Assange and Australia

Well the debate over Wikileaks does not look like it will die down any time soon. The one thing that I've noticed is that "cablegate" (God I hate that '-gate' suffix) seems to have angered people in some way that makes little sense to me.

For some reason posting all of those Iraq war documents was ok for some reason but leaking diplomatic cables? He should be executed. I've noticed that on the JREF as well and it seems to defy logic. Then again logic seems to go out the window when thousands of diplomatic cables are leaked to the world.

But that brings me to the point of this post. The ABC reported that Assange believes that Australia has abandoned him. Or as he put it on the Guardian Q&A with him:

I am an Australian citizen and I miss my country a great deal. However, during the last weeks the Australian prime minister, Julia Gillard, and the attorney general, Robert McClelland, have made it clear that not only is my return is impossible but that they are actively working to assist the United States government in its attacks on myself and our people. This brings into question what does it mean to be an Australian citizen - does that mean anything at all? Or are we all to be treated like David Hicks at the first possible opportunity merely so that Australian politicians and diplomats can be invited to the best US embassy cocktail parties.

Although the possibility exists that Assange may have broken Australian law when it comes to leaking some documents (the ACMA blacklist comes to mind), I don't see how leaking US diplomatic cables are a violation of US law.

What disturbs me more is that we have foreign politicians calling for Assange to be executed/assassinated and we have not heard a single thing from the Government. No "don't assassinate our citizens" or anything like that. Basically the Government have thrown Assange to the wolves.

It is here where I can see the parallels to David Hicks. While countries like the UK and France were getting their citizens out of Guantanamo Bay the Australian Government did nothing for David Hicks and Mamdouh Habib were left to rot in that prison because the Government at the time had more important people to worry about like Schapelle Corby or Bali 9 or Van Tuong Nguyen.

The impression at the time was that the Australian Government cares more about drug traffickers then people accused of being terrorists. Now it seems the Government prefers to look the other way when politicians and pundits from other countries are calling for the death of one of their own citizens.

It does make you question whether there is any point in being able to claim that you're an Australian.

Psychic finds body

Just not the body that she was looking for.

The psychic was trying to find 6 year old Kiesha Abrahams who has been missing since July 31. But on Sunday the police called off the search and are assuming the worst.

So this woman, who hasn't been named, got a feeling that there was a body at Nurragingy Reserve.

The Herald Sun reported:

Detective Chief Inspector Pamela Young from the State Crime Command Homicide Squad said the woman who found the remains was from the local area and had been trying to locate schoolgirl Kiesha, who vanished from her Mount Druitt home 11 days ago.

However the torso was that of an adult woman, believed to be Kristi McDougall, and not Kiesha.

So basically it looks like the woman just happened to be "lucky" and found a body. But when it comes to "psychic detectives" it doesn't count as a "hit".

If it turns out to be Kristi McDougall then hopefully the Police can bring her killer (or killers) to justice, and if not then I do hope they find out who it is. When you think of it that way then it doesn't really matter what the motivations of the finder were, a family will get closure.

Curling? In Australia?

After reading this, I learned that there are Australians out there who curl (I think that's the right word).

Apparently some thieves mistook a truck with curling stones for a beer truck, which really tells you how well known the sport is over here.

But I think this was a gem:

"They are useless to anyone else except for us, apart from as a doorstop or propping up a coffee table," curler Paul Meissner told the Associated Press.

So I think we know how the police will find them. They'll just have to grab a copy of the Trading Post and look for cheap granite rocks that can be used for mundane household tasks.

Incidentally, I'm looking for a good doorstop, perhaps I should invest in a curling stone...

Umm?

That's all I can say.

Yesterday a man was convicted of murdering another man. Ok, it was manslaughter and he got 5 years with a three year non-parole period.

The Scottish man killed another Scot over an argument on evolution and creationism.

Now I know that people have been killed for less but that is really, really stupid.

I wonder what the creationists are saying about this?

Mr. B.

I wrote about the Beaumont Children a while ago it was my second post.

Then I read this today.

So they call Bevam Spencer von Einem a suspect in the Beaumont case. Brilliant.

There is only one thing that I can think of that might be positive. It might change the status of Mr. B (a witness in Von Einems trial for the murder of Richard Kelvin, son of the newsreader). Mr. B has been portrayed currently as something of a crackpot.

It might make him less crazy in the eyes of history.

Hot Chocolate Rapist

When I first read about this today I wondered why I hadn't heard anything about it.

From what I can tell the crimes that I am about to write about happened around 10 years ago now.

I first heard about these crimes in passing on Triple J news on Friday heading to Uni, but I missed some of it and I didn't try to look up more about it.

However from what I have found it seems that this man raped 22 women and has been charged with 61 offences that involve 24 women.

He looked respectable, and would buy the women hot chocolate which he would lace with drugs.

In 1998 the case went cold until possibly July this year when two of the victims appealed for other victims to come forward.

Yesterday a man was charged with 61 charges against 24 women.

The man goes by the name of Harry William Barkas who is in remand until December 12.

The article gives the charges:

Mr Barkas has been charged with four counts of rape, one of indecent assault, five counts of administering drugs to render a person unable to resist sexual penetration and one count each of using and trafficking cannabis.

Now the problem that I have with punishing rapists is that do they really understand what they have done? How they have hurt the people that they raped?

I want to link to a thread in the Myspace forums where someone posted that they should legalise rape, but it might have been deleted.

The reason why I wanted to link to it was because this person didn't seem to understand the difference between rape and rough sex.

I wonder if rapists have the same problem, that they equate rape with having rough sex?

How could you punish someone like that? Let them be raped to see the difference?


Finally if all goes well the women who were raped will finally get to see some justice for what has happened to them. And justice after a crime is really all that matters.

The Ghost of the Ghost of the Beumont Children

I noticed this at work yesterday.

The article in question is about the appearance of one Bevan Spencer von Einem in some archival footage of the search for the Beaumont Children.

Firstly the only real link that I can see between the two is that they both have something to do with the criminal history of the city of Adelaide.

For those that don't know, Bevan Spencer von Einem is a convicted sex offender and former Good Samaritan. I know that sounds weird but he did save the life of Roger James, a man who had been beaten and thrown into the River Torrens for being a homosexual. However von Einem was later convicted of the rape and murder of Richard Kelvin. He was convicted in 1984, and the series of murders that he was suspected of at the same amount of time are known as the Family Murders, since the media believed that there was some form of secret society covering his tracks.

The Beaumont Children disappearance (1966) has a few dubious honours. Firstly after the Wanda Beach murders of the previous year it is considered a major turning point in the Australian lifestyle. Secondly it is remembered for having the largest police investigation in Australian history. Now so I don't spend too much time prattling on about this and not getting to what I want to say, I will give a background that is probably shorter then it should really be.

On Australia Day (January 26^th) 1966 the three children of the Beaumont family, Jane (9), Arnna (7) and Grant (4) went to Glenelg for a day at the beach. They lived in Somerton Park which is not that far away from Glenelg or a beach. They left in the morning and never returned home. Despite police searching, false letters, help from the media, 'psychics', and a rather substantial reward no trace of them was found. To this day the case remains unsolved and also changed the Australian way of life. Unlike the Wanda Beach murders where the two girls, Christine Sharrck and Marianne Schmidt were murdered in a somewhat remote part of the Sydney foreshore the Beaumont's disappeared from a packed Glenelg beach. This fear was reinforced after the disappearance of Joanne Ratcliffe and Kirsty Gorden (11 and 4 respectively) from the packed Adelaide Oval in 1973 and parents became more vigilant (this case was never solved as well).

And now to the whole point of this post.

There are two 'ghosts' of this case. The first is the actual case the ghosts of the children who most likely never grew up at all. The second is one of the media's creation.

Every few years the media will dig up this case and bring it to the limelight. I would say that the first instance of this would have to be with the trial of Bevan Spencer von Einem. There a witness, known as 'B', stated that von Einem was the culprit in the Beumont and Adelaide Oval cases with no actual evidence to support it.

From it's start in 1994 the current affairs show (read: phoney made up rubbish designed to provide people with a different kind of soap opera) Today Tonight has been bringing this back into the limelight with it's latest "The Beaumont children are located in [insert location here]" (i.e. New Zealand, a cult somewhere, Queensland) or "We have 'evidence' as to who did it" story which is stupid enough because the show has no real credibility to begin with.

However it has spread. On the Crime and Investigation Channel they ran a programme about the Beaumont Children and the Wanda Beach murders. The end of the programme they some interviews with some people who 'claimed' that their father had done it.

And now we have this, what you could really call a return to the earlier "von Einem did it" sort of thing.

The problem is that after all the TT 'stories' things that are probably legitimate seem completely pointless, the grasp of stupid television is starting to create an apathetic view on the case. People don't really care any more because the stupid stories have drowned out anything relevant.

Would people care about more important issues like in politics if a show like Today Tonight or A Current Affair produced stories that dealt with an important issue such as the budget to death?

I think so.