 |
| Brown Eye Salute. Photo by Jeff Dawson, Byron Shire Echo. jeff@echo.net.au. www.echo.net.au |
G’Day. I’ve been swamped with passionate Webdiarist reactions to this week’s democratic dramas – on several sides of the argument. What a time to lose stacks of them through a system glitch! I was also going to publish the guest list for the Howard/Bush barbecue today, but that’s gone too. I’ll publish the register of Howard’s unelected elite, including his tame ‘journo’ guests, next week. Tonight, your say from those who survived my email meltdown. If I’ve missed a doozy, please resend.
RECOMMENDATIONS
* The Australian Financial Review’s Peter Hartcher wrote a chilling analysis of the Bush agenda in The main game just before he finished his stint as Washington correspondent and returned to Sydney to become the paper’s international editor. It is a must read, the best piece on the revolutionary agenda of the neo-cons – and copycat John Howard – I’ve read from an Australian journalist, and on par with the courageous work of American economist and columnist Paul Krugman. Thanks to the AFR for providing the link. An extract:
The pundits’ claims that September 11 made terrorism the defining issue of the Bush presidency are completely wrong. The Bush Administration deliberately rejected the counter-terrorism opportunities of post-September 11 to return to its pre-existing agenda of extraordinarily aggressive political and geopolitical activism: an agenda not even remotely connected to terrorism; an agenda squarely devoted to entrenching Republican power at home and US power abroad.
* SMH political editor Geoff Kitney recommends Asian hostility toward U.S. distresses Bush by New York Times reporter David E. Sanger. It begins:
Minutes after President Bush finished an hour long meeting with moderate Islamic leaders on the island of Bali this week, he approached his staff with something of a puzzled look on his face. “Do they really believe that we think all Muslims are terrorists?” he asked, shaking his head. He was equally distressed, he told them, to hear that the United States was so pro-Israel that it was uninterested in the creation of a Palestinian state, despite his frequent declarations calling for exactly that, living alongside Israel. It was a revealing moment precisely because the president was so surprised.
* Carmen Lawrence recommends a report by ‘Reporters Without Borders’ ranking countries by the degree of press freedom. Australia comes in at a dishonourable 50.
* The full text of Donald Rumsfeld’s controversial memo on the war is at usatoday. Thanks to Scott Burchill for the link.
*A reader recommends The case for unraveling corporate DNA.
ONE LINERS
Gary Richards: Margo, the other day I wrote to you about being a disaffected Australian. Today I have new heroes – Senators Nettle and Brown. They will always be “up there”, if only because – against all odds – they exerted their democratic rights in the nation’s House of Representatives and spoke for me and the way I feel. The people I have voted for for years came close, but the Greens won the day. Congratulations to them.
John Crockett: The Bush speech was surreal – a recycled State of the Union address. Bush is a curious combination of Jimmy Stewart and the TV evangelist Benny Hinn. Perhaps George W. Bush was not being disingenuous when he spoke to the joint sitting today. Maybe he just doesn’t get it.
Adam Zaborszczyk: The Russian translation for ‘man of steel’ is ‘Stalin’, somewhat ironic really in terms of political colours, but perhaps rather apt in light of love of war, ASIO legislation, assimilation of ethnic minorities and intolerance of dissenting views.
Steve Wallace: You know that Canberra is marketed to tourists as “Australia’s Bush Capital”? The phrase is evidently appropriate. Great work recently. Only decent source of information around. (Margo: Steve sent me an email before the war saying he was certain there were no WMDs in Iraq. I thought this view so off the wall I didn’t publish it. Sorry, Steve.)
Nick W: You are a pathetic excuse for a human. You are totally fucked in the head and should spend perhaps 20 years with those other terrorists in Camp X-Ray. Bush and Howard are heroes who will win in 2004 in landslide victories and you will still be a lefty loser so bitter at the world. How dare you call yourself an Australian, you Ho.
***
BUSH SPEECH TO US
Scott Burchill
If we accept the argument that economic interdependence between nations pacifies their relations because war becomes counter-productive for both (eg France and Germany after WW2), then logically the growing economic ties between Beijing and Canberra (a scope study exploring the possibility of an Free Trade Agreement, the gas deal, the prospect of China soon displacing Japan as Australia’s largest export market, etc) must be worrying Washington. There seemed to be a hint of this in President Bush’s speech to Parliament yesterday.
The nightmare scenario for Australia has always been the possibility that Washington will ask for Canberra’s support in a fight with China over Taiwan. The time will soon come, if it hasn’t arrived already (as it did with Japan from the late 1950s on), when Canberra cannot even consider a conflict with Beijing on any issue without committing economic suicide. Washington knows this.
***
Tom Lonergan in Campbell, Canberra
George W. Bush asserted in his speech that Mamdouh Habib was “picked up off of a battlefield of war” in Afghanistan. This statement is a blatant fallacy. This fallacy has been perpetuated by the Howard proxy administration like so many others on cable from HQ Washington.
Mr Habib was arrested in Pakistan and transferred to US ‘custody’ in early October 2001. He was then removed, without an extradition hearing, from Pakistan to Egypt. There, it is most likely he was exposed to the torturous and bloody interrogation methods of the Egyptian intelligence service. The US is known to have sent prisoners to countries like Egypt, Tunisia and Morocco for interrogation where human rights are virtually absent to avoid any legal hurdles. Not that the US military seems to be following any rule of law anyway.
He was then sent to Afghanistan, presumably to be ‘washed’ through the dubious Bagram air base detention facility, and then he was sent onto Guantanamo Bay. Mr Habib’s movements were confirmed by Daryl Williams and Alexander Downer in a joint press release issued on 18 April 2002.
Mr Habib may have links to Al Qaeda and he may have visited Afghanistan; yet, he may also be completely innocent. But we cannot know this as Mr Habib has been denied all of his legal rights. These are the supposed rights that Australia and the US are meant to be preserving in the War on Terrorism.
What is most disappointing is the lack of interest in this matter from the somnolent Australian electorate. If the US and Australia are equal partners, then why is there one rule for American citizen captives like John Walker Lindh, and another for Australian detainees?
Let it be clear though: Mr Habib was not captured as an ‘unlawful combatant’ in Afghanistan; he was taken extra-judiciously from Pakistan. And remember, Pakistan has never been a theatre of conflict in the War on Terrorism.
Margo: Howard was very defensive about his behaviour on Hicks and Habib on the 7.30 Report last night. He lied, as usual, justifying his lack of action by implying that the pair had been charged. They haven’t.
***
Graham Giblin in Croydon, Sydney
I think the saddest thing about today is that G Dubya’s quip that he loves free speech will get all the running, as it already has.
First of all, he doesn’t love free speech. Look at the way Joseph C. Wilson IV was vilified and his wife, Valerie Plame’s, name was leaked as a CIA operative. All in the interests of discouraging others from exercising free speech. The same way Andrew Wilkie was vilified here. Not because they were wrong but because they dared to speak freely against the lies that were being told by their administrations.
Look at the way journalists were embedded during the conflict, folded into the media management operation. Look at the way at least 11 identical letters were published in the last couple of weeks in newspapers in the US over the signatures of 11 different GIs, some of whom didn’t know anything about it. Look at the way Australian journalists are barred from covering the Bush visit. What he loves is to manipulate the media and therefore free speech.
And he doesn’t love democracy. If democracy had had its day during the 2000 election he would not be president today. He and his friends, family and mentors rorted the system. There are several books about this, most famously Michael Moore’s Stupid White Men.
In his speech he trotted out the old lies once again, including those that have been discredited (“We have discovered Saddam’s clandestine network of biological laboratories, his design work on prohibited long-range missiles, his elaborate campaign to hide illegal weapons programs”). I mean, doesn’t he think we have radio, or television, or newspapers or the internet?
He once again conflated terrorism and Iraq (“So we are confronting outlaw regimes that aid terrorists, and pursue weapons of mass destruction, and defy the demands of the world. America, Australia and other nations acted in Iraq to remove a grave and gathering danger, instead of wishing and waiting while tragedy drew closer.”) Which other nations is he confronting, rather than appeasing, that pursue weapons of mass destruction or defy the demands of the world? North Korea? Iran? Pakistan? India? Israel? Saudi Arabia? Burma? Sudan?
He seeks now to legitimise his policy of pre-emption on an even looser basis than before. Now it is not a clear and present danger but “a grave and gathering danger” that is sufficient. At this rate, before long simple suspicion will do.
He used the story about the women of Afghanistan (“And the Afghan people, especially Afghan women, do not miss the bullying, and beatings, and public executions at the hands of the Taliban.”) They don’t miss them because outside Kabul they’re still getting them – perhaps not the executions, I don’t know, but the rapes, yes. Women and girls are too afraid to go to school. About the story that was created about the “Afghani women”, Jim Wilkinson, a top civilian communications aide to the administration, called this effort the best thing weve done. Not because they actually did anything but because it highlighted the plight of the women and gained support the US needed. Now they don’t need t e support any more, the women can fend for themselves.
He trotted out yet again the story of how Saddam Hussein gassed his own people (“Surely not the victims he murdered with poison gas.”). He failed to mention that at the time of the gassing the US was supporting Saddam and supplying him with weapons and there was barely a ripple of concern from Washington. “In 1983, Rumsfeld then President Reagans special envoy to the Middle East, now secretary of defense told senior Iraqi officials that the use of poison gas inhibited normal relations between the two countries.” (msnbc)
Nevertheless they continued to support Iraq with weapons and strategic advice in its war with Iran.
He said, “We seek the rise of freedom and self-government in Afghanistan and Iraq for benefit of their people, as an example to their neighbours, and for the security of the world.” But what he has done, with the support of Howard and Tony Blair has, according to the latest reports, actually increased the threat of terrorism and compromised the security of the world. No, the world is not a safer place.
If you’re going to tell a lie, they say, make it a really big one. And then stick to it no matter what.
“The advance of freedom will not be halted,” he said, but with the shut-outs and lockdowns, the pushing away of the protesters out of G Dubya’s delicate sight -and as Bob Brown said afterwards, young men in the chamber who apparently had hearing problems and had to wear hearing aids – the advance of freedom was slowed down in Canberra today.
***
Ian McPherson
In yesterday’s Parliament speech, George Bush stated:
“Because we enforced (UN) Resolution 1441, and used force in Iraq as a last resort, there is one more free nation in the world, and all free nations are more secure.”
Unfortunately, at the Iraq Donor’s Conference in Madrid, Christian Aid UK is distributing a report that indicates that around $US4 billion in Iraq oil revenue has “… disappeared into opaque bank accounts administered by the Coalition Provisional Authority, the US-controlled body that rules Iraq”.
Christian Aid estimates that by the end of the year, if nothing changes in the way these funds are accounted for, that figure will double. I fail to see how Iraq can be more secure, let alone “all free nations”, when Iraq’s occupiers cannot account for the oil revenue funds they have undertaken to manage in the interests of the Iraq people?
Maybe honest John can use his influence with his good mate George W to find out where the money has gone?
***
Tim Gillin in Kensington, Sydney
George Bush calls John Howard “the man of steel”. That’s Texan for fair dinkum, or so he tells us. In Russia ‘man of steel’ translates as “Stalin”.
The last time anyone here called John Howard a “Stalin”, I recall, was during the great gun law debate. Back then gun owners protested the federal diversion of Medicare levy funds to subsidise a defacto federalisation of state law. Some alleged ‘hotheads’ in the movement saw this as the first step to dictatorship.
‘The gun lobby’ staged a lone defence of a right that goes back to before the English Bill of Rights of 1688, one of the oldest of the old Anglo-Saxon rights. They even organised the largest public demonstrations in defence of personal freedom seen in Australia in decades.
The liberty lovin’ left laughed and sneered at the mass protests. I bet they aren’t chuckling so much now.
***
BUSH-HOWARD DEMOCRACY(?)
David Lennon
Your description of the Howard government’s decision to close the public gallery for President Bush’s visit as “a telling symbol of the battering he’s prepared to give to core Australian democratic traditions” inParliament greets Bush: A day in the life of our faltering democracy is more than a little extreme.
Most Australians, including you, were interested in what Bush had to say, and filling the gallery with protesters would ensure that this would never happen. In my opinion, your blind hatred of all things that the Liberal Government stands for has seriously damaged your credibility as a journalist. Your crusade to unseat them by peddling exaggerations and half-truths lowers you to their level.
***
Donato Rufo
My views on Brown’s interruption are somewhat mixed. Good on him for saying something on one hand, but the other I’m appalled at his approach and lack of tact. Why couldn’t he pose his opposition and questioning of Australians detained in Guantanamo Bay in a speech? Crean’s attempt was more statesmanlike while Brown was, as many have stated today, “under-graduate”.
I am outraged by how CNN got video approval! I think it isn’t chance either but some kind of deal from our PM. Is that a bit too conspiratorial?
Margo: Brown asked to make a speech at the joint sitting. Permission refused. Conspiracy re CNN? No – Howard did NOT want that footage broadcast all over the world. Without CNN, Australian networks would have had no footage of the incidents – and that’s what Howard would have wanted. The Speaker of the House of Reps whose orders CNN defied, Neil Andrew, is ropeable.
***
Dennis Argall in Tomerong NSW
Apart from conservative amusement at the opportunity to rough up a dissident female senator, the matter of a head of state not inviting an opposition leader to his one function for a visiting head of state while gathering around him the sort of crowd he had to lunch is disturbing. I am reminded of something Norman Mailer said early in the year in a remarkably insightful speech:
To assume blithely that we can export democracy into any country we choose can serve paradoxically to encourage more fascism at home and abroad. Democracy is a state of grace that is attained only by those countries who have a host of individuals not only ready to enjoy freedom but to undergo the heavy labor of maintaining it.
The planes are on time, there is a general happiness amid lies and rising domestic violence, mental health problems and economic divide. Dissenting opinion will be squeezed out if not exercised more extensively.
I spent two hours as a demonstrator outside the parliament today. It was very disappointing to see the crowd so small, to find middle Australia absent, acquiescent, compliant; the focus of the day dominated by extreme groups.
***
Lathe Gill in California
I usually read your diatribes with bemusement, but I confess I am disappointed with the desire of Howard to put up a unified front. It is the lively and brutal and vulgar exchanges in Parliament that make Australian politics so charming.
Mr Keating was famous for his invective, I am told, gracing Hansard with such words as scumbags, pieces of criminal garbage, sleazebags, stupid foul-mouthed grubs, piss-ants, mangy maggot, perfumed gigolos, gutless spivs, boxheads, immoral cheats and stunned mullets.
How can one help but be entertained by such lively exchanges? I am pleased that Brown got a few comments off before the powers that be shushed him. Bush could afford to answer a few questions. I appreciate Australia’s contributions to democracy.
***
Jamie Jackson, ‘an outraged Australian living in New York’
I am dumbfounded! A foreign leader arrives in our country and our media is not given access to report on his visit? What is happening to our country? This sounds more like a totalitarian state than the robust democracy of Australia. And apart from you, no-one seems alarmed.
Why aren’t journalists pissed off that they weren’t allowed to do their jobs? Why aren’t they the first people screaming in outrage? And to make matters worse, the only images we, the people, have of the goings on in our chamber, is through the American media which was filming in OUR chamber against OUR laws. Have we truly given up?
Bush travels in a bubble and it’s time someone pricked it and exposed him to the anger that is growing in the real world. Howard has sold us down the river and made our democracy a joke. This is one of the saddest days for Australian democracy, made all the sadder by the fact that no-one seems to care.
***
Wendy Hunter in Rose Bay, Sydney
The picture in today’s SMH of Ross Lightfoot and a cluster of suited idiots with John Howard and his outspread arms says it all. This is no democracy. This is a dictatorship and a paranoid dictatorship at that. The whole debacle of the Bush’s visit is testimony enough to that – the people’s parliament closed off and heavily guarded and then the supposition that a file carried by Kerry Nettle contained “something dangerous” would be laughable if it weren’t so pathetic
Bob Brown and Kerry Nettle were trying to exercise their right to speak in a democratic parliament and were asked to leave. John Howard considered their action “a stunt”. george Bush considered it “free speech”…not so free when one is going to be thrown out and then prevented from presenting a petition.
I was brought up to believe that democracy is the government of the people by the people and for the people. These puffed up western world leaders strutting the stage like little Napoleons would do well to remember this.
Yesterday I wept for what Australia has become. I’m sure there are hundreds of others who feel just as ashamed.
***
Neil Harris in Ballarat, Victoria
I’ve just read Parliament greets Bush: a day in the life of our faltering democracy – chilling stuff.
I knew about the lockdown of Canberra, the stacking of the public gallery and the banning of megaphones at the anti-Bush demo (didn’t know it was legal in Aus to ban megaphones) but I had no idea Howard was so obsessed with spinning the event that every image was so tightly controlled. THANK YOU MARGO for letting us know about this – it’s virtually totalitarian, isn’t it? I never thought I’d say thank god for CNN – but thank heavens (or who/whatever) they disobeyed little Johnny’s orders or we wouldn’t have seen anything at all except his propaganda. I’m not proud of our PM but I am very proud of you, Margo. I know you get a lot of flack and it must be disheartening sometimes but I am so glad you’re there.
***
Mike Lyvers in Queensland
I would ask Malcolm Street a few questions (see Living with Bush for a day: Canberra Webdiarist reports). Why did he give the finger to people in a car who were waving American flags? What sort of message did he and his friends intend to convey to them by this act?
The only “message” the people in the car would have received was the impression that Malcolm and his oh-so-macho friends are assholes. So what did that accomplish, Malcolm?
And why does the toppling of fascist regimes – the Taliban and Saddam Hussein – constitute “Neo-fascism”? Would Malcolm and his protesting friends really prefer that Saddam and the Taliban were still in power? If so I wish they’d just come out an say it. Why not hoist protest banners saying “Bring Back Saddam!” or “Mullah Omar – Its Time!” or “Viva Islamofascism: Today Saudi Arabia, Tomorrow the World!”
I’m no fan of Bush – to say the least! – but I saw the disruptions by Brown and Nettle as a stupid stunt that only showed a lack of dignity on their part. I doubt that it will please any but their most feral supporters.