From our trusted ABC

Downer accused of bully tactics over Solomons
The Federal Opposition has accused the Foreign Affairs Minister, Alexander Downer, of sounding like a schoolyard bully in relation to talks with his Solomon Islands counterpart.

Mr Downer today had his first meeting with the Solomon Islands Foreign Minister since the country expelled Australia's High Commissioner.

He had a clear message about keeping the Regional Assistance Mission to the Solomon Islands (RAMSI) intact.

"It was not acceptable to us or to the other members of the Pacific island family to have RAMSI salami sliced," Mr Downer said.

But the Opposition's foreign affairs spokesman Kevin Rudd says he is concerned about the Minister's tone.

"The easiest thing you can do in the world is to play the part of a schoolyard bully. The hard thing is to get this relationship back on an even keel," he said.

According to a top NATO commander, General James Jones, the Taliban and Al Qaeda are raking in record profits from opium sales and NATO is losing ground in efforts to quell poppy production. Poppy cultivation in Afghanistan has risen 59 percent from 2005 levels to record highs, with most of the increases seen in the Taliban strongholds of Kandahar and Helmand provinces.

Recently, a former Chief of Intelligence for the Drug Enforcement Agency said the failures go back to decisions made by U.S. officials in 2001: "The White House and Pentagon position was that drugs don't matter," and U.S. beat back British efforts to focus on uprooting the Afghan opium economy.

But drugs do matter.

House Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Henry Hyde said yesterday during a hearing on Afghanistan, "The [drug] revenues are financing and strengthening the Taliban and anti-Coalition activity, increasing crime and corruption, and eroding the authority of central governing institutions."

Addressing these failures requires a comprehensive anti-drug policy that combines harsher crack-downs on drug lords with more development assistance that "makes farmers think twice about planting opium."

here we go again ……

having ‘reconstructured’ Afghanistan with a government headed by an ex oil company ‘consultant’, with key positions occupied by former warlords & drug kings, the bushits thought the ‘mission was accomplished’, just like dopey fishnets ….

the former Taliban government might have been the Afghan version of Pat Robertson’s fundamentalist crazies, but at least opium growing was eradicated.

From The New York Times

Spy Agencies Say Iraq War Worsens Terror Threat

By MARK MAZZETTI
Published: September 24, 2006
WASHINGTON, Sept. 23 — A stark [http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/24/world/middleeast/24terror.html?hp&ex=1159070400&en=003f596f66422cfd&ei=5094&partner=homepage|assessment of terrorism] trends by American intelligence agencies has found that the American invasion and occupation of Iraq has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicalism and that the overall terrorist threat has grown since the Sept. 11 attacks.
The classified National Intelligence Estimate attributes a more direct role to the Iraq war in fueling radicalism than that presented either in recent White House documents or in a report released Wednesday by the House Intelligence Committee, according to several officials in Washington involved in preparing the assessment or who have read the final document.

from our good old ABC

US senators deny war triggers terrorism
By Washington correspondent Mark Simkin and wires

Senior Republicans in the United States are playing down a secret report that has found the war in Iraq has increased the global terrorist threat.

The White House says its "war on terror" is making things safer but the top-level National Intelligence Estimate reportedly concludes the invasion of Iraq is actually increasing the terrorist threat.

The estimate, which is titled Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States, is based on analysis of all 16 US intelligence agencies.

Republican Senator John McCain says terrorists do not need motivation from the war to attack the US.

________________

Gus: Talk about looking at reality through a morphism of sophism prism... This McCain and the US administration keep looking through the wrong end of the binoculars and think everything is well since everything is so small...

No one claims that war in Iraq has "triggered" terrorism... what one is saying is that the war in Iraq has increased the reality of terrorism way beyond the usual flotsam...

‘The Howard Government and its officials will narrowly escape punishment for the AWB kickback scandal, with senior counsel to the Cole inquiry recommending no criminal charges against any federal cabinet minister, bureaucrat or official.

The Australian understands that a final, confidential submission by senior counsel John Agius is scathing in its description of the Government's role in the largest trade scandal in Australian history.

But he makes no formal adverse findings against Foreign Minister Alexander Downer, former trade minister Mark Vaile, or the former agriculture minister Warren Truss, who now holds the Trade portfolio.

One section of Mr Agius's 1300-page submission, which includes a top-secret sealed section, refers to "knowledge of the commonwealth" and deals specifically with officials of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. Another section deals with the UN's knowledge of the deals.’

Ministers To Escape AWB Blame

and …..

‘Opposition foreign affairs spokesman Kevin Rudd says Prime Minister John Howard has prevented Commissioner Cole from investigating his ministers over the AWB kickback scandal.’

PM Stopped Cole Investigating Govt Ministers, Rudd Says

From Our biased ABC

Downer slams Labor over Iraq pullout plan
The Foreign Minister has strongly condemned the federal Opposition over its promise to remove Australian troops from Iraq.

The Labor leader, Kim Beazley, says if he wins the election, he would immediately talk to the United States about how quickly Australian forces could be replaced in Iraq.

The Foreign Minister, Alexander Downer, told Parliament it is a weak and gutless policy.

"The leader of the Opposition's proposition is that this great country would pullout its forces and ask others to do the job for us," he said.

"[He] would go to our allies, the Americans, and the morally bankrupt way the leader of the Opposition proposes, and say to the Americans 'find someone else to do this job we are too weak to continue with it'."

The Opposition has hit back at Mr Downer.

Labor's foreign affairs spokesman Kevin Rudd calls the Iraq war the single greatest foreign policy disaster since the Vietnam War.

He has questioned how Mr Downer can claim to be proud of the Government's role in Iraq.

"Mr Downer therefore, I presume, is proud of the fact that 50,000 Iraqi civilians lie dead since the invasion of March 2003, Mr Downer is proud of the fact that 100 Iraqi civilians are killed each day in Iraq, he's proud of the fact that this has involved the expenditure of $1.9 billion of Australian taxpayers funding without any exit strategy in sight," Mr Rudd said.

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Gus: in fact the heading should have read. "Rudd blasts Downer for the quagmire in Iraq" but then since, in the ABC, the news department appears to have no guts, they post a heading decidedly against Beazley... The fact is the more we stay in Iraq, the more the situation deteriorates but the more Iraqi petrol we'll indirectly collect from our partner in crime, the US... An insane corrupt moral reasoning... The Poms are already looking at getting out, the Italians have gone and the US looses about 3 soldiers every day meaning that in reality they loose also another nine daily through injuries... Our soldiers have been lucky so far...

Yes Gus & the French have just announced they're going too ....

And it looks like the bushits will also be going from both the US Congress & Senate in a few weeks, provided, of course, that the great deciderarian doesn't attack Iran .... see latest US polls below.

Pretty soon it will just be george & his little aussie besiderer left to face the music for their criminal, ruinous behaviour ....

‘The November election is shaping up as a national referendum on the war in Iraq – and the GOP, AKA the War Party, is in deep trouble.

A recent CNN poll asked voters to rank the importance of the war issue: 48 percent said it is "extremely important," while 38 percent averred it's "very important." The same poll shows overwhelming opposition to the war (62 percent, and climbing), and – the shocker – 56 percent believe the war was a mistake, while a mere 40 percent disagree – with the latter figure the lowest on record. The bad news for Republicans: when it comes to Iraq, voters would rather have Democrats in charge (51 percent). After all, a Republican administration, aided and abetted by a rubber-stamp GOP-controlled Congress, lied to them: according to a Newsweek poll, a whopping 58 percent say Bush and his team "purposely misled the public about evidence that Iraq had banned weapons in order to build support for war."

Although their reaction to the Bush administration's campaign of deception hasn't yet reached Hungarian levels of outrage, the American people are in a vengeful mood. Someone has to be held responsible for what one retired American general calls "the greatest strategic disaster" in American military history. Come November, that someone is going to be their local Republican congressional candidate. Around January or so, it's likely to be Scooter Libby, that is if he isn't pardoned before the trial starts. Libby is one of the biggest arachnids at the center of the neocon web, where the lies were spun and the threads of Ahmed Chalabi's fantasies were woven into swirling psychedelic patterns of faux "intelligence." Down the road, the likely victim is a Republican presidential candidate, who will be forced to run with an iron albatross hung 'round his neck, and it's going to be downhill all the way – the same direction the military campaign on the ground in Iraq is headed.’

Election 2006: A War Referendum

meanwhile, with no-where to run & no-where to hide, the rodent & his gang are left with no choice but to continue with their well worn lies & deceits.

Witness the latest pathetic, hysterical performance of lord fishnets yesterday, when he continued to try & mislead the Parliament & the Australian people by propagating the same base falsehoods that his leader used to justify Australia’s participation in its first illegal war of aggression …..

Our phoney “foreign minister” raged as he accused Saddam Hussein of invading Iran, whilst conveniently forgetting to mention that Iraq was encouraged to do so by then US President, Jimmy Carter. And he again accused Hussein of financing terrorism, a proven false accusation, as anyone who has read the official 911 Commission Report would know.

‘Admitting failure is a healthy sign. Talking about "growing doubts about the Iraq war" for three years running, and issuing reports that "We have just a few months to correct the problems," again and again and again, is to be mired in self-delusion and stupidity.

Admitting that it's a failure means we can actually come up with a better policy.

Admitting it was a mistake will shed the scales of denial and align us with world opinion - in the same way that admitting you're an alcoholic during an intervention aligns you with the opinion of all your friends.

Admitting it was a mistake will win hearts and minds around the world, suggesting that the U.S. is after all a beacon of freedom.’

101 Reasons Why Our Leaders Should Admit That Invading Iraq Was A Mistake