‘Don’t ever suggest that federal bureaucrats are not smart. Take, for instance, the DEA, the federal agency that has the responsibility of waging the war on drugs, a war that has obviously failed to achieve its objective after 30 years of warfare, not to mention all the collateral violence that the drug war has spawned.

Amidst growing discussion and debate in the mainstream media on the libertarian idea of ending the war on drugs by legalizing drugs, guess what the DEA is using as a way to distract people’s attention away from that solution.

from Buzzflash …..

‘When he was young, caretakers picked up his toys. When he was a dissolute adult, protectors covered up for his seedy, irresponsible behaviour and dereliction of duty. When he was old, his father's friends cleaned up after his business failures.

Someone has always cleaned up Bush's messes for him. He's never had to or been able to do it himself.

Now, through the power of Rove packaging, right wing mastery of the media, and a silent Supreme Court coup in 2000, he is playing with weapons of war and lives. And there is no one who can clean up his messes anymore.

The Editor,
Sydney Morning Herald.                                                             August 23, 2006.

Perhaps the assertion by US President, George Bush, that there “must be consequences if people thumb their nose at the United Nations Security Council”, might be taken more seriously if it wasn’t so blatantly hypocritical (‘Nuclear inspectors barred from Iran plant’, Herald, August 23)?

‘It should be small comfort that the security establishments of the UK and the USA - and the "terrorism experts" who inform them and wheedle billions of dollars out of them for bomb puffers and face recognition gizmos and remote gait analyzers and similar hi-tech phrenology gear - have bought the Hollywood binary liquid explosive myth, and have even acted upon it.

We've given extraordinary credit to a collection of jihadist wannabes with an exceptionally poor grasp of the mechanics of attacking a plane, whose only hope of success would have been a pure accident. They would have had to succeed in spite of their own ignorance and incompetence, and in spite of being under police surveillance for a year.

‘Iraq has the third largest oil reserves in the world but yesterday drivers were forming mile-long queues outside petrol stations, knowing that they would spend the night in their cars before they could fill up.

Only six weeks ago, Baghdad's streets were jammed with traffic. Now they are nearly empty because pumps have all but run dry.

The official explanation is attacks on infrastructure. A pipeline from the northern oilfields around Kirkuk was targeted last month while the Beiji power station, one of the country's largest, was partially closed after workers fled following death threats.

‘The term "Bush lawyer" is Australian slang for a hick counsellor, ignorant of the law. Thanks to recent decisions of the US Supreme Court and inquiries into torture at Abu Ghraib, it has been given a wider meaning, to denote the lawyers in US Government service who have misunderstood or misrepresented the fundamental rules of human rights in their advice to the President. Their mistakes have been so damaging that the British Attorney-General has taken to tendering his own advice to the White House about Guantanamo Bay - namely to close it. The case of David Hicks should provide his Australian counterpart with an opportunity to do likewise. 

‘It's not enough that the Transportation Security Administration wastes hours upon endless hours of time. It's not enough that they confiscate our Chapstick and toothpaste and claim that it is for our own protection. It's not enough that we must fork over our ID at five different checkpoints before boarding a plane, and have strangers paid with our tax dollars rifle and snoop through our bags again and again.

No, that's not enough to keep us secure on our airline flights. Now we must be careful not to wrinkle our noses, press our lips together, raise our upper eyelids, or – Heaven forbid – thrust forward our jaws.’

‘And there, of course, was the same old problem. To protect the British people - and the American people - from "Islamic terror", we must have lots and lots of heavily armed policemen and soldiers and plainclothes police and endless departments of anti-terrorism, homeland security and other more sordid folk like the American torturers - some of them sadistic women - at Abu Ghraib and Baghram and Guantanamo.

Yet the only way to protect ourselves from the real violence that may - and probably will - be visited upon us, is to deal, morally, with courage and with justice, with the tragedy of Lebanon and "Palestine" and Iraq and Afghanistan.

15 August 2006

TRANSCRIPT OF THE PRIME MINISTER
THE HON JOHN HOWARD MP
INTERVIEW WITH JOHN LAWS

RADIO 2UE, SYDNEY

PRIME MINISTER:

Well there's no easy solution to this problem and I don't hold out the LPG subsidy as being a silver bullet, as being the answer to high petrol prices. It's doing something at the margins to help, I suspect, a reasonably large number of people. I guess the best way of helping people in relation to high petrol prices generally is to put more money in their pockets through things like tax cuts. I remember at the time of the Budget, there was a debate about whether there should be a cut in the petrol excise. I don't mean a debate within the Government; I mean a debate in the community. And I said at the time, as did Peter Costello, that we both thought the best way of helping people a little with high petrol prices was to make sure everybody got some tax relief, because that's putting money in the pocket, and people can then use that money in whatever way they think fit. Now I'm not representing to the community that what I announced yesterday is an answer to high petrol prices. What I announced yesterday will help at the margins. There is no cure-all answer to high petrol prices, absent a fall in the price of crude oil, which of course is influenced by forces beyond our control.

‘Hysteria over the barbarians at the gate has destroyed republics from Rome to Germany. Will President Bush's post-Sept. 11 America meet a similar fate?

In the name of stopping the new bogeyman of international terrorism, our government has claimed an unfettered right to torture foreigners, eavesdrop on citizens and reorder the world with our military might. It is a policy that depends for its domestic political success on the specter of an enemy whose power and purpose must never be subject to logical and factual inquiry, lest it lose its power to alarm.

‘We are Israel. We are untouchable. No matter what we do the international community will not act against us. Oh, there will be talks at the United Nations but we know that the United States will intervene on our behalf. There will be Arab League discussions but we know that no state will take action against us. There will be mass protests and demonstrations; there will be activists and advocates begging for peace; there will be rallies and fundraisers to help the targets of our bombs. And we know that nothing will make a difference because we are Jews - we are victims of the Holocaust. We have suffered such that we have the right to make the rest of the world pay (even though organised Zionism officially declared war on Germany in 1933, long before Hitler's Final Solution): because we are victims.

August 13, 2006
 
today’s Buzzflash editorial ….

’As BuzzFlash has repeatedly editorialized, the Bush Administration is a detriment to America's national security. Our lives are increasingly at risk every day that they are in office.

They will never seriously battle the sources of terrorism in an effective, strategic fashion. That is because politically they need the terrorists as much as the terrorists need them. And the goals of the Bush Administration are the consolidation of power and the acquisition of natural resources and economic dominance, not the eradication of terror.

whilst “the great decider” & Amerika’s middle-east catspaw, Israel, continue to condemn Hizbullah as a “terrorist organisation”, demanding that they surrender their arms in return for Israel agreeing to a ceasefire, no-one has been able to point to a single terrorist incident for which Hizbollah has been responsible for more than a decade.

Of course, Rupert Murdoch’s SKY News is as determined as his Fox network to push the bushit lies & distortions, trying to create the impression that poor little Israel is only struggling to defend herself from the dreadful terrorists.

‘Meanwhile, back in reality-based reality, anti-terrorism experts around the globe are growing more convinced everyday that al-Qaeda is less an organization now, and more a movement. This, of course, means that everyday onetime harmless Western citizens, due to Bush-Republican Neo-Conservative foreign policy insanity, are taking it upon themselves to create their own al-Qaeda-like terror cells. Bush's policies have created an atmosphere in which Islamic people everywhere feel threatened so, rather than wait on bin Forgotten to call them, they simply take it upon themselves to join the fight. Yet, Bush and the Neo-Con madmen enjoy making wild claims that Democrats endanger American citizens' security. It flies in the face of all known evidence and makes one want to ask the Neo-Con madmen, just where the hell is Osama bin Forgotten?