I find the legal machinations that governments have gone through over the last seven years, since 9/11 quite fascinating.

In Australia we had a period of time under Howard where the immigration minister did some things that were quite amazing and logic defying as well as humanitarian defying.

I just came across this article by an American lawyer that is truly amazing.

Here are a couple of pars:

"Our proof is a top-secret classified document, which the government accidentally gave to Al-Haramain's lawyers in August of 2004. We call it "the Document." It appeared in a stack of unclassified materials that the lawyers had requested from OFAC. Six weeks later, after the government realized its blunder, FBI agents personally visited each of the lawyers and made them return their copies of the Document. But the agents made no effort to retrieve copies that the lawyers had given to two members of Al-Haramain's board of directors, who lived outside the United States.

I can't publicly reveal what's in the Document because, well, it's a secret. I would be committing a crime -- a violation of the Espionage Act of 1917 -- if I were to do so. But we assert the Document as proof of allegations we have made that in March and April of 2004 the National Security Agency conducted warrantless electronic surveillance of attorney-client communications between a representative of Al-Haramain and two of its attorneys, and that in May of 2004 the NSA gave logs of those surveilled communications to OFAC."

When you see stories like this one, you have to wonder how close we all are to a serious societal meltdown.

The UK government is meeting with supermarket chains to encourage them to stockpile basic foodstuffs in anticipation of supply chain failures caused by a national truckers' strike.

The big issue here is not the strikers but the fact that the infrastructure is totally reliant on one strand of the supply chain. And what do they say?: "We are only seven days food supply away from revolution"....