There's a treasure trove of fascinating facts in the preliminary report issued by the Australian Transport Safety Bureau Friday morning and I promise I'll get to all of it. But not in one blog, there's just too much here.

Today let me just address the news. The ATSB has issued another safety recommendation and Qantas has let’s see, one, two…now! to comply.

After discovering what might be a manufacturing flaw in an oil feeder pipe in the engine that went bust on Qantas Flight 32 November 4, the folks at the ATSB and Rolls Royce are thinking perhaps a misalignment might have caused thinning in one wall of the pipe - leading to fatigue, leading to cracks, leading to oil leaks, leading to the engine fire, leading to the unfortunate and highly dramatic failure of the A380’s number 2 engine.

All photographs courtesy of ATSB

To the right, is the photo the ATSB released to illustrate the damage. Frankly, I’m not enough of a gear head to see it exactly. Is thinned metal in a tube really photograph-able?  I’m not so sure. ATSB Chief Commissioner, Martin Dolan told reporters this morning the inspection is highly specialized, involving borescopes and stuff.  So the Civil Aviation Safety Authority has directed Qantas to look for any “abnormal or eccentric counter-boring of the tubes” within two flight cycles, in other words right away. If this manufacturing defect is anything more than a one-off, inspections by Qantas Lufthansa and Singapore, the other two airlines flying with Trent 900s on their A380s, it should show up pretty quick.  

The engines are also going to get a software update, a little high-tech Mr. No so that if an engine starts to over speed, which is preliminary to its busting out the sides of its housing, the electronics that are so crucial to aviation in the 21st century will put a quick halt to that by shutting down the engine. 

And just in case you want further illustration of why runaway engines need to be held in check, take a look at this graphic from the same ATSB report showing the trajectory of Flight 32’s bad boy when its engine parts were “liberated” - flying through the engine cowling and causing plenty of thumps, hisses and OMGs among the 469 people on board.

Is this not a picture worth a couple of hundred words? Holy s… being the first two? What do you think the passengers with seats on the upper deck left side are thinking today? 

While a lot of ground has been covered by investigators so far, I suspect round about now, the three airlines flying Trent 900 engines, may feel a little bit like circus clowns ad libbing their way through each new day and wondering when the next cream pie will smack them in the face.

(By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari Goldstein.)

If you were to ask Rush Limbaugh in between trips to the hubs of the child sex slave trade, he'd stubbornly insist it was Daniel Ellsberg. Then again, Limbaugh is a latter day Republican who still probably harbors a grudge about the Teapot Dome Scandal and, if Eisenhower was still President, he'd be calling for his impeachment for being a radical, anarchic Socialist for taxing the richest 1% up to 90% of their income.

But, as usual, el Rushbo fails to see the bigger picture and insists that Wikileaks founder and head Julian Assange, this decade's answer to Dr. Richard Kimble, is a traitor on a par with Ellberg.

Let's get a few things straight, starting with waving away the superficial similarities:

As with Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers in the latter half of June 1971, Julian Assange made Wikileak's most massive disclosures a year and a half into the Obama administration. The first of these Four Horsemen were the videos of gunship troops killing over a dozen Iraqi civilians, two of them Reuters photojournalists, in 2007. The second was the hardly stunning revelation through 75,000 documents pertaining to Afghanistan that not all is going well there. Hot on its heels was Wikileaks' biggest disclosure yet: The release of nearly 500,000 documents pertaining mostly to Iraq that read like a massive police blotter going back to the invasion in 2003.

Then just after Thanksgiving, the State Dept's internal memos and cables, some of them going back to the Johnson administration, were released, making Secretary of State Hillary Clinton grab her phone to apologize to foreign governments for all the nasty things she and her underlings had said amongst themselves about them. In other words, it revealed that the State Dept. was filled with little Richard Armitages, petty gossips who apparently forgot their cables and internal memos are now part of the digital age.

It's almost like the Dreyfus Affair all over again, only real and multiplied by 251,000.

The Obama administration, because it's still a new one, can hardly be held as accountable as the eight year-long Bush administration for the embarrassing and outrageous disclosures that, just as embarrassingly, were brought to us courtesy of a fresh-faced Pfc. barely out of high school and who used little more than a memory stick and a Lady Gaga CD.

As with the Pentagon Papers and the two year-old Nixon administration, the latest Wikileaks furor and the two year-old Obama administration is outraged not because it's being blamed for originating the abuses and lies spoon-fed to the media, the US public and even foreign governments but for perpetuating those self-destructive policies.

But let's be clear about the even bigger differences: The mainstream media have not divulged the secrets of the government and one nowadays can hardly imagine it showing the same intestinal fortitude of its ancestors that had holed up for weeks in hotel rooms while dedicated reporters hammered out millions of words and braved the DOJ's barking.

Wikileaks, an online entity answerable to no one, did it from the safety of their anonymity and seemingly impenetrable firewall. This time, the press is spreading the news not as actual, crusading journalists but passive spectators. In fact, it could be said the passivity of the US press, especially during wars, since Watergate is the very reason for Wikileaks' existence.

Daniel Ellsberg was a hero, an insider who was a policy analyst for the Pentagon and the Rand Corporation in California who was genuinely tortured by his conscience and felt, rightly, responsible for helping to create the bloody juggernaut that was the Vietnam War. Julian Assange is an egomaniacal little martinet living safely beyond the grasp of a vengeful government that isn't even his by birth who doesn't possess one shred or molecule of the moral currency still wielded by Ellsberg, a man who never fled the country and was quite willing to go to prison.

Ellsberg was motivated by a conscience as tortured as an Iraqi detainee. Assange's motives for embarrassing the US government? No one really knows aside from perhaps an abstract sense of outrage. Or maybe Assange and Wikileaks are merely the Nexus phase of gossip, an indelible reminder that we live in the most Gotcha Age of all time, the Alan Funt of Uncle Sam.

It's still unclear whether or not Assange authorized the leak of any classified material. In Ellsberg's case, it was undeniable (Ellsberg even had his children helping him Xerox classified documents at Rand, even cutting off the "Top Secret" from the tops.). But one thing is clear:

It will set our diplomatic credibility back to the Stone Age, which is to say back to the Bush years, a time in which the Bush Doctrine boiled down to, Agree With Us or We'll Either Blow You to Smithereens or Ignore You Until You Agree With Us. It'll make it that much harder for foreign governments to trust us and work with us and will all but wash away whatever few inroads President Obama had made to repair our international standing.

But to accuse Assange of being a traitor is ridiculous since, unlike Ellsberg, he's not a US citizen.




Assange seems to have a problem with the United States in particular and, to a lesser degree, governments that keep secrets, which is to say all of them. It would be easy to look at these four highly publicized disclosures as the World against Julian Assange but the fact is the latest batch of disclosures shows it's Uncle Sam against the World, with a greasy thumb perpetually at the tip of his nose.