It happened so fast that many didn't see it arrive. As the banner of Halliburton was raised over Australia's Parliament House, the few protesters who dared to attend were taken away for questioning.
Awaiting the arrival of the bulletproof Cadillac carrying President Cheney stood a proud Prime Minister, eager as usual to open the door, while a grinning Cabinet formed a line of honor to mark the auspiciousness of the occasion.

"Thanks, John," said the President, with a courteous nod and an ill-concealed wink. "i'll take it from here."

As they stood at the hour-long ceremony marking the takeover by Corporate Military Personel of Australian Defence activites, the small gallery of approved journalists waited for the response to the President's command that all non-shareholders of Halliburton resign from Cabinet
immediately. None of the Ministers were moving, although it was well-known that at least two rebels hadn't "exercised their stock options."

‘However, now that I am well into my seventh decade of life & very near retirement, I have come to the conclusion that the world basically sucks, that there are few who seem to have the investigative courage to take a good hard look at things that, if discovered, would no doubt destroy one’s image of a land that can do no wrong, one that they believe has somehow received the eternal blessing of God.  

So I must ask: How is it that we have become such a mindless nation, a society populated by deadheads, folks who seem to have little desire to look beyond the thinly-veneered surface of life? 

 First written as comment to a piece on Margo Kingston's Webdiary, in which Kerri Browne has placed the Australian Parliamentary Library's compendium of information regarding the proposed Australian terror legislatiion.  Click here.

When the Commonwealth Heads Of Government meeting was held in Melbourne (late 70's, I think) an Irish friend of our family operated a milk bar somewhere in Victoria, three hundred or so miles from the Big Smoke.

‘On each stage of his journey, as he descended further and further into the gulags and torture chambers of the war on terror, Benyam Mohammed al-Habashi was shadowed by British intelligence.  

The British were there in Karachi when Americans interrogated him and Pakistanis tortured him; they were feeding questions to the Moroccan torturers who took a scalpel to his penis; they stood back and watched as he was dragged to an American torture chamber in Afghanistan and then to the gulag of Guantanamo, where he languishes to this day.  

‘After September 11, the mainstream media's blatant performance as the U.S Government's propaganda machine has only served to highlight the business of `managing' public opinion.  

The resultant `mistrust of the mass media' would at best be a political hunch or at worst a loose accusation, if it were not for the relentless and unswerving media analysis of one of the world's greatest minds.  

And this is only one of the ways in which Noam Chomsky has radically altered our understanding of the society in which we live. Rationally and empirically, he has unmasked the ugly, manipulative, ruthless American universe that exists behind the word `freedom', says ARUNDHATI ROY, in an essay written as an introduction for the new edition of Noam Chomsky.’ 

‘Over a year ago, the comfort of my world severely diminished as I took my journey through the looking glass and discerned the ugly truths about the nation of my birth, the United States of America. “Logic and proportion