willybachpoeticthoughts

The Use of Coercive Force

2011-05-31T13:16:00.000-07:00

The Use of Coercive Force – Willy Bach 31 May 2011

The threshold for resorting to the use of coercive force, formerly called ‘going to war’ is being systematically lowered. We have seen the US War Powers Act and measures designed to enable the President of the USA to use military or covert paramilitary force, including the use of secret arms supplies and the use of private military contractors, without the consent of the US Congress. This followed closely on the heels of US President Barack Obama’s announcement that he had assumed the power to order the assassination of any person(s) including US citizens, anywhere in the world, by whatever means he deemed appropriate, including drone attacks, Special Forces assassination teams or other non-specified means.

Now the Pentagon proposes that a cyber attack on their computer systems or on any essential infrastructure in the USA and elsewhere (there is a long list revealed by WikiLeaks), including power grids and corporations that are suppliers to the US government, such as Lockheed Martin, should be described as acts of war and should be responded to in kind with a ‘proportionate’ response. Since many attempts to hack into the US Defense Department and similar targets have been carried out by non-state actors, including school students and individuals, this new lowering of the threshold suggests that governments are going to be held accountable to the USA for activities within the borders of their sovereign nations and will be faced with demands to reign-in such groups or individuals or face the prospect of military action and possibly the destruction of their entire nation.

This is likely to result in major curtailment, already underway, of civil liberties, free expression, dissenting views, media and artistic creation. Filtering and blocking of the internet (already proposed by Australia’s major parties), data harvesting, monitoring and the introduction of ‘sock-puppets’ to social networking sites and search engines and the absurdities of Edgar Hoover-like excesses of surveillance and persecution of environment and peace groups, the securitisation of the state and the dismantling of democratic institutions (already underway). US President Obama has also stiffened his government’s resistance to whistle-blowers and has attempted to silence and/or imprison some courageous North American people, who saw or discovered wrongdoing that offended their consciences and acted in the public interest. Nations that proclaim their democratic governance will no longer have anything to boast. The nations of the world where this will be most severely experienced will be those that have not yet developed strong democratic institutions and traditions. People who are only now learning how to effectively raise their voices following decades of emergency rule by dictators, in Eastern Europe, in Latin America, in Africa and in the Arab world will see their hopes snuffed out even before the flame is fully lit.

Furthermore, allies are being drawn more tightly into the orbit of US control by the requirement to replicate this doctrine in their own legal structure. This will require member states of NATO and by extension all allies including Australia will be more inextricably and inescapably co-opted and recruited into the service of promoting and protecting US interests (rather than their own interests) and will be fighting yet more wars on behalf of the USA, even with a token force and token tasks. Australia will be embroiled in more wars, enmeshed in US security concerns and will forego the right to object, shed more blood and experience the inevitable flow of displaced people seeking protection. Fighting more wars will see Australia increasingly unwilling and unable to address the issue of refugees. Australia and its people need to make their own choices about what is in their interest, which may not always be identical to those of the USA. Just think of the risk of a US President Sarah Palin and ask this question. Yes, thankfully Donald Trump is out of the race. In making law nothing can be left to serendipitous chance.

This scenario will impact very dramatically on the willingness of the Australian Labor Party and the Australian Liberal Party, both of whom are directly instructed by the US Embassy on these matters, when Greens Senator, Scott Ludlam proposes his Private Member’s Bill to limit the powers of the Australian Prime Minister to take the country to war without consulting Parliament. Australian Prime Ministers are going to argue that there was no time for discussion, that the military response required immediate action. I suggest that the Bill will require further strengthening to protect the interests of the Australian people. We should all study closely the timelines and decisions of the British government under Tony Blair’s Prime Minister-ship, in the way the decision to go to war both in Afghanistan and Iraq were predetermined to mesh seamlessly with the agenda of the then US President, George W Bush. There is little time to prepare for the counter arguments to be made explicitly or implicitly with stubborn silence and negative votes.

A sample of web sites for further reading:

Cyber Combat: Act of War

Pentagon Sets Stage for U.S. to Respond to Computer Sabotage With Military Force

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304563104576355623135782718.html#ixzz1NxP9GBQT

Congress Reauthorizes Overbroad Patriot Act Provisions

http://www.aclu.org/national-security-technology-and-liberty/congress-reauthorizes-overbroad-patriot-act-provisions

Oppose New Worldwide War Authority

https://secure.aclu.org/site/Advocacy?cmd=display&page=UserAction&id=3195&s_subsrc=110511_AUMF

Going to War - Who Should Decide?

http://scott-ludlam.greensmps.org.au/content/speech/going-war-who-should-decide

Background Note Parliamentary involvement in declaring war and deploying forces overseas Online only 22 March 2010

http://www.aph.gov.au/library/pubs/bn/pol/ParliamentaryInvolvement.htm

Interoperability and lawlessness - the Cluster Bomb Treaty

2011-05-01T22:19:00.000-07:00

The Australian government signed the Convention on Cluster Munitions on 3 December 2008. It was in the process of ratification of the treaty. It did take submissions that were supposed to help shape this as an Australian law as the Criminal Code Amendment (Cluster Munitions Prohibition) Bill 2010, but then Washington intervened and ... this is what we get:

Labor foiled bomb treaty

Philip Dorling

May 2, 2011

http://www.theage.com.au/national/labor-foiled-bomb-treaty-20110501-1e37k.html

We must do more to help rid the world of these foul weapons

Paul Barratt

May 2, 2011

http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/we-must-do-more-to-help-rid-the-world-of-these-foul-weapons-20110501-1e2t6.html

My response to this travesty:

Dear (Senator Scott Ludlam's office)

Thank you. My thoughts exactly, and I am with you and with Scott in being outraged by this abominable anti-democratic behaviour by the Rudd/Gillard government(s). How much worse off would we be with Tony Abbott? It couldn't get much worse, could it!

Thank you for this very strong statement. It is good to see that the Greens are really the Greens and standing up for democracy, the rule of law, peace and nonviolence and the independent foreign policy that I wanted to see when I helped to write the Greens foreign policy in 2006-2007. I want this statement to publicly put the Gillard government on notice with all the Greens parliamentary team solidly behind it, that we are profoundly offended by their scurrilous and anti-democratic betrayal.

I do not use the word betrayal lightly or as a wounded victim, or in some quaint 19th century sentimental sense of this word. I was one of the people who submitted to the inquiry a well-reasoned argument why the ratification should be done according to the intent of the treaty, the good intentions of other signatories and morally defensible in the international community. My submission was written in Costa Rica, without any input by others, yet on almost every point it was in agreement with all other submissions. My submission and others that I have read were written in good faith that the democratic process would enable the committee to give fair consideration to all of the submissions, that a rational, evidence-based process would take place, that we are all stakeholders in the good reputation that our nation has in the international community. The decision that the Gillard government has made makes Australia a pariah state without the consent of the Australian community.

Yet we find, with the fortuitous help of WikiLeaks, because the Australian government would not have told us voluntarily, that the committee wilfully ignored all of the available evidence in the large number of submissions that they were presented with, in favour of the views of a foreign power, namely the United States of America, a party that was not openly a stakeholder at the table, not part of a democratic parliamentary process and not Australian. This betrayal is a profound betrayal of the democratically elected Australian parliament and all of its instruments, a failure to respect those who are truly stakeholders and a betrayal of the sovereignty of Australia as an independent nation. Seeking to conspire with other nations to undermine and sabotage an international treaty is a betrayal of the most profound kind, an unconscionable act of deceit.

Furthermore, this betrayal is a profound act of contempt for the lives of members of the Australian armed forces and their forebears, who the Prime Minister and all previous Prime Ministers claim so frequently that they admire and support. This is the final proof that their claim is false. This government is intentionally undermining the morality and dignity of members of the armed forces of this country by contriving with a foreign power to oblige these servants of the government to violate the treaty they so recently signed and went through the motions of ratifying. No wonder our soldiers are conflicted when they are supposed to be serving us and when they find they are required to perform so many tasks that are morally equivocal and not in the best collective interests of Australians. There is nothing that more endangers the lives of Australian soldiers and civilians than being confronted by opponents who don't respect the rules of war, because we are known not to respect these rules either.

What I also want to draw attention to in this context is the recent Canberra Times article by David Ellery on Agent Orange, a matter which I believe further demonstrates that the Australian government pays more attention to the requirements of Washington than they do to their own veterans, some of whom are suffering the effects of Agent Orange, as are their children. Agent Orange is an egregious genocidal weapon with inferred effects of causing inter-generational collective punishment on the children of Indochina, who have never been a threat to Australians and who are no longer regarded as our enemies, yet we refuse to compensate them or our own soldiers. It is time for the nonsense of secrecy to be discarded and all relevant documents be made available to the Australian public, enabling this painful a shameful episode be put to rights. It is untenable that the Australian government goes along with the charade played by the US government with their veterans in order to stay in step with Washington's wishes.

Vietnam veterans at war with historians

BY DAVID ELLERY, DEFENCE REPORTER

27 Apr, 2011 04:00 AM

http://www.canberratimes.com.au/news/local/news/general/vietnam-veterans-at-war-with-historians/2145237.aspx

Please get back to me about this letter.

Regards
Willy Bach

Greens member
Author of one of the submissions of the ratification of the cluster bomb treaty
UQ School of History research student
Veteran of the CIA's Secret War in Laos

An Open Letter to Australian MPs

2010-11-24T10:32:00.000-08:00

Dear elected representatives of the Australian people

I write to you to express my concerns regarding the proposed Australian delegation to Israel. This delegation, like the previous ones in which Julia Gillard participated, gives the appearance of Australian endorsement for all of the various activities of the Israeli government of which you must be aware. Many Australians are concerned that the Israeli government has committed numerous acts for which the United Nations has issued reports of human rights abuses and war crimes. It is simply not adequate to dismiss the findings of such an eminent Jewish lawyer as Judge Goldstone, whose report for the UN on the IDF's military attacks on Gaza should be read as part of your preparation for this trip. Your delegation could appear to the rest of the world as an endorsement of these acts by the Israeli government, an endorsement that many members of the Australian electorate find deeply offensive, unacceptable and not representative of our concerns.

If the Australian media has not made you fully aware of the facts of the long-standing dispossession and displacement of the Palestinian people, I suggest that you should familiarise yourself with the Israeli newspaper, Haaretz available online in both Hebrew and English http://www.haaretz.com/ If this newspaper had few readers it would go out of business. It is widely read and well-respected in Israel. There are actually many peace and human rights groups in Israel. The fact of other shades of opinion among Jews in Israel should be part of your preparation for this trip, lest you be subsumed into compliance with the official views of the Netanyahu government to the exclusion of all other information.

You may wish to ignore the facts of the military occupation, various military actions, the illegal settlements being built on land stolen by force of arms from Palestinians, the daily humiliation of Palestinians at check points; but in doing so you are placing your approval for discriminatory and oppressive policies on the public record and situating yourself as an accessory to these acts. These acts would not be permitted in Australia, nor would they be tolerated by Australians. A representative of the Australian electorate should be both consistent and principled in the stands they take on issues. You may be situating yourself in what amounts to a breach of your own code of conduct if you allow yourself to be characterised as a supporter of what we could call ethnic cleansing. Of course, you will be reminded of this at the next election and in every venue where you speak and everything you say will be closely examined.

You will also be called upon to determine the attitude of the Australian Parliament in respect of Israeli intentions to pre-emptively attack Iran, whether or not there is UN Security Council approval and whether or not there is well-founded justification for such an attack. It is possible that Israeli forces might use some of the nuclear weapons they have but do not talk about. You will then need to vote on whether you would send Australian troops to such a conflict. Clearly, you will acknowledge that such an action would provide serious provocation and may have regional implications that further threaten world peace.

Below are some further points made by the Australian Friends of Palestine:

There are a number of concerns that should give you pause to reconsider your participation.

As the peace talks certainly look set to fail because of Israeli intransigence on illegal settlement construction, Australia should be particularly circumspect in showing support for Israel. Already Australia has enough reasons to keep its distance after Israel’s abuse of Australian passports for which there was no apology and for its shabby treatment of Australian citizens when Israeli commandos violently took control of the humanitarian flotilla to Gaza in May this year.
From a legal perspective, Israel is in blatant defiance of international law and UN resolutions. Thus, for Australia to conduct bilateral relations with Israel compromises its commitment as a signatory to upholding international law and Geneva conventions and certainly its objectivity in the Israel/Palestine situation.
There are, as you would be aware, long-standing Cabinet decisions that acknowledge the “occupied” status of the Palestinian territories, which
should require the delegation to spend equal time with Palestinian contacts in Ramallah, Gaza or East Jerusalem. We believe there is no such arrangement and gives the strong impression that Australia has abandoned any attempt at a “balanced” policy on Israel/Palestine.
Further, this trip - organised and partly funded by a private lobby group - seriously infringes Westminster principles that do not allow the mixing of Government and private interests.
If you still believe that your participation is warranted, we propose that you at least insist on speaking with Palestinian representatives and visiting the occupied Palestinian territories.

I wish that you should read this yourself and search your conscience, not pass it on to a minder for an impersonal response.

Regards

Willy Bach

John Birmingham on Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks

2010-10-24T16:52:00.002-07:00

A Review: The Man Who Fell to Earth John Birmingham on Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks, The Monthly, October 2010

By Willy Bach

7 October 2010

The Man Who Fell to Earth is a reference to the 1976 science fiction film starring David Bowie. It is a creative title, but could this be a reference to Julian Assange’s hair?

John Birmingham, is a fiction writer and author of He Died with a Felafel in His Hand. It is a book about ‘getting wasted’ in suburban Australia. He is an accomplished writer, popular at writers’ festivals and good copy for his publishers, Duffy and Snellgrove.

Michael Duffy of Duffy and Snellgrove is also well-known in Australia for his promotion of privatisation of the ABC, until the ABC gave him his own Radio National show, Counterpoint, which is a vehicle for odd climate change deniers and promoters of 1960s urban sprawl. The style of presentation makes no pretence of objectivity and allows guests to portray risky assertions as facts that were conspiratorially hidden from us by the mythical latté- sipping urban elites.

Birmingham spends a substantial part of his introduction setting the scene for his final conclusion. In his first sentence he spells out the historical fact, which I take on trust at this point, “The religion of peace came late to Nuristan Province, arriving at spearpoint in 1896.” This statement is sufficient to situate the author as one who believes that the various strands of the Islamic faith constitute a religion of violence, and only that.

This statement omits any acknowledgment of the violence perpetrated by the organised forces of the Christian churches through the ages; the Crusaders, the Inquisition, collaboration with the Nazis, or for that matter, the forces sent into Afghanistan in 2001 to accomplish what George W Bush called ‘Operation Infinite Justice’, which quickly became ‘Operation Enduring Freedom’. Nor must the invasion of Iraq in 2003 be misplaced from our consideration. These invasions were carried out with considerable brutality and the overwhelming might of industrialised warfare of which only a hyperpower is capable and accompanied with invocations of a deity that were echoed by British Prime Minister, Tony Blair.

Birmingham’s position appears to accept the ‘normality’ that there is a war in Afghanistan as a given, without any reference to the way it began. There is now a widely held consensus that the wars were illegal, not necessary, that high-level deceit led members of the coalition of the willing to take military action, and that US, NATO and Australian soldiers are slogging it out and risking their lives in a hopelessly interminable and pointless conflict.

In his explanation of the circumstances of the ambush in Badakhshan in which the humanitarian aid workers were brutally killed, Birmingham does not explain to readers that performing this kind of work in the midst of conflict is inherently dangerous. Nor does he explain that any association of the doctors with the allied armed forces immediately endangers the lives of the aid workers, as it instils fear and suspicion among local people. Afghanis do have legitimate concerns about whether the medical assistance has some hidden agenda, which can be a counterinsurgency agenda or a proselytising one or both.

Birmingham mentions International Assistance Mission (IAM), but does not reveal that, as Christian Today Australia explains,

“Dr Karen Woo, 36, was one of 10 aid workers killed by insurgents while working for International Assistance Mission (IAM), a non profit-making Christian organisation.”

Whilst I admire this courageous British doctor as much as Birmingham does; I believe that we need to understand that this was a form of missionary work. Neither would I particularly like to meet bandits with AK-47 assault rifles or the Taliban and negotiate my life. I would not think it wise try proselytising in a country that expressly forbade it, as Malaysia does. Birmingham might have been a little more forthcoming about this religious missionary connection.

Closely related to this point, for those of us who follow development issues, was the news of Australia’s decision to combine AUSAID with the Department of Defence, as seen in this ABC story, Concern expressed about Australian aid agency's independence, 1 May 2009, was extremely unwelcome if you value the lives of good people like Dr Karen Woo and her colleagues. This is just the sort of arrangement that will get them killed.

But the ambush is not just about the aid workers. Birmingham sets a few ambushes of his own. He is doing an article on Julian Assange on behalf of the corporate media that has woefully failed to adhere to journalistic ethics and prefer the safer role of “government stenographers”, as John Pilger put it. Birmingham has assiduously reiterated the ‘talking points’ of the Obama administration without mention of the government fraudulence and secrecy that continue, and led just as surely to WikiLeaks as it did to the revelations of Daniel Ellsberg in 1971. But Birmingham does not mention Ellsberg, or the benefits of more open and accountable government that resulted from the publication of the Pentagon Papers. Ellsberg has applauded Assange’s leaks.

Historical researchers are frustrated when they discover that documents in the archives are not complete or were redacted by canny protagonists. They are still gleaning valuable insights from the Pentagon Papers and the 2009-2010 tranche of documents is being studied now in its refreshing entirety and a very welcome thirty to fifty years ahead of schedule. Birmingham does not mention the many families of veterans who distressingly failed to learn the truth of the loss of their loved ones in time-consuming visits to the archives.

Instead, Birmingham complains that Assange, who is not a journalist, does not play the game set out for this profession in their filtering of often perfidious government media releases. Yet, if governments were truthful and the media thoroughly critiqued government actions instead of acting as war cheer-leaders, there would be no necessity for leaked documents. Birmingham complains: “Not for WikiLeaks the tiresome business of eliminating biases, offering rights of reply or even at times fact-checking its information;” David Carr’s “Asymmetrical journalism”; “Ham fisted attempts at pathos” and “the impossibility of making fine-grained distinctions on a battlefield.”

Since the media embarrassments of the Indochina, the US and allied governments tightened the reign on wandering journalists and sat them all down to watch military PowerPoint presentations. They then became ‘embedded’ – which means exactly that. Birmingham appears to have a special respect for the journalists who ride the Humvees and report the war from the viewpoint of the soldiers. They see the killing of civilians, but then they understand what a hard time those soldiers are having. That is fine, but it is not the whole story. Interestingly, the Australian DoD allows much less of this than their US counterparts.

War is much more than the experiences of soldiers and the manipulated PR-directed accounts that governments want us to hear. The voices of the civilians are all but invisible in this form of journalism. The opposing forces also have a view on the war, yet it is dangerous for many reasons for Western journalists to seek interviews. This is reminiscent of Margaret Thatcher’s ban on Sinn Féin and IRA leaders appearing on British television. The British public was not allowed to know what the Saville Inquiry eventually revealed about the events of 1972 Bloody Sunday in Ulster. Thirty eight years represented an unacceptable level of pain and uncertainty for the families of victims and was unendurably too long to wait.

No doubt, David Finkel’s book is well-written as a view from the US forces Humvee gun turret. But Birmingham’s put-down of Assange, the new kind of online leak publisher, is prejudiced against any investigative journalist and his/her sources, when he writes “did not gather his information clandestinely or at a vast remove. [Finkel, however] Having been embedded with the troops in question he understood the world in which they fought and the infeasibility of making moral judgements during combat.”

Birmingham continues to explain of Finkel that “… the reporter explained minute by minute how the Apaches came to fire on the reporters and the Iraqis, some of whom were found to be armed with AK-47s and RPGs when American ground forces reached the site of the massacre”. All this happened, fortunately, because, “Finkel was given access to the recordings that Assange obtained by stealth … without the crude attempts at emotional manipulation”… “… the killings of Chmagh and Noor-Eldeen can be seen for what they are, two more brushstrokes in a landscape of despair.”

Apparently, war is just a tragedy for which no one is responsible. Birmingham is convinced that the video footage in its entirety sustains his view, and Finkel’s that the incident contained no wrong-doing by US forces on what was a routine operational day. He is untroubled by the fact that Finkel was given privileged access to this material whilst other professional journalists were not.

Yet he is silent on the helicopter crew-member’s response to the wounding of the two children in the van, which was something to the effect that it served the parents right for bringing the children into a war zone. Birmingham might let that go by, but he would probably not appreciate his suburb being referred to as a war zone and in such an unsympathetic tone. One of the US soldiers on the ground suggested that the children could be treated in a nearby US military hospital, but his officer refused to consider this. The wounded children needed to make a longer and more hazardous journey to an under-resourced Iraqi hospital. Birmingham is again silent.

The YouTube version of Collateral Murder and others available online have been the all-time biggest audience builders – such is the worldwide interest and insatiable thirst for genuine information. It is peculiar that anyone should object so strongly and particularly anomalous that the US government has not published their own version, since there are alleged to be such distortions in Assange’s edited version. It is both incomprehensible and unforgivable that the video has not been given to Reuters, whose correspondents were real human beings, not just “two more brushstrokes in a landscape of despair”. On this issue, Birmingham is silent.

Un-embedded journalists have been repeatedly targeted by both insurgents and US forces in order to silence them or destroy their stories, the most notorious being the use of a battle tank in April 2003 to attack the Palestine Hotel room in which Al Jezeera journalists were staying, causing the death of Ayyoub, a Jordanian and wounding of Al-Jazeera cameraman Zouhair Nadhim. This too was not troubling Birmingham’s mind.

Birmingham enlists New York Times consultant, Jay Rosen, who speaks from the ‘old media’ standpoint when he says of WikiLeaks:

“We find the state, which holds the secrets but is powerless to prevent their release; the stateless news organization, deciding how to release them; and the national newspaper in the middle, negotiating the terms of legitimacy between these two actors…If you’re a whistle blower with explosive documents, to whom would you rather give them? A newspaper with a terrestrial address organized under the laws of a nation that could try to force the reporter you contacted to reveal your name, and may or may not run the documents you’ve delivered to them online … or WikiLeaks, which has no address, answers no subpoenas and promises to run the full cache if they can be verified as real?”

This is the same New York Times that won a legal case to uphold its right to publish the Pentagon Papers that Daniel Ellsberg leaked. This is also the New York Times in which Anthony Lewis infamously wrote, "The early American decisions on Indochina can be regarded as blundering efforts to do good. But by 1969 it was clear to most of the world - and most Americans - that the intervention had been a disastrous mistake". What? Ten years of planning and preparing for war, and it was just a mistake? What will be Birmingham’s verdict on the current wars?

Finally, the ambush that Birmingham has prepared, the punch line of his article, the finishing brushstrokes are in his final words:

“Why link to Assange’s 16 pages of first-hand reports … Unless, of course, you are a Taliban commander looking for names to add to your death list”.

Yet Birmingham has no evidence that the Obama Pentagon genuinely held concerns for their interpreters, fixers and collaborators. Nor has any evidence been produced showing harm to these people as a result of the leaks. In fact, the US government has frequently refused sanctuary to such people, as did the Howard government in Australia.

The adherence to US government ‘talking points’ by Birmingham includes all of the gratuitous Assange family information, as though a child could be responsible for having a violent father, which then obliged his mother to move 37 times. Such information has nothing to do with government secrecy or dishonesty; nothing to do with the illegality of the wars; nothing to do with WikiLeaks, not information in the public interest and has no place in a distinguished journal that is said to be a rather long way uphill from the Sydney and Melbourne tabloids.

References

http://www.themonthly.com.au/monthly-essays-john-birmingham-man-who-fell-earth-julian-assange-s-wikileaks-2789

http://www.duffyandsnellgrove.com.au/authors/birmingham.htm

http://civiliancontractors.wordpress.com/2010/08/08/stevenage-medic-karen-woo-executed-in-afghanistan/

http://www.radioaustralianews.net.au/stories/200905/2558539.htm?desktop

http://www.youtube.com/verify_age?next_url=http%3A//www.youtube.com/watch%3Fv%3D5rXPrfnU3G0

http://www.democracynow.org/2010/10/7/iraq_war_veteran_who_rescued_wounded

http://cpj.org/reports/2006/01/js-killed-by-us-13sept05.php

Impressions of a Catastrophe

2010-09-11T09:11:00.000-07:00

(After the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks on the USA the real terror takes hold around the world - especially for the people of Afghanistan)

Commemorating the 9th anniversary of vengeance, paranoia and ignorance rammed down our throats here is my poem from 9 September 2001:

Every rifle is a classroom

Every bullet is a book

Every boy can be a father

Or a soldier in the slaughter

I

The morning our world changed

Began early with two unanswered

Calls from Canada at 1.30

Messages announcing that

America was being attacked

She didn't know what else to do

We only discovered later

At seven my lover rose to

Go to the toilet

I idly leant across to

Flick on the news for a few minutes

She returned to my stunned silence

You've got to hear this I said

It was no fondling matter

She said could we live in a world

Where this kind of thing can't happen

Later I interviewed two boys

Who wanted to go into the infantry

And a girl who wants to be a Navy chef - they meant it

The shock was too much to bear

II

While people leapt from buildings

Collapsing in a tangle of steel

White asbestos clouds

Governments released

Embarrassing media statements

Under the cover of death

The deceit came to light

III

The worst crime of terrorists

The threat to 'our way of life'

Ours the profligate gorging

Of earth’s resources

Unfettered greed in the face

Of unparalleled suffering

Yes this threat is real

The more we ignore the cries of the hungry

The closer that threat becomes

We are not safe

IV

If you are worried by

Bio terrorism Anthrax on the keyboard

Then be assured that your government

Is doing everything it can to

Remove the threat

But nothing to remove its cause

Their advice to citizens

Beset with fear

Stay indoors

Keep your television on

Listen to what your government

Is telling you

Go about your business

As though none of this

Is happening

And have a sombre birthday

A distracted football game

V

Deep in the underground cities

Tunnelled below a defoliated landscape

The Vietnamese

Held poetry readings

Somehow to make sense

Of what was going on above

We were all relieved to hear

The Pentagon is back in business

And reassured to know

The CIA can once again return

To assassinations

In their war on terror

VII

This war like no other

Will last a hundred years

And never will be over

Nor any victories won

Each day's battle costs

Enough to feed the hungry

Each missile reiterates

An unwillingness to listen

VIII

The gold market today

Was disappointed that the price

Had not risen above 295

Following the commencement

Of US bombing

They began selling

The precious metal

IX

And children messaging

Their mobiles sending friends

The one about Bin Laden Airways

Taking you right to your office

Changing our world for ever

The other joke about the friendless one

Asking if he can come

Home to your place

X

Send the fleet the planes the missiles

And watch them scatter

In the tens of thousands

Perishing in the arid landscape

Before a shot is fired

7 ½ million about to starve

Where does compassion fatigue end

And mean-spiritedness begin

There are only 23 million more

Asylum seekers around the globe

Is there is room on the beach

They'll be there

Confusion regarding a suitable epithet for David Hicks in the Australian media

2007-12-27T13:18:00.000-08:00

This picture is not David Hicks, but is a representation of the torture he endured

Dear ABC TV

I saw further evidence on ABC TV 7.30 Report tonight of confusion regarding a suitable epithet for David Hicks.

On a number of occasions on ABC Radio National I have heard him referred to as "former Guantanamo Bay detainee" - pretty accurate so far. I have also heard him referred to as "convicted terrorism supporter" - not very accurate, in my opinion.

Tonight on your programme David Hicks was referred to in several ways, at least once as "convicted terrorist".

If you check extensive interviews with US Major Michael Mori and other legal opinion you will find that:

1. David Hicks was tortured in the experimental torture facility at Guantanamo Bay. No evidence that he could possibly supply to any trial could be admissible as evidence - it was all tainted.

2. David Hicks waited almost six years, much of it in solitary confinement, which has undermined his sanity. The original charges were dropped and most of the newly concocted charges were dropped too.

3. David Hicks was not allowed to know on what evidence he was being charged, nor who was supplying this evidence. He was not able to challenge any of the evidence.

4. The Military Commissions were not considered fair by any legal authority in the world. Citizens of Canada, Britain and the USA were not allowed by their governments to be tried in this style of court.

5. David Hicks was kept in Guantanamo Bay at the pleasure and convenience of the Howard government that also failed to exercise any of their alleged influence in Washington on behalf of an Australian citizen.

6. My memory does not fail me. I remember that it was the Prosecution that carried out White House instructions to get a plea bargain deal with David Hicks sewn up before any evidence could be heard.

7. David Hicks admitted assisting terrorists only to secure a ticket out of Guantanamo Bay and a flight back to civilisation in Australia. Who could blame him?

8. I think David Hicks was a stupid young man to fight for the Taliban, but he did not break any Australian law and is said to never have killed anyone. He was an 'enemy combatant' under the Geneva Conventions. He should have been treated as a Prisoner of War and released on cessation of hostilities.

I would be interested to know whether the journalists at the ABC have checked whether POW's are allowed under the Geneva Conventions to be anally raped.

I hope that the ABC will now realise that David Hicks is not a threat to national security. This is just a face-saving device for the people who have consistently failed to make us more secure and have instead exposed citizens of this country to greater threat.

What we do need is for this country to have a Royal Commission to unearth the truth about the treatment of David Hicks and Mamdouh Habib and the role of Phillip Ruddock, Alexander Downer and John Howard in this disgraceful affair. I also believe that our Ambassador to Washington, Dennis Richardson, formerly Director General of ASIO, should also be answering questions regarding his support of the torture of Australian citizens.

Please check that the facts I present here are correct and instruct your journalists to desist from cheap Channel 7 labels. One day there could be a defamation case. In the mean time, keep the descriptors neutral, I suggest.

Regards

Willy Bach

PS:

Just in case the tabloid media think this is an opportunity to feast on David Hicks' release from Yatala Prison and his signing-on at Centrelink, lets tell them too that we are turned off by their ghoulish campaign to make David Hicks' reintegration even more difficult.

Hicks to apologise upon release

http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,22977442-5015421,00.html

"DAVID Hicks plans to head from the prison food line to the dole queue on his release from jail tomorrow, after an apology from the confessed terrorist supporter is read by his lawyer.

The nation's most famous prison inmate has told his father Terry Hicks a trip to Centrelink to sign on for the "Newstart" allowance is at the top of his to-do list when he tastes freedom for the first time in six years".

What do the media expect this very damaged young man to do?

Let all this sit heavily on the consciences of John Howard, Alexander Downer, Phillip Ruddock et al - we need a Royal Commission. We should rejoice that these people are now out of office and the former ring-master deservedly out of public life.

Get the Laborials to tell the truth

2007-11-18T16:56:00.000-08:00

Dear friends

In the closing days of an Australian federal election campaign that has mostly been about massive vote buying on a scale that puts to shame almost every failing dictatorship in the Third World. I think the shame is in OZ though! The actual substance of the positions taken by the major parties has been cynically absent as our political 'leaders' adopt the most regressive position of the most bigoted and least sensible voter. I have just put together a blog that I think will be useful for the rest of the week and the next ten critical years.

Get the Laborials to tell the truth

http://getthelaborialstotellthetruth.blogspot.com/

Papuan Voices – Conflict Prevention Workshop

2007-11-09T05:38:00.001-08:00

Papuan Voices – Conflict Prevention Workshop

University of Queensland 9 November 2007

Speech by Willy Bach, Greens candidate for Griffith

Good afternoon.

First I would like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land we are meeting on, the Jagera and Torbul people. I do this to draw our attention to the fact that their dispossession has led directly and inexorably to our continuing enjoyment of the benefits of that dispossession.

This discussion, which we are having directly, relates to the marginalisation of indigenous people in West Papua through dispossession of their land and the exploitation of their resources.

The Greens draw attention to and do not avoid the issue of acknowledgement of the rights of the West Papuan people in relation to their land, their culture and language and their rights as indigenous people. The Greens emphatically support indigenous people’s rights to both control and benefit from the sustainable extraction of resources.

I take note of the fact that the Howard government recently refused to sign the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) declaration on the rights of indigenous peoples, passed in September 2007. The Howard government did this without consulting the people of Australia. I am sure that most of us would be outraged by this decision.

I am the Greens candidate for Griffith, the seat of Labor leader and possibly next Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd. I register here my deep concern and misgivings that Labor will abide by the bipartisan protocols on foreign policy and continue with the same policies as our present government.

What is wrong with this?

I had a meeting with Kevin Rudd within days of his return from walking the Kokoda Trail in Papua New Guinea in April 2007, shortly after ANZAC Day. He was sunburnt and exhausted and complained that the telecommunications in that remote area were poor, even with satellite phones.

I tried to explain to Kevin Rudd that Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Damien Kingsbury (who I have met), all report that the Indonesian Army, the TNI, is conducting their own business enterprises in West Papua and routinely violating the rights of Papuan people.

Kevin Rudd said that I should bring proof to him, as though this proof is easily obtained from remote places and people who are intimidated and frightened. I reminded him that others had already taken risks and had written reports for human rights organisations. I pointed out to him that what he had experienced of poor communications should inform him of the difficulties in obtaining this information. How did Kevin Rudd expect reports of human rights abuses to reach the outside world when the people did not even have access to mobile phones, let alone satellite phones? It was obvious that I was just being blocked, stone-walled.

My concern continues to rise in regard to the provisions of the Lombok Treaty:

“Joe Collins of AWPA said "Because Australia has signed a treaty with Indonesia, The Lombok Treaty, it is to be expected that Australia will try and keep West Papua off the agenda. However, it is hoped the other Pacific leaders including the New Zealand Prime Minister will raise concerns about the human rights situation in the territory”.

I am concerned because the treaty pledges Australia’s cooperation in maintaining the “integrity” of the Indonesian unitary state, as well as many aspects of military cooperation. Inevitably the Lombok Treaty does not mention the rights of indigenous West Papuans, who were not consulted either. I often wish that New Zealand Prime Minister, Helen Clark, were Australia’s Prime Minister, as that government’s policies are more ethically sound.

Kevin Rudd is fully briefed on West Papua. He cannot pretend that he does not know of the human rights abuses perpetrated against the people of West Papua. His denial and his silence are a stain on his conscience.

The Greens maintain an ethical stance on human rights and international relations. Senator Bob Brown has spoken in the Parliament and in the media on the question of West Papuan self-determination. The West Papuan issue underlines the importance of having the Australian people elect candidates to the Senate who will vote with their consciences, not in line with party dictates.

The Greens support efforts to implement effective codes of conduct for resource extraction corporations in line with the Equator Principles and the Kimberley Process and will represent the standards of morality and the values of Australians, not the short-term, unscrupulous deals that are done in secret and without the knowledge of the electorate.

Larissa Waters is the Greens lead Senate candidate for Queensland. You also heard yesterday from Democrats Senator Andrew Bartlett, who spoke about the Senate Committee on Treaties, where he examined numerous civil society submissions expressly opposing the Lombok Treaty and put on the public record his one dissenting vote. This is a very necessary step. This is the kind of meticulous work that is required of minor parties Senators. I am sure that Larissa Waters will carry out this type of work too.

Thank you, and I will now take questions.

Willy Bach

Free David Hicks, clear his name, compensate him, give him a job

2007-10-27T18:09:00.000-07:00

Dear friends

I am sick of the careless labelling of David Hicks as "a terrorist", "a convicted terrorism supporter" in the Australian media. He should be referred to as the man who was tortured and kept in Guantanamo Bay at the pleasure of John Howard, who hoped to benefit from David Hicks' suffering.

I have just started a new group called Free David Hicks, clear his name, compensate him, give him a job on facebook:

David Hicks appeared before a judicially bogus Military Commission in USA, following over five years of false charges with no legal standing, unwarranted experimental torture, at the political expediency of John Howard, he was found guilty of a minor and legally weak charge, he naturally preferred to be return to Australia to serve a token period in an Adelaide prison having pleaded guilty. The moves to release David Hicks from Guantanamo Bay were apparently made by US Vice President Dick Cheney to help John Howard win the 2007 election.

David Hicks could be released from prison before (rather than after) the federal election on 24 November 2007. He should not need to be restrained and further harassed by a Control Order. He should be compensated for his suffering, the ruin of his dignity and reputation. He should be given trauma counselling following the egregious torture he has endured. He should be given a job to do within his capacities and to assist with his rehabilitation.

Never has Australia had a government that cost so much to maintain as the discredited Howard government.

I have invited Kevin Rudd to join this campaign. This is my letter to Kevin Rudd:

Dear Kevin

I would like to invite you to differentiate yourself from the most odious aspects of the Howard regime. Lets have a sensible and fair way of treating David Hicks. He needs to be released from prison, he needs psychiatric treatment, counselling, rehabilitation, vocational training and compensation. He also needs a job - I hope someone will be willing to give him a go now that he has grown up and learned his lesson.

John Howard kept David Hicks in Guantanamo Bay experimental torture facility for over five years to keep his government in power - and Labor out of power.

I am inviting you to join this new group. The door is open, you are welcome.

Willy Bach
Greens candidate for Griffith

This campaign is based on expert legal opinion:

Hicks case interference/Guantanamo military tribunals update from smh this morning.

Richard Ackland
October 26, 2007

Try as they might to bury one of the nastiest instances of political meddling in the course
of justice, sooner or later the David Hicks case was bound to resurface as an unwanted
pong for a desperate government.

The New York attorney and Columbia law lecturer Scott Horton, who has written tirelessly on Hicks's case for Harper's Magazine, reports that a military officer told him that the Vice-President, Dick Cheney, "interfered directly to get Hicks's plea bargain deal".

The timing seems to work. By the end of 2006 the Government was taking a lot of heat on Hicks and its hardline "terror boy" tactic was fraying. Cheney was in Australia in February this year, the same month that Hicks was charged after five years of nothing much happening in Guantanamo Bay. The next month the accelerator went flat to the boards - Hicks appeared before a military commission at 2pm on March 26 and by 8pm that evening returned to the courtroom, where it was announced that his lawyers had struck a deal with an official in the Pentagon. The prosecution lawyers were nowhere in the deal-making loop.

Hicks was sentenced to seven years in prison, six years and three months being
suspended. His nine months end on December 31. The election is November 24.

The Pentagon person was Susan Crawford, who had the title Convening Authority.
According to Leigh Sales, the ABC's former Washington correspondent and author of a
book about the Hicks case, Crawford has long-time ties to the Republican Party, was a
chum of Cheney and had worked for him when he was Secretary of Defence from 1989 to 1993.

Hicks pleaded guilty to one count of providing material support for terrorism, under a US
statute adopted long after he was captured. After all that time this was the best the
prosecution could muster because there was no evidence that the former kangaroo
skinner had actually done any terrorism. In any event, prosecuting an Australian caught in Afghanistan under domestic American criminal law posted all sorts of legal problems.

Needless to say the front-line men here have issued all-out denials that anything so
rancid as a political fix would have occurred.

Yet plenty of disturbing details have emerged since Hicks started his term at Adelaide's
Yatala Prison.

Moe Davis has resigned as a prosecutor, citing political interference in the process. Not
only was he sidelined by Crawford in the Hicks plea bargain, but The Washington Post
reported he resigned because senior Pentagon people sought to use classified evidence in
closed sessions of the military commissions. His authority as an independent prosecutor
had been usurped by Defence officials - indeed the military commission process had
effectively been placed under the command of the department's general counsel.

On October 20 The Washington Post also reported that political appointees at the
Pentagon "have pushed for convictions of high profile [Guantanamo] detainees ahead of
the 2008 [US] elections".

On October 5 the US law blog SCOTUS reported that an army reserve officer who sat on 49 Pentagon status review panels to decide whether detainees should remain at Guantanamo Bay swore in a statement to the DC Circuit Court that the Government repeatedly manipulated the process. If one of the combat review panels decided in favour of a detainee the people at Defence would order a "re-do" in order to ensure the prisoner was designated an "enemy combatant".

Further, the affidavit said that evidence discovered by the Government, often accidentally, was not provided to detainees where it might be favourable to their cases.

Colonel Stephen Abrahams, another army reserve officer and lawyer, also complained of
the Pentagon ordering "re-do" hearings so that the status review panels could arrive at the
"right" result.

In fact, the corruption infecting what is supposed to be an independent military justice
system has become so apparent that it was a factor in the US Supreme Court changing its
mind in June and deciding to have a broad review of the legal rights of detainees. This is
scheduled for the current sittings of the court.

We have also seen the dismissal of two military commission cases after the military judges pointed to a flaw in the Military Commissions Act. The effect of that legal shortcoming means David Hicks pleaded guilty to an offence that did not exist at the time he committed it, before a commission whose legal status was a nullity, and whose regulations for its proper functioning hadn't been issued.

Now there's this allegation of a political stitch-up. You wouldn't believe it.

justinian@lawpress.com.au

War is the issue in this 2007 Australian federal election

2007-10-18T07:54:00.000-07:00

Shrine near Sang Khom, West of Nongkhai, Mekong River, North East Thailand

What follows is a very frank disclosure on my part:

As you will see from my candidate profile on http://qld.greens.org.au/election2007/HouseofReps/griffith/ I was in the British Army and regard myself as a reluctant veteran of the CIA's Secret War in Laos. I have been damaged by war although I never faced the 'opponents' in battle nor was I called upon to fire a shot in anger. Credentials are important and I make that clear. I was a sapper, 20 years old, and helped build an airfield for Air America and for a Commonwealth invasion of Laos that was called off. Laos was a low-technology peasant society, no threat to anyone and neutral. I am currently researching the part that was played in this conflict by Britain, Australia and New Zealand. I understand how difficult it is for enlisted people to say no to illegal orders. I tried several times. I was never promoted and spent some of my time under suspicion.

I have thought for a long time that the anti-war movement needs to have at its core people who understand why war is unconscionable and a travesty against human security and human rights. See 'Winter Soldier', a film about American soldiers coming out and telling one another what they had done in Vietnam - John Kerry was part of that movement. They threw their medals over the fence of the Whitehouse.

As well as being concerned for the civilians of Indochina who were needlessly slaughtered, I am concerned for the well being of the people who went, often in good faith, often with misplaced trust in the political leadership, and returned as damaged and rejected people who could not put their case. Their lives are very painful now forty years later. I will be talking with one of these people very soon.

If we can find such a group of veterans who are prepared to step forward I want to join with them. I am not afraid of ASIO nor will I hold back in criticising the shabby and unprofessional role some members of the 'intelligence' community have played in allowing John Howard to politicise them and make them go along with his illegal wars of aggression and plunder against the people of Afghanistan and Iraq and several other places where ADF personnel have secretly been sent without the knowledge of the Australian people.

I deplore the way these people have colluded with the Howard government to erode the civil liberties of this country and have infiltrated academia undermining scholarly integrity. I deplore the way these people have undermined Australia's absolute position against torture and capital punishment and how their 'war on terror' is allowed to instil fear in our population for the political purpose of maintaining John Howard in power.

If this group conducts itself in a manner that could gain the respect of a large body of Australians it will need to invite people like Colonel Mike Kelly (ALP candidate for Eden Monaro), Rod Barton, the weapons inspector, Lt Col Lance Collins, Andrew Wilkie (2004 Greens candidate for Bennelong), Warren Reed, Tony Kevin and others - all whistleblowers who have demonstrated that the Howard government have lied to us and threatened the very fabric of democratic institutions.

It is now time to tell our major parties that they have nowhere to hide when the question is asked: will you support the Bush administration if/when they bomb Iran? Will you allow further war crimes to sully this country's history? Mr Howard, Mr Rudd, only straight answers will be acceptable. You were both silent when Israel destroyed a large swathe of Lebanon and killed over 1,000 people. You hastened slowly to assist 20,000 Australians who were living in Lebanon at the time. You don't have that privilege now.

Willy Bach

Greens candidate for Griffith

Abandon hope as Kevin Rudd joins the Liberals on the death penalty

2007-10-10T18:01:00.000-07:00

The debate in Australia on the death penalty reveals that both Liberal and Labor governments offer little comfort for human rights in the Asia-Pacific region and the world. Both will do nothing effective on the death penalty and a string of other issues.

The usual story is that 'megaphone diplomacy is ineffective. But 'back-channel diplomacy' is done in secret and we, as concerned citizens have no guarantee that anything at all is happening. Click here for the letters sent to Kevin Rudd:
http://burmastrugglefordemocracy.blogspot.com/

Racist Minister is a disgrace to Australia

2007-10-06T15:19:00.000-07:00

http://www.crikey.com.au/Media/images/071003-KevAndrewstintin2-0e367d5e-4d7c-4ba9-b2a0-1fa8973a3b41.jpg

Racist Minister is a disgrace to Australia

Around the world people are reading about Australia’s sudden retreat from a successful African resettlement programme:

Reuters

"Australia's decision to freeze its African refugee intake is a sign race issues may taint looming elections, a political analyst said, as the country's rights watchdog called the ruling 'un-Australian'."

Herald Tribune

"The hard line taken on immigration by Prime Minister John Howard has been credited with helping him win the past four elections, and some assume Andrews' comments were aimed at influencing voters by again raising the spectre of Australia being overrun."

BBC

"Certainly, there is a nativistic streak in parts of the Australian electorate. In previous campaigns the Prime Minister John Howard government has benefited from concerns over immigration — especially in regional seats.

Liberal quits over mill

October 6, 2007 - 3:37PM

http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2007/10/06/1191091405432.html

Liberal candidate for Lyons, Ben Quin has resigned from the Liberal Party because he disagrees with the federal government's approval of Tasmania's $1.7 billion pulp mill. He has resigned as a Liberal candidate because he profoundly disagrees with his party.

So, I postulate that Minister for Immigration, Kevin Andrews should be sacked because his racist statements profoundly offend his colleagues. Perhaps he should join Pauline Hanson. If John Howard does not sack Kevin Andrews, then he is effectively endorsing his errant Minister for Immigration – and we can assume from this that the election campaign has begun – and it will be a very ugly business from which this country’s social cohesion will emerge as ‘damaged goods’.

Kevin Rudd now has an urgent duty to establish his intention to conduct an election campaign that is inclusive and cohesive in character. He should call on John Howard to sack his unfit Minister!

Unfortunately for the bigoted Minister ...

2007-10-06T01:57:00.000-07:00

Waiting to register at the Iridimi Transit Center in eastern Chad. This woman’s husband and 6-year-old child died amid the violence in Sudan. She fled with her remaining children and first arrived at the Chadian border town, Tine. She then walked 60 km to the transit center for assistance (some generous Chadian villagers helped her along the way). She now waits under a plastic sheet to register - the next day, she hopes - for shelter, food and water for her family.

© Women’s Commission/Megan McKenna

How could Australia find room for people as resilient as these, Kevin Andrews?

The Sudanese and other African refugees in Australia are proud, assertive, articulate people who feel profoundly offended at Kevin Andrews' references to illiteracy and Grade 3 education levels.

They don't need anyone to speak for them:

"A race issue on the eve of a John Howard election, we thought it might’ve just been the Aboriginal Intervention strategy or the Citizenship test or the Haneef debacle and leave it at that. Well, the polls just aren’t bouncing for the Coalition are they?

There aren’t any Tampa boats on the horizon either, so we’ll just invent one about these Africans that just can’t seem to integrate dog gone it. Boom, No Africans Allowed".

http://www.illusive-mind.com/tag/sudan

Have a good look at this man ... unfit for a position in public life

2007-10-06T00:40:00.000-07:00

We must never think that our politicians are stupid, nor can we assume that they make mistakes. Every gesture is a performance for the camera, every word, measured for its impact, a sound byte for the electronic media. Look at the cosmetically enhanced face, the gelled hair, the tailored suit, the poised document and the Australian flag (with not too much Union Jack showing in the picture) This is a skillfully confected image. Everything has a meaning. Everything has the potential to send messages to the targeted audience. He is the very model of a Liberal Member of Parliament, Howard Minister and the man is 87% Rottweiler.

This is Kevin Andrews, former Minister for Workplace Relations, architect of the notorious Work Choices legislation, now Minister for Immigration and Citizenship. He will, no doubt, be remembered as one of the 'hard men' of the government of John Howard. Kevin Andrews has ruined the lives of so man low paid, young, old, female, migrant and disabled workers by increasing the insecurity of their employment.

As Minister for Immigration and Citizenship he has abused his office by denying a visa to Dr Mohammed Haneef and destroyed the Gold Coast doctor's reputation around the world. Dr Mohammed Haneef would now be unable to obtain a fair trial, even if he was a terrorist (which was the accusation).

So, now time is running out for trickster politicians to pull out a 'bastard act' that will resonate with the very basest fears among the least informed members of the community. It is time for 'dog whistle' politics. Kevin Andrews plays the race card with the tacit approval of his mentor and 'handler' John Winston Howard.

It will be time to launch a cowardly and despicable attack on the most vulnerable and newest refugee community in Australia ... Africans, specifically Sudanese. Oh, yes, Pauline Hanson is waiting in the wings, first to hear the ultra-sonic tones of Kevin's call to his kindred spirits.

Interview with Lindy Burns

Tuesday, 2 October 2007

http://www.minister.immi.gov.au/media/media-releases/2007/ka_transcript_0783.htm

Interview
Lindy Burns, ABC Melbourne

Australia closes door to African refugees

http://www.abc.net.au/worldtoday/content/2007/s2049830.htm

Africans unwelcome: Hanson

Article from:

http://www.news.com.au/couriermail/story/0,23739,22534591-5007200,00.html

Lachlan Heywood, Martin Philip and Michael Wray

... and the Kelpies and blue heelers are eagerly leaping on board:

Deport Sudanese troublemakers, businessman says

http://abc.net.au/news/stories/2007/10/06/2052563.htm?section=australia

Burma, democracy and being consistently ‘on-message’

2007-10-02T19:51:00.000-07:00

This article has been posted to http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=6465

Burma, Democracy and corruption

2007-09-27T19:14:00.001-07:00

Many of us around the world find the actions of courageous non-violent Burmese people inspiring and impressive. We hope they will not be detained, tortured or killed by the military junta that rules Myanmar. We complete petitions and write to our politicians urging that something be done to end this tragedy. We do not know what will actually make a difference, as sanctions and boycotts have had no effect, except that these usually lead to suffering for the poorest and most vulnerable people.

Clicking below will add your name to this petition to Chinese Premier Hu Jintao and the UN Security Council: "We stand alongside the citizens of Burma in their peaceful protests. We urge you to oppose a violent crackdown on the demonstrators, and to support genuine reconciliation and democracy in Burma. We pledge to hold you accountable for any further bloodshed." http://www.avaaz.org/en/stand_with_burma/f.php?cl=20213140&signup=1

Click Here to Sign Now!

Some of us are astonished (not really) when we hear the champions of Democracy like US President, George W Bush and Australian Prime Minister, John Howard expressing their concern for the Burmese people. Why do they consistently undermine democracy in their own countries and support the undermining of democracy in other countries? Why do these leaders invade other sovereign states, plot covert assassinations of political leaders and coup d'états?

The Australian Foreign Minister, Alexander Downer’s statement on Burma: http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2007/09/25/2042309.htm

In part, Mr Downer said”, I think there's a risk that they [the military Government] will move against the leaders," he told the program from the sidelines of a UN conference on climate change in New York. "They'll arrest the leaders and subject them to very harsh treatment. That would be my concern. "I think it's unlikely that they will, you know, send the tanks into the streets, that sort of response. But we'll have to wait and see."

Mr Downer said he was "very concerned" about the situation in the country. But this same man supports the suppression of other peoples around the world where it suits Australian foreign policy, which is routinely conducted in secret.

In fact the leading ‘Democracies’ are quite comfortable dealing with military juntas and puppet dictatorships and regularly support their repressive policies with supplies of weapons, equipment and training. The French oil company TOTAL is a major investor in Myanmar and its payments to the regime underpin the repression of the Burmese. Britain is a major investor, possibly the second biggest, and supplies armoured vehicles and other military equipment to the junta. But lets not forget that China is the junta’s most powerful friend – and unlikely to lift a finger to save a single life.

Transparency International has this to say:

“Transparency International Chairwoman Huguette Labelle, in a speech presenting the Berlin-based organization's annual Corruption Perceptions Index, which found Myanmar (Burma) and Somalia to be the most corrupt nations. Transparency International said many countries ranked among the cleanest are facilitating bribery and plunder in the impoverished nations at the bottom of the list”.

"The junta which runs Myanmar is clearly one which is able to do very secret deals with international companies, and particularly in illegal logging,'' Laurence Cockcroft, a director for Transparency in the U.K., said in an interview with Bloomberg news agency.

If citizens of Australia think they should boycott the loathsome military regime in Myanmar they should be aware that the Howard government is quietly making this kind of citizen activity illegal:

Govt looks at fines for boycott campaigns, protests

http://abc.net.au/news/stories/2007/09/20/2038707.htm?section=justin

So, the first lesson for democracy and human rights is that we must be consistent. Tibet? Palestine? Many more struggles lie ahead.

The same arguments being advanced today in support of democracy could have been advanced in relation to the protests against the APEC Conference, the presence of known war criminals and the futile outcomes of this denial of free speech.

Find more images in this series here:

http://burmastrugglefordemocracy.blogspot.com/

How to guarantee some populist violence at a peaceful Anti-APEC protest

2007-09-09T19:15:00.000-07:00

The Pinochet Solution will not save the discredited Howard government, nor will it particularly help 'bridesmaid' a change to Labor's Kevin Rudd. There should be a full independent inquiry into the NSW government's handling of the anti-APEC protests, A$170 nmillion they spent and the instructions officers were given as their paramilitary 'Rules of Engagement". See this photo-video from the Sydney Morning Herald Photos: protest right

It is not very often that I find it necessary to quote from commercial television, but we all deserve to view this footage that shows what police brutality means in New South Wales, when our present Prime Minister wants to impress world leaders:
http://ninemsn.video.msn.com/v/en-au/v.htm?g=347cf87c-50ab-47a3-a0be-da23de81841c&f=39&fg=email
I would call this video "NSW Police demonstrate the Pinochet solution"

There is plenty of evidence that shows that at least 200 police officers removed their name tags. They could only have been directed to do this by their officers, who would take their orders from NSW Premier, Morris Iemma and from the Prime Minister's Office.

Let us not easily forget what Premier Iemma said on ABC TV:
QUENTIN DEMPSTER: Under Ken Moroney's performance contract policing seems to have been turned into what's known as authoritarian populism. The police - a force for retribution and revenge for the community's fear, distress and anger.

This was best illustrated by Premier Iemma's advice to recruits at Ken Moroney's final parade at the Goulburn Academy.

MORRIS IEMMA: Be as tough on the criminals as they are on us. Give them the same consideration as they give our kids when they deal them drugs, when they assault and rob a senior citizen, when they rape someone's daughter, when they deface a war memorial. In other words, be faithful to the police motto "let punishment swiftly follow crime".
http://www.abc.net.au/stateline/nsw/content/2006/s2021285.htm

Expect full force of law: Iemma
http://www.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/story/0,22049,22348896-5001021,00.html

When it comes to getting tough on demonstrators no one in power wants to be left out. John Howard had enough to say ... and aspiring Prime Minister in waiting Kevin Rudd had to put his impramata on the expected 'biff':

Rudd backs APEC crackdown http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2007/09/03/2022379.htm

When our governments steal oil this violent act make all of us unsafe

2007-07-05T17:13:00.002-07:00

Since I uploaded this post there has been further discussion on the topic:

All about oil ? - repost By jquiggin | July 6, 2007 http://johnquiggin.com/index.php/archives/2007/07/06/all-about-oil-repost/#more-3597

A worthy read. You decide who to believe - not John Howard's spin doctors.

Dear Prime Minister,

For years your Government has adopted the Bush administration's Iraq policy as our own, even as that policy has repeatedly failed. With Australian troops still at risk and the situation in Iraq deteriorating, Australia urgently needs an independent Iraq policy.

We ask that you announce a plan for a new way forward, including a clearly defined exit strategy for Australia in Iraq.

*Petition updated as of February 15, 2007

www.getup.org.au/campaign/PleaseMrHoward

I thought going to war in Iraq was supposed to make us safer, not put us in more danger. And now we're hearing it was for their oil. Some of you may have seen me ask John Howard from my hospital bed whether he thought what happened to me was a result of the war in Iraq.

I did not think then that two years later we would be still be in this position, where I feel compelled to ask Mr Howard the same question. Yet here we are - our military presence is not making the Iraqis any safer; it is not making Australians any safer. Why, exactly, are we there then?

Louise Barry

Survivor, 2005 London Bombings

GetUp member

Howard, Bush stand firm on Iraq timeline, Reporter: Jim Middleton http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2005/s1418872.htm

Bomb victim grills PM Howard in new TV ad http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,22027003-1702,00.html

Howard links Iraq war to oil, Brendan Nicholson | July 5, 2007 http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/articles/2007/07/04/1183351327508.html

Well, Brendan Nelson also knows why Australian troops were used to illegally invade and occupy Iraq:

Nelson: Oil a factor in Iraq deployment, July 5, 2007 - 10:50AM http://www.theage.com.au/news/national/howard-links-iraq-war-to-oil/2007/07/04/1183351291906.html

Speaking this morning, Dr Nelson said oil was among the reasons to keep troops in Iraq.

"Energy security is extremely important to all nations throughout the world, and of course, in protecting and securing Australia's interests," he said.

"The Middle East itself, not only Iraq, but the entire region is an important supplier of energy oil, in particular, to the rest of the world."

Govt splits on Iraq war oil link

http://abc.net.au/news/stories/2007/07/05/1970982.htm

My comment:

These pernicious politicians should look straight into the eyes of soldiers who risk their lives and tell them that they are asked to do this so that we can drive cars without paying for the petrol we use. How many would agree to fight if they knew it was to enable us to steal the oil that belongs to the people of Iraq on whom we have heaped nothing but misery and destruction. John Howard and his cohort are unfit for public office. He and George W Bush and Tony Blair should be tried as war criminals.

Iraq: Growing opposition to oil law

http://www.albawaba.com/en/countries/Iraq/214809

Seeking Asylum Down Under: A Just Australia welcomes ALP policy shift on Temporary Protection Visas

2007-06-20T05:51:00.000-07:00

Seeking Asylum Down Under: A Just Australia welcomes ALP policy shift on Temporary Protection Visas

Fear and Identity – are these the tools of modern politics?

2007-06-20T05:02:00.000-07:00

Fear and Identity – are these the tools of modern politics?

Venue: The Irish Club, 171 Elizabeth Street, City

Thursday 5 July 2007, 6.30 for 7 pm start

All welcome, entry by donation

Organised by Willy Bach, Greens candidate for Griffith.

Introduced by Larissa Waters, Greens lead Senate candidate for Queensland.

Dr Winnifred Louis (PhD, McGill, Canada) is a Lecturer in the School of Psychology and a Research Associate of ACPACS, UQ. Her research focus is on decision-making in intergroup conflict. She will present research examining the role of threat in prejudice towards asylum seekers in Australia, and the ways that threat perceptions are shaped by social factors - entitled ‘The Psychology of Threat’ Dr Louis explains her work on John Howard’s ‘children overboard’ strategy which led to his victory in the 2001 federal election.

Dr Richard Matthews, is a philosopher and ethicist based at Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick, Canada. His forthcoming book responds to recent claims by some commentators that, in an age of global terrorism, torture is justifiable and necessary in some cases. His book, The Absolute Violation: Why Torture Must be Forbidden, argues against this and defends the absolute prohibition against torture.

The topic of his book, ‘The indefensibility of torture’ will be discussed at this public lecture. The Howard government’s tacit support for the use of torture in the ‘War on Terror’ is well documented.

Both of our speakers will welcome questions.

The Irish Club is a licensed venue.

Contact Willy Bach: 04007 15627

Authorised by Ian Gittus, 26 Horan Street, West End, Qld 4101

The proposed closure of the Queensland University of Technology School of Humanities and Human Services

2007-05-18T21:37:00.001-07:00

QUT vice-chancellor Professor Peter Coaldrake -'Master of spin'
"Professor Coaldrake said the school was losing between $200,000 and $400,000 a year, which was unsustainable. He said the Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Human Services had high attrition rates and poorer employment outcomes than other QUT courses.

Professor Coaldrake said QUT's strength in humanities was its Creative Industries faculty at Kelvin Grove, which was internationally competitive.

"For us, that is the new humanities," he said".

http://www.news.com.au/couriermail/story/0,23739,21594681-3102,00.html

Some of my comments on the proposed closure of the School of Humanities and Human Services at the QUT Carseldine campus:

I am concerned that no strategies have been developed to ensure that the promise of “adequate” supervision of Post Graduate study. The very use of the word “adequate” suggests something less than comparable with optimum or best practise. It is like the use of the word ‘tolerant’ in a multicultural society. I am also concerned that our Vice Chancellor, Peter Coldrake, does not see the differences between Creative Industries and Humanities. They do complement one another, but the community of interest has a small overlap.

This managerial casualness in dealing with detail informs me that the consultative process is designed to fail; that the decision is regarded as irreversible, possibly necessary and ‘courageous’, and that no account is being taken of either the intrinsic value of the Humanities to the functioning of the whole university; or the interests of the students. There can be no Post Graduate students or programmes without committed Supervisors, who in turn, need to have real Undergraduate student teaching to contribute to their work load and inform their research and supervision duties.

I am concerned about the manner in which the announcement was made in the media with the appearance of an executive fait accompli achieved without consultation and in an authoritarian managerial style that denies intrinsic values and the role of ethics in public life. The model of management demonstrated by our Vice Chancellor does not appear to draw on the ethical standards; consultative process and social responsibility are at odds with what these managers would learn if they studied the Humanities. The ‘University of the Real World’ appears to ignore any engagement with the disciplines and needs of the real world that is around us.

This real world is in a state of terminal decline, with dangerous climate change, a widening gulf between privilege and poverty, leading to social turmoil, instability and deprivation. It is a world in need of sound ethical research, genuine humanistic and societal change and real committed people at the ‘coal face’ dealing with human needs. The real world is at war, with combatants returning to be ignored with their psychiatric illness and millions of refugees with nowhere to go beyond starvation and their miserable tents in the desert. The real world is much more than the temporary bubble of prosperity created by a casino economy mineral boom. Global warming will teach us not to rely on digging holes and shipping coal. We need to conduct a equitable functioning society that is informed by the Humanities that you appear to see no value in retaining. We need to be a smart society.

QUT Carseldine has a huge catchment of potential students but is poorly served by public transport and little relatedness with the adjacent community. Perhaps less drastic solutions would start by addressing these anomalies.

I am reminded of my poem from 2002:

Making Ends Meet

We declared a war on terror

And asylum seekers gladly offered

To forgo a meal each day

Waiting out their desert detention

We declared a war on terror

The mentally ill, though not consulted

Relinquished adequate treatment

We declared a war on terror

Educators readily raised their hands

Allowing deep cuts in all departments

The Humanities promised to prune

The deepest as theirs were merely

Human concerns

We declared a war on terror

Housing authorities decided that

Accommodation for the disadvantaged

Was no longer a priority

We declared a war on terror

And assistance for the long-term unemployed

Tapered away to a vanishing point of despair

We declared a war on terror

Fifteen-year-old boys thumped

Each other’s arms and threw

Screwed up balls of paper

Larked around in the classroom

Oblivious that they would join

The next wave through snow-clad minefields

Jungle creeks – weapons held aloft

We declared a war on terror

And politicians who had lied

And rorted to stay in power

Passed legislation banning groups

Opposed to war, arrested

On whim, stifled dissent

Silenced those who knew

Too much of what was true

And sold their consciences

In the service of Uncle Sam

West End, Brisbane 2002

War criminal Dick Cheney threatens Iran and the world

2007-05-12T02:41:00.000-07:00

A Navy F/A-18 fighter jet is seen in the background as Vice President Dick Cheney arrives to greet sailors and Marines at a rally aboard the USS John C. Stennis aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf, Friday, May 11, 2007. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert) (Gerald Herbert - AP)

As reported today in the Washington Post, the USA is now ready to launch an unprovoked and illegal act of military aggression on Iran.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/11/AR2007051100572.html?hpid=sec-politics

"Throughout the region our country has interests to protect and commitments to honor," Cheney told Navy staff aboard the USS John C. Stennis. "With two carrier strike groups in the Gulf, we're sending clear messages to friends and adversaries alike. We'll keep the sea lanes open. We'll stand with our friends in opposing extremism and strategic threats. We'll disrupt attacks on our own forces. We'll continue bringing relief to those who suffer and delivering justice to the enemies of freedom."

War criminal, US Vice President, Dick Cheney issued his threats in much the way George W Bush announced, "mission accomplished" in May 2003. We may be surprised to see whether loyal allies, Britain and Australia will join this latest irresponsible militarist adventure, whilst their troops are bogged down in the un-winnable conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Read this update from Noam Chomskey on the American plans to attack Iran:
US-Iran Policy Dynamics
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/

The war in Afghanistan is likely to fail

2007-04-12T23:44:00.000-07:00

When Western nations that make high claims to morality and justice make deals with war lords like the Northern Alliance they can never erase the memory of scenes like these.

Read what was said in 2001 and ask who was right about the ill-conceived war against the people of Afghanistan:

SAS regiment soldiers to be redeployed to Afghanistan: prepare for casualties says Howard (11 April 2007) http://www.abc.net.au/canberra/stories/s1894333.htm?backyard

More Canadian soldiers die in Afghanistan (12 April 2007)
http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200704/s1895170.htm

More Australians sent to battle resurgent Taliban (25 September 2006)
http://www.abc.net.au/am/content/2006/s1747629.htm

In 2001 I set up the web site Afghanpeacezone in which I said: http://www.geocities.com/afghanpeacezone/

Peace is very difficult when so much is unresolved.

President Bush has signaled to the world that the USA has learnt nothing from their previous and continuing violations of human rights around the world. Globalised corporate greed begets despair and desperate people can become terrorists.

Did all those miscounted votes matter, after all - now that we have probably the worst possible choice of American President? Can we really expect peace while the CIA agents go free who gave Osama Bin Ladin, Saddam Hussein, The Shah, The Taliban their first guns, their first pay-packet? If US retaliation leads to massive civilian casualties, regional destabilisation and many thousands of angry and committed suicide bombers then we should not be in the least surprised. If a return to CIA assassinations and engineered coups lead to more terror attacks around the world (perhaps in your suburb) we can only blame ourselves.

The USA refuses to give up their war criminals, people like Henry Kissinger (named by Christopher Hitchins) whilst labelling other nations as 'rogue states'.

Yes! We've got to stand up for peace and we will have to go on for the next awful fifty years (it will be every bit as paranoiac as the Cold War) We will need to go on stand up for peace because of what has happened last week. Some of us in the peace movement feel that our whole life's work has just been destroyed. It will be completely decimated by an ill-considered and indiscriminate response.

Willy Bach 2001

Greens Senator Bob Brown's Media Releases

04 October 2001 - SAS Squad Should Be Under UN Control

It is a strategic mistake for Australian troops to be deployed under a US led mission in Afghanistan, Greens Senator Bob Brown said today. “Australia’s commitment should be under the auspices of the United Nations,” Senator Brown said. “Terrorists could use the fact that the US is in charge to widen the conflict. “It is a strategic mistake for our forces to be led by the USA. They should be under Australia’s control or the United Nations’. “The use of the term ‘war’ is also a mistake. “This is a hunt for terrorists and the term ‘war’ is inflaming the crisis and creating more fear around the world.

07 October 2001 - Greens Condemn Howard and Ruddock Greens Senator Bob Brown has condemned the Prime Minister and Phillip Ruddock for their handling of the latest boatload of asylum seekers.

“Howard’s One Nation policy of ‘turning the boats back’ is causing the situation to spiral ever further out of control,” Senator Brown said today. “The latest incident, with people jumping or being thrown overboard, is a direct outcome of Mr Howard’s policies which have made refugees election fodder. “Mr Ruddock’s pronouncements today are media manipulation of the worst sort. Nobody throws their children overboard unless they are desperate. “Australia is being hugely damaged by a policy that has already cost $100M and the results of which would have been the same: cheats sent home with genuine refugees remaining in Australia. “This is not an exercise in war it is an exercise in politics. Howard’s approach has snarled one third of the Australia Navy when they should be available for others uses,” Senator Brown said.

08 October 2001 - Howard and Beazley Have Huge Responsibility: Brown

“Australia’s political leaders have a huge responsibility to ensure innocent Afghani civilians are not killed in the current attacks”, Greens Senator Bob Brown said in Hobart today. “Both Mr Howard and Mr Beazley are totally committed to Mr Bush’s war. Both have rejected the safer comment of the anti-terrorist campaign being lead by the United Nations. They are wrong.” “But their support for Mr Bush carries the responsibility of achieving maximum restraint to avoid killing innocent people. “The rambling bellicosity of terrorist Bin Laden is no excuse for destroying innocent Afghani communities or elevating the chance of a wider war between the West and Islamic countries which he advocated.” Senator Brown said.

10 October 2001 - Ruddock Unbelievable

The Minister for Immigration’s assertion that young children were thrown overboard from the refugee boat in “premeditated” parental abandonment last weekend is unbelievable, Greens Senator Bob Brown said today. “That the children were jettisoned, if it happened, points to great alarm or terror as a result of the Howard Government’s new policy being implemented,” Senator Brown said. “There should be independent observers or journalists on the naval ships: otherwise the government exposes the navy as well as the asylum seekers to potentially damaging publicity when Mr Howard is at fault. “Videotape of last weekend’s incident must be released. “Mr Ruddock is not Minister for propaganda and is not enlisted to select what the public see,” Senator Brown said.

17 October 2001 - Howard Wrong On Ground Troops

‘Conscription Next, Parliament Should Be Recalled’ - Brown. Prime Minister Howard is wrong in committing 1,550 Australian ground troops, under US command, to the US- led invasion of Afghanistan, Greens Senator Bob Brown said in Hobart today. “Australians should not be committed except under the auspices of the United Nations following a General Assembly resolution,” Senator Brown said. “The effort to bring terrorists to justice should be by the community of nations, to avoid the real prospect of a war between the US and Islamic populations. “Mr Howard has also put conscription on the agenda. He is not a man to change. He advocated conscription in the 1960s and 70s. He will bring it in during the coming term of government if the global crisis deteriorates,’ Senator Brown said. “We support a UN-led effort to bring the terrorists to justice in a world criminal court. The Bush proposal has no such contingency plan or end-point. Parliament should be recalled to discuss this commitment of young Australians,’ Senator Brown said.

25 October 2001 - Cluster Bombing is an Outrage

- Greens Cluster bombing, now being used by the United States in Afghanistan, is outrageous and totally unacceptable in an operation meant to target only terrorists, Greens Senator Bob Brown said in Launceston today. “Cluster bombing is indiscriminate and while it may not effect one terrorist it will maim and kill many innocent civilians,” Senator Brown said. “The Prime Minister John Howard should publicly demand an immediate halt to cluster bombing which itself is a form of terrorism against civilian populations. “The Prime Minister should offer the United Nations Australian expertise in deactivating the unexploded cluster bombs,” Senator Brown said.

25 October 2001 - Howard Must Restrain Bush’s Bombs

- Brown Mr Howard’s speech is redolent with his fear that Australians will judge him as mistaken on Afghanistan, Greens Senator Bob Brown said tonight.“The cluster bombs are threatening the cluster alliance. Australians can pick the difference between necessary an anti-terrorist operation and the cluster bombs maiming innocent civilians,” Senator Brown said. “Mr Howard would do better to tell President Bush to avoid the imminent humanitarian catastrophe in Afghanistan than lecture Australians in inappropriate history. “Most Australians expected Osama bin Laden would be out of action by now, instead we a seeing maimed children on the TV screens. Mr Howard should tell President Bush to narrow his focus on the first and protect the second. Senator Brown who has called for a one-month moratorium on the war in Afghanistan said Mr Beazley should follow suit. “This is a watershed moment in Afghanistan and potentially the election,” Senator Brown said.

Further information: Ben Oquist 02 62773170 or 0419 704095Category: Senate Office Author: Ben Oquist Bob Brown's Media Releases

Further comments from a friend:

There is almost no analysis of the reasons why Afghanistan was invaded in the first place. Australian new outlets seem oblivious of the fact that the decision to invade Afghanistan was made before 11 September 2001 when the Taliban government, in a meeting in Brussels, refused the terms of the American's demands regarding the laying of the pipeline through Afghanistan to the Pakistan coast. they were offered the choice of a "carpet of gold or a carpet of bombs". that was in July 2001. The decision was made to start the attack before the snow fell (October).

After September 11 the Americans alleged that the attack was the work of "al Quaeda" which is Arabic for "database" a term devised by the Americans to identify those who were part of the American financed mujihadeen attacks against the Russians in the 1980s. Bin Laden was one of the leaders of the mujihadeen and visited the US under the pseudonym of "Tim Osman".

When the Americans accused bin Laden of being behind the attacks, the Taliban government offered to hand him over if the Americans could offer proof that bin Laden had in fact been involved in 9/11. The Americans did not, and in my view could not, offer such proof. They simply ignored the Taliban offer because they needed to secure the pipeline routes.

The real objective of the Afghanistan invasion is to justify the establishment of American bases in the "stans" to the north of Afghanistan because they are one of the few remaining major sources of oil and gas. Look at the map of American bases. It closely follows the pipeline route.

The other major objective of the invasion was to allow the reconstituting of the poppy fields that hads largely been destroyed under the Taliban. Afghan opium is the main supplier to Europe, and again the supply route closely matches the establishment of American bases, including (and this is not a coincidence) in Kosovo, now the largest US base outside the USA.

Apart from enriching the Bush crime family and their friends, drugs are the main source of funding for intelligence black ops.

See Don Paul and Jim Hoffman: "Waking up from our Nightmare", and the several books by Nafeez Ahmed.

Needless to say, none of this is even hinted at by our politicians or our media.

There is no more justification for the invasion of Afghanistan than there was for Iraq.

end

The US psychological torture system is finally on trial - what about the Howard government?

2007-03-14T21:14:00.000-07:00

Naomi Klein says that America has deliberately driven hundreds, perhaps thousands, of prisoners insane. Now it is being held to account in a Miami court, 23 February 2007 http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2019580,00.html

This history of purposeful harm is clearly demonstrated by Alfred McCoy and now Michael Otterman http://www.americantorture.com/

Australia’s Howard government fully support torture and the Guantanamo Bay ‘facility’ – that is why they have not tried to get David Hicks home for the past five+ years.

I would also add that the Howard government in Australia has also been intentionally inflicting psychiatric harm on asylum seekers for the past ten years. Is this a case of ‘Little Brother’ trying to learn the dark arts? We should promptly remind the Howard government that we find the CIA’s psychological torture experiments in Guantánamo Bay and hundreds of other locations totally repugnant and unconscionable.

The Howard government’s new ‘strongman’ in Immigration, Kevin Andrews, is now using the 82-83 Sri Lankan asylum seekers as a wedge for the 2007 federal elections, just as ‘Tampa’ and ‘children overboard’ were used in 2001 and 2004
www.theage.com.au/.../02/25/1172338469275.html
Now that these hapless people will be punished “as a warning to people smugglers” we can expect them to suffer psychologically in Nauru, far from legal and community assistance from Australia. http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200703/s1872527.htm

If you really wanted to discourage people smugglers you would arrest them in Indonesia – but that is not possible because they are providing economic benefits to ‘certain influential people’ as TNI officers are sometimes described.

Over two years ago Australia's most prominent psychiatrists, Dr Jon Jureideni and Dr Louise Newman warned that arbitrary and indefinite detention causes psychological and psychiatric damage.

In an ABC TV 7.30 Report, 'Asylum seekers' mental health under the microscope', Dr Louise Newman is interviewed and defends the scientific findings against the accusations and slurs of Phillip Ruddock

http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2001/s437074.htm

"The survey, published in the Medical Journal of Australia, points to significant psychological problems, claiming 85 per cent of detainees showed signs of severe depression".

I would like to see Phillip Ruddock, Amanda Vanstone and the senior departmental officers, like Bill Farmer, now Australia’s Ambassador in Jakarta, charged with this criminal offence. I am probably being idealistic again.

We are yet to hear anything of a protest from the charismatic Leader of the Opposition and 'conscience', Kevin Rudd.

Guantánamo Bay (Cuba) and David Hicks are symbolic of an empire on steroids

2007-02-03T03:17:00.000-08:00

Amnesty International has called Guantánamo Bay a human rights scandal. http://web.amnesty.org/pages/guantanamobay-index-eng But Guantánamo Bay also reflects the true aspirations of an American empire that has no interest in democracy and freedom and spreads poverty, misery, terror and tyranny around the world.

If they really believed in freedom and democracy would they really be branding the Geneva Conventions as “quaint”? - White House counsel Alberto Gonzales, who was nominated for Attorney General http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/111304A.shtml

“The first trials under a new system for trying foreign terrorism suspects held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, moved a step closer on Friday when a US military prosecutor filed charges against three inmates.

"The chief prosecutor for the Office of Military Commissions has sworn charges against Guantánamo detainees David Hicks of Australia, Salim Hamdan of Yemen, and Omar Khadr of Canada," Pentagon spokesperson Bryan Whitman said.

The move was the first step toward trial under a system of military commissions set up by the Bush administration last year to try foreign terrorism suspects held at the detention camp at the US military base in Cuba”. http://www.int.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click_id=22&art_id=qw1170493921417B253

“Alfred McCoy is Professor of history at the University of Wisconsin. In 1972 he wrote The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade, which is now regarded as a seminal work on the CIA's complicity in Asian drug trafficking. His latest book is A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation from the Cold War to the War on Terror, which examines the CIA's development of psychological torture over the past 50 years. And in an article in the latest edition of the Monthly magazine, he turns his attention to the treatment of David Hicks in Guantánamo Bay, which he says must be viewed through the lens of CIA torture techniques”. http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2006/s1662218.htm

Australia’s ABC TV interviewed a spokesman for the experimental torture camp:

“Mr Durand also denied Hicks was placed in solitary confinement last March.

"First off there is no solitary confinement at Guantánamo," he said.

"People will often use the fact we do have single cell detention and they will throw out the term 'solitary confinement' because it is cruel and inhumane.

"It (solitary confinement) is completely locking them away from human contact and no access outside their cell”.

The man must be so used to lying that he doesn’t always know when he is doing it!

Surely it is time to remind Australia’s Attorney General and tormentor of refugees that he should be making an effort to cash in on all that succulent “influence” that John Howard has in Washington with the Bush administration and get David Hicks released. Regrettably, there is still some way to go in convincing Australian parliamentarians that due process and human rights actually matter.

We should note the non-signatories for targeting in the coming federal elections!

As Michelle Grattin explains in the Melbourne Age: “Barnaby Joyce was the only Coalition name on the letter sent yesterday by 96 federal MPs to members of the United States Congress urging them to try to get David Hicks repatriated.

All ALP MPs bar Robert Ray, Michael Danby and Mark Bishop signed,

as did the Greens, Democrats and independents Peter Andren and Tony Windsor.

Democrats leader Lyn Allison, the letter's organiser, initially approached several Liberals known to be concerned about human rights (later she sent it to all Government backbenchers) but they declined.

The Liberals might have opted for discretion but John Howard is under no illusion. There's mounting concern in the ranks over Hicks' treatment and the reaction coming from constituents. With Parliament resuming on Tuesday, it would be surprising if the issue didn't boil up in the Coalition party room, especially if the Government's hopes that Hicks is about to be charged haven't been met by then”.
http://www.theage.com.au/news/opinion/hicks-case-backfires-for-howard/2007/02/01/1169919469186.html

We should not forget weasels like Foreign Minister, Alexander Downer, who has consistently failed to do anything worthwhile for David Hicks or anyone else whose human rights are threatened.

“The Government's state of mind came through in comments by Foreign Minister Alexander Downer. Asked whether he was satisfied with Hicks' conditions, Downer said "you've just got to be so careful what you say here because there are so many hysterical claims made on the back of anything you say". Quizzed about Labor assertions and whether the Government had specifically asked what techniques had been used on Hicks, Downer replied, "You just ambushed me with that, I'd have to get that checked."
http://www.news.com.au/adelaidenow/story/0,22606,21158931-5007700,00.html

Only a third of the detainees (read abductees) at Guantánamo Bay will enjoy the privilege of a sham trial before the so-called Military Commission. The rest, many whose names will remain unknown, will slowly go mad for what remains of their miserable lives at the hands of the USA’s finest torturers.

Iraq: It's the American Alliance, Stupid!

2006-12-20T00:28:00.000-08:00

Iraq: It's the American Alliance, Stupid!

http://www.newmatilda.com//home/getArticle.asp?NID=286&AID=1993

Dear Caven Hogue

Thanks for a worthy article. There is much in this article to agree with and to value. The 'insurance policy' argument is regularly trotted out by International Relations academics of the so-called Realist persuasion. It is unfortunate that the people who do the number crunching on the premiums never factor in all the detrimental outcomes of Australian involvement in whatever militarist adventurism with which the USA is involved.

I would draw your attention to the book 'A very small insurance policy, the politics of Australian involvement in Vietnam, 1954-1967 by Glen St J Barclay, UQP 1988. Even the dates in the title are interesting. The USA intended and planned its military aggression in Indochina long before the fabricated Gulf of Tonkin incident, long before there were military combat troops on the ground and long before Sir Robert Menzies shabby lies to the Australian parliament.

Many veterans will tell you, some from behind cupped hands, that they were not happy to be associated with what one British Ambassador to Saigon termed "a tide of napalm". They were uncomfortable with any association with what their American counterparts were doing.

In Iraq Australian troops have not been exposed to the 'worst of the worst', which is why Australian troops, apart from our Special Forces, have suffered so few casualties. Just the other day our 'Defence' Minister refused US requests for Australian troops to be 'embedded' with the newly reformed Iraqi troops (some of whom are also members of the deadly militias - see Paul McGeough's article in the Sydney Morning Herald http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/leave-it-all-behind-and-youll-live/2006/12/15/1166162319928.html and his interview on ABC RN 'Breakfast', Wednesday 20 December 2006).

One ADF officer mentioned to me in conversation that he and his colleagues hated torture and would refuse to cooperate with any Americans who were engaged in these abhorrent practices. Rod Barton, former Australian intelligence officer and member of the WMD search team, confirmed on a number of occasions that the Americans were indeed routinely carrying out barbaric and degrading practices on prisoners with which he raised objections. He was ignored by the real war criminals in Canberra, of course.

In short, we are not along for the ride without inheriting some of the baggage. American war crimes in Indochina, including the carpet bombing of Cambodia and Laos, the use of napalm, cluster bombs, phosphorus, Agent Orange and other egregious weapons against non-threatening peasant societies are all well documented (though no doubt absent from John Howard's version of the history books).

Any one who doubts the long-term harm of these weapons should check media photographer, Tim Page's web site http://www.vietnampix.com/ackn.htm and order the shocking images of third generation Agent Orange babies. These are nearly as grotesque as the Depleted Uranium babies of Iraq.

Our so called insurance policy causes lots of veterans to fight our stingy, mean-spirited and ungrateful government to get some compensation for their injuries and their PTSD, whilst their children commit suicide at three times the national youth average. Lets not forget the unmitigated disaster of the Union Carbide factory in Sydney, where Agent Orange was manufactured. Nor should we ever forget that UXBs and mines in Laos will continue to kill and maim for the next 700 years.

For our trouble, as you will see from reading the declassified documents in the US State Department, our 'powerful friends' seldom bothered to 'consult' with the Australian government about their intentions, though much is made of the possible ‘influence’ we may have (in our dreams) in Washington.

Finally, with many of the detriments not factored into the premiums, many of us have known for over thirty years that the USA would not have come to our aid if we were attacked by Indonesia, though this is, admittedly, any unlikely scenario. Our governments, of both 'Tweedle' persuasions, pandered to General Suharto and his brutal militarist regime, to the delight of people like Henry Kissinger.

An insurance policy with so many hidden costs, and one that denies us a right to democratic governance and a conscience is, in my view, not worth a cracker.

I fully expect the US forces and their 'allies' and mercenaries to shoot their way to the airport as the flee Iraq in hasty and undignified retreat any time in the next eight months. This disgraceful war crime, the war of aggression and plunder against the people of Iraq, is an episode we will long regret. I do not share the view that 'collateral damage' to Australia will be minimal. When will we be able to repay the 600,000 + Iraqi deaths we helped to cause?

Willy Bach

See also: http://willybachpropaganda.blogspot.com/

If anyone wants to contact me about Australia's part in the CIA's Secret War in Laos please do so through NewMatilda

Why I never march on the various ‘Amnesia Days’ that have been devised

2006-11-12T11:11:00.000-08:00

Why I never march on the various ‘Amnesia Days’ that have been devised

12 November 2006

Remembrance Day 2006 has just been ‘commemorated’ in Britain with a tight formation of four Vulcan jets screaming over Hyde Park and traffic diverted around the heavily securitised unveiling of a new monument to New Zealand’s dead of World War II and subsequent conflicts. This year featured a speech by New Zealand Prime Minister, Helen Clark, who we know holds a very different view of the present military adventurism in Iraq, refuses to host nuclear powered and armed naval vessels, and has disbanded most of the offensive sections of the New Zealand Air force. Yet Helen Clark’s government refuses to acknowledge that some of New Zealand’s military personnel were involved in one of the twentieth century’s bloodiest and most illegitimate wars, the CIA’s Secret War in Laos, during the American Indochina War.

“Where have all the poppy sellers gone?” was a front-page headline on the aptly named giveaway tabloid ‘London Lite’. Indeed, there seem to be fewer people wearing the tawdry little red flower, which was probably mass-produced in Bangladesh or, dare I suggest, Vietnam. There has even been some discussion as to whether people should be coerced by social obligation to wear this thing on their lapel. A religious organisation has even suggested that the red poppy ‘smuggles in’ the message that redemption can come from participation in war. They have the temerity to suggest that we should look afresh at the principles of ‘Just War’ and that the flower should be white, to symbolise purity and peace.

Remembrance Day and similar commemorative events play a vital role in reinforcing the nations’ mythology of righteousness, purity and goodness in the face of a great deal of evidence to the contrary. These annual officially supported events help to underpin the ‘high external threat – high internal cohesion’ formula that keeps governments in power and well-funded militaries under civilian control.

The real point of ‘remembrance’ is that ordinary people have been persuaded by distorted history and disinformation into performing high risk ‘tasks’ at the expense of their own well being. These ‘tasks’ have included putting their own lives at risk and taking the lives of other ordinary people. As David Grossman says, this breaks all the fundamental conditioning of human beings that tells us that killing is taboo. People have to be trained to kill and it often causes them great, if very private, remorse and frequently psychiatric illness. Many veterans cannot express disclosure regarding their experiences for many years after the traumatic events. Some psychopaths enjoy this kind of work and no one really knows how to reprogram them.

‘Remembrance’ gives political and religious leaders the opportunity to enhance their own positions of authority, reinforce the precarious righteousness of the Christian ‘Just War Theory’ and sanitise the historical record of the nations’ narrative mythology. It also gives the veterans and their families the mistaken impression that these leaders actually care for the well-being of this audience and valorise this mythology to the wider audience of the nation.

Veterans, especially but not only those who experienced combat at close quarters, but including those who killed by remote control, as well as those who performed the support tasks, all need to be rehabituated into civil life and need to feel ‘OK’ with what they have experienced. Some will need to come to terms with things that they have done. For others it might be remorse for what they failed to prevent others from doing. Some veterans grieve over fallen comrades and feel guilty to be enjoying their own survival.

I am reminded of the SAS storming of the Iranian Embassy in London in 1982. One story that has had little airing alleges that the SAS soldiers entered the building through a smoke grenade cloud and disabled everyone on the floor. They then pumped bullets into the heads of all but one of the hostage takers. This was all standard procedure for SAS personnel. One hostage taker lay down with the hostages and emerged from the Embassy building alive to be seen by the waiting media contingent. The hostages had not ‘given him away’. The operation was considered to be a ‘failure’, not because the hostage takers ‘escaped’ interrogation and were not brought to trial; but because one hostage taker lived to see his day in court, and no doubt revealed details of what had happened. It is also said that the Coroner did not record the nature the ‘execution style’ killings – a very British approach to public amnesia in the face of inconvenient facts. No one knows the names of the soldiers or hears their explanation.

The identity of the ‘Veteran’ is a person scarred by war. A meticulously constructed ‘public amnesia’ prevents a closer examination of this phenomenon. The comfort the veterans feel with this identity depends on a valorising narrative. They were brave, they fought for their country, and they fought so that their fellow citizens can enjoy freedom. Yet they return from wars with persistent military habits, with a simplistic logic that the strong should always prevail - that force can always settle problems, a desensitised culture of violence and an inability to associate their actions with the well being of others. Substance abuse, alcoholism, domestic violence, child abuse, family murder-suicide, risk-taking behaviours and self harm all characterise the destructive cycle that can be experienced by veterans affected by PTSD and similarly ‘uncategorised’ affects of war.

Governments often make the appearance of respecting the dead whilst wilfully ignoring the pleas for help and the sometimes ‘invisible’ injuries suffered by veterans. Those whose personal narrative reminds them that they performed their ‘tasks’ in undeclared and clandestine conflicts are at most risk to their own well being. They are at risk of being, co-victims of ‘plausible denial’, together with millions of unknown civilians, when their exploits do not fit comfortably into the nations’ mythological narrative of ‘bravery, purity and righteousness. The extensive deployment of Special Forces around the world in the Long War, also known as the War on Terror, will inevitably lead to some more of this ‘short-changing’ when these people return wounded or worse for wear. There will be some ingenious explanations for ‘remembrance’ humbug, I think.

I never march. I always cry inside.

Willy Bach

John Howard rejects Iraqi death toll survey

2006-10-12T07:20:00.000-07:00

A short time ago in Canberra, the Prime Minister joined the US President George Bush in dismissing this latest estimate of Iraqi deaths.

JOHN HOWARD: "Well, I don't believe that John Hopkins research, I don't. It's not plausible, it's not based on anything other than a house-to-house survey. I think that's absolutely precarious.

It is a… an unbelievably large number and it's out of whack with most of the other assessments that have been made.

There are continuous reports or continual reports out of the United States about a reassessment. The latest advice I have is that there's no fundamental reassessment going on".
http://www.abc.net.au/worldtoday/content/2006/s1763454.htm

I believe that John Howard has a duty to explain exactly what method of assessment of Iraqi civilian casualties would be 'acceptable' to him. His usual dismissive comments can only indicate that he has no regard for the loss of Iraqi lives - it is as unimportant to him as it is for the war criminals in Washington with whom he is working.

New study in British based The Lancet medical journal reveals 655,000 Iraqis killed by US war in Iraq.

A study published on the website of the British medical journal The Lancet on Wednesday reveals that an estimated 655,000 Iraqis have been killed as a result of the US invasion and occupation of Iraq since the spring of 2003.

The study supervised by Iraqi and American public health researchers said that deaths in Iraq rose sharply after the American invasion.

“Deaths are occurring in Iraq now at a rate more than three times that from before the invasion of March 2003,” the lead author of the study, Dr. Gilbert Burnham, said in a statement quoted by the American Associated Press. Burnham is a researcher at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Western supporters of the American occupation expressed disdain for the study because it revealed a death toll far in excess of the numbers they have been claiming.

The AP reported that Burnham said that the estimated death toll was much higher in this study because it was derived from a house-to-house survey, rather than on the basis of body counts and media reports which are notoriously incomplete.

For The Lancet study, researchers gathered data from a sample of 1,849 Iraqi households with a total of 12,801 residents from late May to early July 2006. The sample was used to extrapolate the total figure and therefore covers deaths only up through July 2006.
Major funding for The Lancet study came from the American Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Source http://www.albasrah.net/en_articles_2006/1006/iraqiresistancereport_111006.htm
See http://www.thelancet.com/webfiles/images/journals/lancet/s0140673606694919.pdf for full article

Content 'taken down' on my web site on the CIA's Secret War in Laos

2006-09-25T19:36:00.000-07:00

The two kilometre airstrip near Leong Nok Tha, Northeast Thailand, that I helped to build in 1966, as a member of a British military construction unit.

The airfield was a 'small' contribution by Britain, Australia and

New Zealand to the CIA's Secret War in Laos.

Photo by Willy Bach February 1993.

We are often complaining that our freedom of expression is being curtailed. It feels really different when the silencing reaches ourselves. Of course, I have no idea who made all the content of my web site vanish - see http://www.angelfire.com/wi/poetryantiwar/ but it is not hard to work out who would be displeased by the content, after the site has been up since 2000.

Twenty four hours later: the site works again - was this a false alarm?

Kim Beazley affirms Australian 'values' - if you believe him

2006-09-13T04:58:00.000-07:00

Writing to your Member of Parliament sometimes works - if they answer your letters:

Dear Kevin Rudd

I am extremely disappointed that your leader, Kim Beazley, has made this announcement, http://www.theage.com.au/news/national/beazleys-values-test-absurd/2006/09/12/1157826910190.html
Beazley's values test 'absurd', September 12, 2006 - 11:20AM and http://www.theage.com.au/news/National/Gillard-cold-on-Beazleys-values-plan/2006/09/13/1157826953856.html Values statement won't suit tourists: PM, September 13, 2006 - 2:34AM - seemingly without any consultation with colleagues. I believe this is breaking with Labor's long tradition of tolerance.

Sadly, this ill-judged announcement is playing straight into the hands of the ugliest members of the Howard government: John Howard, Peter Costello, Brendan Nelson, Bronwyn Bishop, David Jull, Dana Vale, Sophie Panopoulous, Peter Dutton et al, who, as you know, are leading this country into a divisive "Kristallnacht in slow motion", resulting in numerous acts of vandalism, violent assaults and insults against Muslims and other minority groups - and the Cronulla riots - egged on by John Howard's great friend, shock jock, Allan Jones. Lets not forget Phillip Ruddock.

I would be happy if Kim Beazley quietly dropped the unworkable and insulting suggestion that people coming into Australia on holiday, or for any other purpose, should affirm Australian 'values'. I would want watertight written guarantees that such thinking would not be a part of any future Labor government. Please provide me with this assurance.

Fortunately Senator Robert Ray has called on Kim Beazley to scrap the idea and other Labor colleagues have taken the same view. I hope you will do the same.

Thanks for this.

Regards
Willy Bach

Not like ordering a pizza

2006-08-28T16:03:00.000-07:00

I never stop being busy. The most recent being the launch of my book 'Picking mangoes that are still green' at the Queensland Poetry Festival, at the Judith Wright Centre on Saturday 26 August. http://www.queenslandpoetryfestival.com/

'Picking mangoes' is an artefact of George W Bush's fraudulent 'War on Terror' in which state terror has risen to new heights of obscenity and the most afflicted people are the world's poorest. War in Africa is the signal of further conflicts to come. The book is published by and available from Post Pressed Publishing http://www.postpressed.com.au/index.html

I would also like to express my appreciation for another artefact of the illegal War of Aggression and Plunder Against the People of Iraq: James Blunt - 'No Bravery'. Listen and watch, the passion must move you.

James blunt served as a soldier in Iraq with the British army and he hated every moment of it, not because of fear but for what he is describing in this lovely song of his from his 2005 released album "Back to bedlam"!

To listen to this song follow the link
http://nobravery.cf.huffingtonpost.com/

This is my contribution to the body of work denouncing the war crimes that Israel and the USA have most recently committed against the people of Lebanon - and while we were all distracted with this horror, denounced by the UN, Secretary General, Kofi Annan http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/747774.html and by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International http://www.amnestyusa.org/news/document.do?id=ENGMDE150702006, the IDF continued to commit atrocities in Gaza and the West Bank against Palestinians http://web.amnesty.org/pages/mde-150612006-eng

Not like ordering a pizza

If we are convinced
That war is normal
A routine activity
Something that
Must be done
Like the chore
Of cleaning the house

Cleaning up South Lebanon
Levelling villages
Evicting everyone
Who can drive
Or walk
Or breathe

Then war is something
To do when you see advantage
A natural response
When the mood takes you
Periodic
Part of life
Something to plan for

Unless someone has
The temerity
To resist your advances
To hinder your work
Cause you to reconsider

I’ll have olives and anchovies
With mine
In say 30 minutes?

Willy Bach © 2006

10 August 2006 – Montessori School, Fig Tree Pocket, Brisbane – during Israel’s assault on Lebanon

Footnote:
[Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud] “Olmert has said Israel would welcome a robust international force in southern Lebanon. But Israel's main concern remains the presence of Hizballah fighters in the area, as Israeli Brigadier General Yossi Kupperwasser, a senior intelligence officer, told reporters in Tel Aviv on August 7. "Some people ask, 'How come the Israeli army has not crushed Hizballah within five minutes?' So, let me tell you something: Crushing Hizballah is not like ordering a pizza. It takes time," Kupperwasser said”.http://www.rferl.org/featuresarticle/2006/08/937223ac-7aa3-4f02-87ee-18e4469ea1b2.html

Lets encourage the brave Refuseniks of Israel

2006-08-12T03:01:00.000-07:00

http://www.refusingtokill.net/Israel/ShaulMograbiBerger.htm

Refusenik Shaul Mograbi Berger
Shaul Mograbi Berger aged 19, was imprisoned for the fourth time on 16 October 2005 for refusing to serve in the Israeli army. He was sentenced to 21 days in prison and will be released on 6 November 2005, by which time he will have spent a total of some 65 days in prison.

There are princpled and brave young men and women in Israel refusing to commit war crimes. We should encourage this tendency in many other countries too.

Military Refusal in Israel

From a report by Sarah Anne Minkin and Rela Mazali: “…activist groups New Profile and Yesh Gvul report that hundreds, if not thousands, of reserve troops are refusing to go to the war. More than a hundred have turned to the groups for help in refusing to serve. While 5 refusers are currently in jail, with more awaiting trial for their refusal, the vast majority of refusers will not face immediate trial or punishment.” Why not? Report Sarah Anne and Rela: “…the majority of refusers are being told by their commanders to go AWOL, with punitive measures delayed for a later, less-urgent time. Refusers also report that many other men get out of service by going abroad, getting a medical deferral or simply going AWOL.” (Soon to appear on www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org)

... and many more!

I did it my way

2006-08-12T01:30:00.000-07:00

Picture of American soldier laughing at the charred remains of a VC soldier

who was burned to death by a Napalm Bomb.

I am reminded that not much has changed since the Vietnam War.

We are counting down the days that are left for the war criminal George W Bush to 'serve' as President of the USA.

We would respectfullly ask our American friends to choose more carefully next time. Please don't go for Hillary Clinton - she is for war! Choose peace. Choose to be good neighbours.

I did it my way

Regrets….
I’ve had a few…
Its 3 am
At Tommy’s Guest House
Nong Khai
Suddenly in the darkness
Sinatra is playing really loud
I try to ignore it
Tossing restless
On my rush mat in my sarong

Switch it off
Someone shouts
Shut the fuck up
Replies the strident
American voice

I did it My Way…
Now singing along
A little slurred
Switch it off
Or I will

I’ve been here
Longer than you’ve had hot dinners
You can get fucked
If I want to play
My music
I fucking will

I called him Joe
I don’t know
His real name
In his sixties I thought
Helicopter pilot’s
Baseball cap
Check shirt
Mekong whiskey
An endless supply
Of cheep
Uncomplicated girls
Money to live on
For the rest of his days

I did it My Way…
Reminds me of
Swaggering arrogance
Anything we do is OK
The world’s most lawless policeman
Weapons and poppy seed
Its all currency
War is a game
Opportunity
Live fast
Don’t count
The casualties

Regrets…
Very few
We were doing a job
We were paid
To do what we did
That was then
Wear your past
Or bury it

Footnote:
This incident took place on my last night at Nong Khai before moving to Sang Khom. I had seen the man I have called Joe and guessed that he was an old ‘hand’ who had stayed on. Perhaps he was one of the gung ho pilots of baby airforce. Somehow I had an aversion to engaging him in conversation. He was sometimes drunk and argumentative, anyway. The Sinatra incident was indicative and revealing. It took six years for this poem to surface.

Acknowledgement to P. Anka, J. Revaux, G. Thibault, C. Frankois who wrote the song.
My Way

Israel attacks the people of Gaza and now Lebanon

2006-07-13T22:55:00.000-07:00

This is a letter I wrote to Kevin Rudd MP, Shadow Minister for Foreign Affairs, Australia:

Dear Kevin Rudd

I am writing to express my alarm and extreme concern regarding the present military activities being undertaken by the Israeli armed forces in both Gaza and Lebanon. My concerns in no way condone violence by Hamas, Hizbulah or other armed groups. It is the disproportional nature of the Israeli military attacks.

If we only concern ourselves with Lebanon we have to see that nation as one that is struggling to establish democratic institutions, yet the Israeli air force has destroyed all transport infrastructure, including the Beirut International Airport. Not only does Lebanon not pose any meaningful threat to Israel, They have very little defence against this kind of aggression. According to Global Security http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/lebanon/airforce.htm Lebanon's air force and ground defences are no match for the sophisticated and lethal Israeli Air force. It is obvious that these attacks were planned long ago, including the targeting of the airport runway, roads to Damascus and power stations.

As Global Security put it:

"Today, the Lebanese Air Force has no real fixed wing capability. The few fighter aircraft they possess are old and outdated planes that have no combat value. Instead the Air Force has invested in helicopters with limited firepower and survivability. These aircraft are also bound to fair weather conditions because of their limited capability. Their continued operations are still heavily concentrated on domestic operations, primarily narcotics trafficking and other criminal violations.

Lebanon received much of its modern equipment at a discount from the United States and continues to purchase new systems from the U.S. as well. France also represents a large portion of Lebanon’s imports. In 2000, there were only approximately 800 active personnel in the Air Force".

I am outraged by this aggression and believe that the Australian government and opposition should condemn this and the loss of lives (so far reported at 53) and that this condemnation should be of a higher order than that which was given to North Korea for that country's recent missile tests. I am sure that you are aware that the USA, (The Age 12 July 2006) and India (Sydney Morning Herald 10 July 2006) have both conducted recent missile tests for which we should voice our concerns.

At least Australia should express concern to the UN Security Council regarding Israel's aggression in Lebanon, better if Gaza was included in this resolution. This country needs to have a morally defensible foreign policy that is differentiated from that of the United States. The time for this must be now.

TVRI Berita Pagi

2006-06-21T04:12:00.000-07:00

The past few weeks have been very worrying for the people of East Timor, now known as Timor Leste. All the hopes that were raised in 1999, when the people voted for independence from Indonesia - now on a knife edge. This took me back to 1992 when I was in Denpasar, Bali, and Xanana Gusmao was a political prisoner in the Denpasar jail. Then as now the intervention of major powers like the USA and Australia had the potential to cause great harm or benefit. Which will it be this time?
TVRI Berita Pagi

I am sitting in a peaceful room
In a garden of jambu
And bilimbing
Three kinds of coconut
TVRI is with us
In full colour
Bringing us the world
As they see it
Berita Pagi presented
In sophisticated style
By model women
All about what the men
Are doingIn their uniforms
With their guns
Bosnia Herzogovena
In full colour
Mogadishu in ruins
We are so lucky
In Kuta with so many
Men with guns
To protect their rule
From quiet folk with sarongs
And stick brooms
Pounding their chillies
Washing rice
Grating coconut
Marinating their tempeh
And Xanana Gusmao
Not far from here
Captive

Footnote:
This poem was written in Kuta, Bali in 1992. It has been published in several literary journals.

Propaganda is the principle weapon of war.

2006-06-16T05:36:00.000-07:00

Robert Fisk demonstrates how war propaganda 'shields' audiences

from the most disturbing images - jet we need to be disturbed.

Propaganda is the principle weapon of war.
To read about how the images of war are manipulated so that you will not be aware of how grotesque and inhuman war really is for my essay on this subject:
http://willybachpropaganda.blogspot.com