AUSTRALIANS AT WAR

AUSTRALIANS AT WAR
THE NEW AMERICAN CENTURY is a compelling factual history of neoconservatism and its influence on US Foreign Policy in the Middle East during the first decade of the twenty-first century. Click on image above for details.

Monday, April 30, 2007

LATEST ON THE ‘LYING LOONY LOBBYIST FROM LYON’ STORY

The latest development has ‘Desperate Dylan Kissane the Lying Loony Lobbyist from Lyon’ (read the comments at that post) conceding in the face of irrefutable proof that he had lied and practised deceit as he admits to having been the ‘anonymous’ commenter on this blog after claiming that he was only a third party observer of the ‘anonymous’ commenter while posting at his own blog.

Like Bush and his neocon mates, you can’t trust a word these people say; nothing but lies and deceit from fascists and Ziononazis.

And, since this particular Ziononazi liar also happens to be a PhD student in Australia, one wonders how academia will judge him now that his credibility as an impeccably honest scholar has been shot completely to pieces – and I shall ensure that it is!

Kissane’s lies and deceit are intellectual dishonesty of the very worse kind and Kissane can rest assured that I shall ensure that academia is informed of his dishonesty.

SOME RIGHT-WING PRO-GOVERNMENT 9/11 FAIRY-STORY SUPPORTERS THINK BRIDGE COLLAPSE VINDICATES THEM!

A few loony right-wing bloggers have grasped the story of the fuel tanker that crashed, exploded and caused a freeway bridge to collapse due to the fuel burning and weakening the structure near Oakland, San Francisco, as proof that burning fuel is able to bring down tall buildings.

So desperate are they to rebut the assertion of engineers and scientists that fuel can’t possibly have caused the WTCs to have collapsed that they have jumped on the story as proof that 9/11 did happen the way the government reckoned after all. However, they have forgotten to stop and consider 1) what kind of fuel caused the bridge in San Francisco to collapse and 2) The two totally different types of structures.

The reality is that the fires in the WTCs were fuelled by Jet-A1 fuel which has a free air burn temperature of between 500°F and 599°F, nowhere near enough to weaken, let alone melt, high-strength steel columns which were the primary structural material used in the buildings. The tanker that crashed and burned causing the bridge to collapse on the other hand was carrying 8600 gallons of unleaded gasoline which exploded right under the bridge causing temperatures to reach some 2000°F which is enough to severely weaken the bridge structure and cause it to collapse.

The other aspect not taken into account in this ill-considered comparison is the fact that the two structures are totally different. The most obvious is; the WTC towers are vertical whereas the bridge structure is horizontal. The other difference is that the primary structure of the WTCs is massive steel columns whereas the structure of the bridge is reinforced concrete, a material that is given to cracking when subjected to sudden high temperatures. It is clear from the photographic evidence that the collapse of the bridge was caused by a combination of the heat and the force of the explosion.

The fairy-story believers are grasping at straws!

Sunday, April 29, 2007

US-ISRAELI OPTIONS FOR WAR AGAINST IRAN – AND MOST OF THE MIDDLE EAST.

It seems that Gabi Ashkenazi, the new Israeli Defence Force Chief of Staff, has settled in to his new job and is now flexing his muscles up near the Golan Heights where the IDF are having an exercise in preparation for a ‘surprise’ attack by the Syrians.

The whole idea of the Lebanon war against Hizbollah last summer was to provoke Syria into a fight knowing that Iran is committed to helping Syria. As we know, nothing came from that accept a lot of innocent Lebanese, and some Israeli civilians too, ended up dead. Syria didn’t rise to the bait then and nor is it likely to now.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is in serious trouble. Beside the release of the Winograd Report, due next Monday, which to say the least, is likely to not be kind to Olmert, he is also facing the likelihood of prosecution for criminal activity he is alleged to have been involved in when he was Industry, Trade and Labour minister. But Olmert’s personal and political problems could all disappear if there was seen to be a successful attack against the Syrians. On the other hand, however, while one set of problems might go away, other far more serious problems will appear – like the possibility of a retaliatory attack by Iran against Israel as Iran makes good its treaty to help Syria if attacked by Israel. Of course, this is exactly what the Israelis would be hoping will happen; Iran, after all is their real target and an Iranian strike against Israel would be just the kind of scenario that would give Bush the opportunity to deal a blow to Iran on behalf of Israel. In this scenario Hamas in the West Bank and Gaza would rise up in support of their allies Syria and Iran as would Hizbollah in southern Lebanon – unless both Syria and Iran were to capitulate immediately in the face of a devastating opening round of conflict.

Unfortunately – for Olmert that is – this scenario is unlikely to be successful. Firstly, it would necessitate collusion with the US from the very start and Bush, or more particularly, Cheney, would unlikely endorse Olmert as a war leader in the light of the fiasco that was the Second Lebanon War and nor would they endorse Amir Peretz, Israel’s Defence Minister, for the same reason. A far more acceptable leader as far Cheney is concerned is Benjamin Netanyahu, the Likud Party leader who is waiting in the wings for Olmert to stumble. Netanyahu and Cheney have been meeting quite frequently of late. Jeffery Steinberg writing in the Executive Intelligence Review reports:

“Well-placed Israeli sources within the Kadima ruling coalition party have also warned EIR that former Likud Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is making serious political moves to return to power, and that he has assured Vice President Cheney that, if he takes over again, he will be prepared to launch military strikes against both Iran and Syria—in full coordination with Washington.”

Olmert, despite the fact that he says he won’t go without a fight, would not be able to gain the kind of ‘full coordination with Washington’ that Netanyahu could expect. Olmert’s huffing and puffing and display of muscle on the Syrian front would only be impressive to the US if he was prepared to actually use it and, far more importantly, had been able to demonstrate that he would actually be able to use – and that is something he is unlikely to do without US support in the first place. In other words, Olmert has got himself into a classic political Catch 22 situation.

Without US support no Israeli leader – Olmert or Netanyahu – could hope to successfully take on Syria or even Hizbollah. Israel has to have massive amounts of jet fuel, aircraft spares, and ordinance all of which is only available from the US. It would also need to have full access to US satellite intelligence particularly in the first hours just prior to and during the opening shots of war, all of which takes considerable of planning.

The third player in Israel’s complex political equation is Labour’s Ehud Barak. This coming week in Israeli domestic politics could prove to be crucial, not just for the future of Israel, but for the future of the region. An Olmert/Barak team (with Barak replacing current Labour leader and Defence Minister, Amir Peretz), if Olmert survives the inevitable challenge from Netanyahu, will still want to see regime change in Iran at least and Iran’s nuclear facilities destroyed at most though their preference would be for a regime change in Iran instigated by the Iranian people in the hope that a more ‘Western-friendly’ government in Iran would either abandon their nuclear program entirely or transfer its construction and operation to western interests rather than Russian and Chinese. The overall game plan, however, doesn’t change. Israel’s real interests in neutralising and subduing Iran lie more in their long term goal of pacifying the Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and eliminating Hizbollah in southern Lebanon all of whom are supported by Iran.

The Netanyahu option on the other hand is far more hawkish. Netanyahu has made it quite clear that he regards Iran as an immediate threat to Israel and that, as such, it should be dealt a massive crippling blow immediately and its government changed. Netanyahu’s reasons for destroying the current Iranian regime are the same as Olmert’s although Netanyahu’s vision of a future Israel is far more ambitious than Olmert’s and includes never allowing the Palestinians to have their own state but rather including the West Bank and Gaza into a Greater Israel that would also include southern Lebanon up to the Litani River.

For both Olmert and Netanyahu the real goal of a subdued Iran is in order to increase Israeli hegemony in their region. The Iranian ‘nuclear weapon threat’, the evidence for which remains non-existent, is merely a cover for their ulterior motives of creating a stronger Israel in order to ultimately achieve the right-wing Zionist dream of a Greater Israel.

Saturday, April 28, 2007

ISRAELI LOONY LOBBYIST CAUGHT FLAT OUT LYING.

The Lyon, France, based Australian independent Israeli Lobbyist Dylan Kissane has been caught out in a fraudulent lie. Kissane, well known to me and regular readers here, has been commenting on this blog over the last few days posing as an ‘anonymous’ commenter. He has now commented on his own hate blog about the series of comments recently made on this blog as though he is simply a third party observer criticising this blog. On his blog Kissane moans about the fact that I deleted a comment from a ‘commenter’; Kissane’s blog distinctly infers that he is not the commenter.

Still with me?

OK. The problem for Kissane is this – and it is this that exposes him to be the truly deceitful and desperate liar and fraud that he really is:

I did indeed delete the comment that he refers to and which he even reproduces on his own blog. However, the only way that Kissane would have known that I deleted his comment and also have known what the comment was word for word, was if he had written and posted it himself because I deleted it AS SOON AS IT ARRIVED AT MY DESK. No more than a few minutes would have passed between the comment being posted and me deleting it. There is absolutely no way that Kissane could have known that I deleted a comment and known what it said verbatim unless he had posted it himself – which, of course, the lying little loon denies.

His obsessive hatred is his own undoing.

He doesn’t get called ‘Desperate Dylan the Lying Loony Lobbyist from Lyon’ for nothing!

Thursday, April 26, 2007

MORE EROSION OF AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

The House has voted on the war spending bill which is conditional on American troops starting to be pulled out of Iraq by the beginning October this year. But that is where the façade of American democracy will end. President Bush has already stated that, despite the American people voting against the Republican Party that was for war and despite the requirements of the House in congress, Bush will veto the bill.

So much for democracy.

Real democracy is underpinned by a justice system that treats its people with equality under the law. It seems in America some people are more equal than others. Certainly those that are held in American concentration camps at Guantanamo are less equal than others and it looks like they are going to be even less equal if the US ‘Justice’ Department gets its way in the federal appeals court as the Department asks the court to limit even further prisoner access to lawyers.

So much for democracy.

And Bush wants the rest of the world to be just like America!!?? It’s getting to the stage now where even Americans don’t want America to be like America!

Do the world a favour before it’s too late – get rid of these lunatics.

Wednesday, April 25, 2007

‘AL QAEDA’: A FIGMENT OF THE FEAR- AND WAR-MONGERING PROPAGANDISTS IMAGINATION.

Yesterday the Australian Prime Minister John Howard and his band of fearmongering lunatics warned Australians gathering at Gallipoli for ANZAC Day to be aware of a ‘terrorist threat’. In the UK Guardian today it is reported that the ‘head of Scotland Yard's counterterrorism command said yesterday that al-Qaida had survived the six-year long "war on terror" launched by President George Bush and Tony Blair, and its central leadership had retained the ability to order devastating attacks on Britain.’ As well as Gallipoli that is. And in Iraq, where it seems the Iraqi franchise of ‘al Qaeda’ has claimed responsibility for the deaths yesterday of nine US troops.

So good is the ‘al Qaeda’ franchise business that even the Israelis have tried to set up an ‘al Qaeda’ shop in Palestine. Unfortunately the locals soon discovered that the business wasn’t genuine (apparently Mossad hadn’t paid bin Laden the franchise fee) so the business was quickly shut down.

Of course al Qaeda exists, or at least existed, (indeed, it was set up with the assistance of the CIA as part of their covert war against the Soviets in Afghanistan before the Taliban took over there) but it doesn’t exist in the way that the western neocon-dominated press would have us believe. Despite the continued references to ‘al Qaeda’ everyday as we are told that they are responsible for every conceivable atrocity that occurs on our planet, there has not been any evidence whatsoever that ‘al Qaeda’ per se has ever been responsible for anything beyond the borders of Afghanistan and the remoter parts of Pakistan.

The western propagandists have presented to the world a picture of an ‘al Qaeda’ as being a massive and extremely well disciplined international organisation that has branches everywhere. Yet nowhere is there any prima facie evidence to suggest that they even exist, let alone in such an organised and disciplined way. As the piece in today’s UK Guardian demonstrates, we are expected to simply believe what we are told with the total lack of evidence being conveniently explained away as; ‘for security reasons we can’t divulge the source’.

In Iraq the US and their allies are currently busy trying to wedge the Sunni and Shi’ite factions by blaming ‘al Qaeda’ for the friction between the two groupings. This is nothing new; they’ve tried it before, but now they are putting more effort into their blame game because they see it as away of polarising the rest of Islam in the Middle East and beyond thus diverting attention away from the Israelis and their efforts to subdue Palestine, Hamas and Hizbollah but, at the same time, demonising further an Iran that has a predominately Shiite population (as against the rest of the Islamic world which is around 80% Sunni).

The problem for the US, Israel, and their western allies, is that all this propaganda is for consumption in the west only. The Middle Eastern peoples, Sunni or Shia, are very much aware that their relationships with each other are quite secure and have been for decades. For them the myth of ‘al Qaeda’ remains just that – a myth, and that the struggles that exist between various Sunni and Shiite groups in Iraq are mainly a combination of political and criminal secular differences in a post-Saddam lawless era and that such violence, as bloody as it often is, is contained within Iraq and has nothing to do with the battles that Islamic peoples and Arabs generally are fighting against Israeli right-wing Zionism in Palestine and US hegemonic colonialism in the Middle East and Central Asia.
‘Al Qaeda’ remains, as it has since the US decided that they were to blame for the events of 9/11, a myth that exists solely to perpetuate fear and the illusion that there is always an enemy to justify the continued ‘Global War on Terrorism’.

Tuesday, April 24, 2007

AUSTRALIA'S CLIMATE CHANGE DEBATE AND JOHN HOWARD’S DECEIT.

John Howard reckons: “…to say climate change is the overwhelming moral challenge for this generation of Australians is misguided at best; misleading at worst.” He goes on to say: “It feeds ideological demands for knee-jerk policy reactions that would destroy jobs and the living standards of ordinary Australians.”

Then comes the deceit: “The moral challenge of our time is not vastly different from the challenge earlier generations faced. It's to build a prosperous, secure and fair Australia - a confident nation at ease with the world and with itself.”

Only Howard could come out with Aussie-centric garbage like ‘to say climate change is the overwhelming moral challenge for this generation of Australians is misguided at best; misleading at worst’. The reality is that the challenge is for the entire world to face – regardless of how small our farts are relative to the rest of the world’s farts.

Some, like William Kininmonth, are arguing that climate change is a natural phenomenon over which man has no control. Others, and it has to be said, far better qualified scientists, like Australian of the Year recipient, Tim Flannery, argue that climate change is man-induced and furthermore, can be controlled if we put or minds to it. It is only recently that Howard has started to take any interest at all in the problem of climate change and it is the convergence of two factors that have been directly responsible for that interest; first, the current drought crisis and, second, the fact that it has happened in an election year. What Howard neglects is the fact that this problem has been staring Australia in the face for a very long time and Australians have known that such a crisis was going to come sooner or later many years ago. And he’s only listening now because he knows that Australians know there is a problem – not because he believes himself that there is a problem, at least not one that can’t be solved by a bit of praying and a lot of deceitful waffle and outright lies.

Howard reckons that it’s not in Australia’s interest to come to the party on the green house gas problem. What he means, of course, is that it’s not in the interests of his Australian Big Business mates. Whenever Howard mentions words like ‘Australia’s interests’ you just know that it’s a euphemism for ‘Australian Big Business’ who couldn’t care less about climate change and the effects that it’s going to have on tomorrow’s world.

But it doesn’t just end there. What Howard also refuses to look at is the bigger picture that climate change involves. Howard seems to think that the problem can be solved just by the expedient trading of carbon emissions. His ears prick up when he hears the word ‘trading’. ‘Trading’ means the exchange of big bucks so, if the terms of trading are in your favour, go for it. But if they’re not – well… And therein lies his dilemma. On the one hand Australians are now demanding the problem be confronted and on the other his Big Business mates are shaking their heads saying ‘no’ and telling him that it will cost ‘Australians jobs’, which is really just another euphemism which means ‘its either cut jobs or cut fat profits’ and we know that they’re not going to cut profits.

Making huge profits from manufacturing consumer goods means consuming massive amounts of energy in order to make those goods. Providing the fuel for that energy is in itself massively profitable. Each feeds off the other in a seemingly never-ending cycle of manufacture-profit-consume-profit-manufacture without – until now – worrying about how the cycle is fuelled and where its waste ends up. And that’s not all; now we are going to have to start worrying about what happens when the fuel that we all thought was most abundant finally does start to dry up. Is the world going to start fighting over what’s left? It looks like they’ve already started – gas-pipes and vast oil reserves not withstanding in Afghanistan and Iraq.

It’s time Australians put to good use its well known innovative skills in developing alternative energy resources using the free, safe and abundant nuclear energy of the sun to power our country and to show how the rest of the world can do the same.

Even if some think climate change is inevitable there is no excuse for sitting back and letting a finite fuel run dry without working out ways of using the most natural fuel the universe has to offer in order to alleviate the problem of energy supply for the future generations and, at the same time, solve part of the problem that most scientists think is the one that confronts us right now – climate change.

Solar is the way to go. You don’t have to dig it up and you don’t have to bury it when you’ve finished using it. And more of it lands on Australia’s land in a second than man can dig up in ten years. All we got to do is figure out a way of using it.

Contrary to what Howard says, climate change and all that that involves is indeed the overwhelming challenge, and not just for this generation of Australians but for all the peoples of the world and all the generations to come. What Australia can do is lead the way in meeting that challenge.

MORE FEARMONGERING GARBAGE FROM THE LIARS WHO HAVE BROUGHT NOTHING BUT WAR AND DEATH

Australian Prime Minister John Howard and his band of fearmongering lunatics are never ones to miss an opportunity of keeping up the fear factor. As ANZAC Day comes around once again so it’s time to remind Australians once again that we need to be in a constant state of fear in order to continue the Global War on Terrorism. And so it is that today we are once again warned of the likelihood of a terror attack as Australians gather at Gallipoli, just as we were warned last year, and the year before, and the year before that and even the year before that.

Al Qaeda exists only in the mountains of Afghanistan and the remoter parts of Pakistan – and, of course, in the minds of the western propagandists, the warmongering neocons in the Bush administration and their right-wing Islamophobic Israeli Loony Lobby supporters in whose collective minds al Qaeda exists with branch offices everywhere!

Monday, April 23, 2007

THE DROUGHT CRISIS IN AUSTRALIA.

Scientists and researchers have been telling us for years that this would one day happen but no one listened. Successive governments just thought that any activists or pollies that went along with the idea of actually doing something about it was just a tree-hugging pinko greenie. Howard has been in power for ten years and has been just staring at what has been happening right under his nose without having done a thing. Now its election time and the problem has become a disaster – and all he asks us to do is pray!

Perhaps if we spent the $6 billion we were going to spend on those completely useless F/A-18 Super Hornets – which are only a stopgap anyway while we wait for the equally useless Joint Strike Fighter which, by the time we get them, will be outmoded by the latest J-10 Chinese fighter and J-11 Russian designed Chinese built aircraft – perhaps if we spent that $6 billion on researching how to use solar energy (that’s natural no-risk nuclear energy) to power desalination plants, and then use that other $6 billion the government wants to spend on that other equally completely useless piece of defence equipment known as an air warfare destroyer (one air to surface missile from a J-10 and it’s gone) on building those desalination plants and other renewable energy resources to power our homes and industries then Australia would be far better off than just praying that its going to rain soon!

Perhaps if Australia didn’t go poking its nose into other peoples countries where it’s not wanted then we wouldn’t feel the need to feel better about ourselves by arming ourselves to the teeth with useless weaponry. It’s not really a good look and it’s fooling no one.

On the other hand, if we could design and produce stuff that was actually useful for both us and the rest of the world we might find ourselves actually being liked by our neighbours and the rest of the entire world and not just the US and the UK.

Friday, April 20, 2007

BUSH RECKONS HISTORY WILL BE KIND TO HIM!

Bush reckons history will be kind to him.

It’s said that history is only written by the winners. Bush, however, is no winner by any stretch of the imagination.

He had to cheat his way into the White House against Gore in 2000 and he had to cheat his way back in again against Kerry in 2004. He has had to lie and cheat his way into starting a war with Afghanistan and he had to lie and cheat his way into starting a war with Iraq. And right now he is trying to lie and cheat his way into a war with Iran.

Bush has failed to subdue Afghanistan after five and a half years of war and countless thousands dead and injured. He has failed to kill or capture Osama bin Laden who Bush, using lies, asserts was responsible for the events of 9/11. Bush has failed miserably in Iraq where some 650,000 people have died and another 3.9 million people have been made refugees, and where some possibly 12,000 (the 3000+ figure are just those killed on the battle ground) allied soldiers have died or been killed while tens of thousands more have been maimed and injured and still with no end to the killing in sight in a war that Bush cannot win.

Bush has all but destroyed the reputation of an America that was once proud and respected and he has wilfully neglected his own people as demonstrated by the treatment given to the people of New Orleans after hurricane Katrina. He has taken away the basic rights and freedoms of Americans in exchange for fear. He has spent trillions of dollars of Americans hard-earned and given it to his friends in Big Business, Big Oil and Big Military. He has pushed the world to the edge of the abyss for the sake only of power and greed. And there is still over a year of his Presidency to run.

And Bush reckons history will be kind to him.

Thursday, April 19, 2007

THE RIGHT-WING ISRAELI LOONY LOBBY GET DESPERATE AS THE MYTH OF ‘AL QAEDA’ BECOMES INCREASINGLY EXPOSED.

Infuriated by the fact that the world is slowly beginning to realise that the ‘Global War on Terror’ is increasingly looking like an excuse designed specifically to serve the interests of Bush, his neocon Zionist Israeli-supporting allies and his mates both in the military industrial complex and big business, the right-wing loony Israeli Lobby and their supporters are desperately trying to keep alive the myth of ‘al Qaeda’ in order to maintain the illusion that there is a tangible enemy for the West to fear and be forever at war with.

The people trying to maintain this myth have become over the last couple of years so desperate that they are now feeding into their propaganda machine the idea that al Qaeda has branch offices everywhere. For example, Stephen Ulph, a neoconservative so-called 'Senior Fellow' at the neocon think-tank organisation the Jamestown Institute thinks there is an al Qaeda branch office in Palestine calling themselves “al Qaeda from the Land of the Outposts, Occupied Palestine”, and in Saudi Arabia we are expected to believe there is a mob that call themselves “al Qaeda in the Land of the Two Shrines” and, of course in Iraq there is “al Qaeda in the Land of the Two Rivers”. All of these are simply a figment of the neoconservatives imagination. Another neoconservative writer, David Keyes of the AIPAC Israeli Lobby think-tank organisation, the notrious Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), manages to weave straight out lies from nowhere. He claims (among other straight up and down lies) that:

“In a September 2005 interview, leading Hamas spokesman Mahmoud az-Zahar confirmed the infiltration of al-Qaeda members into Gaza. In addition to physical infiltration, he said that telephone contact from Gaza with other al-Qaeda centres in foreign countries existed as well.” This is an out and out lie. Mahmoud az-Zahar said no such thing. In the interview referred to he simply talked about some Palestinian fighters having contact with other fighters who have a common enemy - namely right-wing Zionist Israel. It was Keyes who embellished it with ‘al Qaeda’.

“Leaflets in Khan Yunis distributed by al-Qaeda’s “Palestine branch” proclaimed that the terrorist group has started its work of uniting Muslims under an Islamic state. The group stated that their primary goal was enforcing Sha’ria law worldwide. The leaflets were signed by al-Qaeda of Jihad in Palestine.” The reality was that, far from being distributed by ‘al Qaeda’, they were distributed by Mossad stooges. As they handed out the leaflets their transparency was immediately recognised and most of them ended up straight in the bin and those that were handing them out were literally run out of town.

The propagandists attempt to cloak their lies in a veneer of academic respectability by calling themselves ‘Fellows’ and ‘Senior Fellows’ of these ‘institutes’ and, in the case of the American Enterprise Institute, often referred to as neocon headquarters, they even delude themselves with titles such as ‘Freedom Scholar’, as in the case of the extreme right-wing warmongering lunatic Michael Ledeen.

It doesn’t take a great deal of research to soon discover that the only people pushing the idea of a world-wide ‘al Qaeda’ organisation are the Western right-wing governments supporting the Bush line and right-wing think-tank organisations and individuals. The reality is that most Islamic peoples fighting the US and Israel are doing so because both of these nations have invaded lands that belong to Islamic peoples. Simple as that. ‘Al Qaeda’ is simply a convenient catch-all that describes anyone that raises arms against the occupiers of these lands. The insurgents of Iraq and Afghanistan just want the US and their allies out. The Palestinian fighters want the Israelis out and a state of their own. Al Qaeda has nothing to do with it.

The world is waking up to this reality and the liars and deceivers are becoming more desperate.

AND SINCE THIS POST WAS FIRST PUBLISHED…
A member of the Israeli Loony Lobby has, quite predictably, been quick to embellish even further the lie that Mahmoud az-Zahar had said that al Qaeda were in Palestine by linking to what they claim is the verbatim words of az-Zahar. Problem is this particular Israeli Loony Lobbyist, the well known liar, pseudo-academic and believer in fairy stories, Dylan Kissane, links to – and I kid readers not – a Haganah website to attempt to give the lie credibility. Unbelievable!

But it doesn’t end there. The deceit is compounded by Kissane as he feverishly trawls the net for more ‘evidence’ of an ‘al Qaeda’ connection to Palestine. He 'discovers' two. And where does he find them? One in the National Review, another neocon right-wing Zionist pro Israeli journal that supported the lies that gave us the Iraq war, and the other written by Dore Gold, yet another neoconservative lunatic who also happens to be president of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs! All of them have a vested interest in perpetuating the myth of ‘al Qaeda’. And this garbage from the neocon right-wing loonies is presented as evidence of the existence of ‘al Qaeda’.

BUT WAIT… THERE’S MORE FROM DESPERATE DYLAN THE ISRAELI LOBBY LOON!
This right-wing lunatic has become so desperate to promote the myth of al Qaeda he’s now actually trawling my blog to see how often I quote UK Guardian material in order to justify something he’s found in the Guardian that gives some vague quote about az-Zahar saying something about al Qaeda in Palestine. Persistent… but that’s about all. Still no actual evidence of al Qaeda in Palestine – apart from the ones Mossad have set up there.

AND EVEN MORE FROM DESPERATE DYLAN…
Apparently it wasn’t az-Zahar that the Guardian article referred to, but Abbas himself. Well, I guess that means al Qaeda is everywhere if the Guardian says as much then I guess it must be so… Dream on!! I suppose I'll have to read this lunatics garbage and links more carefully... as if!

But still no actual evidence of al Qaeda in Palestine; just desperate attempts from this obsessed lunatic to protect the myth.

As if a quote in a newspaper is likely to support this garbage about a worldwide al Qaeda organisation with more branch offices than Prudential Insurance.

DESPERATE DYLAN KEEPS ON TRYING BUT STILL NO HARD EVIDENCE
Desperate Dylan seems to think that my mistake of writing ‘az-Zahar’ instead of ‘Abbas’ is somehow proof positive that ‘al Qaeda’ exists in Palestine. So desperate is this loon to try and make his point that he hangs on every single word I write waiting for some slip that will provide him with the opportunity to perpetuate his delusion of al Qaeda’s existence. I don’t know why he is so obsessed with me and my blog and what I say. He seems to devote more time attacking what I write than actually providing any primary evidence to back his claims. And this is the bloke who thinks that “…ad hominem arguments aren't effective as rebuttals”. It’s another characteristic of the neocon/fascists that Desperate Dylan represents– hypocrisy.

Look out for the next exciting episode of 'Dylan's Delusions'. He's so obsessed over what I write that I'm sure there'll be one!

DISAPPOINTED
Desperate Dylan, the Loopy Lobby Lunatic from Lyon, has disappointed me by not responding to my last ad hominen attack on him as I thought he would. (Yes, I’m quite happy to make ‘ad hominem’ attacks on any neocon/fascist thug that thinks invading other people’s nations and destroying them is good for business and their disgusting Islamophobic racist policies.) But then again, he still hasn’t provided any hard evidence that al Qaeda exists in Palestine or anywhere else outside of Pakistan, Afghanistan and the vivid imagination of the Loony Lobby propagandists. Perhaps he’s busy trawling the net for some morsel of a quote of a quote sourced from the cousin of a sister of Osama bin Laden’s hairdresser who told a joke about an ‘al Qaeda’ staff application form for wannabe Palestinian terrorists in the Gaza Strip.

It’s all very well having Bush, Blair and Howard and their lunatic warmongering propagandists and supporters saying ‘al Qaeda’ this and ‘terrorist’ that every time someone fights back against the US or any of their allies in order to get them out of their countries but the reality is; there has not been one piece of hard evidence to say that anything like a movement called ‘al Qaeda’ exists except maybe in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Wednesday, April 18, 2007

THE LAST TIME WOLFOWITZ GOT A JOB FOR HIS GIRLFRIEND IT WAS WITH THE OFFICE OF SPECIAL PLANS!

It seems that it isn’t the first time that Wolfowitz has been instrumental in getting his girlfriend Shaha Riza jobs in departments and organisations that he is boss of. Back in 2003 the Department of Defence, of which Wolfowitz was Deputy Secretary of Defence at the time, instructed a private contractor called Science Applications International Corporation to employ her on secondment from the World Bank for whom she worked.

Her job was to spend a month studying issues related to setting up a new government in Iraq. And who was she to report to within the Department of Defence? Doug Feith who, at the time, was Under-Secretary for Policy and who also headed up the now notorious Office of Special Plans which was responsible for ‘stove-piping’ false intelligence about Iraqs WMDs to the President – false intelligence that led directly to the invasion, occupation and plundering of Iraq.

Small world isn’t it!

Tuesday, April 17, 2007

SO WHO’S REALLY KIDNAPPED BBC JOURNALIST ALAN JOHNSTON?

The word on the street in Gaza is that no Palestinian group there has taken him. Johnston it seems had been reporting from the Gaza for some three years and was well known for his sympathetic attitude toward the Palestinians plight and is well liked by his Palestinian journalist colleagues who have rallied for his release.

Johnston was soon to finish his three year stint in the Gaza and was in the midst of preparing his final report from Gaza when was kidnapped. During his time there he had nurtured a working relationship with both Fatah and Hamas documenting and observing how their relationship had evolved. He had also witnessed the settlement withdrawals and the aftermath of the Israeli incursions into the Gaza after the capture of the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit.

There are several reports about who has been responsible for Johnston’s abduction with one report on 2 April 2007 in the UKs Independent newspaper claiming that Johnston was kidnapped by a criminal family, the report indicating that his kidnapping was for either purely criminal reasons or carried out as part of a ‘contract’ on behalf of a third party. However, by the 15 April 2007 the Israeli newspaper Arutz Sheva were reporting that a group calling themselves the ‘The Brigades of Tawheed and Jihad’, a group that is claimed to have links with ‘al Qaeda’, had claimed that Johnston had been executed in protest at the way Israel are holding their prisoners. But on the same day Timesonline reported that the kidnappers were demanding the release of ‘an Iraqi woman who tried to blow herself up during the bombing of a wedding reception in Jordan in 2005’.

It’s interesting that the ‘Taweed and Jihad’ and ‘al Qadea’ link be made here especially by the right-wing religious Zionist-supporting Arutz Sheva media group. The only other time that ‘al Qadea’ has been linked to Palestinan resistance groups was when it was found that they were in fact Israeli stooges posing as ‘al Qadea’ in the Gaza.

In recent months the special forces group of the IDF, the Sayeret Duvdevan, have been exposed operating in the West Bank and Gaza. Could it be that Israel have used their special forces to pull this terrifying stunt against a journalist who wasn’t exactly reporting in the best interests of Israel? After all, it’s not as though it’s the first time that Israel has murdered journalists they didn’t like.

THE NEOCON COMIC, THE ‘WALL STREET JOURNAL’, MOVES TO PROTECT MASTER NEOCON AND LIAR-IN-CHIEF WOLFOWITZ.

Paul Wolfowitz’s move to head up the World Bank after it was becoming obvious that he was going to get caught up in the scandal of lies that were used to kick off the invasion, occupation and plundering of Iraq while he was Deputy Secretary of Defence was, so the Bush administration thought, the most appropriate reward for the services of one of the worlds most disgusting warmongers and liars.

For most people the World Bank is a quiet nondescript entity where Wolfowitz could safely hide away from any of the real limelight yet still maintain an influential role in the affairs of the world using his skills as a professionally trained and fully qualified Straussian liar.

Recently however, his skills at lying and manipulation have again caught him out and yet again thrust him into unwanted limelight that may well, hopefully, cost him his job.

The neocon comic, the ‘Wall Street Journal’, yesterday attempted to rescue their liar in chief by trying to make it seem as though Wolfowitz is the victim and, just to compound their deceit and dishonesty, they blamed European elements within the World Bank organisation for manipulating Wolfowitz’s potential demise from the World Bank’s Presidency in order that they can protect their own interests who the 'Wall Street Journal' infer are ‘corrupt’. What the ‘Wall Street Journal' didn’t mention was how these European elements managed to get Wolfowitz’s girlfriend, Shaha Riza, seconded to a virtually non-existent job in the US State Department where she would be working for the State Department sponsored Foundation for the Future at a salary of some $244,960, a salary that is greater even than Condoleeza Rice’s salary as Secretary of State, head of the Department that Riza was going to work for.

More lies and deceit from the neocon masters. Only problem is; the world is now beginning to wake up to their malevolent little tricks. No one is taken in any more.

Saturday, April 14, 2007

DOES THE U.S. NEED NEW ISRAELI GOVERNMENT FOR PRE-EMPTIVE STRIKE STRATEGY AGAINST IRAN?

From President George Bush’s point of view one would have to wonder if Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and the Israeli Defence Minister Amir Peretz are really the best partners the US could hope for when it comes to a pre-emptive strike strategy against Iran.

A strike against Iran would be no small deal. While ostensibly such a strike would be to reduce or eliminate Iran’s capacity to produce a nuclear weapon, the real goal of such a strike is far more ambitious. And they’ll only get the one shot at it.

An attack on Iran is only part of a much larger strategy; a strategy that benefits both the Israelis and the US. In eliminating what the Israelis and the US perceive as the Iranian threat, the Syrians will be deprived of a strong ally. Syria has a defence treaty which commits Iran to Syria’s defence in the event of an attack by Israel. It was this alliance with Iran that prevented Israel from attacking Syria directly during last year’s war against the Hizbollah in southern Lebanon, a war that was designed to deliberately provoke Syria and Iran into attacking Israel knowing that in doing so the US would massively intervene on Israel’s behalf. As we now know, that strategy failed miserably. Both Syria and Iran practised restraint knowing full well what Israel’s game was and Hizbollah were able to hold their own against a concerted effort by the Israelis in southern Lebanon.

One of the reasons the Israelis withdrew from Lebanon, apart from the overwhelming worldwide public outcry over their indiscriminate bombing strategy, is because they are unable to take sustained casualties themselves without Israeli public opinion intervening, especially if it seems there is not going to be a quick result favourable to Israel. Despite the Israeli attacks on Hizbollah, the IDF were unable to prevent Hizbollah launching retaliatory rocket attacks against the Israelis and, if they were unable to absorb Hizbollah rocket attacks, they certainly would not have been able to sustain any attack on them by Iran’s far more sophisticated ballistic missiles which may well have been the risk they had to take had they attacked Syria. Since it was clear that neither Syria nor Iran were going to attack Israel, the US deferred involvement beyond supplying armaments to Israel. As a result Israel failed in both its declared war aim of eliminating Hizbollah and also its undeclared war aim of provoking Syria and Iran into some kind of final showdown that could well have escalated into war with devastating worldwide consequences which could even have included the use of strategic nuclear weapons.

Given these failures, the overall tactic has now shifted. The Israelis and the US have not given up their goal of eliminating forever those that stand in the way of their ambitions for creating a Greater Israel surrounded by passive, subdued and submissive neighbours. The tactic now is to first remove Iran from the bigger picture thus cutting off support to Syria and thence to Hizbollah and Hamas.

Eliminating Iran from the bigger picture is not something that Israeli is able to do on its own; at least not without using nuclear weapons. Eliminating Iran can only be accomplished by the US if conventional weapons are to be used with the possibility of using smaller tactical nuclear weapons only on Iran’s nuclear facilities. However, the moment the US attacks Iran, Israel will almost certainly need to attack Hizbollah and Hamas simultaneously and, at the very least, threaten Syria with a massive attack, possibly nuclear, if it intervenes.

The big problem here is; the present Israeli government with Olmert as Prime Minister and Peretz as Defence Minister have already shown that they are not able to deal with an extremely tenacious Hizbollah. To ask them to be able to take on Hizbollah again and, at the same time, also take on a Hamas that would likely see such a fight as one to the death and therefore one that would be extremely ferocious, is unlikely.

Olmert and Peretz have proved themselves to be weak and ineffective war leaders. The Israeli Chief of Staff responsible for conducting last years disastrous war against Hizbollah, General Dan Halutz, has already fallen by the wayside and it is generally expected that, once the Winograd Commission hands down its preliminary report into the conduct of the war later this month, Olmert and Peretz will fall similarly. Olmert’s likely successor will almost certainly be Benjamin Netanyahu who is reported to already have been in discussions with Kadima Knesset members.

Netanyahu’s closest ally in the Bush administration is Vice-President Dick Cheney who, in turn, has massive influence on Bush himself. It has even been reported that the last failed war was instigated and planned during an American Enterprise Institute conference held at Beaver Creek, Colorado, where Netanyahu and Cheney met in June 2006, just prior to the capture by Hizbollah of two Israeli soldiers inside the Lebanese border, the incident that was the casus belli of Israel’s attack on Lebanon. Netanyahu met with Cheney at the recent AIPAC conference where both spoke strongly of the need to deal with the ‘Iranian threat’.

Could it be that Bush, via Cheney, is waiting for a stronger government in Israel before launching any attack on Iran? Will the warmongering Netanyahu manage to persuade the Knesset to give him the Prime Ministership or force another election? Does the future of the entire Middle East hang on what the Knesset decides? One hopes that, if there is to be an election, that the Israeli people chose peace – not war!

Thursday, April 12, 2007

ISRAEL ATTEMPTS TO SILENCE HIZBOLLAH MEN THAT CAPTURED ISRAELI SOLDIERS INSIDE LEBANON

There is more to the Israeli government’s desire to change the status of three Hizbollah prisoners, captured during last years war in southern Lebanon, from ‘prisoners of war’ to ‘illegal combatants’ than meets the eye. All three of them it seems were captured on August 4 in the villages of Aita al-Shaab and Shihine, just inside the Lebanese border with northern Israel.

The Israeli government wants to charge at least one of the men, 23 year old Hussein Suleiman, with aiding in the capture of two Israeli soldiers. Now, readers may recall that it was at Aita al-Shaab, a village that is inside the Lebanese border, where the two Israelis were captured. The problem for the Israelis is; if their Hizbollah prisoners maintain their ‘prisoner of war’ status then the Israelis will have no alternative but to release the men once the deal has been struck to exchange prisoners. Since the Israeli government has insisted that their soldiers were captured inside Israel and not Lebanon, and if Suleiman is released knowing the real story, and then subsequently spills the beans, the Israelis are going to end up with even more egg on their faces than they already have. Imagine the furore there would be if the man that actually had a hand in capturing the Israelis inside Lebanon were able to tell his story.

The only way that the Israelis can prevent this from happening is to change the status of their prisoner to the extremely controversial status of ‘illegal combatant’, a status similar to that of America’s so-called ‘unlawful combatant’ under which ‘law’ the US feels entitles them to keep their prisoners indefinitely and to be tried whenever the US can dream up a charge to try them with. As an ‘illegal combatant’ Suleiman can then be charged with whatever crime the Israelis fancy they can get away with and then keep him locked up indefinitely.

First, however, the Israeli government has to front up to the Israeli courts in order to get Suleiman and the other two prisoners’ status changed. There are three things working in the prisoners favour; first is the obvious and transparent ulterior motives the Israeli government have for wanting to change their status; secondly, the Israeli people are beginning to get more than a bit fed up with the way Olmert and the other right-wing Zionists are handling Israel’s affairs and, third; a change in the status of Hizbollah prisoners may also have an effect on the status of the two Israeli prisoners. Given this, the courts might not necessarily look favourably at the Israeli government’s quest.

Olmert increasingly is on the nose of Israelis as well as the rest of the Arab world.



A QUICK NOTE OF THANKS TO THE EXTREME RIGHT-WING ISRAELI LOONY LOBBYISTS FOR HELPING TO PROMOTE THIS BLOG.

In his frantic efforts to attempt what he delusionally believes is belittlement, Australian extreme right-wing Israeli Loony Lobbyist, pseudo-intellectual and academic wannabe, Dylan Kissane, has been continually linking to this site and in doing so has unwittingly been promoting some of the ideas that he is so dead-set against. For some reason this warmongering moon-bat has become obsessed with this blog.

Personally I regard so much attention from the likes of Dylan Kissane and other hate sites like Tim Blair, etc., as a mark of success. One right-wing blogger from another Australian Islamophobic hate site has even suggested that I am the most despised anti-war and anti-Bush, Blair and Howard person throughout the world of right-wing warmongering and Israeli Loony Lobby bloggers. The most despised! Honor indeed!

What can I say except; thank you for your support by linking to my blog!

Wednesday, April 11, 2007

THE NAJAF DEMONSTRATION: MORE LIES, DECEIT AND CHUTZPAH FROM THE US GOVERNMENT AND THEIR LOONY RIGHT SUPPORTERS.

The Bush government and their right-wing supporters everywhere have gone into damage control mode after the massive turnout of Iraqi people who demanded that the US leave Iraq. Their spin, as noted here yesterday, is that such a demonstration could not have been held if Saddam had remained in power. Beside the obvious Chutzpah here, whereby if Saddam was still in power there would be no need to have a demonstration to rid the nation of the US invaders in the first place, there is also the naivety in the right-wings implied belief that the Iraqi people actually didn’t mind having their nation destroyed, 650,000 of its people killed, another almost four million of its peoples made refugees, its resources plundered, and its people murdered by US troops on a daily basis just so that they can hold a demonstration and get to have a choice about which corrupt persons they’d prefer to have in a puppet government that exists only at the whim of the US.

The US government have also made complete fools of themselves – again – this time over the numbers involved in the demonstrations. Rear Admiral Mark I. Fox of the US Navy seems to think that only 5000-7000 turned up for the demonstration in Najaf. He should take another look at the photographs. You don’t need to count them to see that there are considerably more that 7000 in the pictures. Of course, you need to look at the right photographs; some right-wing bloggers have apparently been posting a picture of a comparatively smaller gathering in Baghdad and claiming it to be the Najaf demonstration.

When are the US and their western allies, together with these right-wing warmongering lunatics that support them, going to wake up to the fact that many of the peoples of the Middle East and elsewhere are not interested in US-style ‘democracy’? They have been on the receiving end of its hypocrisy and arrogance for decades and are no more interested in it now than they were when Europeans first came to the Middle East in modern times to plunder it for its fuel to power their industrial and war machines.

Tuesday, April 10, 2007

CAN MOQTADA AL-SADR UNITE THE IRAQI PEOPLE AGAINST THE INVADERS?

Moqtada al-Sadr seems to have put paid to the illusion that Sunni and Shia relations are the root cause of the violence in Iraq. The weekends massive and peaceful demonstrations by his supporters, included Sunni as well as Shia clerics in the parades, were all calling for the same thing – an end to the occupation of their country by the US and their allies.

Meanwhile, US government spokesman, Gordon Johndroe, tried to put a positive spin on the latest development saying: “…I note today that Sadr called for massive protests. I'm not sure that we've seen that, those numbers materialize and the numbers that he was seeking in his call from his hangout in Iran. But Iraq, four years on, is now a place where people can freely gather and express their opinions. And that was something they could not do under Saddam. And while we have much more progress ahead of us -- the United States, the coalition and Iraqis have much more to do -- this is a country that has come a long way from the tyranny of Saddam Hussein.”

It would have been a little difficult to stop hundreds of thousands to ‘freely gather and express their opinions’ as they did yesterday in Najaf, but if just a few hundred had tried the same thing in Baghdad, where there was an effective vehicle curfew which prevented any such activities, there would have been no such freedoms available.

As if to reinforce the call that Moqtada al-Sadr has made that Iraqis should rise up together and push the Americans and their allies out, some 10 US soldiers were killed in various actions by insurgents. While there can be no doubt that there has been some gross and extreme violence between Sunni and Shia as the groupings vie for power on the street, al-Sadr has now called for them to put aside their differences in order to fight against their common enemy; the US and their allies. The mainstream media have been reporting that the civil war that is underway in Iraq is because of the continuing violence between the Sunni and Shia groups. This is not the case. The reality is that the civil war is between the Iraqi insurgents, Sunni and Shia, and the Iraqi puppet government army and police who operate under the command of the US occupation forces. This, however, may soon end in the light of Moqtada al-Sadr’s call for even the Iraqi army and police to now rise up against the occupiers.

The western mainstream media propaganda machine are going to have to re-think their ‘civil war’ stories in the coming weeks and months as the reality dawns upon the world that all the Iraq people want is for the US and their allies to leave.

Thursday, April 05, 2007

NOW THAT THE BRITS ARE ON THEIR WAY HOME, THE COUNTDOWN TO WAR AGAINST IRAN CAN RESUME!

One can presume that the countdown to war with Iran, put on hold while the British sailors and marines were being held captive by the Iranians, can resume now that said sailors and marines are safely winging their way home back to the UK. The USS ‘Nimitz’ battle group got underway for the Gulf on Monday (2 April) to replace the USS ‘Eisenhower’ group already stationed in the Gulf with the USS ‘John C Stennis’ battle group.

The worry here is that the Navy have gone to great pains to explain that there will be no overlap in the change-over. This is a lie. The USS ‘Eisenhower’ and her group will not leave station until the USS ‘Nimitz’ and her group actually arrive on station. There has to be an overlap. It would be extremely fortuitous if there were some defining event that adversely affected the US presence there or elsewhere in the Middle East which could be effectively blamed on the Iranians just at that moment of time when there is an overlap or at least a window of opportunity where either the ‘Nimitz’ group could rush to the Gulf or the ‘Eisenhower’ group could easily rush back to the Gulf after having begun to return home.

And, of course, by then the Israelis would have completed all their exercises ensuring that they’ll be ready for the next time Hamas and/or Hizbollah ‘kidnap’ any more of their soldiers or to stop Hamas and Hizbollah from preparing to defend themselves from Israeli attack. (How’s that for Chutzpah?!)

It’s all a matter of timing.

Wednesday, April 04, 2007

NOW THE WARMONGERING SUPER NEOCON WILLIAM KRISTOL DEMANDS BUSH IGNORES DEMOCRACY!

Not content with using their influence to start wars on behalf of the right-wing Zionist Israeli government, the US neoconservatives are now attempting to erode what’s left of American democracy by using their influence to impede Congressional due process.

William Kristol, ultra right-wing neoconservative editor of Rupert Murdoch’s The Weekly Standard, tells his readers: “Surely President Bush must realize that the Democratic Congress is not merely struggling with him over policy, or jousting for political advantage. The Democrats in Congress are trying to destroy his presidency.” Well, yes – that’s what the American people voted the Democrats in to do. Kristol goes on: “They are trying to cripple his ability to govern for the rest of his term.” Right again. “And they are not far from succeeding.” Well, if they do succeed, that’s good Kristol; what’s the problem? Democracy’s working!

But then Kristol displays his anti-democracy credentials. He asks: “Will Bush fight back?” Naturally, Kristol hopes he does. He tells the President that “…Attorney General Gonzales and Deputy Attorney General McNulty should go.” In fact Kristol says the President should “…get rid of them now,” and then “appoint strong conservatives to replace them.” Kristol then goes off the deep end and suggests that the President “…insist on their prompt confirmation.” Never mind that there should be any Congressional oversight in the matter.

But all this is just a warm up for what he’s really leading up to. He writes: “Senate judiciary chair Pat Leahy threatened last week to hold up any such confirmation until his committee had access to testimony from Karl Rove.” That’s right! Leahy has had the nerve in Kristol’s book to ‘threaten’ to get at the truth. Whatever next?

Well, according to Kristol, the next thing you know Leahy and his committee will be wanting to know is what else Karl Rove was getting up to with various departments of the government. Kristol recommends that Bush ignore the democratic process saying: “And if Leahy holds up confirmation hearings for the nominee for attorney general--if there is one--Bush needs to make his man acting attorney general in the meantime, rather than allowing Democrats to impede his ability to govern.” Kristol is demanding that Bush completely ignore the democratic process and dictate for himself who should be the nation’s attorney general. Kristol is demanding that the checks and balances that govern and oversee executive power be removed. He is demanding that the very tenets that are the cornerstone of American democracy not only be removed, but that Bush unilaterally appoint a right-wing attorney general without any referral to the democratic process and, to top it off, that Karl Rove should not be held accountable for any part he has played in of the actions that the Bush administration has taken since being in power.

And then, just to really show the world what he thinks of American democracy and what’s left of the American justice system, he demands that the President pardon I. ‘Scooter’ Libby!

William Kristol has finally made the step from lunatic warmongering neocon to dangerous fascist.

Tuesday, April 03, 2007

THE AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE'S ATTACK DOGS JUMP ONTO THE 'IRAN HOSTAGE CRISIS' BANDWAGON.

The attack dogs at neoconservative headquarters in Washington, DC, are at it again. They have seized on the ‘crisis’ that was brought about by the capture of the 15 British sailors and marines by the Iranians inside Iranian waters to call again for confrontation and war against Iran.

Two of the American Enterprise Institute’s (AEI) most unwavering and repulsive warmongering lunatics, David Frum and Michael Ledeen, have each jumped on the bandwagon of hate to take advantage of the current stand-off between Britain and Iran in order to further their cause of getting the US to attack Iran thus leaving Israel free to deal with their immediate neighbours, Syria, Hizbollah in Lebanon, and Hamas in the Gaza and West Bank, all of whom rely on support from Iran.

Frum’s frothing at the mouth contribution opens with: “The Iranian seizure of 15 British naval personnel is an outrage--and an opportunity.” The ‘opportunity’ he refers to is the opportunity to encourage the Europeans to take up the challenge of making some tough sanctions decisions against Iran. But he also writes toward the end of his piece that: “Since 9/11, Europeans have pleaded with the U.S. to rely on sanctions and diplomacy rather than force. Fine. Let's see some sanctions then--real sanctions, not the wrist-slaps imposed till now.” Since Frum just knows that that isn’t going to happen, then the real meaning of Frum’s use of the word ‘opportunity’ comes into play – ‘if you can’t come to sanctions then support a strike against Iran’.

Frum also exposes both his hypocrisy and his obsessive paranoid Islamaphobia in his piece. He reckons Iran “…forced the captured female sailor to wear the Islamic hijab, a violation of her Geneva Convention right to practice her own religion.” Frum compounds his paranoid obsession about Islam by trying to use the headscarf the female prisoner is wearing as some kind of demonising symbol when he asserts: “…let's broadcast one more time that image of Faye Turney, cloaked against her will in that black headscarf of subordination and humiliation.” The hypocrisy is in the way that Frum, a supporter of the horrors of Gitmo and Abu Ghraib, attempts to glibly mention that Iran’s prisoners are entitled to the protection of the Geneva Convention.

For the lunatic fascist neocon Michael Ledeen, it’s not so much hypocrisy and paranoia that sets the pace in his rant; it’s his arrogance, which is just another of those values, together with hypocrisy, that ‘they’ hate about ‘us’. He berates the British because they didn’t fight to gain their freedom before capture and then rubs it in by relating a story about a similar border incident in which American servicemen were involved. They, of course, escaped capture by fighting back. The implication is barely disguised.

For Ledeen the reason for Iran’s actions is straight forward: “The Iranians have two basic reasons to take hostages. One is to break our will and drive us out of the region; the other is to trade their prey for their comrades now in our grip, of whom there is a significant number (several hundred Iranian intelligence and military officers have been captured in Iraq in recent months, according to good U.S. government sources).” Ledeen’s arrogance is supreme. For him the capture of Iranian intelligence and military officers by the US is quite legitimate despite the fact they are part of the Iranian diplomatic corps in Iraq but for the Iranians to capture coalition forces renders them to be likened to wolves or animals that have captured their 'prey'. It doesn’t for one moment occur to Ledeen that it is the US and Britain that is on land that doesn’t belong to them and who are in places where they are not wanted.

Hypocrisy and arrogance; the hallmarks of all true warmongering neoconservatives.

ISRAELIS OPENLY ADMIT THEY ARE NOW ONLY WAITING FOR AN EXCUSE TO INVADE THE GAZA!

The 'Haaretz' reports that the Israeli Defence Minister, Amir Peretz, has said that “…we will not allow the continuation of arming, in a way that the Gaza Strip will turn into the Second Lebanon.”

The report went on to say that: “The scenario for launching the operation was large-scale rocket fire on western- and northern-Negev communities and the abduction of soldiers.” Preparations for the invasion have been completed. The Jerusalem Post reported that: “At the end of last year, Chief of Staff Dan Halutz ordered that preparations be advanced for a possible action in the Gaza Strip that would use large numbers of ground forces. Infantry, armoured units, artillery and intelligence units underwent training, mainly at the Tzeelim base in the South, and the Southern Command headquarters held an exercise last week.”

Now all the Israelis need to do is wait for their ‘excuse’. Naturally, if they have to wait for too long, one couldn’t put it past them to fabricate some ‘false flag’ incident in order to meet their schedule.

No doubt the new IDF Chief of Staff, Gabi Ashkenazi, will be itching to prove himself in order to consolidate his new position.

Monday, April 02, 2007

HOWARD’S CRIMES

THE CONSEQUENCES OF THE HICKS SAGA HAS RENDERED THE HOWARD GOVERNMENTS CRIMES FAR MORE SERIOUS THAN ANY CRIME HICKS WAS SUPPOSED TO HAVE COMMITTED.

Robert Richter in his analysis of the fiasco that has been the David Hicks saga, published in ‘The Age’ newspaper, has raised questions that go to the heart of Australia’s legal, moral and constitutional integrity particularly in relation to the way the Howard government, especially his chief minions Alexander Downer and Phillip Ruddock, have handled this entire affair from the moment Hicks was arrested.

Richter cuts straight to the chase arguing that, “Hundreds of years of what constituted the rule of law have been jettisoned so that Howard, Ruddock and Downer can pretend that Hicks is off their election agenda. Forget habeas corpus. Forget retrospective legislation. Forget coerced evidence and confessions. Forget commissions in which guilt has been predetermined. Forget prosecutors being judges in their own cause.”

Richter also specifically refers to the laws that Howard, Downer, Ruddock, et al, have breached; laws that relate to the responsibility the Australian government has to protect the rights of Australians overseas when arrested regardless of what they are alleged to have done, and also their responsibility to ensure that they are not denied and do receive a fair trial. So incensed is Richter, a renowned Melbourne barrister, he has gone on to write: “…we can only hope there will be another attorney-general in Australia who will have the guts to authorise proceedings against those who "aided, abetted, counselled or procured" the commission of the crimes to which I have referred. Let us not forget the war crimes trials after World War II, in which the German Nazi judges who prostituted their duty in the service of the political ideology that put them there were put on trial for what they did.”

The problem for Howard and his minions is that, while they may be able to prevent the beans being spilt about the detention and injustices that Hicks has received, they are unable to conceal the fact that there are beans there to actually be spilt – it’s just a matter of time.

The reality is that Hicks did not commit any crime that he could have been charged with under any US domestic law or even any Australian law. In fact the whole of the Hicks saga isn’t even about Hicks; it is more about the crimes that Howard and various ministers of his government have committed when they ignored the plight of an Australian who had been denied justice and a fair trial. It also now seems that, not only did they do nothing to ensure that Hicks did receive a fair trial; they were actually complicit in ensuring that he did not receive a fair trial.

Howard can only delay the emergence of the truth of what has happened to Hicks but he can’t ever make it go away. When eventually it does emerge – and that may well be sooner rather than later if Hicks is returned to Australia and his lawyers are then able to convince an Australian court of the injustice that has been meted to him – then the Howard government may well have to answer to the laws of Australia for the crimes that it has committed; crimes that are far more serious than any Hicks was accused of.