‘US evangelical leader Pat
Robertson labels Islam, "a bloody, brutal kind of religion," on the
Christian Broadcasting Corporation’s televised 700 Club. Commentator Ann
Coulter writes in the Jewish World Review that "[T]he government should
be spying on all Arabs, engaging in torture as a televised spectator
sport." Civilized people would like to believe that Coulter is an
anomalous hatemeister, lurking from the shadows of an ill-designed blogsite,
with iron crosses and ads for assault knives in the sidebars. But Coulter is a
welcome guest on cable TV giants like Fox News, MSNBC, and CNN, and her column
is syndicated by UPI.

‘Five major military contractors are competing to design a
system to tackle up to two million undocumented immigrants a year in the United
States. Boeing, Ericsson, Lockheed, Northrop Grumman and Raytheon are working
on proposals that focus on high technology rather than high fences, but
ignoring some of the fundamental problems of immigration.

At each checkpoint along the path
to citizenship or deportation -- from desert wilderness to urban labyrinth --
private contractors are expected to be hired to detect, apprehend, vet, detain,
process, and potentially incarcerate or deport people seeking economic and
human rights asylum in the U.S.

The rockets red glare,
Bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night
That our flag was still there.

Oh, say does that
Star spangled banner yet wave,
O'er the land of the free,
And the home of the brave.

‘When I look at the star-spangled
banner I think of my son who began wearing a uniform with the flag on it from
the time he went into scouting at the age of 6. I also think of one of the last
pictures taken of Casey when he was awaiting deployment to Iraq from Kuwait. He
was standing in a tent holding a bottle of water, wearing his desert cammies
with an American flag patch on the chest. When we buried him a few weeks after
that picture was taken, I was handed a folded flag that reminded me of the
swaddling blanket that I wrapped him in to bring him home from the hospital
almost 25 years before.

‘A black flag hangs over the "rolling" operation
in Gaza. The more the operation "rolls," the darker the flag becomes.
The "summer rains" we are showering on Gaza are not only pointless,
but are first and foremost blatantly illegitimate. It is not legitimate to cut
off 750,000 people from electricity. It is not legitimate to call on 20,000
people to run from their homes and turn their towns into ghost towns. It is not
legitimate to penetrate Syria's airspace. It is not legitimate to kidnap half a
government and a quarter of a parliament.

‘It is hard sometimes to know what is real and what is
fiction when it comes to the news out of Iraq. America is in its "silly
season," the summer months leading up to a national election, and the
media is going full speed ahead in exploiting its primacy in the news arena by
substituting responsible reporting with headline-grabbing entertainment.

So, as America closes in on the
end of June and the celebration of the 230th year of our nation's birth, I thought
I would pen a short primer on three myths on Iraq to keep an eye out for as we
"debate" the various issues pertaining to our third year of war in
that country.’

In its 5-3
decision (PDF), the US Supreme Court ruled yesterday in Hamdan
v. Rumsfeld that the special military tribunals created by the Bush
administration to try suspected terrorists are illegal. Specifically, the court
found
that the tribunals "were not authorized by any act of Congress and that
their structure and procedures violate the Uniform
Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) and the four Geneva
Conventions signed in 1949.

Jones was prepared to spend money and this would become a
game of deep pockets, and that's where the ABC would be exposed 

The ABC will not proceed with the publication
of Jonestown, the controversial unauthorised biography of Alan Jones by the
Four Corners journalist Chris Masters.

‘When a man's plea for help is rejected by both of the
countries that legally owe him a duty of care, it is clear that political
expediency has triumphed over justice.

David Hicks, the only Westerner
still incarcerated in the US military prison at Guantanamo Bay, was born in
Adelaide of an English mother. This entitles him to dual citizenship. 

Since January 2002, Hicks has
languished in detention while the Australian Government has denied any
obligation for his welfare, preferring to support clear breaches of
international law by its American allies. Now, the British Foreign Office has
decided not to make representations for his release because he was an
Australian citizen when captured and handed to US forces.

Four former Bush administration officials involved in the run-up to the
Iraq war testified before the Democratic Policy Committee yesterday to explain
how and why the intelligence was manipulated.

Lawrence Wilkerson, Secretary of State Colin
Powell's former chief of staff, said he needed just three words to explain why
a small number of individuals in the administration “had more influence…than
the professionals.” "The
Vice President," he said.  

 
from yesterday’s Crikey ….. 

No basis for Murdoch's Muslim
scaremongering

Charles Richardson writes: 

Rupert Murdoch picked a bad time
to express the view, as he did yesterday, that Muslims'
religion "supercedes any sense of nationalism wherever they go".
Perhaps he was following Mark Steyn, who maintained back in February that Islam
"is not something you leave behind in the old country. Indeed, for its
adherents in the West, it becomes their principal expression – a Pan-Islamic
identity that transcends borders."

Just last week, the Pew Global Attitudes Project released a report that
provides strong evidence against the Murdoch-Steyn position. Pew surveyed
people in Muslim countries, western Europe and the US, and also specifically
Muslims in western Europe. While the responses were not monolithic, they show
that as a general rule European Muslims were more liberal and less anti-western
than their counterparts in the Middle East.

‘Tell me, if you went into
surgery to correct a knee problem and the surgeon mistakenly amputated your
entire leg, what would you think if someone then asked you: Are you glad that
you no longer have a knee problem?

’Great Moments
In The History of Imperialism

For those in our audience who are
too young to remember or too old to want to, a long, long time ago, in a far
off part of the galaxy called Awstralya, there was once a Minister for Defence
- Senator “Wookie” Hill.

Now “Wookie” was in charge of
Awstrayla’s stockpile of second-hand & redundant “boys toys”, acquired for
enormous sums of money from the Amerikan Military Industrial Complex (AMIC),
the people who run the United States government (aka The Universal Policeman –
TUP): Awstrayla’s special friend.

‘Nothing's going better in Iraq.
Everything's out of whack in Afghanistan. The two military interventions in the
greater Middle East that were supposed to bring stability, if not democracy,
clash with a ferocious opposition composed of radical forces that do not
necessarily have the support of the population, but which profit from growing
hostility towards the "liberators." The deterioration of the
situation in Afghanistan at the moment when NATO is taking over the international
coalition led by the United States is not independent of the latter's failure
in Iraq.

From Crikey …..

‘Hello, hello. The Vizard plot thickens.  

Today we're running a correction based on a letter we've received from
the lawyer acting for Steve Vizard's former accountant Greg Lay. Lay, you may
recall, was the sole director and shareholder of the company that made Vizard's
illegal share trades when Vizard was a Telstra director trading in shares of
companies in which Telstra was involved. Greg Lay was the man who bought and
sold shares on oral instructions from Vizard. It was Greg Lay who declined to
sign a witness statement incriminating Vizard. And it was Lay's refusal to sign
a witness statement that ASIC and the Commonwealth DPP cited as a key factor in
their decision not to lay criminal insider trading charges against Vizard over
share purchases made while he was a Telstra director.