‘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.

 Conflict In The Middle East:( From Investors' Business Daily) As a top cleric warns of a strike on Tel Aviv if the West takes action against Iran's nuclear program, it's clear the real winner was not Israel or Hezbollah. It's Tehran.

Club Troppo's Nicholas Gruen posted this bell-ringing article by a former UK ambassador, and it's ringing out danger.  Have a look at this extract  for a different point of view to that of the mainstream media:

I have been reading very carefully through all the Sunday newspapers to try and analyse the truth from all the scores of pages claiming to detail the so-called bomb plot. Unlike the great herd of so-called security experts doing the media analysis, I have the advantage of having had the very highest security clearances myself, having done a huge amount of professional intelligence analysis, and having been inside the spin machine.

So this, I believe, is the true story.

None of the alleged terrorists had made a bomb. None had bought a plane ticket. Many did not even have passports, which given the efficiency of the UK Passport Agency would mean they couldn't be a plane bomber for quite some time.

In the absence of bombs and airline tickets, and in many cases passports, it could be pretty difficult to convince a jury beyond reasonable doubt that individuals intended to go through with suicide bombings, whatever rash stuff they may have bragged in internet chat rooms.

What is more, many of those arrested had been under surveillance for over a year - like thousands of other British Muslims. And not just Muslims. Like me. Nothing from that surveillance had indicated the need for early arrests.

Then an interrogation in Pakistan revealed the details of this amazing plot to blow up multiple planes - which, rather extraordinarily, had not turned up in a year of surveillance. Of course, the interrogators of the Pakistani dictator have their ways of making people sing like canaries. As I witnessed in Uzbekistan, you can get the most extraordinary information this way. Trouble is it always tends to give the interrogators all they might want, and more, in a desperate effort to stop or avert torture. What it doesn't give is the truth.

The gentleman being "interrogated" had fled the UK after being wanted for questioning over the murder of his uncle some years ago. That might be felt to cast some doubt on his reliability. It might also be felt that factors other than political ones might be at play within these relationships. Much is also being made of large transfers of money outside the formal economy. Not in fact too unusual in the British Muslim community, but if this activity is criminal, there are many possibilities that have nothing to do with terrorism.

We then have the extraordinary question of Bush and Blair discussing the possible arrests over the weekend. Why? I think the answer to that is plain. Both in desperate domestic political trouble, they longed for "Another 9/11". The intelligence from Pakistan, however dodgy, gave them a new 9/11 they could sell to the media. The media has bought, wholesale, all the rubbish they have been shovelled.

We then have the appalling political propaganda of John Reid, Home Secretary, making a speech warning us all of the dreadful evil threatening us and complaining that "Some people don't get" the need to abandon all our traditional liberties. He then went on, according to his own propaganda machine, to stay up all night and minutely direct the arrests. There could be no clearer evidence that our Police are now just a political tool. Like all the best nasty regimes, the knock on the door came in the middle of the night, at 2.30am. Those arrested included a mother with a six week old baby.

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.

Halliburton, the scandal-plagued oil company, that Vice President Dick Cheney used to run, sold an Iranian company key components for a nuclear reactor, Halliburton sources revealed.

Cheney was CEO from 1995 to 2000, during which Halliburton Products and Services set up shop in Iran.

Halliburton, which sells about $40 million a year worth of oil field services to the Iranian Government, was secretly aiding one of Iran’s top nuclear program officials on natural gas related projects and provided the official's oil development company with the components last April, the sources said.

Bear in mind when you read this that there are Raytheon people wandering around Antartica, and that the reasons that Raytheon have identified Adelaide as a hub are probably similar to those I gave in Halliburton's Adelaide.  

Reprinted from Raytheon's website, this speech explains South Australia's new military role in the world better than I can:

An address by Mr Ron Fisher, Managing Director Raytheon Australia

To

Does anyone know what happened to Steve?  Why didn't he face trial with Lindy England?  I read somewhere that he was actually in Adelaide on secondment to the Australian Rail Track Corporation from Halliburton.. better find it, I guess.   Anyway when you know that operatives like this have been hiding in woodpiles, it makes you wonder what else is going on little old Adelaide.

Have a look at this extract from Wayne Madsen's piece on Counterpunch (10/504) 

A CACI employee identified in the report, Steven Stephanowicz, is referred to as "Stefanowicz" in a number of articles on the prison abuse. Stefanowicz is the spelling used by Joe Ryan, another CACI employee assigned with Stefanowicz to Abu Ghraib. Ryan is a radio personality on KSTP, a conservative radio station in Minneapolis, who maintained a daily log of his activities in Iraq on the radio's web site before it was taken down. Ryan indicated that Stefanowicz (or Stephanowicz) continued to hold his interrogation job in Iraq even though General Taguba recommended he lose his security clearance and be terminated for the abuses at Abu Ghraib.

‘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? 

‘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.