‘The news is full of little else than the foiled terrorist plot to blow up a number of airliners in midair. Every official who can possibly justify it is popping up before the cameras with something to say, including, of course, the president.

Does Mr. Bush ever consider that, perhaps, he has become so accustomed to glib platitudes that he has actually come to believe them? I just saw him emerge from Air Force One and tell us, with appropriate solemnity, that Islamo-fascists (as distinct from Red-State-fascists?) are again trying to destroy us because we are free.

Computer Expert Testifies Before Congress That Florida Elections Were Fixed .....

The programmer claims under oath that he designed and built a "vote rigging" software program at the behest of then Florida Congressman, now U.S. Congressman, Republican Tom Feeney of Florida's 24th Congressional District. 

Later he testified that another computer company he was working for sold NASA secrets to the Chinese.

We know it happened in OH, because in one place there were more votes than voters, and in another there were already 4,000 votes on the PC machine before the polls opened, but our Republican Secretary of State Ken Blackwell refused to investigate, and he's running for governor in 2006.  Bev Harris tried to tell everyone, but no one listened.

‘The UN Security Council resolution draft on Lebanon reflects a new stage of Western colonialism in the Middle East, and perhaps a historic precedent: for the first time, the UN Security Council – should the resolution draft be endorsed – breaches the fundamental principle of the right of people under occupation to resist, and in fact legitimizes the violent partition of the sovereign state of Lebanon.

‘I’m wondering. Help me wonder. Either Georgie Bush is the minor, depressing, witless ferret I think he is, or I am. It has to be one or the other. If things don’t start looking up pretty soon internationally, I’m going to be pretty sure which.

As best as I can tell, what the Maximum Cipher lacks, among an inexhaustible list of other things, is a hop-toad’s understanding of how people work. Here we have the explanation of just about everything he does. He’s dealing with a world full of people, but has no idea what people are. He probably couldn’t recognize one. So he doesn’t take their predictable behaviour into account.

9 August 2006

TRANSCRIPT OF THE PRIME MINISTER
THE HON JOHN HOWARD MP
DOORSTOP INTERVIEW
NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY SITE, PARKES

PRIME MINISTER:

We are looking at a number of practical measures which might, at the margin, provide some response to the difficulties I know Australians are experiencing with high petrol prices.  And one of the issues, one of a number of issues we are examining, is that one, but there are quite a number of others.  When our examination has been completed, then if out of that examination there are announcements or policy changes, then there will be an announcement made about those policy changes.  But we must not lose sight of the central fact, that the cause of high petrol prices is the high world price of crude oil. It's affecting everybody and that is something that no Australian government can control, and it's very easy for some in the community, including the Opposition leader to make populist comments.  But he knows, and I know he knows, that this is due to world circumstances that nobody can control. But at the margin, we may be able to make a difference and that's what we are looking at.

‘US soldiers, accused of raping and murdering a 14-year-old Iraqi girl, drank alcohol and hit golf balls before the attack. One of them grilled chicken wings afterwards, a criminal investigator told a US military hearing yesterday.

Benjamin Bierce interviewed one of the accused, Specialist James Barker who made a written statement in which he recorded graphic and brutal sexual details of the alleged assault on March 12.

Mr Bierce was testifying on the second day of the hearing to determine whether five soldiers must stand trial for the rape and killing of Abeer Qassim al-Janabi, her parents and five-year-old sister in the town of Mahmudiya.

‘All of them – Bush, Rice, Hoekstra, Santorum, the warmongering nabobs at Fox News – know they are peddling lies. The truth is too glaringly obvious to ignore, even for a pathologically incurious, spoon-fed twit like Bush. But they don't care. Hanley's story is one of the very few in the mainstream press to have ever laid out the facts alongside their lies in a calm, straightforward fashion. It's clear, concise, quietly but utterly devastating – and it won't make a damn bit of difference.

The Bushists know that a wire story buried on page 16 of the Topeka Times – or even splashed on the front of the Washington Post – poses no threat to their propaganda machine. They know that the majority of Americans get their "news" from TV – or rather, from glimpses at the scrolling headlines rolling by under the bland, blathering, blow-dried heads of the anchors and the fulminating mugs of the countless hard-right apparatchiks who dominate the screen. The lies will go on – and the corpses will keep piling up, despite the occasional flash of lightning piercing through the dark.’

‘Last week, Haaretz columnist Doron Rosenblum wrote a remarkable, explosive analysis that no one would ever dare print in North America, where any criticism of Israel brings a storm of abuse and often terminates careers.

The real cause of the latest Lebanon war, wrote Rosenblum, was not seizure of two Israeli soldiers by Hezbullah, but an earlier TV speech by Hezbullah’s leader, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, that provoked Israel’s leaders to fury and an act of supreme folly.

The Editor,
Sydney Morning Herald.                                                                                         August 6, 2006.

Miranda Divine’s latest poisonous piece on David Hicks is not only deliberately misleading but it ignores & seeks to justify the fundamental injustice being perpetrated against him, whilst mounting a cowardly attack on his family ('United 93 highlights dangers of Hicks cult's flight from reality', Herald, August 6).
 

from the Centre for American Progress

‘Yesterday, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld testified about Iraq before the Senate Armed Services Committee, his first public testimony about the war in six months. One thing became abundantly clear: conditions in Iraq have gone from bad to worse.

Four months ago, Gen. John Abizaid, the commander of American forces in the Middle East, told a Senate committee, "Iraq remains a long way from civil war." Yesterday, Abizaid, who testified with Rumsfeld, said that the "the sectarian violence is probably is as bad as I’ve seen it" and, unless rampant violence in Baghdad is "stopped," a civil war could be imminent.

‘Yet another sordid chapter in the murky annals of Halliburton might well lead to the indictment of Dick Cheney by a French court on charges of bribery, money-laundering and misuse of corporate assets.

At the heart of the matter is a $6 billion gas liquification factory built in Nigeria on behalf of oil mammoth Shell by Halliburton - the company Cheney headed before becoming Vice President - in partnership with a large French petro-engineering company, Technip. Nigeria has been rated by the anticorruption watchdog Transparency International as the second-most corrupt country in the world, surpassed only by Bangladesh.

‘US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said the US government could "indefinitely" hold foreign 'enemy combatants' at sites like the US naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

"We can detain any combatants for the duration of the hostilities," said Gonzales, speaking to the Senate Armed Services Committee.

"If we choose to try them, that's great. If we don't choose to try them, we can continue to hold them," he said.

‘Human Rights Watch, after extensive investigation, has concluded that the Israeli military is guilty of war crimes. HRW says:

·                     Israeli forces have systematically failed to distinguish between combatants and civilians in their military campaign against Hezbollah in Lebanon, Human Rights Watch said in report released today. The pattern of attacks in more than 20 cases investigated by Human Rights Watch researchers in Lebanon indicates that the failures cannot be dismissed as mere accidents and cannot be blamed on wrongful Hezbollah practices. In some cases, these attacks constitute war crimes.

‘When Italian prosecutor Armando Spataro issued arrest warrants for 22 CIA officers last November, for the 2003 kidnapping of an Egyptian cleric in Milan, it seemed like a hollow gesture. Spataro claimed that American operatives had snatched the Imam, who is known as Abu Omar, and transported him to Egypt, where he was allegedly tortured. But there was no way the United States would extradite its spies, and it appeared that the Italian investigation of the murky practice of extraordinary rendition would go the way of similar cases in this country: nowhere.

‘Few things are more crucial to our global situation today than a comprehensive understanding of the fundamental habits and recent overtly aggressive trend present in United States foreign policy.  To achieve such requires a look into the long-standing tradition of creating external threats to conceal unsavory imperial operations conducted elsewhere in the world.  This paper includes an examination of the US-USSR Cold War and the so-called “war on terror” as covers for expansion of imperialism, and 9-11 in the context of provoked and internally engineered first strikes throughout American history, devoting much of its contents to theories on militarism and post-World War II influence on policymaking - how and why those in power do what they do.’