from the Centre for American Progress ….. 

‘For five years after 9/11, the administration failed to work with Congress to develop a system to try detainees. Last week, President Bush finally unveiled legislation for military commissions. "The rationale is clear," Time magazine's Andrew Sullivan writes. "In the week of the fifth anniversary of 9/11 the president wants to change the debate from Iraq, from Iran, from the past and position himself once again as the indispensable protector." With the bill, the administation is "proposing to write into law a two-track system that has existed as a practical matter for some time"; one system that observes the Geneva Convention's ban on "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment," and one that does not. (Georgetown Law professor Martin Lederman described the move as a "Jeckyll and Hyde routine.") On Sunday's edition of Meet the Press, Vice President Cheney explained why the legislation essentially ignores the Supreme Court's Hamdan decision, which forced the administration to develop a system consistent with Geneva: "I happen to disagree with the Supreme Court. I think the Thomas/Scalia/Alito minority views were the correct ones." It looks as if Congress will toe the administration line. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-TN) plans to push for a vote "by the end of the month and hopes the memory of the Sept. 11 attacks would help rally lawmakers behind the White House proposal."

‘Every few years the U.S. intervenes in a new foreign country, making headlines even as its lesser bases, alliances, and pacts pass beneath the radar. To name a continent, to name a country, is to name some form of intervention: Korea, Grenada, Haiti, Somalia, Afghanistan, Iran, Vietnam, to name a few. Even the moon and Mars lie ’neath the new Caesar.

Each intervention is new and news; and our rulers furnish specific reasons for each one. They also appeal to unifying umbrella themes such as anti-Communism, anti-Fascism, and anti-Islamo-Fascism. Few remember or can name last year’s theme. Yet the number of interventions, their global reach, and their long-term persistence paint a different picture. There is continuing method to this madness. An intelligible process is at work. There are long-term causal factors.

And this does not include Howard's FOI, which has shut shop: "The public
would misunderstand the information..." his government says with aplomb of a
Buster Keaton, fiddling with his "General"...

11 September 2006

TRANSCRIPT OF THE PRIME MINISTER
THE HON JOHN HOWARD MP
ADDRESS TO THE SEPTEMBER 11TH COMMEMORATION
UNITED STATES EMBASSY, CANBERRA

E&OE................................

’Ambassador and Mrs McCallum, ladies and gentlemen, we gather here this morning on the 5th anniversary of the terrorist attack on the United States and indeed on the entire world that values individual liberty and freedom on the 11th of September 2001. We gather both in remembrance and reaffirmation. We remember those from many nations, including Australia who lost 10 citizens in the World Trade Centre and was, several years later, to suffer even greater losses in the terrorist attacks in Bali, but also the other nations who lost citizens on that fateful morning. 

‘The fragile truce between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown was dramatically shattered yesterday when supporters from the rival factions mounted attacks on each other, dashing any prospect of a peaceful handover.

Past and present ministers lined up to warn Mr Brown he could not assume he would inherit the premiership unimpeded. Mr Brown's supporters retaliated, saying Mr Blair should resign before Christmas. And in a move destined to add fuel to the fire, the Prime Minister will today make a speech on the "way forward" for the country, in what Labour insiders believe is a deliberate attempt to tie Mr Brown to the Blairite agenda.’

‘"The United States calls 'terrorists' anybody that it doesn't like or that Israel doesn't like, because people like Hezbollah and Hamas who are fighting a war of resistance against Israeli occupation are labelled as 'terrorists,' while most of the world sees them as legitimate resistance fighters when they're fighting the Israeli army."

Such views are routinely expressed in news media almost everywhere in the world. But in the United States, our media insulation about the "war on terror" is extreme - and dangerously self-deluding.’

‘I mentioned here earlier this week that as the Bush era endgame begins, these thugs will grow more brazen in their depredations, and more open about their brutal tactics. It's getting harder to hide the massive extent of their lawbreaking, and if the Democrats take Congress in November, it will be harder still.

So what they must do now is simply break down all notions of law and morality, destroy the notions of justice and honour.

‘The Taliban have regained control over the southern half of Afghanistan and their frontline is advancing daily, a group closely monitoring the Afghan situation said in a report Tuesday.

The report on the reconstruction of Afghanistan marking the fifth anniversary of 9/11 is based on extensive field research in the critical provinces of Helmand, Kandahar, Herat and Nangarhar.

‘Anyone who appeals to freedom as a reason for war has to support and favour freedom. He has to favour the exercise of freedom over one’s just property. He has to favour the absence of unjust attacks and infringements on one’s life, liberty, and property because that is what freedom means, correct? Not so. Politicians constantly make the appeal to freedom while simultaneously supporting the state’s multiple infringements upon life, liberty, and property.

What are we to think of this blatant contradiction? We can conclude that our rulers are hypocrites. This is true. They pretend to favour freedom while their every act undermines it. Whenever they invoke freedom, watch out. They are talking about other things, things that are not freedom, things that go against exercising one’s free will over one’s property. Their aim is to sabotage freedom.

Figuring that if Australia has 36%, and South Australia has three quarters of that, then our state must surely, apart from any other reason, be one of the most stragegically important places in the world.

How could any self-professed superpower feel anything but duty-bound to protect such an important asset, especially if it might one day depend on the ore for its survival ?  What an Achilles Heel the place could become if it's defence was left to the natives.

So we get B-2s on bombing simulations from Guam, a run of "joint trining exercises" that will turn parts of the State into simulations of the Persan Gulf and Afghanistan, Christ knows what monitoring the desert from just outside our vertical territory limit of 100km.

‘Recently, while watching Robert Greenwald's new film, "Iraq For Sale: The War Profiteers," I began to grasp the enormous scope and implications of the corporate takeover of the war in Iraq. I asked myself, Why isn't this a huge issue for Americans of all political stripe? After all, making money off war, while American soldiers are dying, strikes many people as just plain wrong.

It's all in Greenwald's film: American tax dollars paying for the enormous profits enjoyed by a gaggle of well-connected companies that have revolving doors with the military and the U.S. government. Wars waged in our name creating ballooning CEO salaries, gigantic waste, and the loss of control of the role of the military. But the viewer is unprepared for the really shocking realization; the lives of hardworking, patriotic Americans are sacrificed, stupidly and callously, and soldiers are put in unnecessary danger all to make a buck - many, many bucks.’