from Crikey…..

If you do the crime, Johnnie

Chris Graham, Editor of the National Indigenous Times, writes:

Let's talk about John Winston Howard, and his 11th hour epiphany that the "Aborigine people" really aren’t that bad after all.

There must be some logic to building the United States' - and the world's - largest embassy in the world's 44th largest nation, coming somewhere after Nepal and Uganda.

But the logic seems apparent only to the Bush administration, so work plods forward on our Vatican-sized fortress embassy in Baghdad. The massive $600 million project is behind schedule and nearly $150 million over budget. It was conceived in the heady days when the Bush administration believed we would be welcomed as liberators, the war would pay for itself and an efficient government of pro-U.S. Iraqi exiles would have taken over.

In an interview last Friday, President Bush dismissed rumours of a US-planned attack on Iran as "baseless gossip" and "empty propaganda".

2007 Australian Citizenship test

* Do you understand the meaning, but are unable to explain the origin of, the term 'died in the arse'?

* What is a "bloody little beauty?"

* Are these terms related: chuck a sickie; chuck a spaz; chuck a U-ey?

If the hype about global warming is top of the charts for massive public deception and the public being completely led astray on hype, exaggeration and political opportunism, surely the argument about water can't be far behind.

On the one hand you hear about drought, well what could you expect.

We, after all, are a dreadfully dry continent.

The reality is Sydney gets more rain than London.

In fact it would be more truthful to say there's water everywhere.

But then we're told, well it's too dear to get it from A to B.

The "coalition of the willing" is over. One by one, its members have ceded the bloodstained ground to the battling Iraqis and the unyielding U.S. president. Prime Minister Gordon Brown's decision Monday to halve the vestigial British military force in Basra was inevitable; backing the U.S. in Iraq has become a political albatross for governments all over the world.

Not so long ago, the United States was a master in the use of soft power and the light touch: food for famine victims, medicine for sick children, visas for foreign students, radio broadcasts about the wonders of our country, diplomatic missions to beg, cajole and threaten wayward countries back into line.

As Lt. Gen. Peter Chiarelli has noted, the US Agency for International Development employed about 15,000 people during the Vietnam era. Today, it has about 3,000.

Now we use our billions, instead, to hire mercenaries.

The Editor,

Sydney Morning Herald. October 9, 2007.

Sir,

A cynical, amoral & opportunistic creature is Brendan Nelson (‘Explosive device may have come from Iran: Nelson’, Herald, October9).

The loss of Australian Trooper, David Pearce, had hardly been announced before the Minister for Defence accused Iran of being responsible, brutally & dishonestly mimicking the latest attempts by the Bush administration to demonise its government, whist casually acknowledging that there was no “proof”.

The so-called war on terror has been a "disaster" and British military policy in Iraq and Afghanistan must be fundamentally changed if al-Qaeda is to be defeated, a report released today states.

The report, by the Oxford Research Group think tank, calls for major changes in foreign policy and warns of the dangers of military action against Iran.

Iraq has become a training ground for violent jihadists and British and US forces should withdraw from the country immediately, it adds.

The bushit administration may be funnelling more & more money into Iraq, but Afghanistan - yes, the same Afghanistan that Osama bin Laden & Al Qaeda used as a safe haven to plan the September 11th attacks - has fallen by the wayside.

Sunday marks the sixth anniversary of the US-led invasion of Afghanistan. The goals: to oust the Taliban & Al Qaeda & build a stable, secure Afghanistan.

from the New York Times

Once upon a time, it was the United States that urged all nations to obey the letter and the spirit of international treaties and protect human rights and liberties. American leaders denounced secret prisons where people were held without charges, tortured and killed. And the people in much of the world, if not their governments, respected the United States for its values.

Diplomatic relations between Britain and the United States over Iran are under increasing strain after Gordon Brown's special security adviser warned that American claims about Tehran's military capability should be taken 'with a pinch of salt'.

As a new conservative campaign group with links to the White House prepares to make the case that Iran is a direct threat to the US, Patrick Mercer urged scepticism towards any US justification for strikes against the country.

Turning Success Into Failure

from the Centre for American Progress

Upon graduation from Yale in 1968, George W. Bush was accepted into the Texas Air National Guard, known as the "Champagne Unit" for serving as a haven for the privileged sons of the Texas elite seeking to escape duty in Vietnam.

When the Justice Department publicly declared torture "abhorrent" in a legal opinion in December 2004, the Bush administration appeared to have abandoned its assertion of nearly unlimited presidential authority to order brutal interrogations.

But soon after Alberto Gonzales's arrival as attorney general in February 2005, the Justice Department issued another opinion, this one in secret. It was a very different document, according to officials briefed on it, an expansive endorsement of the harshest interrogation techniques ever used by the Central Intelligence Agency.