Here is a letter I sent to The Australian that didn't get published.
The Editor
The Australian
The editorial (26/2) on Cheney's visit acknowledges that Bush and Cheney 'did not have a clue what to do next' after Saddam's removal. Instead of saying they still don't and chiding Cheney, it goes on to present him in a favourable light even when that glow includes nuclear possibilities in Iran. It is as if Greg Sheridanial took over and pasted in the tiresome pro Bush/Howard/Cheney sentiments from his Saturday Inquirer interview with the Vice President. The editorial says Mr Cheney is ' indefatigable' and we Aussies should be grateful. Zealous would be a better label and most Aussies now know the price for Cheney's and Bush's zealotry has been far too high. How amazing that this cut and paste editorial appeared opposite the more realistic article by C. Layne entitled Dick Cheney has led America Down the Road To Hell in Iraq.
Wednesday, February 28, 2007
Saturday, February 24, 2007
A Week of Mateship
Wow! What a week! US Vice President, Dick Cheney, came and went. He managed to extract some mileage from John Willimason - true blue is 'standing by your mates'. Well 70% of Australians don't think it's still OK to stand with John Howard and George Bush in Iraq. If only Cheney could see behind the trees and catch a glimpse of the forest.
And what about the gift to Rudd of a staged British withdrawal from Iraq? This just hours after Rudd was being lampooned by Howard's cronies that this was sky falling in stuff. Tony Abbot was the best. He wailed that a staged withdrawal was a staged surrender. When Blair made his announcement, they ran for cover saying the British were relocating, scaling back, adjusting priorities. JESUS!! they think we are dumb! But then journalists like Greg Sheridan and Paul Kelly of The Australian are always garnishing their lightly disguised pro Bush/Howard articles with preumptions that the public at large don't have the insights and real understanding that they have. They looked more journalistically arrogant than usual as they struggled with Defence Minister Nelson's sublime declaration that there could be no victory in Iraq. Nelson even compared the struggle in Iraq to the Battle of Kokoda. Of course this is all manna from heaven for Rudd.
And what about the gift to Rudd of a staged British withdrawal from Iraq? This just hours after Rudd was being lampooned by Howard's cronies that this was sky falling in stuff. Tony Abbot was the best. He wailed that a staged withdrawal was a staged surrender. When Blair made his announcement, they ran for cover saying the British were relocating, scaling back, adjusting priorities. JESUS!! they think we are dumb! But then journalists like Greg Sheridan and Paul Kelly of The Australian are always garnishing their lightly disguised pro Bush/Howard articles with preumptions that the public at large don't have the insights and real understanding that they have. They looked more journalistically arrogant than usual as they struggled with Defence Minister Nelson's sublime declaration that there could be no victory in Iraq. Nelson even compared the struggle in Iraq to the Battle of Kokoda. Of course this is all manna from heaven for Rudd.
Friday, February 16, 2007
Sometimes Mateship Can Diminish Us All
One of the beauties of the internet is that I can read Mike Carlton and Alan Ramsey in the Sydney Morning Herald online on Saturdays. They give me balance for the syrupy Howard line consistently presented in The Weekend Australian by the likes of so called experts like Greg Sheridan who just don't get how much Iraq and Howard's American sychophancy grate on many Australians. The Iraqi fiasco is central to disillusionment with Howard just as it was central to the recent Congressional elections that demolished the Republicans and by default, Bush. Even in the face of that electoral reprimand, writers like Sheridan were still saying that Iraq was not the key to the negative vote and the editorial in Sat 17 Feb's WE, repeats this myth. The Australian and the Liberal Party ought to have a Professional Development day where they invite Blind Freddy along to ask him what he thinks about a range of issues.
Dick Cheney is about to visit Australia and I can do no better than quote Mike Carlton's assessment from the SMH of Sat 17 Feb 07. It is excellent reading and says a lot about who Howard's mates are and the sorts of people he will stick by when even Blind Freddy knows the real score.
Stink of Blood Money in the Air – must be Deadeye. Mike Carlton, SMH 17 Feb 2007
The Chickenhawk-in-Chief is coming. We are to be visited next week by Deadeye Dick Cheney, the most odious individual to hold the office of US Vice-President since the criminal Spiro Agnew resigned in disgrace from the Nixon administration.
A little history to begin with: first the chicken. Asked in 1989 by The Washington Post why he had dodged the draft for the Vietnam War, Cheney notoriously replied that "I had other priorities in the '60s than military service". Now the hawk. In recent years, his enthusiasm for military service - other people's military service, that is - has multiplied like anthrax. No man, not even George Bush, has done more to drive the American disaster in Iraq.
Cheney was the first to trumpet the delusion that the September 11, 2001 terrorist atrocity was linked to Saddam Hussein. Fixated on a punitive war in Iraq, he connived with his old buddy Donald Rumsfeld at the Pentagon to set up a personal intelligence network that would bypass the professional Washington spy agencies and construct the casus belli he needed. Cherry-picking the evidence, often relying on scheming Iraqi exiles with an axe to grind and money to make, Cheney vigorously pushed the fabrication that the Iraq dictator intended to attack the United States. "We discovered … the allegation that one of the lead hijackers, Mohamed Atta, had, in fact, met with Iraqi intelligence in Prague," he announced in March 2002.
"There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt that he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us," he told the Veterans of Foreign Wars in August 2002.
And then, a month later: "We do know, with absolute certainty that [Saddam] is using his procurement system to acquire the equipment he needs in order to enrich uranium to build a nuclear weapon."
But not to worry, the war of shock and awe would be a cakewalk. "We will, in fact, be greeted as liberators," he assured NBC television's Meet The Press in 2003, just days before the invasion began.
All these and more of the Vice-President's lethal notions have long since been exploded. Only a week ago, a Pentagon investigation confirmed that the supposed Prague meeting between Atta and an Iraqi agent never happened.
We know all about the non-existent WMDs. Cheney's claims about Saddam's nuclear program have been comprehensively demolished. And more than 3000 of the welcome "liberators" have been killed in Iraq.
And there is a scorching account of the nefarious career of Dick Cheney done for The New York Review of Books last year by the writer Joan Didion, on the net at http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19376
The disastrous Rumsfeld was eventually fired, but Deadeye Dick miraculously survives, more arrogant than ever. His critics, he sneers, are "dishonest and reprehensible … corrupt and shameless".
WHILE the Chickenhawk's continuing lust for conflict in the Middle East springs from mad-eyed neo-con fantasies, it has added enormously to his personal fortune. Before becoming Vice-President, Cheney was, for five years, chairman and chief executive of Halliburton, the giant American engineering and oil services company. On his watch, this company - acting secretively through offshore corporate cut-outs - did many millions of dollars worth of oil and construction business with Iran and Iraq, in defiance of Clinton administration sanctions against those countries. The corrupt Soeharto regime in Indonesia was another favourite client.
In 1995, Halliburton quietly paid the US government a penalty of $US3.8 million for illegally selling nuclear technology to Libya, and in 2002, a subsidiary, Kellogg Brown & Root, had to cough up $US2 million to settle a fraud case brought by the US Justice Department. In 2003, the company forked out $US6 million in compensation for "defective accounting practices".
Cheney, on leaving Halliburton to run for vice-president, was given a golden handshake worth more than $US33.7 million. The company has since won tens of billions of dollars worth of Pentagon war contracts in Iraq from the Bush Administration, many awarded without competitive tender, and several of which are under investigation for serious fraud and overcharging.
Cheney maintains that he now has no connection with Halliburton, that his stock is held in a blind trust. But for at least two years of his vice-presidency, the company paid him hundreds of thousands of dollars in "deferred compensation", a legal though arguably smelly tax avoidance device. And Cheney has also worked his old Halliburton connections to finesse the Bush Administration's oil, energy and conservation policies in favour of big business. Estimates of his current personal fortune, including Halliburton stock, run from about $US30 million to as high as $US100 million.
This is the man who will be greeted with open arms by Howard, Downer, Nelson and Co next week. They will be welcoming a deceitful and dangerous spiv. (my bolding)
FOR a penetrating account of the Bush Administration's assault on democracy and honesty, I can recommend a new book, The Greatest Story Ever Sold (Penguin/Viking) by the excellent New York Times columnist Frank Rich.
Dick Cheney is about to visit Australia and I can do no better than quote Mike Carlton's assessment from the SMH of Sat 17 Feb 07. It is excellent reading and says a lot about who Howard's mates are and the sorts of people he will stick by when even Blind Freddy knows the real score.
Stink of Blood Money in the Air – must be Deadeye. Mike Carlton, SMH 17 Feb 2007
The Chickenhawk-in-Chief is coming. We are to be visited next week by Deadeye Dick Cheney, the most odious individual to hold the office of US Vice-President since the criminal Spiro Agnew resigned in disgrace from the Nixon administration.
A little history to begin with: first the chicken. Asked in 1989 by The Washington Post why he had dodged the draft for the Vietnam War, Cheney notoriously replied that "I had other priorities in the '60s than military service". Now the hawk. In recent years, his enthusiasm for military service - other people's military service, that is - has multiplied like anthrax. No man, not even George Bush, has done more to drive the American disaster in Iraq.
Cheney was the first to trumpet the delusion that the September 11, 2001 terrorist atrocity was linked to Saddam Hussein. Fixated on a punitive war in Iraq, he connived with his old buddy Donald Rumsfeld at the Pentagon to set up a personal intelligence network that would bypass the professional Washington spy agencies and construct the casus belli he needed. Cherry-picking the evidence, often relying on scheming Iraqi exiles with an axe to grind and money to make, Cheney vigorously pushed the fabrication that the Iraq dictator intended to attack the United States. "We discovered … the allegation that one of the lead hijackers, Mohamed Atta, had, in fact, met with Iraqi intelligence in Prague," he announced in March 2002.
"There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt that he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us," he told the Veterans of Foreign Wars in August 2002.
And then, a month later: "We do know, with absolute certainty that [Saddam] is using his procurement system to acquire the equipment he needs in order to enrich uranium to build a nuclear weapon."
But not to worry, the war of shock and awe would be a cakewalk. "We will, in fact, be greeted as liberators," he assured NBC television's Meet The Press in 2003, just days before the invasion began.
All these and more of the Vice-President's lethal notions have long since been exploded. Only a week ago, a Pentagon investigation confirmed that the supposed Prague meeting between Atta and an Iraqi agent never happened.
We know all about the non-existent WMDs. Cheney's claims about Saddam's nuclear program have been comprehensively demolished. And more than 3000 of the welcome "liberators" have been killed in Iraq.
And there is a scorching account of the nefarious career of Dick Cheney done for The New York Review of Books last year by the writer Joan Didion, on the net at http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19376
The disastrous Rumsfeld was eventually fired, but Deadeye Dick miraculously survives, more arrogant than ever. His critics, he sneers, are "dishonest and reprehensible … corrupt and shameless".
WHILE the Chickenhawk's continuing lust for conflict in the Middle East springs from mad-eyed neo-con fantasies, it has added enormously to his personal fortune. Before becoming Vice-President, Cheney was, for five years, chairman and chief executive of Halliburton, the giant American engineering and oil services company. On his watch, this company - acting secretively through offshore corporate cut-outs - did many millions of dollars worth of oil and construction business with Iran and Iraq, in defiance of Clinton administration sanctions against those countries. The corrupt Soeharto regime in Indonesia was another favourite client.
In 1995, Halliburton quietly paid the US government a penalty of $US3.8 million for illegally selling nuclear technology to Libya, and in 2002, a subsidiary, Kellogg Brown & Root, had to cough up $US2 million to settle a fraud case brought by the US Justice Department. In 2003, the company forked out $US6 million in compensation for "defective accounting practices".
Cheney, on leaving Halliburton to run for vice-president, was given a golden handshake worth more than $US33.7 million. The company has since won tens of billions of dollars worth of Pentagon war contracts in Iraq from the Bush Administration, many awarded without competitive tender, and several of which are under investigation for serious fraud and overcharging.
Cheney maintains that he now has no connection with Halliburton, that his stock is held in a blind trust. But for at least two years of his vice-presidency, the company paid him hundreds of thousands of dollars in "deferred compensation", a legal though arguably smelly tax avoidance device. And Cheney has also worked his old Halliburton connections to finesse the Bush Administration's oil, energy and conservation policies in favour of big business. Estimates of his current personal fortune, including Halliburton stock, run from about $US30 million to as high as $US100 million.
This is the man who will be greeted with open arms by Howard, Downer, Nelson and Co next week. They will be welcoming a deceitful and dangerous spiv. (my bolding)
FOR a penetrating account of the Bush Administration's assault on democracy and honesty, I can recommend a new book, The Greatest Story Ever Sold (Penguin/Viking) by the excellent New York Times columnist Frank Rich.
Wednesday, February 14, 2007
Mateship overdone
John Howard's support for his mate George W. Bush really is over the top. In the past week he has disparaged a presidential candidate (Obama) and the whole US Democrat party in an effort to bolster the failing stocks of George and himself over their disaster in Iraq.
And the rhetoric from Howard and his cronies (like Brendan Nelson) reaches new heights. If America pulls out of Iraq the sky will fall in etc. etc. Well, hello!! the yanks and we were defeated in Vietnam and the domino effect in SE Asia that we were told would follow a communist victory just never happened. We withdrew in defeat from Gallipoli and managed to salvage a national identity out of that experience! These pricks that keep feeding young soldiers into the bottomless pit of Iraq would have been leading the pack in the pro conscription debate in Australia in World War One. It was stubborness like theirs that fed the human fodder to the cannons on the Western front and in many conflicts before and since. Sure it's a mess in Iraq but in many ways it is worse than what it was and is it any worse than a dozen conflicts in Africa that don't even appear on the West's radar because oil and Israel are not involved????
Maybe, just maybe, Howard, like Bush, has picked a loser here because the average Aussie appears to be fed up with the distorted and blind mateship between Howard and Bush. If Rudd remains steady Howard will be ruddy well finished.
And the rhetoric from Howard and his cronies (like Brendan Nelson) reaches new heights. If America pulls out of Iraq the sky will fall in etc. etc. Well, hello!! the yanks and we were defeated in Vietnam and the domino effect in SE Asia that we were told would follow a communist victory just never happened. We withdrew in defeat from Gallipoli and managed to salvage a national identity out of that experience! These pricks that keep feeding young soldiers into the bottomless pit of Iraq would have been leading the pack in the pro conscription debate in Australia in World War One. It was stubborness like theirs that fed the human fodder to the cannons on the Western front and in many conflicts before and since. Sure it's a mess in Iraq but in many ways it is worse than what it was and is it any worse than a dozen conflicts in Africa that don't even appear on the West's radar because oil and Israel are not involved????
Maybe, just maybe, Howard, like Bush, has picked a loser here because the average Aussie appears to be fed up with the distorted and blind mateship between Howard and Bush. If Rudd remains steady Howard will be ruddy well finished.
Thursday, February 8, 2007
A Fair Go for Hicks is a Fair Go for Howard
John Howard said this week he could get David Hicks home any time he wanted to. Hicks has now been charged and the convoluted and heavily biased legal process has begun. Howard said: ‘I will be watching very, very carefully the timetable towards the actual preliminary hearing and the actual trial before the military commission.’(The Australian 9/2/06) You betcha he will! Howard has a nose for the voters’ mood and he knows the pendulum has swung to the point that the majority of Australians are sick of this farce and the way Howard has let the Americans call the shots for 5 years. Howard’s timetable will certainly include getting Hicks home at precisely the moment which will generate maximum political kudos for him and therefore enhance his own electoral chances. Don’t be surprised to see Howard drag Hicks on stage at the Liberals’ official campaign launch!
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