BELOW IS A TRANSCRIPT OF THE ADDRESS GIVEN TODAY AT THE VP DAY COMMEMORATIVE CEREMONY, AT THE AUSTRALIAN WAR MEMORIAL, CANBERRA, BY THE PRIME MINISTER THE HON JOHN HOWARD MP

BELOW THAT IS A LETTER WRITTEN BY ROBIN GOLLAN OF SCULLIN, ACT, PUBLISHED IN THE CANBERRA TIMES ON AUGUST 13

This film shows how the U.S. attacked Panama and killed 3 or 4 thousand people in an invasion that the rest of the world was against.  (Sound familiar?)

The excuse given was to get the drug lord, General Noriega, who had been on the CIA's payroll for 20 years.  

We see not only the devastation we did to poor cities in Panama, but also how our media was complicit in the way all of this was presented to the American public.  

An Open Letter To Cindy Sheehan, Crawford, Texas

By Ralph Nader

May You Prevail Where Others Have Failed

‘From your grief over the loss of your son, Casey, in Iraq has come the courage to spotlight nationally the cowardly character trait of a President who refuses to meet with anyone or any group critical of his illegal, fabricated, deceptive war and occupation of that ravaged country. As a messianic militarist, Mr. Bush turned aside his own father's major advisers who warned him of the terroristic, political, and diplomatic perils to the United States from an invasion of Iraq. He refused to listen.

• By Gus Leonisky at 13 Aug 2005 - 11:53am
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Because it's not online, I'm going to reprint part of  a story.  It downplays  the possibility of an Adelaide terrorist attack, doubling my concerns.  My daughter is going to the most major local football game of the year on Saturday night, and I'm concerned for her safety.

Those of you who have been following these blogs will know of my belief that Adelaide is the most likely "target" in Australia

In today's paper is a simulated view through a balaclava of the Adelaide Town Hall Clock, and the C.B.D with Parliament House and the Railway Station in the Background.

A stated belief of the Liberal Party is: “We believe in a just & humane society in which the importance of the family and the rule of law & justice is maintained.

The  line on  the paper shouted from the shelf... "The most important civil liberty I have, and you have, is to stay alive and to be free from violence and death," said Australia's Prime Minister.
   It would be wise to look at these words from all angles..  Fair enough to suggest that society may need to make cultural compromises,   But to infer that we need to accept what happens without question in the faith that we are thereby being kept alive suggests that we are not going to like what we are going to be told by our would-be cultural messiahs

‘In the months before he ordered the invasion of Iraq, George Bush & his senior officials spoke of preserving Iraq's "patrimony" for the Iraqi people.  

At a time when talking about Iraqi oil was taboo, what he meant by patrimony was exactly that - Iraqi oil.

In their "joint statement on Iraq's future" of April 8, 2003, George Bush & Tony Blair declared: "We reaffirm our commitment to protect Iraq's natural resources, as the patrimony of the people of Iraq, which should be used only for their benefit

‘Michael Mandel’s How America Gets Away With Murder: Illegal Wars, Collateral Damage, and Crimes Against Humanity is my favorite book of 2003-2004. (Numbers two and three are Chomsky’s Hegemony or Survival and Frank Ackerman’s and Lisa Heinzerling’s Priceless: On Knowing the Price of Everything and the Value of Nothing.)

Mandel’s book is a scholarly, but eminently readable and completely convincing demonstration that the U.S. wars against Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, and Iraq, and the institutional apparatus that has given them legal support, such as the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY, Tribunal) and the UN, have made a travesty of the law and are returning the world to the law of the jungle.’ 

‘So the old man will be buried this afternoon on the edge of the Saudi capital, Riyadh, in a desert graveyard of no memorials.

The strict Wahhabi tradition - to which, of course, that far more famous Saudi, Osama bin Laden, belongs - demands no statues, no gravestones, no slabs. So Fahd will be laid in the desert sand, his head touching the earth, covered over and left for the after-life. Not a single stone will mark his place.