Anyone from Down Under?

[omshanti]

Hello to you

Recently we had two prominent politicians resign in the state of Victoria-Bracks and Thwaites- ("to be with family" type of excuses were given.
The son of Bracks was recently in a fairly serious car accident-driving his father's car.
A warning?.
Does anyone have any information regarding "behind the scenes going-ons" in Australia?
Also there is an APEC conference in Sydney in September- with "important" world leaders attending. Firstly, this is clearly an excuse to amp up the police force and extra security and surveillance.....
there may be a gov. staged terrorist attack.
Anyone have any insights here?

[i_am]

Hello to you

Recently we had two prominent politicians resign in the state of Victoria-Bracks and Thwaites- ("to be with family" type of excuses were given.
The son of Bracks was recently in a fairly serious car accident-driving his father's car.
A warning?.
Does anyone have any information regarding "behind the scenes going-ons" in Australia?
Also there is an APEC conference in Sydney in September- with "important" world leaders attending. Firstly, this is clearly an excuse to amp up the police force and extra security and surveillance.....
there may be a gov. staged terrorist attack.
Anyone have any insights here?

Lots of us from Down Under :)

http://www.davidicke.com/forum/showthread.php?t=749

http://www.davidicke.com/forum/showthread.php?t=5074



As for your question, this discussion could be relevant

http://www.davidicke.com/forum/showthread.php?t=6998&highlight=sydney

[montag]

Hello to you

Recently we had two prominent politicians resign in the state of Victoria-Bracks and Thwaites- ("to be with family" type of excuses were given.
The son of Bracks was recently in a fairly serious car accident-driving his father's car.
A warning?.
Does anyone have any information regarding "behind the scenes going-ons" in Australia?
Also there is an APEC conference in Sydney in September- with "important" world leaders attending. Firstly, this is clearly an excuse to amp up the police force and extra security and surveillance.....
there may be a gov. staged terrorist attack.
Anyone have any insights here?
G'day omshanti, found this in the paper today, doesn't look good..

Crack team trains for 'inevitable' terror attack
August 6, 2007 - 6:16AM

A team of 30 highly experienced Victorian detectives will work with federal police to investigate terror attacks because they are "inevitable" in the state, a senior police officer says.

The detectives will be given global terrorist intelligence and will work with federal police and overseas agencies on specific terror incidents, News Limited newspapers report today.

"Victoria Police sees the need, through experience, to prepare for the inevitable and arrange a cadre of investigators that can be trained and developed with the required mindset, skill set and disposition, Victoria Police Assistant Commissioner Brendan Bannan told News Limited.

"Rather than be caught flat-footed in the event of the inevitable, we are ... going to a group with investigative skills and the background in international and domestic intelligence."

Members would be trained but would resume their normal duties until required to handle specific cases, the report said.

The unit would be headed by Inspector Greg Hough, who led the work to identify victims of the Bali bombings.

Senior police issued an internal recruitment memo on July 16, the day Immigration Minister Kevin Andrews revoked the working visa of now released terror suspect Dr Mohamed Haneef.

But Mr Bannan said the squad was not formed because the AFP mishandled the Haneef case. "It's got nothing to do with that," Mr Bannan said.

Six members of Victoria Police's elite special operations group will join a contingent to protect next month's APEC Summit in Sydney, the News Limited report said.

The SOG has 25 members, and the loss of six for the summit could leave Victoria exposed because the unit was "stretched already", Police Association secretary Paul Mullett told News Limited.

AAP (http://www.theage.com.au/news/national/police-form-crack-terror-unit/2007/08/06/1186252573582.html)

[omshanti]

thanks for the post montag
hardly surprising...in the oft quoted "problem, reaction, solution"...just wondering what shall unfold in relation to our constitution and autralia's more overt role on the world stage
(now i understand why all those security cameras were not removed post the commonwealth-or was it olympic?-games)>
salu!

[ashyr]

we all know. thats why we arnt doing anything about it. because to do nothing is like a DREAM. we sit back and hope somethign will happen. and it does. yet no one contends it. like "the movie wasnt supposed to end that way" damn it,

the SOMETHING MUS BE DONE> is the out of our hands part. sit back have a coffee and pray all will be ok. ahh. yeah ok mr minister and his new BMW. man i would so rather trust a MP who drove a rusty VW than a man with a shiny brand new BMW just off the lot.

[omshanti]

so what are you doing exactly....

[montag]

Reality, fiction collide as terror comes to town


August 12, 2007

Author Adrian d'Hage fears the terrorist attacks he describes in his new book could all too easily happen in the real world. Liz Porter reports.

As he began researching his novel The Beijing Conspiracy, former army officer and counter-terrorism expert Adrian d'Hage imagined himself as a terrorist on a mission to kill Australians.

It wasn't much of a stretch. When d'Hage ("Darj" to his mates) was head of military security for the 2000 Sydney Olympics, it was his job to think up horror scenarios - and find ways to stop them. He had also dealt with the Pentagon, the FBI, the CIA and the top echelons of the NSW police, enjoying access to top-secret documents that would have made ideal source material for a fictional terror plot.

But d'Hage wanted the terrorists in his novel to do what any other 2007 terrorist could. So he went on the internet. A few Google clicks later, he was studying detailed diagrams of several Australian cities' water supplies, including Melbourne's.

Still online, he also began researching a dangerous radioactive material known as cesium-137. In the form of cesium chloride, a highly water-soluble blue powder, it's found in the "teletherapy heads" of machines once used for radiation therapy in cancer treatment.

"These machines were often part of aid packages to the Third World, where control over medical instruments containing radioactive material isn't always what it should be," says d'Hage. "Often teletherapy heads went missing."

The cesium poisoning of an Australian city's water supply is one of many catastrophic events in The Beijing Conspiracy. The book begins with a warning from fictional al-Qaeda operative Dr Khalid Kadeer, a microbiologist and member of the persecuted Uighur Muslim Chinese minority. The terrorist hints at the location of the first of three "warning attacks" that, if ignored, will precede a cataclysm that will destroy Western civilisation.

The novel's fundamentalist Christian US president Denver Harrison threatens, a la George Bush, to smoke the terrorists out of their hideouts. But the more subtle task of working out the details of Kadeer's threat is taken up by CIA agent and bioterrorism expert Curtis O'Connor and Australian-born microbiologist Dr Kate Braithwaite, who is working on a US secret weapons program to mix smallpox with the even deadlier Ebola and Marburg viruses. The pair discover that Kadeer's scientists are only one of two groups planning to unleash an " Ebolapox" supervirus at the Beijing Olympics. And so begins a desperate chase to prevent the death of millions.

The writer, now a research scholar at the ANU's Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies, emphasises that his thriller also carries an urgent message for Western powers about the need to negotiate with the "other side" of the war on terror.

"I wrote this book as a warning," he says."We are in desperate need of the support of Iran and Syria to solve the unmitigated disaster we have created in Iraq. Saatchi and Saatchi could not have invented a better marketing campaign for al-Qaeda. We need moderate Islam on side, otherwise we will not get the intelligence we need to deal with the fundamentalists."

Without negotiation, d'Hage believes, bioterror assaults are inevitable. "I have sat down and talked with some of the world's leading virologists, and they are very worried."

The actual process of bringing such disasters to life on the pages of his book was a thoroughly disquieting experience. "I kept thinking: 'Shit, this could happen,"' he says.

The writer had much more fun on his first novel, the best-selling The Omega Scroll. While also dealing with the Arab-Israeli conflict and the threat of nuclear war, its plot turns on an ancient scroll found in the Israeli desert and the Vatican's efforts, led by a perfidious cardinal, to suppress it. D'Hage has had one "small bite" on The Omega Scroll from a film studio, but he is confident that Hollywood will never come calling with offers to option The Beijing Conspiracy.

The character of Kadeer would be too problematic, he believes. Shockingly for some, the al-Qaeda man is thoughtful and almost sympathetic. While his deputy is consumed by hatred of "the infidel", Kadeer hopes for a world in which the West could co-exist with Islam. And while d'Hage laughingly claims handsome CIA operative Curtis O'Connor as his alter ego, the al-Qaeda scientist is a mouthpiece for many of the novelist's own views - including the parallels he draws between US tolerance of Hitler during the Berlin Olympics and Western governments' silence on human rights in China in the lead-up to the Beijing Olympics. "I think any Western filmmaker would think twice about making a film so critical of Western policy," says d'Hage. "Perhaps al-Jazeera would be interested."

The writer's own life defies any of his fictional stereotypes. As a 16-year-old student at North Sydney Boys High, d'Hage organised the theft of every stick of furniture from every classroom; 1000 desks and chairs were hidden under the school assembly hall. "I had a plan of the school," he recalls. Duplicate keys were cut and cleaners' schedules memorised, while boys posted on the roof kept a look-out for police patrols.

The incident illustrates d'Hage's rebellious streak, his nascent tactical skills - and, perhaps, an ability to enter a terrorist's mindset. All the above were in evidence during his army career, during which he won the Military Cross in Vietnam, returning to anti-war protests that he judged "disgusting". A decade later, as a lieutenant colonel, he was bawled out after being caught moonlighting as a bagman in the bookies' ring at Randwick. But he kept rising, making brigadier and ascending to head of defence public relations, serving six years as the army spin doctor before taking up the Olympics job.

But by late 2001, the career soldier had dropped "off the Defence Department Christmas card list", after emerging as a trenchant critic of Australian involvement in Afghanistan.

Explaining his change of heart, d'Hage refers to the part-time theology degree he began in the early '90s. "My mind started opening," he says. Having begun the degree as a committed Christian, he emerged with "no fixed religion" and an abiding fear of the dangers of mixing religion and foreign policy.

D'Hage's worries about the possibility of a bioterror attack pre-date his conversion to peacenik by some years. Although there was no specific intelligence to suggest a nuclear or bioterrorism attack on the Sydney Olympics, the possibility haunted him.

The Sydney counter-terror operation was vast. The well-recognised "weak points" in any big city were under surveillance - trains, tunnels and aircraft in the vulnerable periods of landing and taking off. Swarms of military frogmen searched constantly under wharves and piers, while more than 5000 soldiers were on alert, assembled in basements and tunnels under Sydney.

"Every life jacket on every ferry was checked, in case one hid a bomb," d'Hage says.

As mobile laboratories monitored Sydney's air and hotel air-conditioning systems were checked, d'Hage kept thinking about claims by a former Russian general that a number of Russian nuclear bombs, called "suitcase bombs", were unaccounted for. Revelations about the Soviet weaponisation of smallpox and anthrax, made by defecting former Soviet scientist Dr Ken Alibek, were also on his mind.

"I needed to be able to sleep at night, so I covered every possibility. But when I kept talking about smallpox and nuclear suitcases, I'm sure that (NSW Police Commissioner) Peter Ryan thought I'd been smoking something illegal."

Seven years on from those Olympic Games, d'Hage is still worried. With no change in Western policy on Islam, he says, the disasters that befall Australian cities in The Beijing Conspiracy will happen here.

"Suicide bombers will appear in this country. We will suffer a devastating explosion in Flinders Street Station - or an attack on the water supplies of Melbourne. It will happen unless we get the moderates on side."

The Beijing Conspiracy, Penguin Books, RRP $32.95
http://www.theage.com.au/news/national/reality-fiction-collide-as-terror-comes-to-town/2007/08/11/1186530685367.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap2

[jetta]

I know this looks like a lot of reading and the first chapter probably doesn't look relevant, but this is some fascinating reading about Australia by an Australian, on the subject of the country's destiny going by bible interpretations, prophecies, legends etc.

http://www2.hunterlink.net.au/~drjh/chapter1.html