‘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.

‘The UN Security Council resolution draft on Lebanon reflects a new stage of Western colonialism in the Middle East, and perhaps a historic precedent: for the first time, the UN Security Council – should the resolution draft be endorsed – breaches the fundamental principle of the right of people under occupation to resist, and in fact legitimizes the violent partition of the sovereign state of Lebanon.

  Last year all we were given for September 11 was an Al Qaeda tape and the arrest of a terror threat named Scott Parkin.  This year I reckon we're in for a suprise party.

A month away, and the celebrations have started already.  People are being made to carry their personal effects onto planes in sealed plastic bags.  What I wan't to know is if this liquid explosive idea was known, why weren't we told.  OK so it might have alerted the would-be terrorists- but it would also have caused a cancellation of plans and perhaps averted the current state of fear that all of those travellers are enduring.  And it might have averted an escalation in hostilities instead of potentially provoking such a possibility.

‘I’m wondering. Help me wonder. Either Georgie Bush is the minor, depressing, witless ferret I think he is, or I am. It has to be one or the other. If things don’t start looking up pretty soon internationally, I’m going to be pretty sure which.

As best as I can tell, what the Maximum Cipher lacks, among an inexhaustible list of other things, is a hop-toad’s understanding of how people work. Here we have the explanation of just about everything he does. He’s dealing with a world full of people, but has no idea what people are. He probably couldn’t recognize one. So he doesn’t take their predictable behaviour into account.

LONDON, Aug 8 (Reuters) - The UK has launched a probe into a Britain-based unit of U.S. oil services company Halliburton Co.  in relation to the suspected payment of bribes to Nigerian officials, a source close to the matter said on Tuesday.

The probe by the UK's Serious Fraud Office (SFO) adds to investigations already under way in the United States, France and Nigeria into whether a consortium in which the unit, KBR, had a 25 percent stake made payments to secure construction work.

9 August 2006

TRANSCRIPT OF THE PRIME MINISTER
THE HON JOHN HOWARD MP
DOORSTOP INTERVIEW
NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY SITE, PARKES

PRIME MINISTER:

We are looking at a number of practical measures which might, at the margin, provide some response to the difficulties I know Australians are experiencing with high petrol prices.  And one of the issues, one of a number of issues we are examining, is that one, but there are quite a number of others.  When our examination has been completed, then if out of that examination there are announcements or policy changes, then there will be an announcement made about those policy changes.  But we must not lose sight of the central fact, that the cause of high petrol prices is the high world price of crude oil. It's affecting everybody and that is something that no Australian government can control, and it's very easy for some in the community, including the Opposition leader to make populist comments.  But he knows, and I know he knows, that this is due to world circumstances that nobody can control. But at the margin, we may be able to make a difference and that's what we are looking at.

‘US soldiers, accused of raping and murdering a 14-year-old Iraqi girl, drank alcohol and hit golf balls before the attack. One of them grilled chicken wings afterwards, a criminal investigator told a US military hearing yesterday.

Benjamin Bierce interviewed one of the accused, Specialist James Barker who made a written statement in which he recorded graphic and brutal sexual details of the alleged assault on March 12.

Mr Bierce was testifying on the second day of the hearing to determine whether five soldiers must stand trial for the rape and killing of Abeer Qassim al-Janabi, her parents and five-year-old sister in the town of Mahmudiya.

"If I am to die politically because of my stance on this bill, it is better to die on my feet than to live on my knees," Government Backbencher Russell Broadbent during debate on the governments Asylum seeker bill.

 

 SMH August 9, 2006 - 5:26PM

Liberal backbencher Petro Georgiou has described Government laws that would send all asylum seekers arriving in Australia by boat offshore as the most "profoundly disturbing" legislation he has ever encountered in Parliament.

‘All of them – Bush, Rice, Hoekstra, Santorum, the warmongering nabobs at Fox News – know they are peddling lies. The truth is too glaringly obvious to ignore, even for a pathologically incurious, spoon-fed twit like Bush. But they don't care. Hanley's story is one of the very few in the mainstream press to have ever laid out the facts alongside their lies in a calm, straightforward fashion. It's clear, concise, quietly but utterly devastating – and it won't make a damn bit of difference.

The Bushists know that a wire story buried on page 16 of the Topeka Times – or even splashed on the front of the Washington Post – poses no threat to their propaganda machine. They know that the majority of Americans get their "news" from TV – or rather, from glimpses at the scrolling headlines rolling by under the bland, blathering, blow-dried heads of the anchors and the fulminating mugs of the countless hard-right apparatchiks who dominate the screen. The lies will go on – and the corpses will keep piling up, despite the occasional flash of lightning piercing through the dark.’