From great rooster to cheap feather duster ….

our great international statesman, the great besider: a full partner in the discredited coalition of the willing, who championed Australia’s participation in its first illegal war of aggression, that wrecked the world’s oldest civilization ….

able to topple the government of East Timor in a single bound ….

‘A United Nations rights panel Friday demanded the immediate closure of any secret U.S. detention facilities and said Washington should grant the international Red Cross access to captives.

The United States "should only detain persons in places in which they can enjoy the full protection of the law," said a 12-page report by the U.N. Human Rights Committee. "It should also grant prompt access by the International Committee of the Red Cross to any person detained in connection with an armed conflict."

‘US citizens suspected of terror ties might be detained indefinitely and barred from access to civilian courts under legislation proposed by the Bush administration, say legal experts reviewing an early version of the bill.

A 32-page draft measure is intended to authorize the Pentagon's tribunal system, established shortly after the 2001 terrorist attacks to detain and prosecute detainees captured in the war on terror. The tribunal system was thrown out last month by the Supreme Court.

‘After being one of the most inept national security advisers in the nation's history, Condoleezza Rice is now earning the same grade as secretary of state.

Her description of the conflagration in Lebanon as the "birthpangs of a new Middle East" was about as callous as it gets, matched only by Bush's remark that the conflict represents "a moment of opportunity." The 400 Lebanese who have died, an overwhelming number of them civilian and many of them children, were not feeling any birthpangs. They were feeling deathpangs.

‘The media magnate Rupert Murdoch is expected to offer Tony Blair a senior role in his News Corporation empire when he stands down as Prime Minister.

Allies of Mr Blair insist he has made no decisions about his plans when he leaves Downing Street - almost certainly next year. But some friends say a seat on the board of News Corp could tempt the outgoing Prime Minister, as it would dovetail neatly with the lucrative United States lecture circuit. Mr Blair's popularity at home may be waning, but he remains big box office in America. His close relationship with Mr Murdoch will be highlighted tomorrow when he addresses the annual gathering of News Corp's executives and senior journalists from around the world.

27 July 2006

TRANSCRIPT OF THE PRIME MINISTER
THE HON JOHN HOWARD MP
INTERVIEW WITH LIAM BARTLETT
RADIO 6PR, PERTH

BARTLETT:

But what about the other end, what about the other end, what about any chance of any sort of regulation?

PRIME MINISTER:

Well you mean price control?

BARTLETT:

Well I mean it's biting into the back pocket of virtually every Australian.

‘Unfortunately, politics has replaced justice in the case of David Hicks.

David has been detained for four and a half years without trial, and has been in isolation for the past four months. He sits in a concrete room for 23 hours a day. He is allowed one book per week and one hour outside his cell for exercise in what best could be described as a large dog kennel, and to shower.

I will visit him shortly to see if there is any improvement in his living conditions since the recent announcement that part of the Geneva Conventions will apply to David. We have tried in the past to get David working on his high school certificate which is something that David has put his heart into. The conditions that he is kept in make this difficult to accomplish.

Rudd gifts Howard a goat .....

Prime Minister John Howard has been given a goat for his 67th birthday today.

Opposition foreign affairs spokesman Kevin Rudd says the goat will go to help people in Sudan as a "gift-in-kind" through an aid organisation.

He says while he was in Sudan recently he was told people needed either goats or donkeys.

‘American officials are very good at vernacular descriptions, but lousy at history and political reality in the Middle East. As U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice sets off Sunday on her short trip to a Middle East that is increasingly engulfed in violent confrontations and political turmoil, she has described the massive destruction, dislocation and human suffering in Lebanon as an inevitable part of the "birth pangs of a new Middle East".

From my perspective here in Beirut, watching American-supplied Israeli jets smash this country to smithereens, what she describes as "birth pangs" look much more like a wicked hangover from a decades-old American orgy of diplomatic intoxication with the enticements of pro-Israeli politics.’

message for clowner …..

‘The British government issued a fierce condemnation of Israel's bombing campaign in Lebanon last night as world leaders desperately sought a last-minute deal to avert a ground war.

As Israeli tanks massed on the border and troops made sporadic raids on Lebanese villages, Foreign Office minister Kim Howells claimed Israel was not inflicting "surgical strikes" but waging war on "the entire Lebanese nation".

‘Citizens of the eleventh class, really not citizens at all, have no rights citizens of the first class or their government are bound to respect.  Their residence is forbidden in nearly nine-tenths of the country, all of which they used to own.  The areas left to them are cut up into smaller and smaller portions weekly, by high walls, free fire zones and hundreds of checkpoints manned by the army of the first class citizens, so that none can travel a dozen miles in any direction to work, school, shopping, a job, a farm, a business or a hospital without several long waits, humiliating searches and often arbitrary denials of the right to pass or to return.  Posh residential settlements for the first class citizens with protecting gun towers and military bases are built with government funds and foreign aid on what used to be the villages and farms and pastures of the eleventh class citizens.  The settlers are allotted generous additional housing and other subsidies, allowed to carry weapons and use deadly force with impunity against the former inhabitants, and are connected with the rest of first class territory by a network of first-class citizen only roads.

‘What is transpiring in the Holy Land is anathema to human civilization; it is an embarrassment to six billion people who are good, decent human beings. If our governments refuse to act, then so we must, for the sake of innocent and peaceful Palestinian and Israeli people, for the sake of human decency and for the sake of our future generations. Walls and fences that imprison and dehumanize cannot stand, for they help set mankind back in time to days dark and repressive, unenlightened and barbaric. Together, united as one we can become the massive tremor that helps bring walls and tyranny down.

from the pen of Richard Neville …..

‘Familiar lies are music to our nation’s ears.

Australians always punch above their weight. We are the most generous people on earth. Our soldiers are the most professional in the world. In fact, we’re so professional, that even when our troops shot at the Iraqi Trade Minister’s bodyguards in June, killing two people and wounding four others, our military carried out an investigation without bothering to interview any Iraqis. Defence Force chief, Angus Houston, found that our soldiers had “acted in accordance with their rules of engagement”. In November, when the US Marines murdered Iraqi women and children in their homes in Haditha, this action was also said to comply with the “rules of engagement”. In that case, the toll was 24. Perhaps it was this death disparity that led Air Marshall Houston to conclude, “the Australian soldiers might have been over-cautious”. While the government has agreed “in principle” to pay compensation, it has decided “in principle” not to apologise.

‘The lives of Muslims mean nothing. They’ve become the “expendable” people whose security simply doesn’t matter. Their wholesale slaughter appears regularly on the evening news while heart-wrenching stories are spun about the suffering of Israeli fathers and mothers who lost loved ones in retaliatory attacks.

Don’t Muslims have mothers and fathers? Is it so important to demonize them that they must be stripped of every trace of humanity including parents?