally, when the Sunday Star Times published this hitherto unreleased information on January 16, all hell broke loose in the media and Peter Doone’s position as Commissioner became untenable.

It was behind the scenes, however, that the newly released docu-

admits confirming the detail, although she suggests she drew attention to the fact that Peter Doone was “disputing” some of those details.

But even if Clark is telling the truth about alluding to the dispute, in actual fact nowhere in the two reports on her desk when she spoke to the SST is there any suggestion that the constable had intended to breath test the driver. Nor does the phrase “that won’t be necessary” appear in either the Robinson report or the Police Complaints Authority report. That allegation was never “in dispute” because it had not been made by any named source except Helen Clark herself.

The documents released by Sir Humphrey’s before the election included statements from a police officer waiting back in the police car, and two other police witnesses, none of whom mentioned seeing a sniffer device in the young constable’s hand as he approached Doone.

Even Brett Main, the constable concerned, says in his brief of evidence for the Doone’s defamation case against the SST earlier this year that there’s no guarantee his sniffer was visible to anyone: “I have read the article from the Sunday Star Times dated 16 January 2000. The headline for this article is ‘Doone case cop was ready to breath test’. This article reported that I had said to the Commissioner that I wanted to breath test the driver of the car. I did not say that to the Commissioner. I know I had the sniffer with me but I can’t re-

ments disclose how events were falling nicely into place for Labour’s plans to oust Doone from his job. For a start, there had been bad blood between Labour and the Police Commissioner for months leading up to the election because of the INCIS computer debacle. Doone and National’s police minister Clem Simich had taken the brunt of Labour’s INCIS attacks in parliament. Politically, Doone was already seen in Labour circles as a lame duck, long before the alleged drink driving incident happened.

Sir Humphrey’s published a cabinet briefing paper dated 21 January – five days after the bombshell Sunday Star Times article now known to have been caused by the Prime Minister’s leak of false information to two journalists.

In the cabinet paper, Attorney-General Margaret Wilson tells her colleagues that “Serious issues of confidence were raised by…the perceptions created by the incident in terms of the wider public perception of the integrity of the law enforcement system.”

In other words, crucial to the issue of whether Doone should keep his job was the amount of media opprobrium bouncing around the case.

And that’s why the Prime Minister’s decision to up the ante by leaking false incriminating information is directly relevant to the events that followed.

That Labour was making the issue a top priority is confirmed in the

50, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, November 2005

briefing paper, with Margaret Wilson acknowledging that she’d been asked by Helen Clark to take over the Government’s handling of the matter as early as January 5, instead of leaving it to Police Minister George Hawkins.

Wilson admits that Labour had known as early as December 17 that there were no grounds for criminal prosecution of the Commissioner or his partner, and she admits the Government had also been told at the same time by Deputy Commissioner Rob Robinson that “it was the PCA’s report, and not his, which would be authoritative in terms of any adverse findings.”

In other words, Labour was clearly on notice that it should not rely on the Robinson report if it wanted to criticize Doone.

The cabinet paper reveals just how much knowledge Helen Clark had of this. It says the Prime Minister, Deputy PM Michael Cullen and Attorney General Margaret Wilson met on January 11 with the Solicitor General, the head of the Prime Minister’s Department Mark Prebble and the head of State Services, Michael Wintringham.

A

t that meeting, full copies of the authoritative Police Complaints Authority report, the Robinson report, and submissions made on behalf of Peter Doone, were tabled and discussed, along with their legal implications. The document reveals that public perception of the Doone affair was identified at that meeting as a critical factor in whether the government would be within its rights to dismiss Doone.

This meeting took place three days before Helen Clark leaked false and damaging information about Doone to the Sunday Star Times. In other words, knowing the adverse media coverage was likely to be a determining factor, the Prime Minister turned up the heat.

In her briefing paper, Margaret Wilson also acknowledges that the issue was not serious enough, but for the publicity, to warrant sacking: “A decision to advise the Governor-General to remove the Commissioner is one with considerable personal and financial impact for the Commissioner. His reputation would inevitably suffer. He would also suffer significant adverse financial effects.

“Given the mitigating factors found by the PCA, a decision to recommend the Commissioner’s removal would be a severe sanction.”

The briefing paper released by Sir Humphrey’s also shows Margaret Wilson gave specific advice to her cabinet colleagues, including Prime Minister Clark, on the basis of the findings of the Police Complaints Authority: “On account of the findings in the PCA’s report, my advice is that Ministers should proceed on the basis that the Commissioner is being truthful, in particular as to the amount of alcohol consumed [very little] and in stating that it was his belief at the time the car was stopped that no road safety issue was involved.”

The cabinet briefing paper was dated Friday, January 21, in preparation for the following week’s cabinet meeting where Doone’s position would be discussed. Before that, the Sunday Star Times had another go at the Commissioner on January 23: “Last chance to resign, Cabinet ready to ask Doone to fall on his sword,” screamed the headline.

“The Government is set to ask beleaguered Police Commissioner Peter Doone to quit this week,” it began, quoting unnamed government ‘sources’ as saying Doone would be asked to fall on his sword.

In the released document, Oskar Alley reveals that his ‘source’ was none other than Prime Minister Helen Clark. Again. He believes he spoke to her on Friday January 21, the same day Margaret Wilson’s memo had gone to all cabinet ministers.

Alley says Clark told him that Constable Main definitely had the sniffer device – “she quoted a passage from the Robinson report on that subject” – and she said she “would hang tough on this one if she were the Sunday Star Times.”

Wilson admits that Labour had known as early as December 17 that there were no grounds for criminal prosecution of the Commissioner or his partner, and she admits the Government had also been told at the same time by Deputy Commissioner Rob Robinson that “it was the PCA’s report, and not his, which would be authoritative in terms of any adverse findings

“I took comfort from the Prime Minister’s comments,” says Alley.

“She had the relevant documents and reports, parts of which she read to me over the telephone…she confirmed that there was nothing to worry about in the story the previous week. In effect, she confirmed that, despite Peter Doone’s statement, the 16 January 2000 article had been accurate.

“She also read to me parts of the Robinson Police Inquiry, which were quoted in the story.”

One of the pieces of information in the Prime Minister’s possession, however, was advice originating from the January 12 legal briefing that she should not be relying on the Robinson report. In fact, the cabinet briefing paper from Margaret Wilson specifically says, “I do not propose to refer further to the Robinson report. I suggest Ministers likewise focus on the PCA report.”

So what game, exactly, was the Prime Minister playing, by continuing to feed the media titbits from a report her own Attorney-General was backpeddling from?

“I specifically put it to the Prime Minister that they would ask Peter Doone to fall on his sword. It was confirmed to me he might, that that ‘was in the plan’, and that that was what the Government were going to ask him to do,” recalls Alley.

Not content, SST editor Sue Chetwin was back on the phone to Helen Clark as well, and came away reassured.

“She encouraged the newspaper to continue its investigation as the matter was reaching its critical stages.”

It is now a matter of record that Helen Clark was the Sunday Star Times secret source on Doonegate. But what hadn’t emerged, prior to the election, was a complete set of documents revealing for the first time exactly what the Prime Minister knew and when she knew it. It is this paper trail that the Sir Humphrey’s blog published on September 8, and which almost the entire parliamentary press gallery were then tipped off about via email.

So why wasn’t the story covered during the election campaign? In the midst of a media scrum over whether National leader Don Brash knew the specifics of the Brethren pamphlet campaign, and Labour calling that an “issue of integrity”, why did the media fail to cover the release of the Doonegate documents?

When Investigate approached One News executive producer John Gillespie, his first words on the document release were, “That’s news to me. First I’ve heard of them. I’ll get back to you.” Investigate is still waiting to hear, although that may have more to do with the Grim Reaper of the Stars currently stalking TVNZ’s news corridors than any November 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 51

attempt to obfuscate. However, we can confirm that three of TVNZ’s senior parliamentary bureau reporters were emailed in the early afternoon of Thursday 15 September by a journalist from a business publication, mystified as to why there’d been no coverage of the matter.

Investigate has emailed all the press gallery journalists concerned directly, only one, from a major newspaper, has replied: “I don’t seem to remember this email. Probably because on the dates you mention, I wasn’t in the office - like most down here, I was on the road six days a week, at least 12 hours a day, and this mail probably got deleted en masse among the hundreds from Nigerian scamsters, Dutch lottery win, penis enlargement pills and offers of free viagra on the very odd late night I came back into the office.”

TV3’s news director Mark Jennings says his team never brought it to his attention.

“I was never aware of it, which is surprising.”

At the stage we approached the New Zealand Herald’s editor Tim Murphy in early October, we were more guarded in revealing exactly what we were investigating, so we simply asked the question whether he was aware of any significant stories that went unreported by the Herald during the election campaign?

“Hell No!!! We didn’t run some comments from the Tauranga woman against Clarkson because they were arguably defamatory. And we took a day or so to get to the bottom of the first wave of Taito Philip Field allegations before publishing throughout that final few days. And 52, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, November 2005

Owen McShane has told anyone who will listen that he had some tip about Christian churches and the Green pamphlet but I’ve not been able to run that down, and not at all sure that it was of tremendous moment in the great scheme of things anyway. “But I’m certainly not aware of — and am pretty sure there aren’t — any stories that could have in any way been thought ‘significant’ that we didn’t run. Quite the opposite. We ran far more ‘significant’ stories than anyone, anywhere.”

TV3’s Jennings, likewise, says he also played it cautious during the election campaign when choosing whether or not to run stories like the alleged “leaked National Party emails”.

“We had some knowledge of that prior to the Sunday Star Times, but I decided not to go with it because what we had was these emails going to Brash, and we did not have any emails going from Brash back the other way. So it was just people giving Brash advice, seemingly unsolicited advice, and I wasn’t comfortable running with it unless I had an email from Brash going back saying ‘Yeah, I really want to take that on board’, or ‘Yeah, if we get in power I really want to follow that agenda’.

So I just didn’t have a high enough comfort level.

“To me, people like the Business Roundtable sending advice to a prospective National Party prime minister did not seem that odd, if you know what I mean. But there has been discussion within our own ranks as to whether we made the right decision on that.”

The leaked emails story, like the Doonegate one, raises fascinating issues about how far the media should go to expose the people delib-

erately leaking politically-damaging material at strategic moments.

“Yeah, that’s a tricky one,” concedes Jennings, “because on that email thing it was a confidential source issue. There were also thoughts going through our minds about the reasons for this going out and where it was coming from, but it came to us through quite a trusted confidential source so we weren’t going to investigate further on that. We accepted that the source was going to be confidential before we knew what the story was going to be about or presented to us. A Catch 22.

“I take your point, that at some stage it wouldn’t be bad to actually blow one of these people wide open, but it’s always the case – are you biting that hand that feeds you!”

“So the Doone story was one that you personally were never told of?”

“No, no. I’m actually fascinated by it right now. It’s still a good story, I would suggest!” says Jennings.

Radio New Zealand’s director of news, Don Rood, is another who wasn’t told.

“Not that I know of, no. It would depend on what else was happening on the day. When dumps like that happen, select your time very carefully. If it’s a dull day you’ll get a lot of attention, but if it’s really busy or someone is crook in the office it’ll be passed over. It’s all about timing, timing is everything!”

To her credit, Nine to Noon’s Linda Clark gave the Prime Minister a serve over the documents on September 9, to which the bloggers responded with glee.

“Yes folks, this is the interview to listen to. Helen gets asked the tough questions. There is a priceless moment where there is a frosty three second silence where I’m sure Helen is imagining flaying Linda alive for the audacity…I hope Linda still has a job after this,” posted one.

“Ouch, has RLWN [Radio Left Wing News] suddenly developed a spine?” queried another.

“If you listen to the beginning of the next hour, a number of emailers were horrified at Linda’s move to the right.”

But there is one other unresolved mystery – the role of the National and Act parties. Both organizations had the Doonegate documents, but apart from Act leader Rodney Hide trumping National by releasing the Prime Minister’s brief of evidence and those of the two SST staff back in May, neither party released the January 21 cabinet briefing paper, or Constable Brett Main’s statement themselves. Instead, the task was left to an internet blogsite.

The man behind the Sir Humphrey’s blog is another mystery, an internet secret squirrel who, aptly, plies his information trade under the pseudonym “Antarctic Lemur”, or AL for short.

“I’m the one who followed the Doonegate story and published the papers online. I’m not keen on revealing myself, as I work in an area not known for its sympathies towards people of my political leanings.

In fact not a single one of the Sir Humphrey’s co-authors is aware of my identity.”

So what does he make of National and Act’s failure to move in for the kill, especially when the documents had been released with stillsensitive portions blanked out. Surely it had all the makings of a Brethrengate scandal for the centre right to enjoy 10 days out from a general election?

“This is all conjecture really. What’s most odd is how neither party released the documents through their websites earlier.”

AL sees three possible explanations: “1. Hide jumped the gun when he released the Briefs of Evidence a day early. Perhaps he was trying to avoid irritating National even more.

“2) National was trying to avoid an overtly negative campaign. Bringing Doone back into it might have taken the campaign down a path of negativity they didn’t want to tread.

“3) Understanding the reports requires a deep understanding of the new facts and contradictions revealed by comparing the Briefs of Evi-

With the election hanging on a 40,000 vote margin, we may never know whether the media’s failure to cover the last chapter in Doonegate effectively threw the election. But the question of socio-political bias in the mainstream media is one that isn’t going to disappear any time soon

dence to the news reports of the day to the official Police reports.

Perhaps neither party had researchers capable or willing to do that.”

On the media’s failure to fire, he remains bemused.

“I’m surprised other print media competing with Fairfax didn’t cover the story, i.e. the Herald. And it’s obviously not ‘oversight’ given quite a few journos were emailed about it by our readers and the documents were available online. I went back through [one journalist’s] previous commentary on the matter and discovered she was more interested in analysing supposed little political games being played by Fairfax etc – who cares? The world doesn’t revolve around the media involved, far from it. I’m not surprised TVNZ and TV3 weren’t interested as it was a complex story damaging to the Left’s election hopes, and I regard most TV reporters as either centre-left or very left.”

Was it conspiracy theory, laziness, or just that the emails to the news media too closely resembled one of those Nigerian penis-enlarging Viagra pill spams?

Given the deafening silence from a large number of press gallery journalists to questions from Investigate, it may be that with the election running so close they simply couldn’t bring themselves to stick the knife into Labour.

The Monday morning that Investigate released its September cover story on John Tamihere and the pokie machine trusts, Prime Minister Helen Clark cancelled her scheduled media appearances on National Radio and Newstalk ZB, and her handlers told the press gallery she had come down with food poisoning.

“It’s the first time she’s ever done this,” a top National party aide told Investigate. “We think she’s pulled a sickie in case she gets questioned about your article.”

Clark needn’t have worried. It was another story the news media failed to cover, and once that fact became apparent by early afternoon, it coincided with a miraculously healed Prime Minister who was able to attend a photo opportunity at the Beehive after all.

With the election hanging on a 40,000 vote margin, we may never know whether the media’s failure to cover the last chapter in Doonegate effectively threw the election. But the question of socio-political bias in the mainstream media is one that isn’t going to disappear any time soon. What we do know is that the documents released on the internet 10 days before the election proved that Helen Clark had not just been mistaken in what she had told the Sunday Star Times – the Prime Minister of New Zealand appears to have knowingly lied, with the sole purpose of creating so much bad publicity that she could remove Doone from his job on the grounds of “public perception”.

Should the voting public have been told? You be the judge.

To see what others think on this, visit Investigate’s new weblog, thebriefingroom.com

i November 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 53

T

he young boy sprawled lazily on his back, trying to discern animal shapes in the clouds drifting far above, aglow in the oranges and reds of the African sunset, pushed onwards to who knew where by the same docile zephyr just twitching the tips of the long grasses above his ears. Below, across the vast plains and as far as little eyes could see, dusk was gathering its skirts and preparing to embrace the veldt almost without warning, as it always did at this latitude. From down by the waterhole, he could hear the muffled grunts as the herds gathered for the savannah’s six o’clock swill.

“Iaannn! Come in and wash your hands for tea!”

The little boy half rolled, half twisted and part stumbled around, in the awkward manner that only seven year olds seem to be able to master, and followed his nose to the roast awaiting him. It would always be like this, he chirped to himself happily…

Twenty years later, in a village café on the outskirts of Auckland, Ian Holding is 12,000 kilometres and a lifetime away from the land of his boyhood. Zimbabwe, the place he calls home, is a land spiraling out of control into a despotic abyss of hatred, murder and corruption. Soon, he intimates, the land that once bespoke the promise of freedom and wide open spaces to a child could become his prison – the threat of having his passport seized when he returns is a real one.

Ian Holding is not his real name, but his debut novel Unfeeling is what critics around the world are calling a hauntingly real expose of the Robert Mugabe regime. The book has only been on sale worldwide for a matter of weeks, but in that time Mugabe’s government has passed a law while Holding has been overseas, declaring people who besmirch the ruling party “enemies of Zimbabwe” who must forfeit both their passports and the right to travel abroad. Was the new law aimed at Holding? He shrugs. “We’ll see what happens when I return.”

At first glance, he’s an unlikely-looking jetsetting author. Tall and lanky, he has a kind of startled possum look that admittedly recedes as he relaxes into the interview over a meal of chicken tostada at Albany’s Winebox Café. On the international blogs and web forums he’s a literary hero, a man the punters say should have been nominated for the prestigious Booker Prize this year, except he wasn’t eligible.

“I only flew in last night,” he explains, “and I’m back out again tomorrow”.

“What would you like to drink?” interjects the waitress.

Holding looks at his publishing company handler nervously. “Would you like a beer?” she asks.

“Oh, you’re allowed to have alcohol here?” The novelty of visiting countries where food is fresh and alcohol is not a blackmarket item clearly hasn’t worn off yet. Holding’s face lightens at the thought of a rum and coke. “That’s my usual,” he says, although when it arrives in a small glass he sends it back, politely. “It’s a little too strong, would you mind putting it in a larger glass with a little more coke?” Truly, an afficianado.

54, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, November 2005

So how does one kick off an interview with Zimbabwe’s hottest renegade right now? Perhaps by reflecting on how staunch the New Zealand government has been in condemning the Mugabe regime internationally.

“Well, you say that,” retorts Holding, “but I had such a problem getting a visa. It starts with the fact that there’s no NZ High Commission in Harare, so the next closest is Pretoria. Pretoria are not accepting Zimbabwean applications because they’re too inundated with Zimbabweans jamming up the whole system.

“Fortunately I was in London for the book launch anyway, so the next closest place to make an application was London which I duly did

EDGE OF DARKNESS Love and Hate collide in Zimbabwe Acclaimed Zimbabwean author Ian Holding is firing literary barbs at the man running his homeland, during a whistlestop book tour of New Zealand and Australia this month. IAN WISHART discovers a man passionate about his country’s future

and was then told that London doesn’t accept Zimbabwe applications either. They’d accept the form but it had to be sent to Wellington to be processed. It was sent to Wellington.

“I had to supply so many, a bible’s worth, of documents to support my case for a two day visit here. They didn’t want me here, even for a two day visit, even though I was supported by a publisher and had an interview itinerary.

“I arrived here last night and there was a

problem again. They saw I was a Zimbabwean so they took me aside, double checked the visa, double checked that it had been processed properly, asked me all these questions.

It was clearly a bit of an issue for them.”

“So New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark stands up with global leaders and says how terrible it all is, while behind the scenes we’re giving you all a kick?”, Investigate ventures.

“Yes, that was my experience.”

He was 22 back in 2000, when the ‘troubles’ began, and for Holding, it may as well be yesterday.

“It took all of us by huge surprise. Prior to 2000, we all knew that land was about to become an issue. The government had gazetted farms. Their policy was that any farmer who had more than one farm should give up that farm. Which was perfectly acceptable, and although some farmers were disgruntled they accepted an inevitability that it had to change.

November 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 55

He ignored the result of the referendum and sent in the socalled ‘war veterans’, most of whom were nothing more than unemployed thugs from the city, and literally overnight without any kind of warning whatsoever they started invading farms. This happened very quickly and within a few weeks almost every farm had some kind of trouble on it, and it was a very unexpected thing

The issue then was how these farmers should be compensated for the land they were giving up. Clearly no farmer in his right mind would give up half his personal business assets for free, nothing in return.

“At Lancaster House in 1980, Britain had pledged to fund the whole scheme, if and when Mugabe decided the time was right to do this. But something went wrong, something happened when the Thatcher/Major conservative regime left and Tony Blair came to power.

R

obin Cooke was the new foreign minister and he had no idea what he was doing when he handled Mugabe. He handled him in a very naïve, immature kind of way and the whole relationship soured very quickly.

So Mugabe threatened to go ahead anyway, regardless of compensation, and take over the farms. And then he said, OK, in order to do that we have to change the constitution. So they made this draft constitution which, amongst other things, included that they could seize land without compensation.

“Of course, everyone was up in arms about that and there was a big campaign to reject the constitution which, foolishly, we did in about February 2000, thinking that Mugabe would bow down to the will of the people.

“Of course, he took it as a slight against himself, his authority. He ignored the result of the referendum and sent in the so-called ‘war veterans’, most of whom were nothing more than unemployed thugs from the city, and literally overnight without any kind of warning whatsoever they started invading farms. This happened very quickly and within a few weeks almost every farm had some kind of trouble on it, and it was a very unexpected thing.

“Even his own party was surprised. I remember at the time one of the vice presidents

actually publicly said ‘look, this is the wrong way to do it, let’s stop this violence.’

“As soon as he said that he was shipped off to trips out of the country, and what he said was refuted in the press, and he was silenced.

So even his own vice president didn’t expect the whole thing to be as militant as it was.

“One of the misconceptions about Mugabe is that he’s mad. He’s simply not mad at all.

He’s in his 80s, he’s as fit as a fiddle, he’s absolutely mentally sharp like a razor. He knows exactly what he’s doing. There’s no question of him being ill, or being mad or senile. He’s simply a disgruntled old man who has a bone to pick with the colonial past, who’s power hungry and greedy and thinks he has a divine right to rule Zimbabwe. There’s no question of him being demented.

“The whole thing was propelled and aided by this particular war veteran named Chenjerai Hunzvi who was dubbed, by himself, ‘Hitler’. He gave himself this inflammatory name.

He was a ‘war veteran’, although his war veteran credentials were quite suspect. He was the kind of guy tasked, probably by Mugabe, to go there and instigate these invasions.

Mugabe always claimed that he didn’t instigate it, but he made it clear he supported it.

He said ‘this is the will of the people, let them do it, let them take the land’. This was his way of getting around it.

“This maniac, Hunzvi, who was a really tyrannical, really brutal sort of person, he instigated all these thugs and that’s when things turned nasty. People were panicking, particularly after the first farmer was killed, very early on. People were panicking. But as a farmer what do you do? Do you stay on your farm and try and weather the storm? Or do give up everything you’ve got, pack the car with a few precious possessions and flee for your life.

“Now a lot of farmers, and this is typical Zimbabwe spirit, they’re tough ex-Rhodesians

56, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, November 2005

and they say ‘Right, we’re not leaving’. And they bore the brunt of the violence. Others packed their bags and said ‘we’re out of here before that happens’.

“There’s so few whites that every white person knows the farmers really well. All of us had relatives who were farmers, friends who were farmers. So as soon as one farm was attacked we all sort of mobilized. It was a very troubling time.

“I think a lot of farmers relied on the schools to keep the situation away from the kids. They left them at school and relied on teachers to shield them, shelter them from what was happening. These are kids who have been born to inherit the farm. It’s their birthright almost.

It’s their future livelihood and something they love dearly. Those farm kids are really passionate about their farms, so obviously it was a huge trauma for them.

“Not in a dramatic sense, mind. Zimbabweans aren’t really emotional people. They

don’t show things externally. Obviously internally these kids were going through hell.

Some of them would leave at the weekends, go back to the farm, see what was going on and come back traumatized.

“Suddenly kids who were very well-controlled, disciplined, suddenly start to show signs of ill discipline and anxiety, more aggressive than normal. Eventually it reaches breaking point and they lash out.”

It was these events specifically that germinated into Unfeeling. In the book, the narrative follows the journey of 16-year-old Davey Baker, forced to confront adulthood too soon when his mother and father are slaughtered at their homestead by Mugabe’s thugs, the home burnt down and their crops torched. The book begins with a drunken and heavily armed boy running away from boarding school and looking for bloody vengeance against those who’d taken everyone he loved.

Holding, himself a boarding school teacher,

says Davey is based on one of his students.

“He is composite, but he’s largely based on a particular boy who I knew and who I’ve since become a kind of guardian to. He’s now 17, we’re still very close. He probably went through the worst of any of the kids at the school.”

“What happened to him?”

“His parents were killed. He was 14. He was there on the property. Each farm has a farm manager because the farms are so large. He was friendly with the farm manager’s children and at the time of the attacks he was with them, fortunately he wasn’t there when it happened. The militia, when they attacked, swarmed the house, attacked the parents and killed them but didn’t realize there was a manager’s cottage concealed some way down the road. So only when the militia moved off after trashing the house and burning it did the boy realize there was a problem, a few minutes afterwards.

“I think the manager realized what had hap-

pened and tried to keep the children away, but he did go up there. He saw. It’s something he doesn’t like to talk about. He certainly saw what had happened. He was an only child, his parents were in their early 40s.”

For Holding, writing the book was an emotional release.

“Extremely cathartic. Difficult to write, not technically but mentally. It took me about four weeks to write. Before that it had been in my head for about half a year. When I finished I felt I’d come to terms with things, so it was cathartic.

“It’s a tough story, a depressing story, but I like to think at the end that there’s some kind of resolution.”

How much of the pain in the book is personal?

“I don’t know if it’s pain so much as simple anger. There’s a feeling of absolute outrage and fury over what is happening in the country. The pointlessness angered me. It could have been done so simply and so peaceNovember 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 57

The whole thing was propelled and aided by this particular war veteran named Chenjerai Hunzvi who was dubbed, by himself, ‘Hitler’. He gave himself this inflammatory name. He was a ‘war veteran’, although his war veteran credentials were quite suspect. He was the kind of guy tasked, probably by Mugabe, to go there and instigate these invasions fully, yet the whole country has now been destroyed and people have lost their lives and been tortured and abused just to make a political point. It didn’t have to happen like that.”

So how many Davey Bakers are there in Zimbabwe?

“A few, more than is probably pleasant to think about. The school I taught, all the boarders there were sons of farmers and without exception almost every single one of them had their farm taken. Some of them violently, unfortunately. The character Davey was based on, he was the only one to have his parents murdered, but others certainly had their parents injured, tortured, beaten up. Others escaped before the militia actually arrived and weren’t hurt at all. But definitely all of them were affected with the end result being that the farm was lost in unpleasant circumstances.”

It is one of humanity’s enduring mysteries that the fate of the many can rest in the hands of the few. In Zimbabwe’s case, the country has a population of nearly 12 million people, but an army of only 36,000. And of that army, more than half are terminally ill with HIV and AIDS. How is it, we wonder aloud, that like the six million Jews who went meekly to the gas chambers, the millions of oppressed Zimbabweans have not risen up like a sledgehammer against Mugabe’s peanut army? Holding puts it down to rat-like cunning on the President’s part.

“Economically, breaking point has been reached. And at some stage, and it’s going to happen soon, the average man on the street simply won’t survive. But Mugabe is a master strategist, unfortunately, a political genius. Any time any sense of uprising is in the air he is

58, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, November 2005

quick to quash it immediately. An example is the elections back in March. Up to that time the government had tried to prop the economy up, artificially, by making it appear things were stabilizing. Fuel was available, inflation was more or less under control, and this made it appear things weren’t sliding any further. But since they won a two thirds majority in the election, they just don’t give a damn, they’ve simply given up on the economy. So inflation has spiraled out of control since then and the economy has plunged so far since March.

“In Zimbabwe, the opposition strongholds are in urban areas, like Harare where the government is situated. And in Harare you have high density slum areas where a lot of these people live. There was a rumour that these people were going to rise up and storm into

the city. Now obviously Mugabe knew about this, and under the excuse of ‘cleaning up crime’ he simply bulldozed every single thing, every single house, to the ground.

“This forced all those people, who were now homeless, back into rural areas. Once they’re back there, he has a policy of infiltrating each rural area so he sends his henchmen in there to re-indoctrinate people into voting for his party. He controls them through food supplies and that sort of thing. So the guy’s clever, he’s not stupid. Any time we think we’ve reached the brink, he somehow pulls back a bit and things are averted.

“The fact that he controls the army, the fact that he controls the police, and the fact that he controls the judiciary, absolutely, means that there’s no chance ever of there being a military coup. And guns are so expensive that the average black person doesn’t have a gun.”

Nor are citizens permitted to own guns.

Just two months ago, Mugabe’s government issued an edict demanding that the few guns left in the hands of the populace had to be handed in to the police immediately. International observers fear that disarming the citizens may be the final step before some kind of Rwandan-style genocide, but Ian Holding is more fearful of what will happen if someone takes a potshot at Mugabe.

“I’d hate to see violence and bloodshed. I do hope there’s a diplomatic solution to this.

Assassination would be the most disastrous thing, because they would undoubtedly blame the British which means there’ll be a backlash against the whites. Every single white without exception, regardless of background, is seen to be British. And the British are blamed for absolutely every single problem in the country. So if Mugabe was taken out tomorrow by a bullet they’ll go crazy in the streets and they’ll kill us. You’d think – we’re so insignificant because there’s only 30 or 40,000 of us – we’re not a threat. It’s surprising he pays so much attention to us, really.”

So what is life like for a white Zimbabwean these days?

“It’s a land of extremes. Part of Mugabe’s plan is to eradicate the middle class. So 90% of the country are in abject poverty, rural peasants. The more desperate, the more dependent they are on him for food supplies the more powerful he becomes.

“But the difference between the rich and the poor is absolutely extreme. For those of us fortunate to have a good job, to own businesses, there’s a lot of money to be made on the black market. People are making buckets and buckets of money exploiting a desperate economy, supplying goods on the black market. The saying is true, that in places of tyranny the capitalists thrive. There’s so much

opportunity for money to be made supplying goods that just aren’t available.

“In the northern suburbs of Harare, if you drove around there you wouldn’t think there was a problem in the country. It’s very quiet, very spacious. We all have large properties on the hills. Beautiful gardens, large houses, swimming pools, tennis courts, dogs, cats and servants. And if you have money you can literally buy anything you want. You can walk into a shop and buy imported groceries if you have the money. So day to day, the whites and rich black people, that’s the kind of lifestyle you have. I can’t afford to buy imported groceries, for example, but I live very, very comfortably.

O

bviously the whole privilege thing comes from colonialism and no one disputes that, but during the boom years of the early 90s the gap was closing.

There was a strong middle class, educated black people – doctors, lawyers, dentists, emerging business people – that entire sector has now left the country. So the drain on the skill force has been huge. Those who are left are opportunists really, they’re there because they know they can make money.

“So I think Mugabe is to blame. It’s a result of colonialism but it could have been avoided and he’s made it much worse. There are now 11 million odd really poor, very desperate, poverty-stricken black Africans and their existence is absolutely abysmal. They have no food.

Buying a loaf of bread takes up an entire month’s salary.”

And appearances in Zimbabwe can be deceptive. The average salary for a soldier is a million dollars a month.

“A month?”

“Yeah,” says Holding, pausing to swallow some tostada. “You’ve got to remember the currency is seriously skewed. A soldier gets a million dollars a month, but there is a hundred thousand dollars to the British Pound, so a million bucks is £10, or NZ$25.”

At that rate, someone like NBR publisher Barry Colman could employ the entire Zimbabwean army for a year, pay them double and still have change from his piggy bank.

It makes you wonder whether change in Zimbabwe could be brought about by showering the place in dollar notes. Holding doesn’t go quite that far, but sees benefit in normalizing relations rather than imposing sanctions.

“Internationally more has to be done. The November 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 59

problem has been partly created because the international community has mishandled Mugabe so badly. You have to handle him with kid gloves, he’s not the kind of man who’s going to bow down to anyone because he’s supremely proud of his own self importance.

“So the Commonwealth, Britain, the EU, America, imposing sanctions does absolutely nothing to him. It doesn’t do a single thing to him physically because he is so wealthy and so privileged that he doesn’t care what sanctions are imposed. He doesn’t give a damn.

All that does is close the door to negotiation.

“Every time Britain imposes a sanction, he turns around and slates Britain to hell and makes relations between blacks and whites ten

times worse than before. He becomes more repressive on media laws and freedom of speech and liberties. It actually has a backfiring effect, and it’s the people who suffer.

“In principle it’s probably the wrong thing to do, but what has to happen is someone has to step down from their hobby horse and say right, ‘we’ll offer you x y and z in return for you changing this policy or that policy’. And he’ll go public and say ‘Oh look, Britain have come crawling to say sorry’, but he won’t do it first. If the west eats humble pie, he will eat humble pie.”

Speaking of face saving, should the NZ cricket tour have gone ahead, or should the team have worn black armbands on the field

60, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, November 2005

as a sign of disrespect to the dictator?

“I’m not convinced that cricket should be a metaphor for political action. I can see how it could be used purposely for that, because cricket is our one international sport. It’s the one thing that although we don’t excel at we certainly have international awareness and focus on. As a cricketer myself, I just feel cricket should be left out of it.”

But should the Kiwis have made a symbolic gesture to Mugabe while they were there?

“I’m not sure about that. That escalates to the point where any sport can be used for any kind of propaganda anywhere in the world, which is a very dangerous path.”

Instead, he argues, it is Zimbabwe’s neighbours who should have been applying pressure.

“South Africa is one country that could have been really influential from day one, but has continually stayed quiet about this situation.

Rumours abound as to why this is: whether Thabo Mbeki himself is about to do the same thing and doesn’t want to contradict himself, or whether there’s a deal between Mbeki and Mugabe. Who knows, but he’s done absolutely nothing and made matters hugely worse.”

In the meantime, the oppression continues.

Although he’s written under a pseudonym, Holding suspects the regime probably know his identity, and his world tour promoting the book and speaking out against the regime won’t have helped. But it’s a risk he’s prepared to take, for a country he still loves.

“I think it’s the kind of country to which people would return, even giving up first world countries, if things became right there.

It’s the kind of country if you’re born there and lived there that you never feel content really anywhere else.”

“What’s the image of Zimbabwe that you most hold onto?”

“The African sunset. The blazing sun over the plains and the veldt, the animals roaming around. Very peaceful, very tranquil. That’s the beauty of it. Potentially, Zimbabwe could be a fantastic tourist place. Victoria Falls is just incredible. Safaris, animals. Tourism could be recovered very quickly, but overall the economy has been so badly damaged that it’ll take many years to see signs of recovery, particularly as the farms and eco-systems have been so hard hit that it’ll take a lot of work to make them arable again, make them productive. It’ll take 15 to 20 years to do that.”

And it won’t happen until Mugabe goes, and there’s no sign of that happening any time soon.

Unfeeling by Ian Holding, HarperCollins, $25.00

i

November 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 61

Erebus WHAT REALLY HAPPENED?

Twenty six years ago, New Zealanders were shocked as their mid evening TV programmes broke format for a newsflash. A somber Dougal Stevenson advised an Air New Zealand DC10 with 257 people on board was overdue from a sightseeing flight to the Antarctic. The airline was advising waiting friends and relatives at Auckland airport not to panic. STUART MACFARLANE argues misinformed commentators are now trying to rewrite the history of New Zealand’s worst aviation disaster:

T

he cockpit transcript of the last few minutes of the flight indicates these guys had no idea where they were as they flew straight into the foothills of Mt Erebus. Everyone in the cockpit seemed to be throwing in their penny’s worth. It was like the country cousins up from Ekatahuna, mum with map book on her knee, lost on Spaghetti Junction,” wrote Brian Rudman in the New Zealand Herald.

“It has been instructive to reflect on the loss of TE901 on Mt Erebus … It is clear from the cockpit transcripts that at least some on the flight deck knew that they did not know where they were. It was therefore a substantial error of judgement that the pilot did not immediately climb his aircraft to a safe altitude at the moment in which the doubt was first raised,” said Keith Rankin on Scoop.

“There was probably more than one cause involved, as I’ve read the Erebus situation, but it is certainly clear I think in retrospect that the pilots could not bear the full blame for what happened,” said Michael Cullen on Newstalk ZB reported in the New Zealand Herald.

62, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, November 2005

CHIPPINDALE REPORT On 28 November 1979, Air New Zealand’s DC10 flight TE901, on a sightseeing mission to Antarctica, crashed into the slopes of Ross Island. It was at 1,500 ft (457 m) and heading towards the 12,450 ft (3,795 m) Mt Erebus. Its number 1 engine, and most probably all three engines, were in climb settings of 94% of maximum power just below a level which might damage the engines. The ground speed was 257 knots or 476 kph. On impact the shock waves passed through the victims’ bodies at about 960 kph killing all 257 before nerve impulses at about 140 kph could transmit any pain, so the victims felt nothing.

New Zealand’s Chief Inspector of Air Accidents of the Ministry of Transport, Ron Chippindale, investigated the cause of the crash. Ian Gemmell, a member of the airline’s management team, and its principal witness who argued the airline’s case that pilot error caused the crash was said to be Chippindale’s principal adviser and perhaps only adviser regarding the technicalities of jet flight and DC10 navigation.

He accompanied Chippindale to the DC10’s manufacturer and was

among those who went with Chippindale to the crash site. He was present when Chippindale interviewed pilots. Reports from Chippindale’s office were leaked to the media who reported the aircraft had been flying in cloud.

When the Chippindale Report was published it said the crash was caused by pilot error. The pilots didn’t know where they were, “the crew was not certain of their position”. “The crew were not monitoring their actual position in relation to the topography adequately”.

“The crew descended beneath the minimum altitude permitted by the airline.” The co-pilot “should not have overcome his natural caution in relation to cloud covered high ground.” The captain decided “to continue the flight at low level toward an area of poor surface and horizon definition.” The report’s findings coincided with the arguments Gemmell subsequently put forward on behalf of Air New Zealand in claiming the crash was caused by pilot error and the airline’s management was blameless.

MAHON REPORT Justice Peter Mahon was appointed on 11 June 1980 as a Royal Commission of Inquiry to inquire into the crash. The inquiry was in public, the evidence extended over 75 days and filled 3,083 pages, while submissions of counsel took 368 pages. The total of exhibits produced was 284. In contrast the Chippindale Report’s inquiry was held in private and, with few exceptions, statements of evidence were not taken. Finally Chippindale made no evidence public. The Mahon Report overturned Chippindale’s findings of pilot error and instead decided that “the single dominant and effective cause of the disaster was the mistake made by those airline officials who programmed the aircraft to fly directly at Mt. Erebus and omitted to tell the aircrew.” “… neither Captain Collins [the pilot] nor First Officer Cassin [the co-pilot] nor [Brooks and Moloney] the flight engineers made any error which contributed to the disaster, and were not responsible for its occurrence.”

He went on to say in respect of Air New Zealand’s case which had asserted that the pilots were to blame for the crash “… the palpably false sections of evidence which I heard could not have been the result of mistake, or faulty recollection. They originate, I am compelled to say, in a pre-determined plan of deception. They were very clearly part of an attempt to conceal a series of disastrous administrative blunders and so, in regard to the particular items of evidence to which I have referred, I am forced reluctantly to say that I had to listen to an orchestrated litany of lies.”

Air New Zealand applied for judicial review to the Court of Appeal against the “orchestrated litany of lies”. The Court held Mahon had no jurisdiction to make such a finding and he could not say that unless he had first warned the witnesses that he did not believe their evidence.

Mahon appealed to the Privy Council but it upheld the Court of Appeal, saying there was no evidence of a pre-determined plan of deception, he didn’t warn the witnesses, and his reasoning was illogical.

Much publicity followed. What is now forgotten by many is that the Privy Council did not accept the Chippindale Report as being correct and indeed went out of its way to uphold the Mahon Report in exonerating the pilots from blame for the crash.

THE COCKPIT VOICE RECORDER The Chippindale Report printed a transcript of the tape from the Cockpit Voice Recorder (CVR) which recorded the last 30 minutes of the flight and which has been repeatedly quoted by the media in subsequent years. The cockpit area microphone (CAM) recorded voices from the cockpit area including those of passengers on the flight deck and, when the door was open, those behind the flight deck including persons in the galley. It was discovered that the transcript printed in the Chippindale Report was not the original transcript which had been transcribed by a

team working in Washington at the Audio Laboratory of the National Transportation Safety Board in accordance with accepted procedure (Washington transcript). This procedure required the transcribers to be familiar with the persons whose voices were recorded, familiarity with the aircraft type, and familiarity with flight deck procedure and terminology.

The Washington transcription team under the direction of an air accident inspector consisted of Captain Barney Wyatt, Don Oliff, the chief flight engineer, and Captain Arthur Cooper who had over 13,000 hours flying time including over 2,000 as pilot in command of DC10s and was an experienced navigator. All knew the deceased flight crew members well, having crewed and socialised with them on many occasions. Cooper knew the engineer Moloney even better than the others.

They had a long time friendship dating back before Cooper joined Air New Zealand in 1965 and continuing until Moloney’s death.

Chippindale did not possess any of the requirements. Cooper was the only one of the Washington team to give evidence. He was appointed on behalf of the Airline Pilots Association. Air New Zealand appointed the other two members of the transcription team but did not call them to give evidence.

The Chippindale transcript was instead one rewritten by Chippindale himself and contained not less than 55 departures from the Washington transcript. Each departure varied from one word to several lines.

For instance one question he added to the Washington transcript seemed to imply one engineer was saying to the other called Bert that the weather was a bit thick here, even though neither engineer was called Bert. Other changes he made removed from the record evidence of the crew’s competence during the flight. Air New Zealand’s principal witness, Gemmell, listened to the tape with Chippindale.

The most lasting damage done by the Chippindale Report was its accusations that the transcript showed the engineers were trying to convince the pilots who were lost not to fly into cloud thereby risking destruction. This folklore is illustrated by the articles Rudman and Rankin have written.

That Chippindale’s allegations are fiction not fact is proved first by the fact that they are contrary to the “crew-loop” discipline, secondly by the record of the very words spoken by the two engineers Brooks and Moloney and the two pilots Collins and Cassin, and thirdly by overwhelming evidence also disproving his 1987 claims based on tone of voice.

First, the crew-loop or fail-safe system to ensure the safe flying of DC10s did not rely on the skill of the captain but relied instead, in the usual case, on the triangular link of three people on the flight deck, being the two pilots in front and the flight engineer seated between the two pilots but slightly to the rear of them. In this instance, on flight 901 it was more than just a triangular link as there were two engineers on the flight deck. In the case of flight 901 it can be virtually taken for granted Brooks would be facing forwards from the time he took over from Moloney and the critical period starts from then. In all probability Moloney would have been standing slightly to the rear of Brooks’s left shoulder. The CAM would have been positioned directly above or slightly to the rear of Brooks’s head so it would pick up the voices of Collins, Cassin, and Brooks clearly.

Airlines run with fail-safe systems. If a main system fails then a backup system will take over and carry the load. The same fail-safe system is applied to the flight crew and was called the crew-loop or simply the loop. Flight deck communication involves a continual flow of comments, questions, observations, and confirmations being circulated between the three members of the flight crew. So that if one member should fail to respond in an appropriate manner, then the other two must take the necessary action, which is to remove the unresponsive member from the loop, that is to remove him from November 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 63

flying the aircraft. A vital part of the crew loop is detecting and interpreting body language.

Gordon Vette, author of Impact Erebus, discoverer of sector whiteout, and a witness before the Royal Commission gave a dramatic example of the loop as practised in the DC10 simulator. A note is secretly passed to one of the pilots saying “You’ve had a heart attack”. Without showing many overt signs the pilot ceases to take part in flying. If the loop works well the two other crew will notice this within seconds.

The engineer will pull the seat withdrawal lever to pull the “dead” pilot clear of the controls and check the flight position and instruments with the other pilot before attempting first aid.

One of the engineers, Brooks, was an instructor in fail-safe training.

He was a firm disciplinarian on the flight deck and came down hard on anyone who seemed not to be concentrating.

Cooper told the Royal Commission: “It is also important to understand the three crew ‘fail-safe’ concept utilised in flying an Air New Zealand DC10. One of the basic fundamentals of this philosophy is that it is the inherent responsibility of every crew member, if he be unsure, unhappy or whatever, to question the pilot in command as to the nature of his concern … if a pilot in command were to create an atmosphere whereby one of his crew members would be hesitant to comment on any action, then he would be failing in his duty as pilot in command. I have no doubt that if any crew member on Captain Collins’ flight had any concern about the progress they would have not hesitated to advise Captain Collins of that concern. Some remarks in the tape transcript are suggested [by the Chippindale Report] as having been directed to the Captain and to have indicated concern on the part of the person who made the remark [an engineer].

“Any such remark would be in the nature of a challenge in the ‘failsafe’ concept and would be responded to. When the transcript shows that there has been no response to a remark, the remark must be regarded as conversational and not a challenge nor critical or important as to the operation of the aircraft and indeed it must be a matter of doubt as to whether Captain Collins was aware of the remark having been made at all.”

Secondly, the record of all that was said by Collins and Cassin during the critical final period of the flight demonstrates that there was no acknowledgment by them of the remarks which Chippindale attributed to the flight engineers and which he claimed showed increasing concern on their part.

If the remarks had indeed been made as a challenge in the crew loop and Collins or Cassin heard them, the pilots would have responded to them. If the pilots had not responded, the engineers would have repeated them. This disproves Chippindale’s allegations. Furthermore, the actual words spoken by the engineers show no sign of so-called mounting alarm.

The following records all that was said by pilots Collins and Cassin from 46:14. It proves from that time at least they did not acknowledge the remarks which Chippindale attributed to the flight engineers and which he claimed showed increasing concern on their part. If the remarks had indeed been made as a challenge in the crew loop and Collins or Cassin heard them, then the pilots would have responded to them.

If the pilots had not responded, then the engineers would have repeated them.

This is because of strict fail-safe or “crew-loop” discipline imposed on flight crews under which they must respond to comments made by others in the flight crew to prove they heard and understood the comment and where appropriate are reacting to it. Furthermore Brooks was himself a fail-safe instructor. The extract printed below demonstrates the crew-loop in operation. Note especially from 48:55. Times GMT, 46:14 being 0046:14 GMT. 64, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, November 2005

THE FINAL 3 MINUTES: WHAT THE PILOTS SAID 46:14 Collins: Two nine three oh ... right Cassin: Yes 46:21 Cassin: A thousand to go.

Collins: O.K. 46:24 Cassin: Alt, Nav track, vert speed.

Collins: Speed.

46:28 Cassin: Speed I see.

46:43 Cassin: Yep Yep. 47:06 Unidentified voice: Down to two thousand feet. [Comment from source other than pilots on the aircraft arriving at 2,999 ft. The acceptance of this altitude is not queried.]

Collins: Yes Cassin: Yes 47:20 Collins: You’ve got speed set up there anyway, haven’t you?

47:23 Cassin: Yes alt cap (nav) track 47:28 Collins: Speed nav track alt ...

47:43 Collins: We might have to (drop) down to fifteen hundred here I think. [Washington transcript. Chippindale rewrote “drop” as “pop”. Both Collins and Cassin with the best forward vision concur in the decision to descend to 1,500 feet.]

Cassin: Yes O.K. 47:47 Cassin: Probably see further anyway.

47:49 Cassin: It’s not too bad. [This is before the commencement of descent from 2,000 feet to 1,500 feet.]

47:55 Cassin: I see vert speed for fifteen hundred feet 48:10 Collins: Right [Chippindale transcript. Not recorded on Washington transcript] 48:12 Cassin: (Terrain) fifteen hundred 48:22 Cassin: Alt hold 48:30 Collins: We didn’t get that TACAN frequency did we?

Cassin: No 48:38 Unidentified voice: What’s the frequency one oh nine two?

[Comment from source other than pilots] 48:40 Cassin: Well we think that’s what it is, but it’s channel twenty nine.

48:46 Collins: Actually those conditions don’t look very good at all, do they? [Note he says “those” not “these”.]

Mulgrew: No they don’t. [Comment from source other than pilots] 48:50 Mulgrew: You’re down at one one four now are you? [Comment from source other than pilots] 48:51 Collins: Fifteen hundred.

48:55 Collins: Have we got them on the tower? [Cooper believed from his personal knowledge of the parties and his involvement in the transcription that this is Collins’s first positive indication of concern.

But his tone of voice showed he was puzzled not worried. It was asked as a question. Although Collins is not concerned about terrain obstruction, he is saying that something is not jelling here, we are not getting some sighting of these buildings, or any of the things which I would have expected would be coming into view.”]

48:59 Cassin: No ... I’ll try again. [Cooper explains that Cassin also sounded puzzled not anxious. His confirmatory demur put into the loop.]

49:04 Collins: Try them again Cassin: O.K. 49:24 Brooks: I don’t like this. [Brooks’s first positive indication of anxiety or concern. It’s the first verbal as opposed to tonal demur. [Sitting between pilots but about 400mm behind them almost certainly facing forward. His view to the right is blocked by the engineer’s panel, so he has lost sight of Cape Bird (which he believes is Cape Bernacchi) on the right. Mulgrew seated and Moloney standing on his left have probably blocked his view of Cape Tennyson (which he believes is Cape Royds). He has gone into full whiteout, so he expresses concern. The pilots are still only in sector whiteout.]

49:50 Impact

THE FINAL 3 MINUTES: WHAT THE ENGINEERS SAID 46:39 Brooks: Where’s Erebus in relation to us at the moment? [Question is directed to either Moloney or Mulgrew] Mulgrew/Moloney : Left (about four or five miles) about 11 o’clock. ((Sound of paper rustling)) 46:43 Mulgrew/Moloney: Left do you reckon?

Mulgrew/Moloney: Well no [pause] I think.

Mulgrew/Moloney: I’ve been looking for it.

46:46 Mulgrew/Moloney: I think it’ll be erh 46:48 Brooks: I’m just thinking of any high ground in the area that’s all.

Mulgrew: I think it’ll be left yeah.

Moloney: Yeah I reckon about here.

Mulgrew: Yes [pause] no no I don’t really know.

47:02 Mulgrew: That’s the edge. [Mistakenly identifies Cape Royds on edge of Ross Island when in fact looking at cliffs on left of Lewis Bay.] 47:06 Unidentified: [unintelligible word] Two thousand feet.

Collins: Yep. Cassin: Yep. 47:16 Brooks: Yeah I just [47:18] Brooks didn’t want to block the window too completely with it.

47:20 Collins: You’ve got speed set up there anyway, haven’t you?

47:23 Moloney: Alt cap. [Moloney has announced he has seen the enunciator light displaying “alt cap”, showing the aircraft is initiating a capture of the selected altitude.]

47:43 Collins: We might have to (drop) down to fifteen hundred here I think.

Cassin: Yeah OK. 47:55 Cassin: I see vert speed for fifteen hundred feet [vert speed in flight guidance system used to initiate descent.]

[47:57] Moloney: [unintelligible words] it’s not right Unidentified: [unintelligible words] 47:59 Moloney: Yeah bloody oath.

48:05 [The word “instruments” was spoken by someone but after Mahon, Baragwanath, Turner , Tench, and Shaddick had listened to the passage, they agreed it was unintelligible or not sufficiently intelligible to be given any reliable meaning. What was shown as one sentence in the transcript was probably two sentences relating to different subjects and possibly by different speakers.]

[48:08] Brooks: Alt cap.

Mulgrew: Ross Island there [Sentence interrupted] Erebus should be here.

Unidentified: Alt hold. [Someone has announced he has seen the enunciator light displaying “alt hold” showing the aircraft has completed the capture of the selected altitude.]

[48:10] Moloney: Yeh yeh. [Moloney appears to concur with Mulgrew, albeit mistakenly, on location of Erebus.]

48:23 Brooks: Hold on both nav track. [Navigation track followed by auto pilot] 48:30 Collins: Ah we didn’t ah get that ah TACAN frequency did we?

Cassin: No. 48:36 Brooks:(Have) we got the (AIRAD) [British equivalent of the Jeppeson navigation manuals] [unintelligible word] on the aircraft?

[Suggesting Cassin looks up TACAN frequency in the AIRAD.] 49:00 Moloney: (Only got them on HF that’s all.) [Refers to radio comms with Control Tower.]

49:04 Collins: Try em again.

Cassin: OK. 49:08 Mulgrew: Looks like the edge of Ross Island there. [Still believes he’s looking at Cape Royds while in fact he’s looking at Cape Tennyson.]

49:24 Brooks: I don’t like this. [Sitting between pilots but about 400mm behind them and is almost certainly facing forward. His view to the right is blocked by the engineer’s panel, so he has lost sight of Cape Bird (which he believes is Cape Bernacchi) on the right. Mulgrew seated and Moloney standing on his left have probably blocked his view of Cape Tennyson (which he believes is Cape Royds) . Has gone into full whiteout, so he expresses concern. The pilots are still only in sector whiteout.]

49:25 Collins: Have you got anything from him? [Anything on radio from Control Tower?]

Cassin: No. 49:30 Collins: We’re twenty six miles north we’ll have to climb out of this. [Sounds puzzled not worried.]

Unidentified: OK 49:33 Cassin: It’s clear on on the right. [In right hand seat, he can still see terrain on right, so he is not yet in full whiteout.]

Collins: Is it?

Cassin: Yep. 49:35 Mulgrew/Moloney: You can see (Ross Island). [Probably Mulgrew. Could not be positively distinguished.]

49:38 Cassin: You’re clear to turn right there’s Collins: No negative [Sitting on left, Collins has lost sight of terrain on right, so is unwilling to fly to the right. He is in full whiteout to the right] Cassin: No high ground if you do a one eighty. [Cassin on the right can still see terrain to the right, so he repeats his suggestion.]

49:44 ((Ground proximity warning tone – warning continues until impact)) [49:46] Brooks: Five hundred feet. [Calls decreasing ground clearances.]

[49:48] Brooks: Four hundred feet.

49:50 Impact [Aircraft impacts on 13-14 degree slope at about 1,500 ft above sea level.]

November 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 65

I

n 1987 during a claim for compensation by the dependents of the deceased Chippindale asserted that the engineers displayed their mounting alarm by the tone of their voices. Here again the evidence disproves his claim. He also claimed by implication that the voices marked by the Washington team as unidentified were in fact the voices of the engineers. He claimed this despite previously saying “At no time did I attribute any comment to any person. I relied totally upon the recognition of the voices made by the team in Washington.”

One needs to examine his 1987 claim in greater detail.

When asked whether he was able to discern any indication of concern or anxiety in the voices of any of the crew members on the flight deck, Chippindale replied that from the time of 0041:45 GMT when a voice said “my God”, “there was a mounting atmosphere of concern among those that were speaking.” He pointed out that the expression immediately followed Collins’s words “Tell him [the control tower] we can make a visual [pause] descent.” Chippindale is by implication attributing the phrase “my God” to one of the engineers, horrified at the prospect of a visual descent, and denying it was some extraneous comment by some passenger or cabin crew member perhaps referring in awe to the scenery. He said the time the engineers’ sounds of concern become continuous commenced when somebody asked where Erebus was [at 43:27]. He said “… there was no reassuring event after that.” However the record of everything the pilots said starting from three minutes later at 46:14 shows they made no acknowledgment to what Chippindale claims were continuous sounds of concern.

The further evidence against Chippindale being correct is: • Of the three-man Washington team Cooper detected no sound of mounting alarm and believes that neither Wyatt nor Oliff did either.

• Mahon and David Baragwanath (who was counsel assisting the Commission, later to become Justice Baragwanath) listened to the tapes many times in Auckland, in Farnborough, and Washington.

Mahon concluded Chippindale was wrong while Baragwanath in his submissions made no reference to hearing mounting concern, which he certainly would have done if he had heard it.

• Three overseas specialists in CVR transcription, Shaddick, Tench, and Turner, also listened to the tape together with Mahon and Baragwanath. Had any of them heard mounting concern they would have discussed it with the New Zealanders.

• One Farnborough CVR transcription specialist, Davis, listened to the tape first with Chippindale and later with Mahon and Baragwanath.

He agreed with Chippindale contrary to the Washington team that certain words were spoken but later when given more facts he offered no opinion. He is not reported as hearing concern by tone of voice, so on this point he can be added to the other eight who heard no concern.

• So a total of at least seven and probably nine persons listened to the tape without hearing sounds of mounting concern as opposed to Chippindale alone who claimed to hear them. Or rather we must assume that Air New Zealand’s representative Gemmell also heard them since he listened with Chippindale, but Gemmell gave no evidence on the point.

• Chippindale chose not to reveal that his theory depended on tone of voice in his evidence before the Royal Commission so he could not be asked to point to the passages when the tape was played in public.

He had legal representation.

• Air New Zealand who were zealous in pointing at every possible avenue of pilot error never adopted Chippindale’s argument.

• The voice saying “my God”, which Chippindale claimed first showed concern by the engineers was marked as unidentified by the Washington team.

• The alleged dereliction of duty would have persisted from 41:45 (the time of the “my God” remark) until 49:24 when Brooks said “I don’t like this” which Cooper says was a genuine expression of con66, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, November 2005

When asked whether he was able to discern any indication of concern or anxiety in the voices of any of the crew members on the flight deck, Chippindale replied that from the time of 0041:45 GMT when a voice said “my God”, there was a mounting atmosphere of concern among those that were speaking

cern. Six seconds later Collins said “… we’ll have to climb out of this”.

• It is not credible to assert the engineers would have continued in dereliction of their fail-safe drill procedure by not protesting in the strongest possible terms if they believed the DC10 faced impending danger.

• Chippindale in his transcript did not purport to identify the voice which said “my God”.

• Chippindale admitted in evidence he could not identify the voice.

• Brooks expressed no concern when at 45:18 he said the DC10 was about to make a further descent to 2,000 feet.

• The actual words used by the engineers reflect a normal flight deck conversation and are at variance with a theory of mounting alarm.

• The engineers had no reason to express mounting concern at Collins’s decision to make a visual descent. The pilots believed they knew exactly where the DC10 was located because of the DC10’s navigation computer, namely at the entrance to McMurdo Sound. They could see the black rock cliffs of the Capes on each side of what they had every reason to believe was the Sound. Cloud cover was not continuous. There were large breaks between the clouds. Collins said he proposed to descend visually. There was no suggestion he proposed to make a cloud penetration. Low level flying in the area by the airline was standard practice and known by the whole New Zealand community which was why passengers booked flights.

• Chippindale admitted he did not know the crew.

• Chippindale admitted he had no experience as a crew member on a DC10.

• He had no experience of the DC10’s computer navigation system.

• He wasn’t familiar with Air New Zealand’s procedures.

• He wasn’t familiar with DC10 aircraft.

• The cockpit area microphone, as previously noted, picked up voices from not just the flight crew but also from persons in the cockpit area, including those in the galley and passengers on the flight deck wanting a view. For example one passenger was found strapped into a seat used only on the flight deck.

• Chippindale’s theory requires all four flight crew on the flight deck to have breached their duty, the engineers by failing to get the pilots to pay attention to their fears and the pilots for failing to heed them.

• A third pilot, Lucas, although not on duty, would clearly be monitoring this part of the flight carefully from the passenger cabin and he would have forcibly made his concerns felt, had he believed the DC10 was in any danger.

• Mulgrew, although he was a commentator and not a member of the flight crew, would have expressed his feelings had he believed the DC10 was in danger.

• Had the engineers in truth “expressed their dissatisfaction with the

Air crash investigators experience whiteout themselves, where the horizon merges with the sky descent toward a cloud covered area”, then they must have known of the perils of whiteout under those conditions. Because it is the presence of clouds overhead when there are white surfaces below which causes whiteout. The airline, the management of which did know of whiteout, had never revealed its existence to the line pilots who actually had to fly the sightseeing flights. It is not credible that the engineers should have somehow discovered for themselves the phenomenon of whiteout and then permitted the pilots to descend without making the most vociferous protests and without explaining the deadly nature of whiteout to the pilots.

• Chippindale claimed the engineers “expressed their mounting alarm as the approach continued on at low level toward the area of low cloud.” Readers would infer the crew is about to fly into cloud which was visible as cloud. This is not correct. In actual fact the pilots were flying into sector whiteout not into cloud. Passenger photographs, taken shortly before impact, show sun streaming in through cabin windows, while other photographs looking out through the windows show clear views unobstructed by cloud. The pilots made 13 or more comments on the transcript that they were in visual meteorological conditions.

When did the pilots first sound even puzzled? Cooper said: • The pilots’ voices did not sound puzzled until 48:55 when Collins asked “Have we got them on the tower?” which was only 35 seconds before Collins decided to climb out.

• Cassin first sounded puzzled when he replied at 48:59 “No [pause] I’ll try him again.”

• Brooks sounded really concerned at 49:24 when said “I don’t like this.”

• At 49:25 Collins confirms that concern is mounting when he says “Have you got anything from him?”

• An uneasy reply of “No” follows from Cassin.

• Collins’s last comment at 49:49 “Go round power please” sounded professional but with a degree of anxiety in his voice.

Collins is following standard go around drill to pull up even though he can see, so he believes, the clear space of McMurdo Sound 40 miles ahead. Had he believed the DC10 was in real danger because they were flying in cloud, then his voice would have carried great anxiety and he would have “firewalled” the engines in a genuine emergency climb.

S

o what did Chippindale actually do in order to create his theory of mounting concern? He took overlapping snatches of different conversations of passengers and cabin crew speaking in the galley area and flight deck and attributed them to the engineers when the Washington team agreed the voices were unidentifiable. He added words to the transcript which the Washington team agreed were unintelligible and suggested they suited his theory that the engineers were expressing their concern about flying conditions to the pilots. He latched onto a few remarks passing between Mulgrew and Moloney. After his theory was disproved by evidence given to the Royal Commission in 1980, he claimed seven years later, contrary to the opinions of seven to nine others, and supported only

by Gemmell, that the engineers expressed mounting alarm by their tone of voice.

The conclusion must be that Chippindale’s claims are untrue. The engineers voiced no queries about the proposed descent, expressed no mounting alarm as the flight continued, and expressed no dissatisfacNovember 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 67

tion. Those claims ought not to have been made by an inspector of air accidents. They brought no credit to the Office of Air Accidents Investigation. They were approved for release to the public by the Minister of Transport on 12 June 1980 and are still at the time of writing on the website of that Office’s successor. They have done lasting damage.

They must have caused grief over the years to the flight crew’s families.

They have created a fantasy scenario of events which supposedly led to the disaster that endures in the public mind to this day as media comments such as Cullen’s, Rudman’s, and Rankin’s bear witness and perpetuates this untrue scenario into history.

Chippindale’s evidence in the court case brought for compensation by the dependents of those killed by the crash against the US Government no doubt contributed to their case failing. He attended in person to give evidence “at the direction of the New Zealand Government”.

The US Government paid for his transportation to and from the US. He has said: “One thing I will state solemnly is that no attempt was made by me to tailor the CVR readout or insert comments which were not clear to me”.

PRIVY COUNCIL UPHOLDS MAHON ON CVR The Privy Council agreed that Mahon was correct in rejecting Chippindale’s interpretation of the CVR, saying: “The other principal reason why the Judge felt able to displace Mr Chippindale’s ascription of the cause of the accident to pilot error was that certain remarks forming part of the conversations recorded in the CVR of the crashed aircraft and attributed by Mr Chippindale to the flight engineers had suggested to him that shortly before the crash they were expressing to the pilot and navigator uncertainty about the aircraft’s position. The tape from the CVR which had been recovered from the site of the crash proved difficult to interpret. The Judge, with the thoroughness that characterised him throughout his investigations, went to great pains to obtain the best possible expert assistance in the interpretation of the tape. The result was that he was able to conclude that the remarks attributed by Mr Chippindale to the flight engineers could not have been made by them, and that there was nothing recorded in the CVR that was capable of throwing any doubt upon the confident belief of all members of the crew that the NAV track was taking the aircraft on the flight path as it had been plotted by Captain Collins on his atlas and chart, and thus down the middle of McMurdo Sound well to the west of Mt Erebus.”

PRIVY COUNCIL UPHOLDS MAHON ON WHITEOUT John Roughan New Zealand Herald: “Mahon’s true insight in retrospect was not the cover-up or even the aircraft’s computer co-ordinates, it was the polar atmospheric phenomenon he described. A ‘whiteout’ was not, as most people assumed, a blizzard. It was a trick of the polar light that could obliterate the horizon on a cloudy day and cause low-flying pilots to hit a mountain they could not distinguish from a flat landscape.”

The Privy Council agreed with Mahon’s finding that whiteout was an essential ingredient of the disaster saying: “Its effect, in meteorological conditions such as prevailed at the time of the crash in the area where it happened, would be to induce in a pilot, unaware that any such phenomenon could exist, the belief that he had unlimited visibility ahead and that he was flying over a flat terrain, since ‘whiteout’ prevents changes in levels of the terrain over and towards which the aircraft is flying from being perceived by the pilot even though the change in level is as great as that of a precipitous mountainside such as that of Mt Erebus. The Judge makes out an overwhelming case in his Report that the aircraft was in a ‘whiteout’ when it crashed into that volcano.”

The form of whiteout (“white surface whiteout”) referred to by the 68, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, November 2005

The form of whiteout leads pilots to believe they are flying in clear air and so can see any obstructions ahead; when in fact, although they are in clear air, any obstructions have been rendered invisible

Privy Council and which contributed to the crash is the insidious optical illusion present in polar conditions where white surfaces exist. It leads pilots to believe they are flying in clear air and so can see any obstructions ahead; when in fact, although they are in clear air, any obstructions have been rendered invisible. This phenomenon would make an obstacle a few feet ahead invisible if the obstacle were white, even in reported visibilities of 40 miles. The contribution of this form of whiteout to the crash, in particular “sector whiteout” in which only one sector within the pilots’ vision is in whiteout, was discovered by Gordon Vette who subsequently received an honorary D.Eng. from the University of Glasgow for his research on visual perception.

The other form widely known by New Zealand pilots without polar training before Erebus involves broadly speaking (there are sub-groups) blown snow or snow showers in which pilots are conscious of being in whiteout.

When preparing for the McMurdo Sound flights to commence in 1977 Air New Zealand management knew of white surface whiteout and had attended the RNZAF briefing for air force flights to McMurdo Sound. Gemmell made a deliberate decision to conceal the existence of whiteout from the crews who flew to the Antarctic. He explained he did this because if pilots had been told, they would have believed they were permitted to descend beneath 16,000 feet which he claimed they were prohibited from doing. His reasoning was that 16,000 ft was above the level of Mt Erebus, so at that altitude whiteout was irrelevant.

However the following evidence given to the Royal Commission disproves Gemmell’s claim a prohibition existed: • The briefing officer admitted he never imposed such a prohibition; • flights to the McMurdo area commencing on 18 October 1977 were without exception flown at low levels; • Air New Zealand publicised low level flying in Antarctica so widely (including distribution to every household in New Zealand) that management’s denial of knowledge did not carry credibility; The possible existence of white surface whiteout renders low level flying in Antarctica without special precautions perilous, so polar trained pilots regarded the pilots of flight 901 as foolhardy in flying at low level in white surface whiteout conditions. This explains why such pilots have subsequently criticised the 901 flight crew.

Chippindale claimed that when the crew made their descent orbit they would have noticed broken sea ice but when they approached Lewis Bay they would have seen no such breaks and he implied that from that fact they should have deduced the existence of the phenomenon of whiteout and so realised they were not approaching McMurdo Sound but must be approaching Lewis Bay made by sector whiteout to look the same as McMurdo Sound and realised that Mt Erebus must lie ahead concealed in whiteout. His reasoning is invalid. The crew would have expected McMurdo Sound to present a flat, featureless, unbroken expanse as contrasted with the broken sea ice of the Ross Sea. Nowhere else but in McMurdo Sound would they expect to see such a clear expanse.

AIR NEW ZEALAND CHANGES CO-ORDINATES Though the global positioning system (GPS) with its pinpoint accuracy did not exist in 1979, the DC10’s navigation system, the AINS, was state of the art for its time, being highly accurate and reliable. After flying from Auckland to McMurdo, a distance of 3,000 miles, the crosstrack error was only 1.2 miles and distance error 3.1 miles. It was not uncommon on the Auckland-Honolulu route for the northbound aircraft at 35,000 feet to have its radio altimeter triggered by the southbound aircraft on a reciprocal track passing directly underneath in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

On dispatch the crew were given a printout from Air New Zealand’s navigation computer being a flight plan having the latitude and longitude of each of the waypoints. One of the crew, probably Cassin, typed these co-ordinates into the DC10’s onboard computer.

While Flight 901 flew south from New Zealand to Antarctica on the track loaded into its navigation computer the auto pilot took it over the same route which Collins had plotted onto his maps from the flight plan the airline had previously given him on briefing on 9 November. The crew would have checked the DC10 was still on this track as it approached Buckle Island, and again as it approached Cape Hallett, its second to last waypoint.

What the pilots did not know, as the airline never told them, was that at 2.10 am that very morning the airline had shifted the final waypoint from the safe location of West Dailey Island in the middle of McMurdo Sound by 26-28 nautical miles east so that it ran to a waypoint lying behind the 12,450 ft Mt Erebus situated behind Lewis Bay on Ross Island.

The DC10 was flying above cloud but passenger photos produced to the Royal Commission proved that there were large breaks between the clouds. Collins decided to descend through one of these breaks so that he could fly visually up the safety of McMurdo Sound. He’d been

told visibility was 40 miles. Being a cautious pilot he decided that not only would he descend visually but he would also keep to the navigation track he had plotted on his maps.

He descended through one of the breaks between the clouds in a conventional figure of eight descent orbit. Unknown to him, as the airline had never revealed its existence to him, he placed himself in peril, because below cloud in Antarctic conditions he became subject to the optical illusions created by whiteout.

He locked the DC10 onto nav track and flew south at 2,000 ft descending to 1,500 ft. Before them the crew saw what they confidently believed to be the entrance to McMurdo Sound exactly where it ought to be located in relation to the nav track plotted from the briefing onto their maps. The geographic features matched what all of them, including the experienced Antarctic observer Peter Mulgrew, were expecting and furthermore those features lay on the expected points of the compass (“azimuth bearings”).

However what they were observing was not the flat expanse of McMurdo Sound as they believed. Instead they were looking at Lewis Bay and Mt Erebus concealed in sector whiteout. The effect of whiteout made the entrance to Lewis Bay appear to the pilots to be the entrance to McMurdo Sound.

NON NOTIFICATION For an ordinary flight, say Auckland to Honolulu, the airline’s flight plan was contained on a cassette which the pilots fed into their on board navigation computer. The tapes were updated every 28 days. Whenever a change to a route was made between the issue of cassettes the consortium of airlines which produced the cassettes issued a notice to airmen (NOTAM) giving details. The Antarctic flights, not being a standard route, did not have cassettes, instead their flight plans were keyboarded into the DC10’s computer. The airline changed the co-ordinates without November 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 69

issuing its own NOTAM and without telling the dispatch officer.

The chief navigator said he asked the flight services controller (flight dispatch) to amend the flight plan on 20 November 1979, the day before Captain White’s flight was due to depart. At first the controller said he didn’t know why he didn’t make the change that day as asked but he later said the navigator hadn’t told him until the next day after White’s flight had departed. Neither the navigator nor the controller radioed White to tell him of the “error” which his flight plan supposedly contained and which the change was to supposedly “correct”. Air New Zealand flights had already flown on that allegedly erroneous flight plan for 14 months. As already noted the airline did nothing for a week until it finally shifted the co-ordinates only five hours 50 minutes before flight 901 was due to depart.

Flight plans had an “ops flash” line at the top for important information for pilots. The airline ought to have entered up the change to the co-ordinates here, but didn’t.

Had the pilots been NOTAMed, the dispatch officer been told, or the ops flash entered up, then the disaster would never have happened.

The airline said it didn’t do any of those things because it thought the change it was making was not 26-28 nautical miles but only 2.1 nautical miles and hence not worth mentioning. In effect it said it would continue not to notify pilots of such changes.

PRIVY COUNCIL CONCURS WITH MAHON ON CO-ORDINATES The Privy Council agreed with Mahon’s finding that since the airline briefed the pilots on a McMurdo Sound flight plan, but on dispatch gave them an Erebus flight plan, there was no pilot error, saying: “The Judge was able to displace Mr Chippindale’s attribution of the accident to pilot error, for two main reasons. The most important was that at the inquiry there was evidence from Captain Collins’ widow and daughters, which had not been available to Mr Chippindale at the time of his investigation and was previously unknown to the management of Air New Zealand, that after the briefing of 9 November 1979 Captain Collins, who had made a note of the co-ordinates of the Western Waypoint [the Dailey Islands waypoint in McMurdo Sound] that were on the flight plan used at that briefing, had, at his own home, plotted on an atlas and upon a larger topographical chart the track from the Cape Hallett waypoint to the Western Waypoint.

“There was evidence that he had taken this atlas and chart with him on the fatal flight and the inference was plain that in the course of piloting the aircraft he and First Officer Cassin had used the lines that he had plotted to show him where the aircraft was when he switched from NAV track to heading select in order to make a descent to 2,000 feet while still to the north of Ross Island which he reported to ATC [the Control Tower] at McMurdo and to which he received ATC’s consent.

“That on completing this descent he switched back to NAV track is incapable of being reconciled with any other explanation than that he was relying upon the line he had himself plotted of the flight track on which he had been briefed. It was a combination of his own meticulous conscientiousness in taking the trouble to plot for himself on a topographical chart the flight track that had been referred to at his briefing, and the fact that he had no previous experience of “whiteout” and had been given no warning at any time that such a deceptive phenomenon even existed, that caused the disaster.”

PRIVY COUNCIL UPHOLDS MAHON ON CAUSATION The Privy Council said of The Chippindale Report: “In effect, although there are criticisms elsewhere in his report of management practices of Air New Zealand in relation to Antarctic flights, Mr Chippindale ascribed the principal blame for the tragedy to pilot error.”

The Privy Council then summarised The Mahon Report’s findings by quoting these extracts from it: 70, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, November 2005

The Privy Council placed on record their tribute to the brilliant and painstaking investigative work undertaken by the Judge with the support of counsel appointed to assist him, Baragwanath. The Privy Council said: “The Royal Commission Report [the Mahon Report] convincingly clears Captain Collins and First Officer Cassin of any suggestion that negligence on their part had in any way contributed to the disaster

“ ... The dominant cause of the disaster was the act of the airline in changing the computer track of the aircraft without telling the aircrew.

“In my opinion therefore, the single dominant and effective cause of the disaster was the mistake made by those airline officials who programmed the aircraft to fly directly at Mt Erebus and omitted to tell the aircrew. That mistake is directly attributable, not so much to the persons who made it, but to the incompetent administrative airline procedures which made the mistake possible.

“In my opinion, neither Captain Collins nor First Officer Cassin nor the flight engineers made any error which contributed to the disaster, and were not responsible for its occurrence.”

The Privy Council said there was ample supportive evidence for these findings. The Privy Council placed on record their tribute to the brilliant and painstaking investigative work undertaken by the Judge with the support of counsel appointed to assist him, Baragwanath. The Privy Council said: “The Royal Commission Report [the Mahon Report] convincingly clears Captain Collins and First Officer Cassin of any suggestion that negligence on their part had in any way contributed to the disaster.”

ACCEPTED BY AVIATION COMMUNITY The Mahon Report transformed the investigation of accidents and was finally recognised as valid by the aviation community in 1994. The International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) in its Safety Digest on Human Factors No. 10 used the flight 901 disaster to demonstrate how latent and active failures combine to cause an organisational accident. The disasters ICAO refers to are: Chernobyl, the world’s worst nuclear power accident 1986; Bhopal, the world’s worst industrial accident 1984 (6,500 killed, 20,000-50,000 seriously injured); Clapham Junction railway collision 1989; Kings Cross underground fire 1989; Dryden, a fatal aircraft accident in Dryden, Ontario 1989. ICAO concludes: “The [Mahon] Report and most of its associated literature were produced ten years before Dryden; they generated violent controversy and remained inconspicuously shelved until recently. The [Mahon] Report was, probably, ten years ahead of its time. After all, Chernobyl, Bhopal, Clapham Junction, Kings Cross and other major high technology systems catastrophes had yet to happen. They need not have happened.

In retrospect, if the aviation community – and the safety community at large – had grasped the message from Antarctica and applied its lessons, Chernobyl, Bhopal, Clapham Junction, Kings Cross and certainly the Dryden report would not have existed.”

CASUALTY LIST ADDIS Peter James 29 Te Atatu * ALLAN Alan Lawrence Malyon 59 Clive * ALLAN Jane Phillipa 17 Clive * ALLAN Marjorie Townsley 66 Clive * ANDERSON Margaret Isobel Epsom * ANGLESEY Grant William 19 Waitara * ARMITAGE Ethel Mary 73 Milford * ARNOLD Melinda Maria Manurewa * ARNOLD Valerie Ellen Papatoetoe * ASHTON Grahame 63 Orakei * BAINBRIDGE Thomas Eric 40 Meadowbank * BALDWIN L Peter 50 Birkenhead * BEAUMONT Earl * BECKETT Desmond 62 Te Puke * BOND Marilyn Edna 48 Blockhouse Bay * BOND Rolain Melville 54 Blockhouse Bay * BREHAUT Ronald Thomas 39 Timaru * BROAD John Phillip (Dr) 51 Hamilton * BROOKS Geraldine Timaru * BROUGH Aubrey Conroy 68 Thames * BUCHANAN Geoffrey 68 Orewa * BUERGI Heinz Avonalde * BURGESS Lindsay Robert 60 Whangarei * BURGESS Rose Eileen 58 Whangarei * BURTON Lorraine 42 Wellington * BUTLER Rae Jeanne 43 Waihi Beach * CAMERON Tangiaho 57 Mt Wellington * CAMPBELL Stuart Donald 22 Whakatane * CARLTON John Barry 46 Otautau * CARLTON Marion Rennie 40 Otautau * CARR Margaret Bell 64 Whangarei * CHADDERTON Bryan Harry Papatoetoe * CHADDERTON Valerie Enid Papatoetoe * CHRISTIANSON Alla Remuera * CHRISTMAS Hugh Francis 58 New Plymouth * CLARK David 60 Mt Wellington * CLARK Irene 75 Belmont * CLARK Iris 65 Takanini * CLARK William Henry 67 Takanini * COCKRILL Joan * COLBRAN Yvonne Louise 45 Invercargill * COLBRAN Cyril Bernhard 49 Invercargill * COLE John Wright 124 Westmere * COPAS Jean Ann 46 Hawkes Bay * COPSEY Audrey Joy 55 Pukekohe * COREY Constance (Dr) 46 Epsom * CRABTREE Mary Alison Takapuna * CRABTREE Norman David 72 Takapuna * DAHL Marie Patricia 57 Wellington * DAWSON Peter Maissie 50 Piopio * DEAN Kay 22 Reporoa * DEBBAGE Florence Daisy Rotorua * DELMAGE N.V * DUKE Athol David 18 Epsom * DYKZEUL Herman Maria Douglas Wiri * DYKZEUL Johannes Jacobs 30 Morrinsville * EAGLES G * EDWARDS Elizabeth Jane 30 Naenae * EDWARDS Miriam Ponsonby * EMMETT Cecilia Campbell 62 Te Awamutu * EMMETT John Barnham Te Awamutu * FROST Barle Sandringham * GALLAGHER Alfred James Remuera * GALLAGHER Elsie Thelma Remuera * GIBBS Bryn 78 Wellington * GOLLAND Pamela Margaret Bucklands Beach * GOSLING Violet 60 Opotiki * GULLEVER Richard Kawerau * HANSEN Marlene Anne Picton * HARRIS Hazel Phoebe 60 Hamilton * HARRISON Annie 50 Takapuna * HARRISON Muriel Florence 78 Campbells Bay * HARTLEY James Follett 36 Otorohanga * HARTY Myra Pearl 82 Devonport * HILL Eileen 73 Lower Hutt * HILL Gordon Alexander Mission Bay * HOLLOWAY Jean Marie 63 Glenfield * HOLTHAM Bryan Ernest 35 Invercargill * HOTSON Roy Henry 58 Tuakau * HOUGHTON John 39 Dunedin * HOWARTH Bart Ralph 31 Tauranga * HOWARTH Kathleen Maureen 47 Forest Hill * HOWARTH Peter 52 Forest Hill * HUGHES Stephen 32 Bucklands Beach * HUMPHREY Mildred 69 Orewa * HYNDMAN Thomas William 60 Blockhouse Bay * JARVIS Nicholas Dunstan 43 Glenfield * JENKINS Evelyn Lois Birkenhead * JENNINGS Charles Ivory 44 Taradale * KARL Kathline 61 Ellerslie * KEARNEY Denis 40 Hillsborough * KEITH John Edgar 39 Whangarei * KENDON Nancy Phyllis 67 Howick * KERR Betty New Lynn * KERR Francis Ronald New Lynn * KERR Geoffrey Ian Hamilton 21 Wanganui * KILSBY Anthony John 44 Levin * KILSBY Geoffrey Michael 35 Levin * KING Nancy 62 Russell * KIRK Donald Clive Te Kuiti * LANVIN James Francis 58 Howick * LARSEN Olaf William Raetihi * LING Alison Louise 60 Titirangi * LOCHER Urs 29 Kelston * LOMAX B Kawerau * LOUGHNAN Charles Henry 66 Tauranga * LOUGHNAN Patrick Louis 61 Tauranga * MacDONALD Shirley

Jane 35 Palmerston North * MacKENZIE John 62 Manurewa * MADGEWICK Eudora Emily Whangaparoa * MANLEY David Victor 37 Cambridge * MANN Dorothy Maude 49 Te Atatu * MARSDEN Dorothy Tokoroa * MARSDEN Joseph Alan 45 Tokoroa * MARTIN Sally 65 Blockhouse Bay * MASKELYNE Trevor John 26 New Plymouth * MASON R * MATHEWS Aoxautere 60 Palmerston * MAYNARD Olive Mytle 54 Thames * MAYNARD William John Thames * McKENDRY Richard John 33 Wellington * McKENZIE Margaret Joyce 62 Napier * McMILLAN John Bruce 64 Gisborne * McMILLAN Melba Pearl 63 Gisborne * McNAMARA Bernard Joseph Pauanui * McNEIL Eric Onehunga * MITCHELL Mark Geoffrey 17 Lower Hutt * MULGREW Peter David 52 Parnell * MUNRO Ross 34 Otorohanga * MURRAY Murray 33 Mataura * NICHOLSON Christine Margaret 26 Christchurch * Oâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;CONNOR Ian John 41 Timaru * OLIVER Mervyn John 65 Palmerston North * PALMER David Lloyd 31 Stanmore Bay * PALMER Edward James 63 Tauranga * PALMER Gary Kent 29 Tauranga * PATERSON Ethel Mary 54 Onehunga * PATERSON Linda Jan 22 Onehunga * PAYKELL Nola Minchin Devonport * PAYNE Alfred Murray 34 Remuera * PEACOCKE Marjorie Ethol Glenfield * PETHERS Carla 49 Takapuna * PLUMMER Alexander Francis 85 Pakuranga * PLUMMER Hilda Francis 52 Hamilton * POTTER Michael Arthur 53 Whangaparoa * PRICE Irene 86 Sandringham * PRICE Beverley (Daughter) Sandringham * PRIDMORE Joy Agnes 40 Levin * RAWLINS Valgria 76 Mt Eden * REVELL Basil Halvor 52 Waiwera * REVELL Geraldine 60 Waiwera * RICHMOND Pamela Gaye 24 Mt Eden * ROBB Helen (Lady) Remuera * ROBERTS Allison Meryle 46 Wellington * ROBERTS Michael Seaver 47 Wellington * ROBINSON Betty Estell 36 Pariate * RUDEN Karl 79 Mission Bay * SCOTT Mary Theresa 40 Dunedin * SMITH Betty Louise 46 Whangarei * SMYTHE Henry Howard 55 Thames * STEVENSON Anthony James Picton * STEWART Donald Mathew 35 Birkenhead * STOKES Alan Maxwell 51 Pakuranga * STOREY Phyllis May 58 Mt Wellington * TANTON Peter Alec 60 Whangaparoa * TAYLOR Douglas Clement Frank 56 Whangarei * THOMAS Roy Pearce Tauranga * THOMAS Walter Daniel 69 Whangaparoa * TREMAIN Floss Taupo * TREMAIN Robert David 60 Taupo * TRINDER Elaine 26 Epsom * WARD Henry 58 Henderson * WARD Valerie 57 Henderson * WATSON Isobel 65 Mt Albert * WATSON Kathleen 64 Wellington * WEBB Alfred William Waitoa * WILLIAMS Jan 60 Havelock North * WILLIAMS Janet Challis 70 Hastings * WILLIAMS Leonard Heathcote 60 Havelock North * WOOD Barbara Annie 66 Kiwitea * WOOD Irvine Kirkham 72 Kiritea * WORTH Linda 74 Epsom * ZOLL Otto 46 New Lynn * FLIGHT CREW: ALL FROM AUCKLAND * BENNETT David John Senior Flight Steward * BROOKS Gordon Barrett Flight Engineer * CARRSMITH Elizabeth Mary Stewardess * CASSIN Gregory Mark First Officer * CATER Martin John Flight Steward * COLLINS Martin John Purser * COLLINS Thomas James Captain * FINLAY Michael James Senior Flight Steward * KEENAN Dianne Stewardess * LEWIS James Charles Fight Steward * LUCAS Graham Neville First Officer * MARINOVIC Suzanne Margaret Stewardess * MAXWELL Bruce Rhodes Flight Steward * MOLONEY Nicholas John Flight Engineer * MORRISON Katrina Mary Stewardess * McPHERSON Roy William Chief Purser * SCOTT Russell Morrison Purser * SICKLEMORE David Brian Flight Steward * SIMMONS Stephen George Flight Steward * WOLFERT Marie-Therese Stewardess

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November 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 71

LIFESTYLE

MONEY

HANDS-ON INVESTMENT Peter Hensley makes the case for keeping your financial advisor close, and your money closer

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eorge was confused. It had nothing to do with him to meet with both he and Mildred. This man did his mature years nor did it have anything to do not wear a collar and tie, however George was struck with his intelligence. Mildred was on his back with his empathy and understanding of their situation. about making a decision and getting on with it. She He listened and quietly questioned their expectations to could not understand why he was struggling with ensure that he recommended the investments that a concept which, to her, was as simple as deciding would be appropriate. This was not hugely different between black and white. from the other two reports.

They had recently sold the family business, the conGeorge’s confusion arose from the fact that all three tract had gone unconditional and settlement day was plans suggested that their investment goals could be fast approaching. Their lawyer had arranged for them to achieved, but George could not comprehend how this see a professional adviser who drove up from Welling- could be the case. They each used a different approach ton and he had done his best to take them through and different investment products. their investment options. Mildred was taken aback at When Mildred read the three reports, only one stood the entry fees that his firm was going to charge and also out as simple to comprehend and her decision was clear the ongoing monitoring fees. George was very good cut. She chose the one where the investments would be with figures and did not have any problems understand- held in their names and they would receive spendable ing the fifty plus pages income. She could see the report contained. that George was atIt was as clear as black and Again George did not tempting to underhave any problems unstand Modern Portfowhite. Two of the reports were derstanding the young lio Theory and how that attempting to baffle them with whippersnapper that Nobel award winning the bank had arranged system could be conscience and charge them significant for them to see. He did nected to their retirefees for doing so admit to Mildred that ment planning. while the young fellow Two of the reports might have had the right qualifications to talk about suggested that they should set aside about three years’ investing their life savings, he did not have any experi- worth of expenses and invest the balance in growthence and did not portray any confidence during the dis- styled managed funds where professional managers cussions they held. looked after the money so that it increased in value.

Now George and Mildred had grown old along with This approach looked very good on paper, however the another couple, Jim and Moira. George knew that they had down side was that it was expensive and what hapused a well known investment adviser when Moira had pened if the growth did not materialise. The performinherited a sizeable legacy from her elderly aunt who passed ance figures for the past five years were not encouraging, away several years ago. Jim had mentioned it however the figures for the past twenty five years were occasionally at golf, however George never took any clearly impressive. notice of the comments as he and Mildred were busy payMildred’s response was that they could be dead poor ing off their mortgage and keeping ahead of the monthly or even dead in 25 years, she wanted a bit more certainty accounts. He now wished that he had shown more interest than some past performance figures which in reality in the topics that Jim was talking about at the time. meant nothing. She growled at George as she found it George tracked down this adviser and arranged for difficult to see why he couldn’t make up his mind. It

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MILDRED PREFERRED THE THIRD APPROACH THAT SAW THEIR INVESTMENTS EARN INCOME FROM DAY ONE. ONLY A PORTION OF THEIR MONEY WAS BEING EXPOSED TO SHARES (GROWTH) AND EVEN THEN THEIR ADVISER RECOMMENDED SHARES THAT PAID A DIVIDEND. THEY THEN WERE GIVEN THE CHOICE TO EITHER SPEND THE INCOME OR COMPOUND IT BACK INTO THE PORTFOLIO

was as clear as black and white. Two of the reports were attempting to baffle them with science and charge them significant fees for doing so.

George knew he was between a rock and hard place. He had lived a lifetime with Mildred saying “I told you so”, and his instincts told him that she would be right again. The issue he was grappling with was that he desperately wanted to know why two of the reports suggested growth-styled managed fund type investments were the way to go rather than the directly owned income producing investment approach.

A purely cynical analysis could suggest that the issue of management fees might bias recommendations. George however was impressed with the implied skills of the professional fund managers combined with the text book support of Modern Portfolio Theory. He was the first to admit that he did not have the skills to manage his portfolio and was drawn to the concept of professional money managers looking after his money. Mildred dismissed this approach because it did not provide certainty of income and she disliked paying fees for a service that still charged even if they lost money.

Mildred preferred the third approach that saw their investments earn income from day one. Only a portion of their money was being exposed to shares (growth) and even then their adviser recommended shares that paid a dividend. They then were given the choice to either spend the income or compound it back into the portfolio. None of this “maybe the markets will be higher in the future” stuff for her.

Maybe the markets could be down as well and they would be worse off.

THE TWINPACK SYSTEM is designed to ensure you don’t run out of gas. When one cylinder empties, it automatically changes across to the reserve cylinder. An easily readable indicator on the regulator changes colour from green to red indicat-

George could understand her argument. With their local adviser, they would have no set up or entry costs, it would produce spendable income and not be exposed to the vagrancies and whims of international markets. With some assistance they could spread their funds so that their funds would not be exposed greater than five or 10% to any one institution. They could also manage their own portfolio. It sure had a lot going for it.

To satisfy his curiosity, George looked in detail at some of the past performance figures that the two managed funds options supplied in their proposal. He created a fictitious computer spreadsheet and was appalled at the results. Had they sold their business at the turn of the century and taken the growth option, they would be in a loss situation and be forced to either consume more capital or severely adjust their lifestyle downwards.

The reports did mention that their funds could drop in value, however these comments were confined to the fine print in the appendix.

Even professional money managers made mistakes. Their local adviser also highlighted the fact that international markets could currently be described as fully valued which did not leave much room for the upside growth to continue.

As their new adviser often said, compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world, it is also boring. George never wanted to be called boring, nor did he want to be dead poor either. The older he got, the more he appreciated how good it was to be boring.

ing that you now have one empty cylinder.

Getting your empty cylinder replaced couldn’t be easier says Ian Macefield, BOCs LPG Manager.Simply phone our Customer Service Centre, which operates 24-7 and a replacement TwinPak cylinder will be de-

livered to you on your designated day.

So if you’re thinking gas, the BOC gas experts will take the hassle out of getting you connected to TWINPACK. Simply call on 0800 800 753, or email customer_services@boc.com

November 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 73

LIFESTYLE

EDUCATION

JUST SAY NO NZ sex education ‘experts’ don’t like it, but Frank Greve reports an abstinence push has had dramatic impact in the US

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.S. teen pregnancy and birth rates have plum- strong hunches about what has been happening. In many meted to all-time lows as more teenagers delay cases, statistics back them up. Among their theories: sex, abstain from it, use contraception and use More assertive girls it more effectively. Abortions also are down.

“Condoms used to be a guy thing, a guy’s choice, really,” The decline, to the lowest teen birth rates since national says Andrea Aumaitre, a sex-ed counselor at an inner-city tallies began in 1940, is a remarkable personal health reform, school since 1996. “Now our young ladies say, “I want sharper than U.S. declines in smoking or increases in seat-belt you to use a condom,’ or they carry condoms themselves.” use. Counselors who work with teenagers cite many factors Aumaitre and other Camden counselors said girls are more but give much credit to more cautious and assertive girls. cautious about sex nowadays because they are more am“A lot more of us are making our own sexual decisions. bitious. “They want to finish school, go to work, go on That way, you don’t get pushed around by your partner to college, and they believe pregnancy will get in their way.” who wants you to do more,” explains 17-year-old Anna Abstinence is up Bialek of New Jersey. “Of course, that can work both ways.” “Kids want to do the right thing, and most of them Whatever the reasons, teen pregnancies and births are understand deep down that sexual activity is an adult down about a third nationwide from their peaks in 1991, thing,” says Elayne Bennett, who founded the Washaccording to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and ington-based national abstinence-only program Best Prevention in Atlanta. If Friends Foundation in the 1991 rates had per1987. In Bennett’s view, Teen pregnancies and births are sisted, about 1.2 million abstinence pledges work more children would down about a third nationwide from because they deliver a have been born to teenclear message. The more their peaks in 1991 age mothers by 2004, tolerant approach, which Congress’ Joint Ecoshe characterized as nomic Committee estimated last year. “don’t do it, but here’s how to protect yourself when you “It’s a big success story,” says Dr. John Santelli, a Co- do do it,” confuses young people, she says. lumbia University public health professor and the lead Whatever the reason, the latest CDC survey reported author of a recent analysis of the decline. He attributes that roughly two-thirds of males aged 15 to 17 had about half the drop to teens saying no to intercourse. never had intercourse. In 1988, half hadn’t.

The other half, he says, is the result of their using con- Anxieties over AIDS and other sexually transmittraceptives more often and more efficiently. ted diseases are powerful motivators Despite these developments, the U.S. teen birth rate Terri Gosser, 47, a school counselor known as “the sex remains the highest in the industrialized world - twice lady” since 1992 to Pinelands junior and senior high Canada’s, for example, and five times France’s. In addi- students in the mostly white rural area around Tuckerton, tion, the rates of sexually transmitted diseases in the N.J., said having multiple partners used to be cool among United States are the highest in the industrialized world. her students, “for guys and girls, too.”

That said, the decline in pregnancy among American That’s changed, she said. “Now kids say the players teenagers is impressive: In 1990, 116 teens out of every are dirty. They don’t mean that they’re sluts,” Gosser thousand aged 15 to 19 became pregnant, according to adds. “It’s said with a hygienic implication.” The mesthe CDC. By 2000, just 85 did. More recent estimates of sage that condoms don’t protect against most sexually teen births suggest that the decline continues. transmitted diseases may also be starting to sink in, forcCounselors who have worked with teens have some ing kids to choose partners more carefully.

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Investigate welcomes submissions from readers for our Education column. Email contributions to editorial@investigatemagazine.com, and ensure they are no more than 1400 words

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November 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 75

LIFESTYLE

TECHNOLOGY

HOME NETWORKING Gene Koprowski analyses the relentless march to full home networking, and the boom it promises

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ew home developers – and Silicon Valley techA number of non-profit industry organizations are nology companies – are collaborating to striving to promote the networked home, including the bring consumers the “digital domicile,” a comContinental Automated Building Association (caba.org), pletely connected home, where TVs, iPods and other the Internet Home Alliance, (internethome alliance.com) appliances are all linked, finally taking the home netand the HomePlug Alliance (homeplug.org). working concept from theory to reality.

“Home-technology-integration firms are responding “While the smart home seems to be a valuable and conto the growing demand for integrating and troublevenient concept, there has yet to be widespread consumer shooting various home subsystems and enabling condemand for products found in the smart home,” reports sumers to take advantage of and fully enjoy the conthe study, “Networking Technology Brings Intelligence into nected home lifestyle,” Ostrowski says.

Today’s Smart Home,” by Research and Markets in Dublin, Technology developers are also moving in with new Ireland. “Factors such as pervasive Internet access, home products. Last week Motive Inc. in Austin, Texas, network growth, and the acceleration of broadband access debuted what is said to be the first end-to-end manto many homes are driving consumer awareness.” aged service meant to bridge a service provider’s wideThe idea of the smart home was popularized by area network to a subscriber’s local-area network, a comMicrosoft founder Bill Gates during the 1990s but genpany spokesman said. erally was perceived as a playNext January a firm called thing of the wealthy. Now, SpeakerCraft in Riverside, About 47 million U.S. however, blue-collar home deCalif., a maker of customized velopers, staffed with carpenarchitectural loudspeakers, is homes will have networking ters and electricians and colexpected to launch a new prodcapability within five years laborating with white-collar uct that will enable hometechno geeks, are integrating owners to network up to six the technologies into homes for ordinary people. iPods throughout their residence, all controlled by a digAccording to research by The Diffusion Group, a reital display that mounts on a wall, as if it were a light search consultancy in the US, about 47 million U.S. switch. homes will have networking capability within five years.

Another approach is being taken by a company called Meanwhile, consumers with older homes who want Coaxsys, in Los Gatos, Calif. The company employs the cool technology are either going to have to integrate existing coaxial TV cable to network a home. it themselves from a variety of off-the-shelf compo“Coaxsys’ TVnet technology has been deployed by nents or hire a systems integrator. over 60 U.S. service providers to date,” a Coaxsys spokes“Most homes are not yet equipped with a plug-andman said. play infrastructure of communication, entertainment, As a result of such technology deployments, as well as security and climate control products,” says Steven wireless LANs, SOHO routers, residential gateways and Ostrowski, a spokesman for CompTIA, the Computnetworked cameras, the market for home networking ing Technology Industry Association. “In many homes, equipment is expected to jump “from US$9 billion today cables and wires from home theaters, computers, to $20 billion by 2009,” according to Research and Markets. broadband connections and second phone lines hang Gene Koprowski is a 2005 Lilly Endowment Award off joists, drift across floors, or are crammed behind winner for his columns for United Press International, the big-screen TV – not exactly the image one has of the for whom he covers networking and telecommunica21st Century digital home.” tions. E-mail: sciencemail@upi.com

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November 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 77

LIFESTYLE

TOYBOX

IMAGE CONVERGENCE The ultimate desktop publishing package

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t had to happen, the competition has just gone supernova in the digital camera wars with Sony offering a thumping 10.3 Mega Pixel camera, the new Cyber-shot R1. When Investigate first moved to digital production four years ago, five Mega Pixels was considered state of the art for magazines and the cameras cost us the thick end of $5,000. Now, just in time for Christmas, you can get the Sony Cyber-shot R1 for less than $1,700. The camera features a 2.0" ‘free angle’ LCD display that folds flat and swivels, meaning the shooter can frame great images from a range of hard to get angles. In other words, versatility.

The R1 is also the first high-end camera with ‘live’ real-time preview allowing users to evaluate scene conditions and adjust image settings before taking the shot for 100% framing accuracy.

A grunty processor means images are saved swiftly – no waiting for the parachute to open on this baby – and Sony reckons its STAMINA technology will keep the R1 on form for longer, in their words: “incredible endurance for even the longest shooting sessions”.

It shoots like an SLR. Incidentally, the technical specs boast that the image quality from this camera is good enough for poster size full colour prints. I’m sold. Ask about the Cybershot R1 at your nearest camera retailer, we understand product hits the shelves in November.

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pson is targeting the small to medium business market with its latest laser printer – it’ll print in both colour and monochrome. The idea, says Epson, is to reduce capital outlay and demands on space, by combining two machines in one. The Aculaser 2600N has only just been released to the market, and delivers black and white pages at a Bathurst-pace 30 pages-per-minute, making it perfect for a networked office or home or for those jobs where speed is of the essence. The trick to its versatility (there’s that word again) lies in the toner cartridge ports. The machine has four. You can have one black cartridge and three colour (cyan, magenta and yellow) for a full colour set-up. Alternatively, you can plug in up to four black cartridges for a seriously high volume monochrome set-up. Insert the colour cartridges (and they’re hot swappable unlike inkjets) and you’ll get colour laser printing at 7.5 pages per minute. A backlit LCD wide panel screen will keep you informed of current toner cartridge levels and a myriad of other data. More details available on Epson’s website, www.epson.co.nz 78, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, November 2005

November 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 79

LIFESTYLE

FOOD & DRINK

FOR OUR OWN GOOD? Eli Jameson looks at our overzealous food regulation – but sees a glimmer of hope

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s anyone who has ever flown into Australia good food police, was an affront to both common sense knows, the rules for what can and cannot be and good taste. The problem was that it Roquefort cheese brought into the country are pretty strict. The is made with unpasteurized ewe’s milk (shock, horror), official obsession with food and drink and animals and and yet was considered a great delicacy. Thus banning it anything that can pass the lips may have valid reasons in was an easy call, satisfying both the nanny staters and the science, biology, and economics, but the seemingly-arbi- competition-shy domestic cheese industry. trary nature of what is and isn’t OK sometimes looks Australia’s Federal Parliamentary Secretary for Health more like an application of a secular state religion, Christopher Pyne MP explained the issue recently on always seeking purity and to keep out the unclean.

ABC Radio: ‘Before 1994, FSANZ had never done an (Once after returning from an extended holiday in the investigation into how the cheese was put together, the United States, I found myself at a quarantine desk in an circumstances, the production of it. In that intervening otherwise deserted Sydney Airport arrivals hall waiting time that has gone on, and it’s been determined that the for my golf clubs to be cleaned, lest a North American way the French make their cheese, of course, after many grass seed wedged in my 7-iron throw off the entire hundreds of years of making this cheese, is safe and Australian ecosystem. I chatted to the young woman good for consumers and the Trade Commissioner manning the station as I waited, and quizzed her about assures me this morning that there’d be no cases of different nationalities and what they’re notorious for Roquefort cheese causing illness in France in recorded smuggling. Japanese? history...after many ‘So honest they declare years of investigation, a stick of chewing gum’.

FSANZ has decided Australians can make their own Koreans? ‘They try and under the right circumdecisions about what cheeses they bring enough food for stances and with the eat. They’re grown up enough to their entire trip’. Ameriright warnings to concans? ‘Usually pretty sumers, that Australdetermine the risks they like to take good, but for some reaians can make their own and that we don’t believe it is danson American girls decisions about what always try and smuggle cheeses they eat. They’re gerous to Australian consumers a bottle of fat-free salad grown up enough to dressing in their backdetermine the risks they packs’, much like Australian backpackers who can be like to take and that we don’t believe it is dangerous to found nursing hangovers from Thailand to Turkey with Australian consumers.’ their own personal jar of Vegemite).

Amen to that. Now if only the Australian governBut while some bans make sense – the impending ment – never shy about sticking its nose into the bird flu crisis has customs officers around the world citizenry’s kitchen cupboards, among other places – could working hard to keep out any potentially-infected poul- take such an enlightened attitude about other food prodtry products – plenty of others do not. Which is why ucts. For one thing, while unpasteurized Roquefort is food lovers down under rejoiced last month when Food now OK, it’s pretty clear that other cheesemakers, both Standards Australia New Zealand finally lifted its ban foreign and domestic, will still not be allowed to make on that marvelously stinky French export, Roquefort or sell similar products on the Australian market. cheese. The ban, which represented an unholy alliance There are plenty of other bans that make little or no between protectionist farmers and the for-your-own- sense and which seem to exist only to give local produc-

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BLESSED ARE THE CHEESEMAKERS: But what about the beef hash corners? ers a leg-up. Prosciutto and other fantastic cured meats are generally not permitted; Aussies have to make do with local substitutes. Less-celebrated delicacies – tinned American corned beef hash (trust me on this), for example – are also barred from Australian soil. According to the rules, any product that contains more than 10 per cent dairy or 5 per cent meat requires a special permit, applied for by the manufacturer in the home country. It’s a time-consuming process, and one with which smaller makers overseas simply won’t bother, even if large corporations will. Thus local production is protected, local palates denied.

All this isn’t to say that there aren’t some great Australian cheesemakers, ham-curers, and so on – there are. But as Christopher Pyne says, shouldn’t we be adult enough to make our own decisions?

The same thing goes for many products that aren’t available to Australian consumers thanks to one or another regulation. While French foie gras – the liver of specially-fattened geese or ducks – is banned due to bird flu and other concerns (fair enough), the production of the stuff locally is also illegal, thanks to the radical animal rights lobby.

Which is a shame, since farmers in the United States have proved that the French hardly have a monopoly on this delicacy. The ban also denies chefs the pleasure of magret de canard, the especially-flavourful breasts from these specially fattened ducks. Instead, we have to make do with the semi-cooked tinned stuff.

Similarly, hanging game for a week or two in the European manner is forbidden, despite the fact that bacteria are killed at 60 degrees C, and no game goes in the oven at under 200 degrees C. Real salami? Also a no-no; authorities require a ‘starter culture’ be used which adversely affects the taste of artisinal salamis.

All this calls for a radical re-think in how we think about freedom and food. What is more personal and intimate than what we put in our bodies to feed ourselves, or give to our families? No wonder

dietary regulations are such a big part of so many religions, especially those that emerged from the desert where preservation is such an issue. Warning labels are one thing, but not allowing consumers the freedom to make up their own minds is quite another. As Pyne says, we’re all adults; let’s eat like it.

ROQUEFORT TERRINE In celebration of the lifting of the Roquefort ban, why not get cooking with it? Make a Roquefort dressing or mayonnaise for salads or burgers on the grill; use it in sauces, or just enjoy it on its own. Or try this Roquefort terrine, adapted from The Palms restaurant in South Carolina.

You’ll need: 250 grams Roquefort, crumbled 125 grams unsalted butter, softened1/4 cup plus 1 tablespoon coarsely chopped walnuts, toasted 2 teaspoons coarsely ground black pepper.

To make: Purée half of cheese with butter in a food processor. Transfer purée to a bowl and fold in remaining cheese, 1/4 cup nuts, and pepper. Spoon into a small crock and smooth top. Chill, covered, at least 2 hours to allow flavors to blend.

Before serving, let terrine soften about 30 minutes, then sprinkle top with remaining tablespoon nuts.

Accompaniment: baguette toasts or crackers

November 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 81

LIFESTYLE

HEALTH

CRITICAL THINKING The brain is a marvelous thing – but it can also play tricks on us (for our own good, of course)

H Claire Morrow

ave you ever felt badly blue, critically assessed cal thinkers. Some try to think well, and some don’t your life and thought, Of course I’m depressed! bother, but the results have been in for years. We are lousy Anyone would be under these circumstances!, and at critical thinking. Our brain wants us to feel good. It tells then gone to bed, or for a walk, or for coffee, or what- us lies so that we do. We can’t all be ‘above average’. ever it is that you do, and felt better?

People believe weird things. Few of us understand ‘Oh’, you thought, ‘it was the night/the weather/ statistics (a subject which should be taught in detail in the deadline/the head lice that made me temporarily primary school), and I have seen grown adults coninsane. I love my life. Could use a little bit of tweaking fronted with the phrase, ‘show me a double blind study’ at the edges, maybe, but nothing major.’ look up with big puppy dog eyes and say, ‘I don’t know Most of us have felt exactly this way at one time or what that means, but I’ve heard amazing stories so I another. And if you don’t feel worse than this, than know it’s true’. guess what? You are not depressed. Instead, you’ve just And actually, even if we try not to believe weird things, suffered from a mild delusion – but that’s normal. they still slip through. Imagine you’re a doctor. In all In fact, your life is always going to be slightly worse probability you or your work subscribes to a couple of than you think. That’s right. You are less moral, less journals about interesting medical stuff. You probably reasonable, less kind, less lucky and less smart than you get digests of popular journals sent to your email think. Aren’t we all. If you were depressed you would address. Drug reps bring pens and reports. All together, feel lousy most days, we are talking about and if this went on for hundreds of studies a Anecdotes aren’t evidence. They’re more than two weeks week here. To keep up you would be well adto date, you will only stories. We all suffer the placebo vised to go and see read the interesting ones effect, and what a blessing that is a doctor. in detail, and if they But if you’re not de‘seem right’ and conpressed then you’re not a good judge of how things are firm what you know to be true, you won’t dig around going. The depressed – aside from being tedious nega- to be sure the study was done well. This is a self-serving tive-Nellies – are better judges in some areas of critical bias. You see what you expect to see. And if a study thinking than the rest of us. The rest of us are opti- comes out tomorrow showing irrefutably that smokmists because it gets us through the day. ing is good for you, everyone will look at it, squint at it, How smart do you think you are? A bit above aver- and say, ‘well, I just don’t believe that’. age? Isn’t everyone. I have done less-than-perfectly in Here’s an example of how this works. Studies have exams because I was tired, anxious, pregnant, shown, repeatedly, that Echinacea really does nothing overqualified, didn’t study at all, missed the lecture, or for the common cold. Nothing. One study showed it the questions were stupid. I have never done worse actually made colds worse, but that was an errant finding. than I expected in an exam because more than half the I’ve been watching the Echinacea phenomenon for ten people who took it were smarter than me. Like everyone years now, and every time it is proven not to work, else, I am smarter than average. I don’t know where the someone says ‘the dose they used in the study was too half of people on the wrong side of the intelligence bell low, too high, preserved in alcohol, or brewed under a curve are hiding, but clearly no one has told them yet. waning moon so of course it didn’t work…but for just We – excluding the floridly delusional and the $50 I can hand-bottle the perfect dose for you’. depressed – who are neurologically normal are poor critiIt still doesn’t work.

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Vitamin C also doesn’t work, at least not in the 2,000 mg-an-hour school of cold-fighting. The anti-viral flu injection doesn’t have as much promise as was hoped ten years ago. We all make mistakes, and we like to see things that aren’t there so long as they make us feel good.

Conventional medicine is fallible, but it does get the message eventually. Conventional medicine makes errors, isn’t always skeptical enough (of drug companies), is perhaps overly-critical of herbal wisdom, but it tends eventually to get with the program. Show it enough studies and it says, ‘well…OK’.

Unfortunately people with a vested interest in something that can be proved to be false (homeopathy, for example) have, by definition, a vested interest in maintaining their point of view. True believers will never be convinced, or at least the majority won’t. Bad No good Western Medicine comes off a little better, because it is based in science which is true (I mean, specifically that it has a plausible congruent hypothesis which could be – but hasn’t been – disproven. That being a damn fine definition of a scientific fact). That this is, so the beliefs of your local GP are only nominally threatened when they read that they have been prescribing and believing in an antiarthritis drug that provides as much pain relief as panadol, and kills then odd person. They feel fo0olish at first; then their brain tells them they couldn’t possibly have known , then they feel better about themselves and their profession, and make a note to be cautious with arthritis management in future. If a homeopath sees a study that shows the whole thing is junk science (and doesn’t work, to boot) they have a lot to loose by accepting this. So they don’t. They become a little paranoid and delusional, which is bad, but they get to keep their jobs and their belief in themselves.

Which is good. I suppose.

Anecdotes aren’t evidence. They’re stories. We all suffer the placebo effect, and what a blessing that is. The human brain abhors a vacuum.

We like to feel useful. ‘Magical thinking’ is the phrase that describes believing in magical things because we don’t like to know how little we know. Magical thinking describes at times a schizophrenic’s reasoning, but it also explains our tendency to attribute cause and effect where there isn’t any. ‘I feel better because I took vitamin C’ really means, ‘the less I know about vitamin C or the cold virus, the more I see the connection’. I don’t know much about computers, but I like to feel smart, so I can gather erroneous information to form a belief about why it won’t do what I want it to. We all do this. But it doesn’t make it right.

The human brain selectively remembers information to support beliefs that support you. This is why there is no point trying to argue someone into or out of religious beliefs. They will accept your arguments only if they are receptive to them, in which case, they are susceptible to believing you and it is in their interest to do so. And yet, the letters page…

You recall the two times in your life that you intuitively thought of a person not thought of for years, only to run into them, or hear they’ve died. Because you like the idea of having spiritual powers and being intuitive. You fail to recall the four million times that you have thought of a person out of the blue, and never saw them, heard from them, or thought of them again. Great dinner party stopper: ‘I had this desire to look up this guy from school – and then a week later I heard he had died!’ Would you believe that the statistical probability that that would occur by chance is really high?

Just another trick of our wonderful, if sometimes deluded, brains.

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LIFESTYLE

SCIENCE

MUTANT STRAINS Researchers are discovering what makes us the same – and different – thanks to genetic mistakes, reports Faye Flam

ust an eyeblink ago in evolutionary time, the ances- land bridge from Asia into North America, how quickly tors of all six billion of us lived together in Africa. they traversed the continent, where they might have lived This has become well-established science, thanks to before reaching New England, and with which tribes DNA evidence. Now, DNA is revealing a never-before- they are most closely related.

Schurr says he and his colleagues want to sample memtold history of humanity, filling in the details of our spread over the planet, taking over where archaeological bers of indigenous groups because they are less records leave off. How did different groups populate ‘admixed’ than, say, the typical person living in PhiladelAfrica? How did some manage to travel by land and sea phia. Researchers need the help of people such as the to Australia as early as 60,000 years ago? Who made it to Amish, or Micronesians or Kalahari bushmen because more is already known about how long they’ve occuthe Americas and when?

Last month, anthropologist Theodore Schurr of the pied their homelands and where they lived before, thanks University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology to linguistics, archaeology and history.

Groups that tend to intermarry also provide clearer and Anthropology took DNA samples from members of the Seaconke Wampanoag, a tribe that once thrived branches on the human family tree. Those with more in Rhode Island and Massachusetts – and helped the diverse ancestry may carry bits of genetic material from those branches but scientists don’t yet know how to Pilgrims celebrate the first Thanksgiving in 1621. recognize them.

Their DNA sampling Previous attempts to marked the start of a do such testing failed to worldwide undertaking Aboriginal Australians refuse to gain the trust of enough called the Genographic be involved, he says, and he doubts indigenous people.

Project. Run by National the Genographic people will But Schurr says he’s Geographic, the project only testing groups who aims to test 100,000 peochange their minds volunteer to help, such as ple from around the the Seaconke Wampaworld. Schurr heads the North American branch. Members of the Seaconke noag, who approached leaders of the project. Eventually, wanted to know more about their genealogy but were Schurr says, his part of the project could help answer limited by a lack of written records, says Michael Markley, many lingering questions: Did different waves of people the tribe’s chairman. Oral knowledge was lost when the migrate to America? How big were the founding groups?

Pilgrims went to war against the tribe in 1676 and, aided How and when did they spread through the Arctic, the American Southeast, Central America, the Caribbean? by other colonists, killed all but a few survivors.

Meanwhile, others participating in the research are seekMarkley says he saw a write-up on the project in National Geographic magazine and sought out the ing willing indigenous volunteers around the world. chance to get involved and learn more about the distant The project, headed by Spencer Wells of National Geographic, will take about five years and will rely on the past of his people.

‘We have 400 years of written history’, he says. ‘In the computing power of partner IBM and $50 million in end, when this comes to completion, there’s maybe private funding.

The idea owes its roots to the thinking of Italian 40,000 years of history.’

Archaeology suggests his people came from Siberia geneticist Luigi Cavalli-Sforza. In the 1950s, he used around 20,000 years ago. Their DNA could eventually blood types to determine relationships between the reveal more precisely when their ancestors crossed the people of Europe, Asia, Africa, the Americas, Australia

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and New Zealand. After moving to Stanford University in the early 1970s, he started gathering genetic clues. We all carry many harmless copying errors, called mutations, in our DNA, and how many of these we share with someone else tells something of how closely we’re related.

The first bit of DNA studied was called mitochondrial DNA, which is carried by eggs but not sperm, thereby following maternal lines.

By comparing copying errors in volunteers from around the world and estimating how long it takes them to accumulate, researchers estimate that human beings share common ancestors who lived in Africa about 60,000 years ago. Similar studies with the Y-chromosome follow male lines and also lead to a recent African origin.

Around 1990, Cavalli-Sforza dreamed of a project to fill in the details of our family tree using DNA from indigenous people. He launched a proposal called the Human Genome Diversity Project, whose goals were almost identical to those of today’s Genographic Project.

The diversity project was to go along with the much larger effort to sequence the human genome, sampling a small number of people.

Cavalli-Sforza’s research aimed to look at how human genes varied among many people of diverse ethnic origins.

Controversy soon erupted when indigenous groups protested that they would be taken advantage of. It became known as the ‘vampire’ project.

Yale geneticist Kenneth Kidd, one of the project’s founders, says he has never fully understood what went wrong. ‘There was a huge amount of misunderstanding.’ At the time, scientists were starting to take out patents on human genes. ‘Indigenous populations say you’re out to steal our unique genes, patent them, and make lots of money.’

Others were suspicious, he says, because U.S. companies had taken crop seeds from them, creating higher-yield versions and selling them with no profit to those who bred the originals.

The National Science Foundation never funded the effort and it

died, much to the disappointment of scientists who say it was a lost opportunity to understand ourselves, break down barriers, and perhaps even fight racism.

Some researchers from the original diversity project continued with lower-key work. Yale’s Kidd has been tracing human history using samples from 44 groups including Finns, Irish, Danes, Eastern Europeans, Yemenite Jews, Ethiopians, Cambodians, Japanese, Koreans and Micronesians, among others. Aboriginal Australians refuse to be involved, he says, and he doubts the Genographic people will change their minds.

Schurr says National Geographic will use the project to build up a fund intended to protect indigenous groups. To raise those funds, the researchers are offering anyone a chance to have their DNA ancestry read for $100. It’s not meant to be a complete genealogy – just a sketch of some very distant ancestry that may become more complete as the project continues. It might tell you, for example, that 10,000 years ago some very distant ancestors came from the Caucasus into Northern Europe, or moved from Central Asia to India.

Like the defunct diversity project before it, this effort deals with the delicate issues of religion and race. In 1999, when a genetics project claimed that today’s Chinese migrated from Africa through Southeast Asia and north to China, it didn’t fit with Chinese textbooks that traced the Han majority back a million years in China. But the finding also demolished the prevalent Han belief they were racially ‘purer’ than those from Chinese minority groups.

DNA analysis already has shown that skin color and other traits we associate with race are much more superficial than previously thought ZUMA and emerged only in the last few tens of thousands of years, Schurr says.

‘The important thing to remind people of is, despite our differences, we share a common heritage.’

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LIFESTYLE

TRAVEL

AMAZON IMMERSION Richard Scheinin visits a treetop eco-lodge as he explores the untamed river

O

It was about the strangest thing I’d ever seen: five N THE RIO NEGRO, BRAZIL – I was for tunate while in the Amazon to have Michael circular towers that resemble lopsided wedding cakes, Kartwright as my guide. Ex-gold miner, topped with tin roofs painted in tropical blues and ex-diver, and ex-cowboy – a “legendary Third World greens, all linked by long, narrow wooden catwalks that fixer,” I’d been told, a man who would open doors, swayed slightly as the swelling river’s waters lapped betake me anywhere I wanted to go, and, best of all, edu- neath them. The place brought to mind a primitive space cate me about what I was seeing. I envisioned Kartwright station, and all the visitors who had accompanied us on our 60km ride from Manaus grew silent as the ferry as some kind of wild man.

But here he was aboard a small ferryboat chugging glided through the shady creeks that crisscross the miles from Manaus, the Amazonian metropolis of two mil- of hotel property. We slid past a soccer field that floats lion, toward a distant portion of jungle, and he was on pontoons and a 20-metre reinforced, wooden tower instead the epitome of erudition and charm. He was 51, that guests must climb to reach “Tarzan’s House” – a spark plug of a man. Born in Guyana to parents of Ariau’s version of a penthouse suite. I’d spent the preEast Indian descent, he spoke in a clipped staccato rush vious two weeks in Rio de Janeiro and Salvador, big that reminded me of rapid rhythms coaxed from a tabla cities with generic big-city hotels, and I was immediately charmed by the fact that Ariau (pronounced AH-ree-ahdrum by a master musician.

Crossing the Rio Negro, which seemed wide as an OO) was pleasingly out-of-kilter, almost jerry-built, it ocean, he held forth on Amazonia’s geologic history, on seemed, yet somehow durable and waiting to give me an adventure. tectonic plates and tribuThe “eco-lodge” was tary sources, on indigEarlier that day, Kartwright had told designed in the midenous tribes, dolphins, `80s by an influential reptiles and fish, includme that he enjoys swimming in this lawyer and financier in ing the 500 types of catlake, because caimans “rarely attack.”

Manaus, Francisco Ritta fish that swim the rivers here. Cracking open We all take risks, I suppose. I rode the Bernardino, who is also a remarkable and quirky a couple beers and handNew York City subways for years artist and architect. In ing me one, he said 1982, the oceanogracheerily that the largest catfish is the piraiba, which can grow to more than six pher Jacques Cousteau had told Bernardino that he feet and has been known to drag swimming children to would capture a lucrative market with a hotel such as the bottoms of rivers and swallow them whole. this, built from strong-as-iron tropical woods, and drawKartwright also explained why I wasn’t being consumed ing water for its showers and swimming pools from by mosquitoes: The Rio Negro’s waters, dark as leather, artesian wells. The hotel does its best to enhance the are loaded with decaying vegetative matter and tannic jungle; garbage is still burned to ashes and used as fertilizer or fed to pigs at a farm upriver. There is almost no acid, which makes it hard for the bugs to survive.

This absence of bugs was delighting me as was the visible concrete or plastic.

Kartwright was hired several years ago to direct a staff temperature – a righteous heat, cleansing but not killing – as we passed through the Rio Negro’s narrowest strait of 15 guides at Ariau. Even before I had a chance to and approached our destination. There it was, straight wash up, he wanted to show me a few things. There was ahead: the Ariau Amazon Towers, a treetop hotel rising the thatched, open-air “cultural center” where Olivia Newton-John once led a couple hundred guests in song. from the jungle canopy.

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There was the floating menagerie – actually, an animal rescue operation for indigenous birds, cats and monkeys – that had fascinated actress Susan Sarandon a few months earlier. (Kartwright, naturally, was her guide.)

I couldn’t help noticing that the catwalks were crawling with monkeys – gray woolly monkeys, each about two feet tall, leaping about like squirrels to the delight of arriving children. I had been warned that these monkeys like to open unlocked doors and destroy the possessions of guests. Kartwright called them “happy, but mischievous.” He also pointed out a couple of small, skinny spider monkeys, and told me that they are fertile only two months a year (“Man should be like that; we’d have a whale of a time!”). He led me to the dining hall for a massive buffet lunch of catfish stew, salads, beans, chicken dishes and coconut flan. Then he sent me to my room, where I found that the air conditioning wasn’t working, turned on a fan, peeled off my clothes, checked out the jungle vistas and plopped down on my bed for a nap.

Above my head, I spotted a piece of paper tacked to the wall. On it were printed 11 “Rules for Hotel.” I concentrated on No. 7: “Do not swim or play in the water close to the hotel; there are big caimans around.”

After my nap, I dodged the monkeys and hurried to meet Kartwright in the breezy lobby. I’m a religion writer and, in a series of e-mails a few weeks earlier, I had asked him if he might arrange a meeting with a local Indian shaman of the Tariano tribe. I was particularly interested in learning about the indigenous tradition of using a natural hallucinogen called ayahuasca as a means to access the spirit world for divination and healing. I thought this was a fairly exotic request, but Kartwright wrote back, “No problem!” And now we were about to go meet the shaman.

We headed up the Ariau River – a tributary of the Rio Negro – in a

small outboard, passing miles of flooded forest, waving to families who live in tiny cabins perched on stilts. After about an hour, Kartwright pulled our river taxi onto a small beach of orange-brown clay and there he was, the shaman, hands stuffed shyly into the pockets of his shorts. He shook our hands, then motioned for us to sit on a couple of tree stumps. I should feel free to ask any questions I wanted, he told Kartwright, who translated. The shaman called himself Caree.

He broke off a branch from a nearby bush; this was the caapi vine, from which the hallucinogenic tea is derived. It is ritually pounded and ground to form the basis for the brew, which is extraordinarily powerful and was used ceremonially in the village where he grew up, hundreds of kilometers upriver. Here, near Ariau, he lives with only a few family members and feels very distant from tribal rituals like those involving the caapi vine. In fact, many Indians along the river have become evangelical Christians, abandoning ayahuasca and much else.

We were sitting in front of a thatch-roofed, dirt-floored house. On the planks of its outer walls there were swirling patterns painted with thick clay-based pigments of pink, black and ocher. The patterns practically vibrated. Caree said they were representations of the demonic visions one sometimes sees under the influence of ayahuasca. Entranced as a young man, he once saw waves of blood rolling toward him. He struggled to pass through the blood – and then met his father, dead 15 years, who calmed his fears and recited the tenets of right living to his son. Caree wasn’t sad or dramatic as he told his stories. He smiled easily, fine lines creasing his copper skin. It occurred ZUMA by to me that the shaman, 65 years old, was happy to be distracted strangers on this quiet, drizzly afternoon.

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We talked for about an hour, thanked him, and headed back down river. It was almost dusk and I noticed that the remaining light was playing on the water in funny ways. It was setting off patterns of undulating shadows in the dark moving waters – rocking, spiraling patterns that looked a lot like the ones painted on Caree’s house.

There was a similar surreal quality to many of our outings. One night at 11, we boarded the outboard and headed out under a full moon into the flooded forest. Kartwright brought along two young guides to help him lasso the crocodile-like caimans that he hoped to catch.

We putt-putted through narrow forest passageways, brushing against hanging branches of massive trees, and listened to the night sounds of the jungle. No one spoke. One guide sat in the back of the boat, navigating, while the other, named Levi, stood silhouetted beneath the moon at the front of the craft. He held up a flashlight, which he planned on using to blind the caimans.

Then we emerged from the forest into a large lake. We listened to a frog song – high-pitched chirping that sounded like the squeaky sounds of samba drums. The moon and a million stars illuminated the lake.

Floating hyacinths abounded. Levi’s light accented the outlines of denuded trees, their branches poking out akimbo above the surface of the water. It was eerie, a midnight theme park in the middle of nowhere.

We approached the banks of the lake now, making plenty of noise to scare up a caiman or two. Levi leaned precariously over the edge of the boat, peering into the waters.

“Stay there!” Mike shouted at me. He leaped to Levi’s side with a rope in his hand and, before I knew it, was trying to get the lasso around a caiman’s neck. There was a lot of splashing and thrashing.

Kartwright was laughing; he shouted that the critter was “only” two metres. But it got away. This happened two or three times. The caimans were wily tonight. Finally, we settled for a baby – less than two feet long

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and looking a bit frightened, it thrashed about in Kartwright’s grip, then settled down. My guide explained that its tail was “good eating.”

Then he held forth, alternating English and Portuguese, on the animal’s metabolism. It has a variable heart rate that it controls “like a yoga master.” This white caiman – which Kartwright released into the water a few minutes later – can live to an age of 65 or 70 years and grow to nine feet in length, he said. The more formidable black caimans can live a century and reach six metres.

“Last year,” he said, “one came up slowly behind a fisherman on the bank, knocked him in the water with its tail, and killed him.”

Earlier that day, Kartwright had told me that he enjoys swimming in this lake, because caimans “rarely attack.” We all take risks, I suppose. I rode the New York City subways for years.

But I grew a little uneasy one morning when Kartwright told me quietly that an anaconda had slithered out of the water somewhere on the hotel grounds and coiled itself around a gray woolly monkey.

“Sank the monkey, drowned the monkey, ate the monkey.”

Still, as my visit went on, I wondered if some of these Amazonian risks I’d been hearing about were mere titillation for tourists. After all, I was in the hands of pros. Ariau wasn’t going to let me get hurt. I was having an orchestrated adventure, and that was fine with me.

I spent much of my time like the other guests, benignly soaking up the heat and the astonishingly glorious surroundings. Kartwright took me miles out into the middle of the Rio Negro at sunrise, where we were quickly surrounded by a school of leaping, gray dolphins. He took me for a walk in the rain forest, hacking and scraping at vines so that he could deliver a walking lecture on ethnobotany. This vine cures menstrual cramps. That one relieves drunkenness.

One morning, toucans shot past us on the river as we headed toward a local village. Kartwright was telling a story about Bill Gates – he stayed at Ariau a couple years ago, arriving in a private yacht with a security contingent – when he spotted something high up in a towering tree. He pulled the boat to the river bank, pointed way up into the branches at a basking iguana, and started slamming the water with a paddle. The ruckus startled the animal, big as a dog, so that it divebombed from 20 metres up, disappearing into the water with a great splash.

These were good times.

I grew to particularly love the trips through the winding passages of the flooded forest. Kartwright knew them inside out.

He knew where to fish for piranhas.

We stopped one afternoon, deep in the forest, in a passage where the water was ink-black and motionless. We could hear a pack of howler monkeys in the distance, thrashing and hooting through the treetops.

One minute, the flooded forest was noisy like that. The next, it was totally silent.

Kartwright handed me a bamboo pole with a string and hook attached to it.

He handed one to Levi, who accompanied us on most expeditions, then took one for himself.

Fishing for piranhas turned out to be easy, and I’m no fisherman.

All you do is attach a piece of gizzard to the hook, flick the string into the jet-black water and – bam! bam! bam! – the piranhas hit.

I quickly pulled in one of the mean little suckers. It was surprisingly small – maybe five inches long - for a fish that inspires so much dread.

Levi and Kartwright pulled them in one after another. Pretty soon we had a pile of piranhas on the bottom of the boat.

That night in the dining room, I had a surprise.

As we sat down to dinner, the chef arrived at our table with a large, steaming bowl of soup. Half a dozen red-bellied beasts floated on the surface. They were piranhas. I blanched. Kartwright looked me straight in the eyes. “Lovely eating,” he said with a smile. “Dig in.”

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LIFESTYLE

BOOKCASE

SUMMER THRILLERS Michael Morrissey overdoses on banned substances, psychopathic killers and the world’s best assassins

NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN

By Cormac McCarthy, Picador, $34.95

Michael Morrissey

A decade or so ago, bookseller-turned-successful-novelist Nigel Cox used to encourage me to read a Cormac McCarthy and for some reason I resisted. I’ve finally made the plunge and have to report back with respect and appreciation. Risking a generalisation that could probably be punctured by numerous exceptions, one could categorise American writers stylistically in three camps – baroque (Faulkner), meticulous (Updike) and laconic (Hemingway). McCarthy definitely belongs to the Hemingway school complete to straightforwardly constructed sentences with phrases frequently joined to each other by the conjunction “and” – Ernest’s famous trademark. The great advantage of such a style is that after a while it becomes seamless and acts as a window, offering a clear view of what’s on display.

And just what is on display? An assortment of familiar Good Guys and Bad Guys – a ruthless efficient psychopathic killer (Anton Chigurh), a philosophically ruminative law officer (Sheriff Bell), a lone hunter (Llewelyn Moss) plus $2 million worth of heroin money and a trail of dead bodies. It’s excellent film material and a riveting read for that spare wet afternoon.

The novel is told at rapid page-turner pace making skilful use of a threepronged point of view, and the employment of an almost stream of consciousness style affected by omitting punctuation marks from speech – a device often encountered before but seldom deployed with such adroitness.

The technique is done with such mastery, at times you would swear the characters are inside your head. Like many American writers, McCarthy can describe detail – particularly those of firearms with confident and exact detail: “The pistol had been fitted with a silencer sweated onto the barrel. The silencer was made out of mapp-gas burners

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fitted into a hairspray can and the whole thing stuffed with fibreglass roofing insulation and painted flat black”.

Chigurh is as chilling a killer as can be encountered in crime fiction yet I was disappointed we didn’t reach a climactic showdown scene between him and the persistent and under-rated sheriff. Nevertheless, in the way of a good western, justice is seen to be done and the sheriff gets the last word.

SHOCKWAVE: The Countdown to Hiroshima

By Stephen Walker, John Murray, $45 Even today descriptions of the effects of the world’s first atomic bomb read like science fiction: “a piece of faintly radioactive trinite, the strange, greenish, bombblasted earth”. Then there is the surreal contrast between the weird unearthly beauty of the explosion in the air and the inhuman misery it causes to those human beings unfortunate enough to be annihilated, radioactivity-sickened or hideously scarred by its force on the ground beneath. Beauty might not be the word that first springs to mind when the scientists themselves referred to it as The Beast, The Gadget, The Thing, The Device – and never the atomic bomb. Dan Hornig, who designed the electric trigger for the New Mexico explosion, saw it thus – “... the most astonishing spectacle was the colours, a glorious riot of luminescent pinks, and blues and greens spilling out of the cloud before themselves unfolding whole spectra of new colours, until the sky became one vast and dazzling fireworks display”.

Accompanying the “fireworks” was the most elaborate complex of instrument ever devised for a single scientific experiment – the array included crusher gauges, geophones, seismographs, gamma sentinels, peak pressure gauges, piezoelectric gauges, sulfur threshold detectors, impulse meters, ionization

chambers, and “a hundred kind of other instruments”.

The bomb had been fast tracked over three years – a wartime escalation of a project that might have taken 10-20 years in peacetime that is skilfully detailed in this gripping book.

The first atomic bomb was more than just a fireworks display, more than just the largest explosion in history. According to Enrico Fermi, a leading physicist, it could have set fire to the atmosphere and destroyed the world - a fear that luckily was unfounded. And it was about to become the world’s most terrible weapon.

The build up to the first wartime use on Hiroshima is done with thriller-like expertise in the New Journalism style – from shifting inner viewpoints of the lead characters. We read of the battle of personalities between the bulky near teetotaller, anti-smoker, workefficient General Groves and the lean, chainsmoking martini-drinking Oppenheimer, director of the nuclear device-aimed laboratory.

The shifting point of view includes several Japanese – most notably Dr Shuntaro Hida, army physician, whose anti-military sympathies made him subject to investigation by the Japanese secret police. What this book vividly achieves is the bizarre contrast between the scientific anxiety and triumph, and airforce ingenuity in delivering the bomb, and the tranquil unsuspecting lives of the about-to-be incinerated victims going about their normal routines on a brilliant blue day. Leo Szilard, another leading scientist of the day, wanted to demonstrate the bomb on a deserted island but his views were ignored As part of the nuclear strategy, Hiroshima had been spared bomb attacks to measure the proper extent of the blast – so a plan to “complete” the job with an incendiary raid was not acted upon. In an act of bizarre cruelty, the notion of sounding a loud siren so that everyone who looked up would have been blinded by the flash was considered, but thankfully rejected. Though the Americans only had two bombs completed by August 1945, there were plans to make a further 23 by the end of the year. The wonder of it is that the Japanese high command were still evenly divided on the issue of surrender. The Japanese attitude to death is bewilderingly different from the western perspective - “Would it not be wondrous,” asked General Anami, war minister, “for this whole nation to be destroyed like a beautiful flower?” The emperor ended the

deadlock by casting the majority vote to surrender.

Was dropping the bomb justified? This is one of those endless moral debates that are difficult or impossible to resolve. From the American military point of view, it was justified – they were planning a mass landing of 750,000 troops with an estimated 31,000 casualties in the first month and many more to follow. The atomic bombs, of course, were dropped without any American casualties. From a humanitarian point of view, justification always looks bad to untenable. Let be it noted that Hiroshima was always a military target over 40,000 troops were stationed there – and the two nuclear bombs effectively ended the war in the Pacific. Astonishingly, there has been no further military use of atomic weapons something for which we can all be grateful.

Interestingly enough, Tibbets, unrepentant pilot of the Enola Gay, the B-29 plane that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, is still alive aged 90, as are several of the Japanese survivors alluded to in the book, including Shantaro Hida. A re-union seems unlikely.

THE PLANETS

By Dava Sobel, Fourth Estate, $36 Never judge a book by its cover – thus goes an ancient adage. But this time judging a book by its cover would be good idea. The cover is beautiful, superb, entrancing. Rendered in orange, umber, gold and brown with touches of other hues in an astrological motif, it has a hole symbol of peering through a telescope perhaps – through which we glimpse half of Saturn, most beautiful of planets. Peel back the cover and we find the nine planets emblazoned on the book itself.

And does the book match up to the cover?

I am happy to report, affirmative. Ms Sobel, already well known for her books Longitude and Galileo’s Daughter, writes like an angel from the heavenly spheres which she is given to inhabiting. As an adolescent, I had a bookish interest in astronomy, though oddly enough I never owned or looked through a telescope.

Reading about the planets, solar system and beyond, seemed sufficient to quench my in-

terest. Then science fiction annexed my imagination and real astronomy took a back seat for a while With Ms Sobel as my guide, I have been able to re-connect with the solar system and bring my Patrick Moore circa 1950s picture up to date.

It was a revelation therefore to learn that beyond Pluto lie some 700 “trans-Neptunian objects”; that Pluto risks demotion from planetary status to one of the aforementioned TNOs – this possibility sparked off by the 1992 discovery of another small dark cold object (Charon) backed up by Pluto’s “shrinkage”, its original estimated diameter of 3600 miles now down to 1500 miles. I was relieved to have it Sobel-confirmed that Disney’s dopey dog Pluto, was named after the planet and not the other way round. If Pluto was once a far and remote object, its remoteness has been hugely surpassed by the latest member of the Solar System – Sedna, half as big as our moon and revolving around the sun at a staggering 83 billion miles and taking 10,000 years to complete an orbit around the sun. Beyond Sedna, Sobel tells us, astronomers expect to find a sphere containing trillions of small celestial objects. Truly is our solar system a wondrous place.

I was gobsmacked to read that a single carat of Moon rock sold in 1993 for $442,500, making it the most expensive real estate on earth. Everybody knows that Saturn has rings but how many know that Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune also have rings?

Though the latter groups are far less spectacular.

Prediction plays a big part in astronomy. Lowell, of Martian canals fame, predicted Pluto and Kuiper predicted trans-Neptunian objects. I predict there will never be a McDonalds on Mars but there may turn out to be a restaurant at the end of the galaxy. Watch this space.

THE DEVIL’S PICNIC

By Taras Grescoe, MacMillan, $34.95 We all have our ideas of wickedness, kicking over the traces, being rebellious etc. Here’s Taras Grescoe’s list : “a shot of 186-proof moonshine from a bootlegger in Norway.

Then we’ll have crackers and cheese: narcotic poppy-seed biscuits banned in Singapore, spread with reeking five-week-old Epoisses ..” These little treats are rounded off with a swing or two of absinthe, a puff on a Cuban cigar, some bull’s balls from Brussels, lashNovember 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 91

ings of Chocolat Mousseux and a cup of Mate de Coca.

The only treat that the intrepid Grescoe does not try is Pentobarbital Sodium, a guaranteed lethal cocktail used in Switzerland for legal euthanasia.

Despite his love of illegal naughtiness, there’s more at stake here than just imbibing either forbidden or highly exotic /potent substances/dishes. Grescoe explores the psychology of banning and the attitudes of the particular cultures involved. He makes the interesting point that it was only when North American Indians “observed the way European fur traders used drunkenness as a pretext for raping women, or ax-murdering competitors did they realise alcohol’s reputation as a toxic inhibitor could be exploited for its excuse value”. In other words what we often consider to be ipso facto automatic drunken behaviour is learned behaviour. Accordingly, “culture is the more significant predictor of how an individual will behave”. When he actually – almost at chapter’s end – tries the dreaded bootleg Hjemmebrent - probably the world’s most alcoholic drink - he reports thus: “You were sober, then you were drunk. It was grim, goaloriented, and a little sad.” Quite so.

Notwithstanding a certain juvenile inclination to shock, a mild penchant for emulating Hunter S. Thompson in miniature, Grescoe’s real agenda is to discuss the societies involved – what they ban or tolerate, the social consequences of indulgence, the culture’s mores and attitudes and so forth. At heart, it’s a serious document though initially it comes on as gourmet Gonzo journalism. Thus said, there is wry amusement to be had at Singapore’s expense. Banning poppy seed biscuits is consistent with anti-opium laws but sounds overly cautious when the author informs us that 600 packets would be needed to produce any effect. Other items banned in Singapore include chewing gum, firecrackers, gold-foilwrapped chocolate coins and walking around one’s apartment naked, plus plain old litterbugging. Penalties for infringements are draconian. Needless to say, the streets of Singapore are very clean and not many people are walking around their apartments naked.

Grescoe is a juicy writer - his style is plump, rosy but never overblown. Describing the glossy orangish red French cheese Epoisses, he writes, “At the summum of its maturity it oozes from its rind, as pale and sweaty as the protruding belly roll of an obese Persian

satrap”. An image which will have some readers salivating decadently while others reach for their Chesdale.

In contrast to the hectic jollity and Chaucerian gusto of most of the text, the final (yes, pun) chapter at first seems puzzlingly ghoulish.

After savoury crackers dusted with opium, swigs of absinthe etc - the pursuit of the genuine article is hilarious - why bring on the topic of a euthanasia-inducing drink? The answer must be that many of the substances examined are potentially - if taken to excess – life threatening. If self-opted suicide sounds like legal murder of a sort, it is consoling to read that Minelli, chief Swiss death dealer, sometimes talks people out of dying by their own hand. And we can all take consolation from that.

TERMINATE WITH EXTREME PREJUDICE

By Richard Belfield, Constable & Robinson, $29.95 My introduction to the concept of assassination was probably Mark Anthony’s speech over the body of Julius Caesar. In his well-researched and thorough book on the topic, Belfield notes that Plutarch’s account of Caesar’s demise drives home two blunders that the conspirators made – they did the killing themselves and they bragged about it afterwards. In Belfield’s cynical view of history, Caesar’s assassination cast a very long shadow and taught a lesson well learnt by the KGB and the CIA. Despite the commonly held view that the KGB and the CIA are highly sophisticated and well-organised, Belfield details many blunders and notes the difference between the film version and the real thing which, not surprisingly, can differ. As portrayed by western propaganda, Russian assassins were efficient unemotional killing machines and as depicted in James Bond films, the Brits used highly ingenious devices. In the 1950s, in one spectacular case, the boot was on the other foot. The Russians designed a gun resembling a packet of Chesterfield cigarettes that fired a potassium cyanide-laced bullet at below the speed of sound and

made a noise no louder than someone clicking their fingers – at the time the most sophisticated killing device in the world. Ian Fleming drew on such Russian ingenuity when he wrote From Russia with Love.

The would-be cigarette assassin, Captain Nikolai Khokhlov, was given the most thorough training for the job. Unfortunately, as Belfield gleefully informs us, the Russian did not adequately profile their man. He informs his victim that he has come to kill him but instead intends to defect which he duly does.

Filmed faithfully, this scenario would come across as a humorous parody, not real life. At this point, Belfield sardonically notes, the Russian score card now reads: six attempts, two successful assassinations, but four failures, and four defectors.

History tends to remember the successful assassinations, not the failed attempts. Belfield fronts each chapter with well known examples and effectively switches to the present tense to render them in taut thriller-like prose. Some of the key assassinations in history he re-visits include Julius Caesar (44 BC), Thomas Beckett (1170), Marat (1793) Rabin (1995), and at greatest length, Princess Diana (1997). I tend not to lean in the direction of conspiracy theories but Belfield makes a good though complex case for things being not what they seem with the most photographed woman on the planet.

Less convincing is his theory that Sirhan Sirhan, slayer of Robert Kennedy, was doped on scopolamine and did not commit the deed.

More convincing is his scholarly argument that the famous Old Man of the Mountain cult (described by Marco Polo) that gave us the word assassin were not users of either hashish or marijuana – this was a later interpretation by an early nineteenth century Orientalist whose theory was reaffirmed by Alexander Dumas and re-echoed ever since especially by narcotics commissioner Harry Anslinger and FBI’s Edgar Hoover. The true significance of the assassins’ cult was as a founder of asymmetric warfare whereby a small but deadly cult can strike fear in the heart of a larger enemy by its power to penetrate seemingly impenetrable defences. In his view, al Qa’ida is a direct descendent of this type of warfare. Belfield observes – perhaps unsurprisingly – that the al Qa’ida assassins’ manual and that of the CIA are really quite similar.

For any one interested in assassinations – and who isn’t? – this is a must read.

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LIFESTYLE

MOVIES & DVDs

MOB RULES Skip the fairy tales this month – the best flicks on offer this summer are all about nitty-gritty reality

Inside Deep Throat Released: November, 2005 Rated: R

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D Shelly Horton

eep Throat cost $25,000 to film and grossed over $600 million worldwide, making it the most profitable movie of all time. Inside Deep Throat is an amazing documentary about the impact the original porno film had on society then and now.

I’m not much of a porno girl so I’d never seen Deep Throat, but I must admit I was intrigued to see what all the fuss was about. And I was pleased I could watch it without having to don a trench coat or furtively avoid eye contact with my local video store employee.

The doco shows a small amount of the original skin flick – including the infamous scene from which the film takes its name. Sure I was shocked (Linda Lovelace obviously had no gag reflex), but what shocked me more was how the film was used as a social and political football.

Released in America in 1972 it seemed to hit a social nerve and shows how sex, culture, politics, and morality all collided to explosive effect. This doco uses new and old interviews and newsreel footage to show the protests, arrests and general hoo-ha.

So I was keen to meet the main players and see what they made of all the fuss thirty years on. My favourite scene is when you see footage of the director, Gerard Damiano, as his younger self, a former hairdresser and sleazy swinger. Then it cuts to him now, a shuffling “Harry Highpants” retiree in Florida.

There is a sad side of this doco. Its star Linda Lovelace became an anti-porn crusader and died in a car accident in 2002, broke and bitter. Her co-star Harry Reems, who nearly went to jail on a trumped-up obscenity charge for taking part in the film, is now a recovering alcoholic and born-again Christian who sells real estate.

Why weren’t they all rolling in cash? Damiano made the film with mob money, so when it became a hit the mob threatened to break his legs if he didn’t sign over

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royalty rights. So basically no-one who worked on, or starred in, Deep Throat ever saw the rewards of the most successful movie in box office history.

Now that’s shocking.

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang Released: November, 2005 Rated: MA

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he opened the door with nothing on but the ra dio.’ I love that cool gumshoe detective speak. And Kiss Kiss Bang Bang oozes with it. From the opening titles you know this is going to be a sassy, popculture romp of a film. And it doesn’t disappoint. It stars Robert Downey Jr (who despite all his drug problems is a very talented actor) as Harry Lockhart, a crook who escapes the cops by pretending he’s an actor auditioning for a role of a detective. Stick with me, it’s worth it. Needless to say he’s a hit with the film producers, gets the job and is whisked off to Hollywood.

There the producers hook him up with private eye ‘Gay’ Perry (played by a fat and hilariously camp Val Kilmer) to tutor Harry in the ways of actual detective work. So Harry becomes a crook-playing-an-actor-impersonating-a-detective. Gay Perry sums it up: ‘This isn’t good cop, bad cop. This is New Yorker and fag.’

Add a sub-plot of an aspiring actress Harmony Faith Lane (played by the vixen-like Michelle Monaghan) who’s obsessed with pulp fiction detective novels and whose sister has been murdered. You know you’re in for a high action, schlocky, fun time.

Downey is suitably jaded as the film’s narrator and often speaks to camera with a snarky aside: ‘Look I’m not going to end this film 17 times… I saw Lord of the Rings.’ And rather than fight for screen time, Downey and Kilmer work perfectly together.

And with lines like this how can you lose? ‘She poured herself into a seamless dress. From the look of it she spilled some.’

The Brothers Grimm Released: November, 2005 Rated: M

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nce upon a time there was a movie about fairytales. It was really, really bad. The end. I wish that was all I had to write about this dog’s breakfast. You see, The Brothers Grimm is not actually about the Grimm fairytales but elements of the fairytales are in it.

Confused? Wait it, gets worse. In The Brothers Grimm, Will and Jake, (played equally appallingly by Matt Damon and Heath Ledger) are travelling con artists. They journey from village to village in Germany, staging phony magic and claiming it is real.

But then they come across a clichéd village where the woods are indeed magic; the cursed trees move and a sinister tower sits in the middle of it. Inside is the Mirror Queen (the breath-takingly beautiful but under-utilized Monica Bellucci). A hideous witch who needs to sacrifice twelve maidens to restore her beauty during an eclipse (a beauty routine I’m thinking of adopting!)

So even though they don’t believe in magic the brothers have to save the maidens and break the spell. Whatever! And to make things more confusing, there are fairytale references and characters, like Hansel and Gretel, Little Red Riding Hood and even the Gingerbread Man. They all seem shoe-horned into an already dodgy script.

It was a mess. Very Grimm indeed.

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DVDs

THE COMPLETE JAMES DEAN 7 discs, PG & M The beauty of DVD is the huge number of back-catalogue material now being released. Warner Brothers’ DVD division adds to the mix this month with The Complete James Dean Collection ($79.95), it contains all of the actor’s film work, not counting bit parts in three early pictures. Dean did three movies in 16 months before crashing his Porsche into another car on a rural California highway; the third, Giant, was still filming in September 1955 when he died.

Giant, released in 1956, and 1955’s Rebel Without a Cause have been previously issued on DVD, but not East of Eden, Elia Kazan’s emotional adaptation of the John Steinbeck novel about two Salinas Valley brothers (Dean and Richard Davalos) vying for their father’s approval in the days before World War I. Frustrated fans are rewarded for their patience with a gorgeous new transfer of the CinemaScope film and a second disc of supplementary material.

Rebel, directed by Nicholas Ray and perhaps the first film to deal seriously with teenage alienation, and Giant, George Stevens’ adaptation of an Edna Ferber bestseller that has a Cain-and-Abel story similar to Eden (with Rock Hudson, in his best performance as Dean’s competitor for the affection of Elizabeth Taylor), are also two-disc packages.

Giant is the same extra-packed edition released internationally two years ago, while Rebel is outfitted with a new making-of documentary and other related material.

Reviewed by Terry Lawson

FRASIER – The Fourth Season 4 discs, M Arguably the best US sitcom of the past decade, and nearly nine hours of comedy packed into this four disc, 23 episode set from Roadshow. While the show itself went off the air last year, NBC has ensured it’ll be re-running in homes around the world for years to come as part of the growing trend towards wrapping up a season of TV and putting it out 96, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, November 2005

on disc in time for Christmas. In this particular pack are classic episodes featuring the will-they/won’t-they Niles and Daphne, Frasier’s blind date, and Eddie’s doggie depression.

NEW & NOTICED

CIRQUE DU SOLEIL – MIDNIGHT SUN Best viewed on a big fat plasma or LCD with surround sound. In fact, if your set is big enough, you can probably bypass the real thing and just go with the DVD – save yourself a packet. Cirque du Soleil first came to our attention with Allegria way back when, and Midnight Sun is the troupe’s newest production, featuring more than 250 artists and filmed in high definition format.

BEING JULIA From the award winning director of Sunshine – Istvan Szabo – and based on the novella by playwright W Somerset Maugham, comes this tale of love, adultery and revenge set amidst the high-spirited and egocentric world of 1930s English theatre. Featuring a scintillating and brilliant “tour-de force” performance by three time Academy Award nominee Annette Bening, Being Julia is “one of the must see movies of the year! Simply Brilliant!”

HOTERE Hotere is a documentary about a complex man who is arguably New Zealand’s greatest living artist. Ralph Hotere is intensely creative and wildly innovative yet he has produced works of profound refinement and essential distillation. The DVD offers a fascinating journey through forty years of art.

“There is no surface left for him to deface or mark exquisitely. His work with recycled materials is unequalled. The [DVD] is all about this stuff and more. It’s about one man’s quest for beauty and perfection among the most banal, the most ordinary landscapes and materials.” – Director, Merata Mita.