Four former Bush administration officials involved in the run-up to the
Iraq war testified before the Democratic Policy Committee yesterday to explain
how and why the intelligence was manipulated.

Lawrence Wilkerson, Secretary of State Colin
Powell's former chief of staff, said he needed just three words to explain why
a small number of individuals in the administration “had more influence…than
the professionals.” "The
Vice President," he said.  

 
Howard says IR protests threaten
resources trade ….

Prime Minister John Howard says
today's national day of protest and the Opposition's policy to abolish
workplace agreements (AWAs) jeopardises resources trade with China. 

Mr Howard and the Premier of China
today attended a ceremony in southern China, marking the start of multi-billion-dollar
Australian liquid natural gas exports.

Australia's Foreign Minister believes he's responsible for the marriage of Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban?  This is the man that George W. Bush wanted to lead the world into Iran?

Ninemsn has reported that Downer was "in the vicinity" when Kidman and Urban met.  Apparently he's just told BBC Radio that he has a photograph to prove it.  Until this photo is released the mental pictures in my head will keep me giggling for days.

Alex, you're always going to be an "extra", even in attempted publicity stunts like this one.  What the Brits think of this announcement is a point of conjecture, but the word "tosser" springs to mind. 

 
from yesterday’s Crikey ….. 

No basis for Murdoch's Muslim
scaremongering

Charles Richardson writes: 

Rupert Murdoch picked a bad time
to express the view, as he did yesterday, that Muslims'
religion "supercedes any sense of nationalism wherever they go".
Perhaps he was following Mark Steyn, who maintained back in February that Islam
"is not something you leave behind in the old country. Indeed, for its
adherents in the West, it becomes their principal expression – a Pan-Islamic
identity that transcends borders."

Just last week, the Pew Global Attitudes Project released a report that
provides strong evidence against the Murdoch-Steyn position. Pew surveyed
people in Muslim countries, western Europe and the US, and also specifically
Muslims in western Europe. While the responses were not monolithic, they show
that as a general rule European Muslims were more liberal and less anti-western
than their counterparts in the Middle East.

The Australian Government's Aid Agency Ausaid, a major Australian employer of Halliburton/KBR, has been warned to tighten its anti-corruption practices in a report released today (Wednesday)

The report follows admission by Ausaid representatives earlier this year that the organision had no internal protocols for reporting detected corruption in aid deals.

The report, released by the National Audit Office, states that funds earmarked to provided relief to Indonesia following the Decenber 2004 tsunami were used to pay Ausaid officers and to cover administration costs.   It includes the statement that "a key risk for activities is that of fraud and corruption" and claims that numerous contracts were not signed until after the provision of services had commenced.

‘Tell me, if you went into
surgery to correct a knee problem and the surgeon mistakenly amputated your
entire leg, what would you think if someone then asked you: Are you glad that
you no longer have a knee problem?

’Great Moments
In The History of Imperialism

Do you think that Dick Cheney's words in the US today are going to be echoed in Canberra in next year?

[from SBS) 

US Vice-President Dick Cheney has said that a
landmark nuclear deal with India will win support of the US Congress
despite strong opposition by critics.

Mr Cheney said in Washington that the deal was "one of the most
important strategic foreign policy initiatives of President Bush's
second term".

Reuters has reported that legislation prepared for action next week
by a key House of Representatives committee would require India to
strongly support US efforts to halt Iran's nuclear ambitions and would
bar lawmakers from amending the formal peaceful nuclear cooperation
agreement still under negotiation by Washington and New Delhi.

The draft bill, which was obtained by Reuters, is "much closer to
the Bush administration's initial cut than things that were being
talked about" earlier by some lawmakers, said a congressional analyst
who closely followed the drafting process.

 Writing the piece Agonies Of A Conspiracy TheoristA and reading the responses both here and on Webdiary has altered the way I go about things.  The main sentiment I was left with was that I should "keep on keeping on".

The trouble is that in my second year of this blog I feel like I'm in a time-loop, almost as if I'm watching last year's script being followed by a sequel.  It even comes down to the sense of "lull" in proceedings I felt last June, which quickly came to an end with the arrival of the London bombings.

For those in our audience who are
too young to remember or too old to want to, a long, long time ago, in a far
off part of the galaxy called Awstralya, there was once a Minister for Defence
- Senator “Wookie” Hill.

Now “Wookie” was in charge of
Awstrayla’s stockpile of second-hand & redundant “boys toys”, acquired for
enormous sums of money from the Amerikan Military Industrial Complex (AMIC),
the people who run the United States government (aka The Universal Policeman –
TUP): Awstrayla’s special friend.

‘Nothing's going better in Iraq.
Everything's out of whack in Afghanistan. The two military interventions in the
greater Middle East that were supposed to bring stability, if not democracy,
clash with a ferocious opposition composed of radical forces that do not
necessarily have the support of the population, but which profit from growing
hostility towards the "liberators." The deterioration of the
situation in Afghanistan at the moment when NATO is taking over the international
coalition led by the United States is not independent of the latter's failure
in Iraq.

From Crikey …..

‘Hello, hello. The Vizard plot thickens.  

Today we're running a correction based on a letter we've received from
the lawyer acting for Steve Vizard's former accountant Greg Lay. Lay, you may
recall, was the sole director and shareholder of the company that made Vizard's
illegal share trades when Vizard was a Telstra director trading in shares of
companies in which Telstra was involved. Greg Lay was the man who bought and
sold shares on oral instructions from Vizard. It was Greg Lay who declined to
sign a witness statement incriminating Vizard. And it was Lay's refusal to sign
a witness statement that ASIC and the Commonwealth DPP cited as a key factor in
their decision not to lay criminal insider trading charges against Vizard over
share purchases made while he was a Telstra director. 

‘"Dictatorships, and there are plenty to choose from,
are referred to as rogue states and threatened vociferously with military
strikes, including the deployment of nuclear weapons. But it only further
stabilizes the fundamentalist power systems in those countries.

"Whether the term `axis of evil' is used
to refer to Iran or North Korea or Syria, politics could not be more stupid and
hence more dangerous. Yet the entire world is watching and pretending to be
powerless."