G’day. The latest Iraq scandal to engulf the government is bloody difficult to get your head around so I thought I’d set out my preliminary understanding and seek your input. Calling all legal experts on the Geneva Conventions and what our obligations are under them!!! For a great Aussie timeline, see southerlybuster. We need to blend a timeline of events in America with those in Australia too. Then, the transcript of Howard’s press conference yesterday, where, for once, the press gallery wiped the floor with a bloke who is very close to being exposed, finally, as a Prime Minister without shame leading a bureaucratic hierarchy without honour. For my first take on the scandal, see Did our government lie to us to protect America?

To begin, the fact is that The Sydney Morning Herald’s Tom Allard’s breaking story on Thursday inArmy knew months ago has proved accurate in almost every detail, including Australia’s involvement in drafting interrogation technique protocols in Abu Ghraib, investigating abuses and drafting replies to the Red Cross. Layer upon layer of denials of his story by Howard, Hill, Cosgrove and Smith have been stripped away in the days since, partly because the Herald later revealed the official reply to the Red Cross last year, the draft of which the government also had in its possession. You’d think Tom would have got such a detailed, accurate story from someone in government who knew what he or she was talking about, which would mean Australia has its Abu Ghraib whistleblower, like the junior US soldier who blew the whistle at Abu Ghraib and the person who leaked General Taguba’s devastating report to Seymour Hersh. So you’d assume that whoever leaked the truth to Allard knew there was disgusting stuff happening in government to cover it up. Could the Herald know and the government, the defence force and the defence department not know? We’re supposed to buy this?

1. The Red Cross – the authority authorised by the United Nations to act as custodian of the Geneva Conventions against torture of prisoners of war – reported to Baghdad military HQ in October last year that serious breaches of 12 articles of the Conventions were taking place, detailing men being forced to walk the corridors naked wearing women’s underwear on the their heads and being handcuffed to cell doors. Robert Hill now admits this. Yet on the day of Tom’s story, Howard denied it in Parliament, saying the October report referred only ‘food clothing and communication opportunities’ and that Australian officers in Baghdad military HQ knew nothing of serious breaches until January.

2. Several Australian military officers were involved in preparing a response to the October report. Australia’s Major George O’Kane and an unnamed Colonel visited Abu Ghraib several times after the report was received in 2003 to investigate the allegations. In fact, Australian military legal officers acted as the liaison between the Red Cross and the Coalition of the Willing on its report, and O’Kane drafted the response to its October report, which denied that the Geneva Conventions were completely applicable to prisoners in Iraq and insisted that the Red Cross cease making unannounced inspections. And the worst of the torture, from what we know so far, occurred in November, 2003, AFTER Australia knew breaches of the Geneva Conventions were rife at Abu Ghraib.

3. Australia, as a signatory of the Geneva Conventions, is legally and morally bound to abide by them. An agreement between the invading powers – The US, The UK and Australia – confirmed that the Geneva Conventions would apply to prisoners of war in Iraq. Question: Once Australia was aware of breaches, were its legal obligations triggered? If so, is that why the government pulled out all stops to deny knowledge of the breaches before the photos were published in April? And if so, WHY did O’Kane and his superiors in Baghdad not send a red light warning to Australian immediately? Or did they?

4. To me, the crucial piece of evidence indicating that we’re not talking about mere stuff up here is that after weeks of a purported investigation after the torture photos were publicly released, ADF chief Cosgrove and defence department chief Smith certified in a joint statement last Friday that “No Defence personnel were aware of the allegations of abuse or serious mistreatment before … January” and that “it is understood from Major O’Kane that the October report raised general concerns,” NOT abuses (in retrospect, the “it is understood” weasel words give the game away). Therefore, Australia did NOT have a copy of the October Red Cross report, which DID document serious abuses detailed serial abuses of the Geneva Conventions.

Yet Defence Department chief Ric Smith testified yesterday that he was told that same Friday night of “two working papers” prepared by the ICRC (the International Red Cross) which had been in the hands of a senior ADF officer since early May since their delivery to him by O’Kane himself. In these circumstances, ALL department secretaries and ALL defence chiefs, unless there are hidden agendas yet to be revealed – would IMMEDIATELY inform the Prime Minister through the Defence Minister that he may have misled Parliament. Failure to do so would normally result in instant dismissal, for good cause. TWO DAYS LATER, John Howard repeated the false story onSunday Sunrise, repeatedly, falsely, denying that Defence had the October report. He said the Red Cross had refused a government request for a copy, and so Howard’s ambassadors would now ask the USA and the UK for a copy. He was super, super meticulous in saying, over and over, that he was relying on the Smith/Cosgrove advice. For example, “I haven’t seen the report and I’m told once again – and I’m relying on what the Defence Department tells me – that they don’t have a copy of it either.” In retrospect, classic weasel words used routinely by politicians covering themselves.

Placing a Prime Minister in such a humiliating position would, in normal circumstances, be a clear dereliction of duty by Smith and Cosgrove unless, as I say, there were undercurrents which have not yet come to light. If John Howard is telling the truth – that he knew nothing of war crimes in Abu Ghraib until he saw the photos along with the rest of us and that he learned only late Sunday that he’d been misinformed about the knowledge of the government – he’d have dealt with the unacceptable behaviour of Smith and Cosgrove, whether by design or ludicrous incompetence, by sacking them if they failed to resign.

But no. At his press conference yesterday he said: “If you’re asking me whether I have confidence in them, yes of course I do. I have great confidence in the three of them.” (Hill, Cosgrove and Smith).

It gets worse. Smith now claims more than 10 officers worked all weekend to work out the exact status of the “working documents” (And yes, they did include the damning October Red Cross report). Why the hell didn’t they just ask O’Kane???

Smith claims they’d finally worked it out by Sunday, so he and Cosgrove would, of course, immediately issue a correction. NO. They waited until lunchtime Tuesday, after more than a day of exhaustive questioning by Senate Estimates kept dragging truth out of obfuscation and misleading evidence and forced revelations of the involvement of yet more Australian officers in the Red Cross visits to Abu Ghraib and their aftermath last year, to do so. Sorry guys, it won’t wash.

This saga stinks to high heaven. I’d bet my bottom dollar that there’s much more to this than meets the eye. I’d really appreciate stuff from lawyers who know about the Geneva Conventions to tell Webdiary what THEY think is going on.

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THE PRIME MINISTER THE HON JOHN HOWARD MP, PRESS CONFERENCE, PARLIAMENT HOUSE, CANBERRA, MONDAY, MAY 31, ON THE EVE OF HIS TRIP TO SEE HIS MATE GEORGE BUSH

JOURNALIST: Mr Howard, will you apologise to the Parliament and the Australian public for misleading them over Australian knowledge of the extent of serious abuses of prisoners in Iraq?

PRIME MINISTER: I did not mislead the public or the Australian public or the Australian Parliament. The advice that I gave the Parliament and the public was based on the advice I’d received from the defence department.

JOURNALIST: The Defence Department now concedes that advice was wrong.

PRIME MINISTER: Well, that’s what I will be indicating, as I have already, that everything I’ve said was based on the advice of the Defence Department. I did not set out to mislead anybody. It is impossible in a situation in which I am placed for me to have direct personal knowledge. I wasn’t in Baghdad. I have to rely on the advice of the department. I regret very much that I was given the wrong advice, I regret that very much.

JOURNALIST: Mr Howard, why didn’t you insist on being better briefed, especially when the man involved who had all the knowledge was just down the road? (Major O’Kane.)

PRIME MINISTER: Well, I’m sorry, Michelle, it is simply not possible for somebody in my position to talk to every single person in a department. Its just that is an unreasonable proposition. It is not unreasonable for a prime minister to rely on a written brief from a department in relation to a matter, I do it every day. And if in future I have to personally sit down and talk to each person in a department who provides that written brief and to interrogate the people in that department my job becomes quite impossible.

JOURNALIST: – at least one minister have known before April?

PRIME MINISTER: Not according to the advice that I have, no.

JOURNALIST: Prime Minister, what do you think about the quality of that advice? I mean, what does it say about the competency of defence, given they had these reports with a senior defence official on May 11 and what does it say about the motives of defence that they didn’t bring it to the attention of the Government until Sunday as I understand?

PRIME MINISTER: Let me say this I am very unhappy that I was misinformed by the Defence Department, so is the Defence Minister. I have, as you know, an extremely high regard for the men and women in the Australian Defence Force. We’re dealing here with what was clearly an inadequate briefing, not only of me, but bear in mind that the Chief of the Defence Force and the Secretary of the Defence Department themselves were equally poorly served by the advice they received from the Department.

JOURNALIST: Are you confident that it won’t happen again?

PRIME MINISTER: Jim, I can’t give a guarantee that a department in the future wont give inaccurate advice to a Minister. I can’t, I can’t.

JOURNALIST: What are you doing to ensure that it doesn’t happen again?

PRIME MINISTER: Well the Minister will be, at my request, making a detailed statement to the Senate when it meets again about the chain of events, the knowledge of and involvement in and communication with the ICRC (Red Cross) , the CPA (Coalition Provisional Authority), communications back to Australia and the timelines involved in all of that. I have asked the Defence Minister to make that detailed statement to the Senate. But I’m plainly unhappy because the information I gave, I believed to be correct, and it was based on a brief I had from the Defence Department. And this proposition that I have to sit down with individuals who originate that advice, particularly when I have to preposition any advice I give with the comment that this has come from the department, I mean no Prime Minister has the capacity, given the other demands on his time, to do that.

JOURNALIST: If you had known then, would you have expressed your concerns…

PRIME MINISTER: Had I known what?

JOURNALIST: If you had known about this earlier, would you have expressed your concerns at the time to the Americans?

PRIME MINISTER: Well if I had known, if I had known what back in October? Well I didn’t know about it until April. That remains…

JOURNALIST: (inaudible)

PRIME MINISTER: Well I mean, look I would have done the right thing, and of course if I had have known about it, of course I would have expressed my concern. Of course I would have.

JOURNALIST: (inaudible) didn’t go up the chain and back to Canberra in October when it was first clear that there were serious problems and allegations being raised about the conduct of the coalition in Iraq…

PRIME MINISTER: Well the response…

JOURNALIST: …so we could have done the right thing?

PRIME MINISTER: Well ok, well one question – can we have questions and not speeches? The response that has been given to that question, and it has been asked, is that it wasn’t passed up the chain because it didn’t involve Australians. It was believed that the issue was being responded to and dealt with by the Americans, particularly in relation to the January report. And as I understand it, and I choose my words carefully, as I understand it, the working papers that were referred to in the Senate in October, which clearly contained references to unacceptable behaviour and unacceptable treatment of prisoners, that they fed into the February report. The February report, as I am told, has been commented upon in the Senate by Senator Hill and General Cosgrove and Mr Smith. The February report, when presented to the relevant people, caused a great deal of concern, and that the response of the British and the Americans was satisfactory to the Red Cross, and that is another reason why it is claimed, it is said, that the material was not passed up the line.

JOURNALIST: Prime Minister, will you apologise to the Sydney Morning Herald after you said that we conflated reports and were involved in a despicable slur?

PRIME MINISTER: Well I withdraw the claim that you deliberately conflated the report, if you feel I made that claim. I do not withdraw what I regarded as the more serious allegation or implication in the story, when you said that a claim by Senator Hill that quote, as best I can remember, there was no association of Australians with the abuses, I think that is a paraphrase of it, that that might appear to be misleading.

JOURNALIST: But the association I was referring to was the deep involvement of…

PRIME MINISTER: Well can I say if you say that somebody is associated with an abuse, it means that they are in some way an active participant in it. The idea that because you’re investigating something, youre associated with it, is the equivalent of saying that a police officer investigating a robbery is in some way associated with it. That was the bit…

JOURNALIST: But the report also clearly says that he did not witness, endorse or participate.

PRIME MINISTER: Yes, but you use the expression associated and I think that… I thought then that was unfair, I still think it’s unfair, and I think its very important that I stick up for the reputation of the Australian Defence Force, because however what is being written and reported may be explained, the danger is that some will imply a guilt by association, and to my knowledge no men or women in the Australian Defence Force have been in any way involved in abuse or have in any way condoned that abuse, and that is why I feel quite strongly about this.

JOURNALIST: Prime Minister, what’s the point of having Australian military officers attached to the coalition command in Iraq if they don’t keep their own Government and their own department and their own hierarchy informed, abreast of developments?

PRIME MINISTER: Jim, that generally is a fair observation and its one of the things that in the aftermath of this, that I will be expecting a response to.

JOURNALIST: Do you think its a bit peculiar, Mr Howard, that a couple of Labor Senators can get all this information out in a day and a half, and the Prime Minister couldn’t get it, being charitable, in the last two weeks?

PRIME MINISTER: Yes, but Michelle, in the last two weeks there have been a lot of other things that I have been dealing with, and the truth of the matter is this that there has been never any allegation of Australian involvement, never. There is no suggestion of Australian involvement. The allegations are against the Americans. Theyre not against Australians. I mean you… many of the questions are asked as if the inquiry is whether or not Australians were involved. Were talking here about knowledge of allegations in the context of those allegations being responded to by the people against whom the allegations were made, and I think the context of that, with respect, is being missed by some people, yourself included.

JOURNALIST: Prime Minister, is the O’Kane affair another example of the bureaucracy telling the Government what it wants to hear to suit its political ends?

PRIME MINISTER: That is an absurd proposition Tom. I mean there is no reason why I wouldn’t want to know the full story on this, no reason at all, absolutely no reason at all. I first became conscious of these allegations about behaviour by the Americans and to some extent the British, although just exactly what happened in relation to the British appears unclear, after I came back from Baghdad. I mean to give you an illustration of my state of mind, nobody mentioned this to me when I was in Baghdad. I met General Abizaid when I was in Baghdad, I met General Sanchez when I was in Baghdad, I met Paul Bremer when I was in Baghdad, I met two people in the Iraqi Governing Council, I met the Australian Commanding Officer in Baghdad I met all of these people and nobody mentioned it to me. The journalists who were travelling with me didn’t pick it up. I mean if it was all around and it was the subject of a lot of conversation, and if there were widespread concern about it, why wasn’t it mentioned to me? (MARGO: Because there was a cover up!!!)

JOURNALIST: (inaudible) failure of Defence to appropriately brief you, what do you Prime Minister then…

PRIME MINISTER: Look I don’t know the answer to that.

JOURNALIST: And for their failure to…

PRIME MINISTER: Mark, I don’t know. I am unhappy. I mean I don’t enjoy being misinformed. I am very unhappy with it.

JOURNALIST: Prime Minister, are you satisfied…

PRIME MINISTER: But I am, you know, I am equally… I can’t in this, you know, early winter morning or afternoon just sort of declare precisely why it happened. Of course I’ve asked Senator Hill…

JOURNALIST: You’re obviously telling us how unhappy you are about it. From your preliminary inquiries, what reason…

PRIME MINISTER: It’s too early. They are too preliminary because bear in mind that over the past couple of days the three people principally concerned and to whom I would speak have been tied up in Senate Estimates. I mean, I had the opportunity last evening of having a very brief discussion with Senator Hill, with General Cosgrove and Mr Smith before I went off to have a Monday evening chat with Kerry O’Brien.

JOURNALIST: Prime Minister, are you satisfied with the way those three people have handled this?

PRIME MINISTER: If you’re asking me whether I have confidence in them, yes of course I do. I have great confidence in the three of them.

JOURNALIST: …down the line to the junior people who cant speak for themselves?

PRIME MINISTER: Well, Michelle, I’ll find out what happened and before then I’m simply not going to respond to those sorts of questions…

JOURNALIST: General Cosgrove (inaudible)…?

PRIME MINISTER: Look, I’m not going to canvass what General Cosgrove said to me. I have a tremendous regard for General Cosgrove. I think he’s one of the outstanding military figures that this country has had for a number of years and I have very strong regard for the administrative skills of Mr Smith and, of course, Senator Hill is a very close and very senior member of my Cabinet…

JOURNALIST: Prime Minister, in view of what we know now about these matters is the Australian public entitled to hear directly from Major O’Kane what he saw and what he thought about what he saw and to whom he reported it?

PRIME MINISTER: I think it’s appropriate that the normal procedure in relation to these things be followed and that is being followed and what Senator Hill has said and done in relation to this is similar to the attitude that has been taken by Ministers on both sides of politics when similar situations have arisen. Thank you.

OK. We can�t believe the Prime Minister. We can�t believe the Defence Minister. We can�t believe the head of the Australian Defence Force. We can�t believe the head of the Defence Department.

 

But we already knew that, didn�t we? We knew that for sure after the children overboard inquiry revealed Howard, Reith, Admiral Barrie and Allan Hawke as serial liars, dissemblers and/or cover up artists. We KNOW that our public service ethics lie in ruins, across the board. We know that our senior public servants no longer see themselves as having any duty to the public interest, and that their �duty� is solely to protect the government�s political interests. They�ve sold their souls, no less, and by doing so have sold the soul of Australia.

So there�s nothing new in the Abu Ghraib cover up in that sense. What�s new, or at least newly exposed, is the systemic downgrading of human rights behind the scenes � even the protection for prisoners of war established after World War II in disgust at the treatment of POW�s by the Japanese. I put these human rights above all others in a purely practical sense, because an absolute insistence on compliance by civilised nations is all that protects our soldiers and our citizens from horror if they are captured by our enemies. It allows us to prosecute perpetrators hard, with the full force of international law, and it�s that threat that weighs on the minds of our enemies if they capture us. Breaches of the Geneva Conventions are called war crimes.

The defence force knows this better that anyone else, and that�s why our soldiers are trained thoroughly in the Geneva Conventions.

So let�s look at the real scandal revealed this week in Senate Estimates. Let�s examine the behaviour of Howard, Hill, Cosgrove and defence department chief Ric Smith. If Howard is innocent, all the rest of them are as guilty as sin, and all should leave public life in shame. None will.

JOHN HOWARD

Howard says he knew NOTHING about prisoner abuse by the Americans until April, when the public saw the photos. NOTHING. Imagine a Prime Minister concerned with Australia�s reputation as a member of the Coalition of the Willing and the utter necessity of winning the Iraqi people�s hearts and minds to win the war.

He wonders why he didn�t know, right? Surely the Americans would have briefed us long ago. And we have officers in Baghdad HQ. What did they know? If nothing, then lines of communication between the Coalition partners are seriously flawed. Were any of our soldiers involved in investigating the abuses, had any reports been sent up the line? He would have liked to have been in the loop by Anzac Day at least, when he was in Iraq being briefed by the heavies of the occupation who knew all about it. He listed them all yesterday: �I met General Abizaid when I was in Baghdad, I met General Sanchez when I was in Baghdad, I met Paul Bremer when I was in Baghdad, I met two people in the Iraqi Governing Council, I met the Australian Commanding Officer in Baghdad � I met all of these people and nobody mentioned it to me.�

Item one on his agenda, if he’s in good faith – find out who knew what and when, and if nothing, then why not, and if so, why the hell wasn�t he told?

Note that Howard didn�t even lodge a formal protest with the Americans when the torture was revealed. Without any inquiries of our forces, it seems, he blindly ran the George Bush �few rotten apples� line now so thoroughly discredited by subsequent revelations in America.

ROBERT HILL

At yesterday�s press conference, Howard was asked: �If you had known about this earlier, would you have expressed your concerns at the time to the Americans?�

Howard: “Well, I mean, look I would have done the right thing, and of course if I had known about it, of course I would have expressed my concern. Of course I would have.”

So why the bloody hell wasn�t he told � if he wasn�t?

On May 11, Robert Hill persistently avoiding answering direct questions in the Senate on when he knew of the February 2004 Red Cross report � the one which details the torture and abuse � the war crimes � which were in April revealed to the rest of us via the photos. �Defence� knew in February, he said at first. And finally:

�The government became aware of that report in February. I accept the responsibilities that flow from that.�

Why did Hill prevaricate? Most likely answer � he had been briefed but did not want to say so. And what responsibilities might flow from that? Labor knew one of them, and Labor�s defence spokesman Chris Evans said it to Hill�s face: �So you lied to the ABC?�

On May 5 on the 7.30 Report, Hill denied any knowledge of the abuses before he saw the pictures:

�If this had of come to my knowledge other than through the public domain, I would have made my inquiries and expressed my views.�

The Howard defence!! But he did know, it seems, two months before, and did nothing. Why not??? And if he did know, what can we make of this comment in the same interview?

�Well it’s a bad story, it’s a bad story in that it doesn’t reflect the values that we are seeking to apply in Iraq and secondly it’s a bad story in that it’s certainly counter productive to winning the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people.�

So, Howard says he should have been told. Hill didn�t tell him. Yet Hill will now brief the Senate on what happened and when. It�s all so old hat, isn�t it? Just before the election Peter Reith was told in no uncertain terms by the acting defence force chief Angus Houston that NO CHILDREN WERE THROWN OVERBOARD. Reith SAYS he didn�t tell the PM, allowing him to continue the falsehood until election day. Then, Reith�s successor Robert Hill masterminds the cover up at the unthrown children inquiry, banning a department officer who handled the photos which Reith falsely used to prove the lie from giving evidence. And Cabinet bans Reith�s staffers from giving evidence. And Reith refuses to give evidence. And all of his staff are rewarded with plum posts, as is Reith. The rot set in then, and the defence force�s integrity has been rotting away ever since.

If Howard is telling the truth that he should have been told, then he should sack Hill if he knew and wouldn�t tell him.

Let�s assume � as we have a right to do since Hill won�t say � that Hill knew in February. Why didn�t Hill tell the PM, if we believe the PM that he wasn�t told? The usual protect-the-prime-minister�s arse reason? I hope so. Because the other two explanations don�t bear thinking about.

The first is that he – or, if he didn’t know, senior officers in the military and the defence department – didn�t think the matter was important. That is simply impossible to believe. Howard himself had admitted that the scandal has refelected badly on Australia, as a member of the Coalition.

The second is that the defence force, the defence department, and perhaps Hill, were involved in a systematic cover up to try to protect the Americans. Remember, after the photos, Bush and co madly insisted that a few reservists had got out of control and that was it. It took a few days before Seymour Hersh blew that out of the water by publishing the scathing report of General Tagula, and ever since the rotten apples lie been buried with more and more evidence that America deliberately avoided its obligations under the Geneva Conventions. So read O’Kane role attracts US legal teamsin today�s Sydney Morning Herald and have a think about it:

US defence lawyers for some of the prison guards at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq facing court-martial will attempt to obtain documents written by the Australian military lawyer Major George O’Kane about abuse complaints by the International Committee of the Red Cross while he was working in coalition headquarters in Baghdad.

“We’re very interested in this Australian officer,” said Gary Myers, the lawyer representing Sergeant Ivan Frederick, a military police officer.

“We have already asked for the relevant documents in a discovery request,” he said. Major O’Kane’s numerous reports to his Australian commanders about his dealings with the ICRC between November and January is one of the few clear paper trails that has emerged in the Abu Ghraib scandal despite weeks of hearings by the armed services committee of the US Senate.

Major O’Kane worked in the legal office attached to the head of the US-led coalition forces in Iraq, General Ricardo Sanchez, when the Red Cross made detailed complaints about abuses at Abu Ghraib and another Iraq detention centre, Camp Cropper.

Those complaints were given to the legal office, headed by a US colonel, Marc Warren, over two months before photographs of torture at the jail were uncovered and handed over to US army investigators.

Most of the US military police who have been charged over the abuse depicted in the photographs say they were instructed by military intelligence officers to “loosen up” detainees for interrogation and were encouraged in their behaviour.

Evidence to Senate hearings in Canberra this week confirmed that two working papers from the Red Cross spelling out its concerns about Abu Ghraib and Camp Cropper were given to Major O’Kane in November.

As a result, Major O’Kane visited Abu Ghraib on December 4 to discuss the allegations with US military police and military intelligence officers.

Until the Senate hearings, Major O’Kane’s activities had not surfaced anywhere in the US media or during lengthy evidence given to the US Senate Armed Services Committee, which has been investigating the scandal.

On May 19 General Sanchez told the committee he was unaware until February that the Red Cross working papers had been sent to his headquarters in November. He said the papers were sent to his staff legal officer, Colonel Warren, but he did not recall seeing them. Colonel Warren said the Red Cross reports were handled by his legal staff but came into the office “in a haphazard manner”.

However, Senate committee evidence from Australian military officers in Canberra this week suggests that Major O’Kane handled the Red Cross complaints more systematically…�

Any chance, you reckon, that the lot of them covered up everything about Australia�s deep involvement in investigating the abuses and replying to the Red Cross to help the American defence force cover-up?

GENERAL COSGROVE AND RIC SMITH

There is nothing on record to indicate Hill did anything to get the facts from February. He did so in April after the release of the photos. And the result, after weeks of �investigation�? A series of bare faced lies, or an utterly incompetent investigation by Cosgrove and Smith which should result in their instant dismissal. As late as Sunday, Howard claimed Australia couldn’t acess last year’s Red Cross report, when Defence already had it! For proof, read Tom Allard�s backgrounder atSearch that failed to find the answers.

These men should have demanded a sweep of all available documents. They should have taken personal charge of the investigation. They should have interviewed relevant officers. What did Cosgrove do? Remove a picture of Major O�Kane visiting Abu Ghraib, for one thing. It tells the story, doesn�t it. Wipe out evidence of the Australian connection.

Remember, this cover-up unravelled only after the Sydney Morning Herald revealed that O�Kane was involved in investigating abuses at the prison, and helped draft the response to the Red Cross last year. So cover-up 2 � last year�s Red Cross report didn�t detail the abuses. Then the Herald proved that was false. And still, Cosgrove and Smith refused to lay out the truth, for nearly TWO DAYS of questioning in Senate Estimates until they had no choice.

I reckon it was a cover up from minute one. God knows what pressure O�Kane was put under to gild the lily and cop the blame. But Robert Hill is making damn sure we don�t get to hear from O�Kane. He is banned from giving evidence.

We do know that he helped prepare a response to the Red Cross last year which denied any breaches of the Geneva Conventions and even suggested it might not apply, in defiance of public pledges by America and Australia that they did apply. The response was legal rubbish, just as the government�s �legal advice� from low level compliant public servants that invading Iraq was legal was rubbish. Funny, isn�t it, that O�Kane is being scapegoated now. Small fry, just like the little people who the Pentagon is trying so hard to scapegoat for the Abu Ghraib atrocities.

Let�s be frank. The government has never taken responsibility for its decision to invade Iraq. Pay the insurance premium to the Yanks, but cut and run quick before the hard work begins and ensure Australian hands LOOK clean when bad things happen. Support whatever the Yanks say publicly and don�t raise a word of protest behind the scenes. Of course we are complicit in the American�s cover-up of the abuses and their extent before April. Of course we are.

We�ve lost our pride, Australia. And we�ve lost our moral authority. Howard wants to APPEAR faithful to our beliefs and our ideals while tossing them in the toilet. And his courtiers � Cosgrove, Smith, Hill and the rest of them, will do whatever it takes to preserve the illusion.

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POSTSCRIPT

Webdiarist Mark Sergeant dug up this vignette of how we want to avoid all responsibility in Iraq.

In Senate Estimates yesterday, Cosgrove explained the surprising fact that our SAS boys hadn�t taken one Iraqi prisoner, despite their frontline role even before the war was officially declared.

You know why? Because when our blokes took someone into custody, we organised it so an American pretended to do so. If we�d taken someone in, we�d be responsible to ensure they were treated in accordance with the Geneva Conventions. This way, we washed our hands of them.

Here�s an extract from Hansard, pages 114 and 115:

Senator CHRIS EVANS: So there is a captain or a major leading the SAS contingent�20 or so of them and one American NCO is with them. But you tell me that the legal device you have agreed with the Americans has that one American NCO legally capturing those Iraqis, and that the SAS soldiers commanded by an Australian officer have no responsibility in that regard…

Gen. Cosgrove: Exactly, and we did it knowing that, in certain circumstances, there would be a larger number of Australians and a relatively small number of US or UK personnel present. Had there not been US, UK, et cetera personnel present, and had there been a need to detain the people in question, then the agreement that Senator Brown refers to [that the detaining power is responsible] would have been activated.

Senator CHRIS EVANS: And your evidence is that, on all occasions when Australians led contingents that captured Iraqis, there was at that time an American or UK person with them who took responsibility immediately for those prisoners?

Gen. Cosgrove: That is correct – I think, in each case, US servicemen.

Senator BROWN: How was that agreement arrived at?

Gen. Cosgrove: By practice to ensure that countries like Australia, which, by their very organisation, were not set up for the holding or processing of detainees, would not have a chain of custody when we had to send them into another person�s system…

Senator BROWN: But even where Australians alone capture somebody in Iraq, isn�t it true that, under this arrangement, they hand them across to the UK or the US and abrogate responsibility as the –

Gen. Cosgrove: – No, they carry the responsibility. If you read the instruction, they are supposed to monitor the further treatment, processing, care et cetera of the detainee.

Senator BROWN On what occasions has that provision come into play?

Gen. Cosgrove: It did not come in at all… under the arrangements that we had entered into, and by the circumstances of the event, there were US personnel available and present to become the detaining power.

Senator CHRIS EVANS: Is that based on legal advice?

Gen. Cosgrove: Yes.

This piece was first published in the Sun Herald today.

 

The day after Mark Latham was elected ALP leader by a whisker, I had a coffee with a Liberal MP stunned by his �ladder of opportunity� victory speech. �We�re in trouble,� he said. �Latham has updated Menzies� forgotten people.�

Robert Menzies, opposition leader, made that speech in one of many radio talks to the Australian people in 1942, in the depths of World War II. I read them, and could not believe how enduring they were, and how apposite to the war in Iraq.

In �Freedom from fear�, he said three forces were necessary to stop governments waging war: a passionate longing for peace, international machinery for peace and �that intelligent citizenship among ordinary men and women which rulers will respect and which will be the greatest enemy of war�.

“If the individual, as in the past generation, neglects politics – except as a means of obtaining some selfish end – then the people will at times of crisis be dumb and impotent, and despotic rulers will make war.�

In �The moral element in total war�, he said that �there can be no passionate patriotism or willing self-sacrifice in war unless we know in our hearts that we are fighting for good things against evil things, and there can be no better world order except on a moral basis. The brain of man may devise wonders and the hand of man execute them, but they will all fall into evil and harmful uses unless the heart of man – the guide of conduct – is sound and true.�

�The question we need to put to ourselves most frequently in these days is, “What do we believe in?”

The liberal answer was that we believed in the dignity of every human being. From the ashes of WW11 we created the United Nations, and drafted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Abuse and degradation continued, of course, but the West hung its hat on the ideal. America led the drafting of the Geneva Conventions, too, to help prevent a recurrence of the torture and degradation of prisoners of war by the Japanese. War crimes were created.

Before his retirement John Valder, like Menzies a pillar of the liberal establishment, headed the Sydney Stock Exchange and the Liberal Party. He was a kid in World War II, and carries Menzies� message still. In October last year he rose at a public meeting on Sydney�s North Shore, looked his friend Tony Abbott in the eye, and said:

�There must be quite a conceivable possibility of George Bush facing indictment for what he’s done in Iraq� For the first time, we have a Prime Minister who has put this country at risk of being branded a war criminal.

�There is a total disregard by this government, really, for human rights. I understand there are citizens of forty-two nations in Guantanamo Bay, and forty of those forty-two nations have all protested bitterly to the United States about that. Two haven’t. Australia is one of them.” (China was the other.)

It�s got worse since, with cascading evidence of multiple war crimes, including murder, committed by the Americans on Iraqis picked up on the streets without charge. With each day, responsibility for the war crimes gets ever closer to the very top in the United States. Tellingly, the US refuses to even count the numbers of Iraqi dead during or since the invasion.

Last week the Sydney Morning Herald revealed that last year Australian Major George O�Kane at the US military headquarters in Baghdad helped draft a response to the first Red Cross report on abuses in Abu Ghraib prison. He reported back regularly to his superiors. Howard�s government had claimed ignorance until the pictures of the horror were released last month.

As usual, John Howard did not respond by setting out the facts, but by obfuscation. Why? What do we believe in?

Even on purely practical grounds, we should have protested. The downside for the Coalition of torturing ordinary Iraqis is enormous. But I bet we didn�t, just like we won�t ask for the videos of the interrogations of our citizens in Guantanamo Bay.

We have lost our moral compass under John Howard, and thereby aided a superpower which is dooming itself and the world to endless war. Last week the International Institute of Strategic Studies confirmed that the war had rejuvenated al-Qaeda and swelled its ranks � now estimated to be 18,000, with 1,000 now in Iraq.

How can we find politicians who believe in duty and service and who are unafraid to tell us the truth? Look around, and if there is no one in the major parties who qualifies in your seat, find someone who does and organise support for them. As Menzies said in �The task of democracy�:

�I am aware of the weakness of democracy, of its occasional stupidities and shallowness, its temptation to prefer the rabble-rousing spell binder, its habit of giving way to envy, hatred, malice and all uncharitableness. (But) I believe in democracy as the only method of government which can produce justice based upon recognition of enduring human values. Parliament must be recruited from the best we have, and politics once more become a noble and glorious vocation.�

Reader quote of the week

John and Karen Dwyer in Florida, USA

�American survival is not – and never was – threatened by Iraq, unless the hatred we leave behind is really the weapon of mass destruction we were looking for and had to create in order to find.�

A version of this piece was first published in the Sun Herald today.

 

“Let’s keep Australia in safe hands.” John Howard’s “son of Menzies” video at his 30 years in politics bash launched the theme, apparently his key election message to voters.

Maybe he’s in a world mere citizens can’t access, for the previous night, at another laudatory dinner of the right, he completely changed his mind on why Australia had to stay in Iraq.

“The reality is that international terrorism has invested an enormous amount in breaking the will of the coalition in Iraq,” he said. “Not only are organisations associated with al-Qaeda operating in Iraq but each and every turn of the Iraq struggle is interpreted by spokesmen for international terrorism as part of the ongoing campaign against the US and her allies.”

Does he think we don’t remember his recent slash at the Federal Police commissioner Mick Keelty for daring to suggest we were a greater terrorist target for invading Iraq? “It’s my view that Iraq is really irrelevant to the intent and the purposes of al-Qaeda,” he said then.

Howard even said we were on the side of the Iraqi people, when most Iraqis want the US out NOW! He’s spun himself so tight to maintain unconditional support for all that President Bush and his team of incompetents and madmen have done and will do that he makes sense to no one.

Safe hands? I don’t think so.

Web diarist Antonia Feitz sent me this headline from The Independent in London: Howard’s message to Blair: Time to stand up to Bush.

“Alas, Margo, it was Blair’s political opponent, not OUR Howard. But didn’t it make your heart race, briefly?”

Conservative Michael Howard leads a party which backed the war but is increasingly despairing at the self-destructive behaviour of Bush’s boys.

“My party’s support for the war does not mean we are disqualified from asking legitimate questions about the conduct of events in Iraq now,” the other Howard said.

“Nor does it mean we should be inhibited from criticising. And to suggest, as Mr Blair sometimes does, that any such criticism involves a failure to ‘support our troops’ is to demean the very democracy of which we are so proud.”

Last week OUR Howard praised his MPs for “putting their personal beliefs aside” on the wisdom of Iraq to shut up and nod.

Last week the Americans disowned Ahmad Chalabi, the man they flew to Iraq with his armed militia to be its puppet leader, and raided his home in the belief he was leaking intelligence to Iran (Agency: Chalabi group was front for Iran and The Truth About Ahmed Chalabi).

Chalabi ran the US Government-funded Iraqi exile group which gave Bush’s neo-conservatives bogus evidence of WMDs. It was revealed last week that the fake evidence of a Chalabi “defector” used by Bush to justify war, already had been dismissed after the man failed a CIA lie detector test (Source behind WMD claims failed lie test). The Prime Minister has never protested about the lies Bush told Australia or his unforgivable failure to plan for the peace, and he never will.

I reckon Howard’s tragic failure of leadership on Iraq underlies his failure to get a boost from his budget of cynical bribes to the swingers he needs in his marginal seats to win again, leaving those he doesn’t need to get no tax relief at all.

I reckon Australians have worked out that this bloke is dangerous and blind to the challenges facing us, particularly on global warming, the oil supply crisis, and the collapse of public education and health.

Last week former Liberal Party president John Valder, a former friend of Howard’s and a fervent anti-war campaigner, suggested Howard could be in danger in his own seat, perhaps to the man who blew the whistle on his lies before the war, Andrew Wilkie.

I received this email from Michelle Wright, who lives in Peter Costello’s Melbourne seat and was stirred to action by an interview she heard with Brian Deegan, who lost a child in the Bali bombing and will stand as an independent against foreign minister Alexander Downer in his Adelaide seat of Mayo:

“He spoke of his feeling of impotence and disappointment in the face of this Government’s lies and deceit. He spoke of his determination to make this country better for his children. I offered my support in an email. He phoned to thank me and I once again pledged to support him.

“Oke doke – now what do I do? I have never been politically active (nor has he, I understand). Trust my instincts and start writing letters like this. This is as grass roots as it gets. Political virgins coming together and finding a voice – I am already feeling more empowered and confident.

“Alexander Downer, you did not go to war in my name. I will do whatever it takes for you to hear my voice. I believe that this will be the most effective use of my limited financial and human resources.”

Perhaps Deegan’s campaign slogan could be “Let’s put Australia in safer hands”.

Reader quote of the week

Grant Long in Newcastle

“And now, Mr Howard’s ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’ speech. Iraq is the front line on the war on terror, we stupid, ignorant plebs are told by our humble leader. The frame and foundations of modern governance are rotten and barely supporting the structure, but the facade looks good. An illusion.”

It�s bound to be a coincidence, but a strange little editorial in the Australian yesterday attacked my argument in Sunday�s Sun Herald that Iraq was an oil war: Oils ain’t just oils, they’re to die for.

 

“Oil is a crude theory for invasion of Iraq”, the Australian�s headline declared:

The great value of conspiracy theories is that they are immune to evidence. The key argument of the Left about the invasion of Iraq – it was �all about oil� � is essentially a conspiracy theory, tied up with the oil links of the Bush family along with those of Vice-President Dick Cheney. This argument has never had any purchase on the facts. If the principle concern of the US in Iraq was oil, easily the best policy would have been to keep Saddam Hussein in power, and buy him off.

… But there is something that makes renewed cries of �It�s all about oil� sound even stranger � and, well, it�s all about oil. The price of a barrel of crude crashed through the $US40 ($57) last week for the first time in more than a decade. There are many factors behind the rise, including strong demand in China and the US, and of course the fact the OPEC cartel still controls two-thirds of known reserves. But there is also the invasion of Iraq. If US policy was �all about oil�, then helping drive up the price by a destabilising Middle East war was a strange way of pursuing it. Thanks to the US and its allies, Iraq will once again have a thriving oil industry, at which point it will almost certainly join OPEC. Our actions will end the pain for Iraqis � but not our own pain at the pumps.

What sort of �argument� is happening here, and just who has no �purchase on the facts�?

1. The US did buy Saddam off, kept him in power and financed his war on Iran after its puppet there, the Shah of Iran, was destroyed by revolution. Things went wrong when Saddam invaded Kuwait, and ever since he�s been persona non grata in Washington.

2. We now know courtesy of Bob Woodward, Richard Clarke and others that Bush ordered a war plan to invade Iraq almost as soon as he took office, and that months before S11, Colin Powell announced that Saddam was effectively contained. We also know that from the day after S11, Bush�s people discussed invading Iraq, despite no evidence that it had any connection to S11, and despite advice that war on Iraq would divert America from the war on terrorism.

3. The editorial avoids addressing the respectable argument that the world is running out of oil!

4. Former lieutenant-colonel in the U.S. Air Force Karen Kwiatkowski, who worked near the Bush people�s special plans unit to tart up intelligence on Iraq�s WMDs, said of the real reasons for war:

The neoconservatives pride themselves on having a global vision, a long-term strategic perspective. And there were three reasons why they felt the U.S. needed to topple Saddam, put in a friendly government and occupy Iraq. One of those reasons is that sanctions and containment were working and everybody pretty much knew it. Many companies around the world were preparing to do business with Iraq in anticipation of a lifting of sanctions. But the U.S. and the U.K. had been bombing northern and southern Iraq since 1991. So it was very unlikely that we would be in any kind of position to gain significant contracts in any post-sanctions Iraq. And those sanctions were going to be lifted soon, Saddam would still be in place, and we would get no financial benefit.

The second reason has to do with our military-basing posture in the region. We had been very dissatisfied with our relations with Saudi Arabia, particularly the restrictions on our basing. And also there was dissatisfaction from the people of Saudi Arabia. So we were looking for alternate strategic locations beyond Kuwait, beyond Qatar, to secure something we had been searching for since the days of Carter � to secure the energy lines of communication in the region. Bases in Iraq, then, were very important � that is, if you hold that is America�s role in the world. Saddam Hussein was not about to invite us in.

The last reason is the conversion, the switch Saddam Hussein made in the Food for Oil program, from the dollar to the euro. He did this, by the way, long before 9/11, in November 2000 � selling his oil for euros. The oil sales permitted in that program aren�t very much. But when the sanctions would be lifted, the sales from the country with the second largest oil reserves on the planet would have been moving to the euro.

The U.S. dollar is in a sensitive period because we are a debtor nation now. Our currency is still popular, but it�s not backed up like it used to be. If oil, a very solid commodity, is traded on the euro, that could cause massive, almost glacial, shifts in confidence in trading on the dollar. So one of the first executive orders that Bush signed in May [2003] switched trading on Iraq�s oil back to the dollar. (Soldier for the Truth: Exposing Bush�s talking-points war)

5. Yes, the US policy was flawed – remember, the neo-cons thought they’d go in, beat Saddam, and be out in a year with the booty. Has the Aus. forgotten its own propaganda?

6. And has it forgotten the words of its owner Rupert Murdoch, who pronounced before the war:

The greatest thing to come out of this for the world economy, if you could put it that way, would be $20 a barrel for oil. That’s bigger than any tax cut in any country.

Who knows what the future holds? I have a pretty optimistic medium and long-term view but things are going to be pretty sticky until we get Iraq behind us. But once it’s behind us, the whole world will benefit from cheaper oil which will be a bigger stimulus than anything else.

(Bush) will either go down in history as a very great president or he’ll crash and burn. I’m optimistic it will be the former by a ratio of two to one. (Murdoch: Cheap oil the prize)

What is the Aus. doing here? Afraid the truth will finally burst through the propaganda? Trying to preempt Mike Moore’s movie? Whatever it’s doing, it’s deliberately avoided “any purchase on the facts”.

Before more from you on oil, for those of you following the Media Matters challenge of The Bushies’ favourite shock jock Rush “they’re just letting off steam” Limbaugh, see Media Matters. The network which runs his show won’t run the ads! How long before this happens in Australia? Antony Loewenstein recommends Get Me Rewrite! Stories make the world go around. So how come liberals can�t tell one?. Greg O�Connor in Yeronga, Queensland recommends an interview with an American soldier who invaded Iraq and left with bitterness, at Atrocities in Iraq: �I killed innocent people for our government�.

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OIL!

Matt Marshall: Check out this website.

Brendan Mooney: I have been following the global Peak oil issue, Oil economics and the Iraq war quite closely and read this essay some time ago. Have a read, it’s quite interesting: Revisited – The Real Reasons for the Upcoming War With Iraq: A Macroeconomic and Geostrategic Analysis of the Unspoken Truth

Ian McPherson

Colin Campbell and Kjell Alecklett at ASPO have updated the Peak Oil model, and have now predicted that world Peak Oil will occur in 2008 (not 2010) � see peak oil and its latest newsletter. This model was generated in response to the fact that the Middle East (specifically Saudi Arabia) no longer has sufficient spare capacity to discharge a swing role (over oil prices).

The steepest section of the downward curve, between now and 2020, indicates the critical timeline for any development of alternative energy sources. 12 years is not a long time, and the price of oil will climb steeply during this time. Even more importantly, oil will be needed to R&D other energy sources.

The best introduction to Peak Oil that I have seen is a RealVideo presentation from Dr. Colin Campbell, Founder of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil: A turning point for mankind. If you have broadband, please check it out. It was recorded in Germany in 2000.

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Phil Webb

There’s nothing like a long term problem to make people’s eyes glaze over.

In theory everyone wants to help curb global warming and pollution. But only if they don’t have to lower their perceived standard of living. At a time when the price of petrol is starting to edge it’s way up to a more realistic price, 6 of the top 10 best selling cars in Australia come with an engine choice of 3 litre V6 or 5 litre V8. At the same time the government is subsidising the purchase of not particularly eco friendly four wheel drive vehicles to the tune of $500 million per year, where the only time the vast majority of the 4WDs go off road is when they drive up the kerb. John Winston must be sweating in his size 7’s, knowing how sensitive those “battlers” in their V8 utes and Pajeros are to petrol prices.

This is just one aspect of oil use – the increasing prevalence of plastic based disposable lifestyles is also a major contributor. But the scale of the addiction is highlighted by the article in the SMH today, where commuters point out they would rather spend 2 hours per day in their car than catch public transport, unless it happened to pick them up at the end of the street, drop them off at the door of their workplace, take half the time of travelling in the car and of course be a reasonable cost. It isn’t just George and Dick who are addicted to oil.

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Darrell Stone in Belmont, NSW

I always enjoy reading your Sunday column, but yesterday�s was long overdue.

For some time now, the concerns on the decline of the oil age have failed to reach the mainstream news media. It was pleasing to see chinks in the armour that have limited this discussion. It, and global warming, pose the greatest threat to our future, not terrorism. Our government MPs are too worried about their pension cheques to look at what needs to be done to prepare our society for a future with personal transport only for the wealthy and expensive food for everyone because of the loss of cheap oil.

On alternative energy, the NSW government is playing around with toy power stations to allow for peaks when we turn our air conditioners on. The federal government is going to subsidise oil search programs to the tune of $1.50 for each $1 spent.

If we were to use all of the wheat that Oz produces to make biofuel, it would only satisfy 9% of our demand � and leave us without any bread!

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Michael Ekin Smyth

�Peak oil� is like reds-under-the-bed, or �Bolshevik hordes� or any of the many other spectres of doom and destruction that have been trotted out by various demagogues over the years. Like all of them it is based on an element of truth taken out of context and spun to meet other political needs and aims.

Certainly many agree that production from conventional oil sources will peak sometime in the relatively near future – in this decade or perhaps in the next few decades. But, so what?

The �real� price of energy – the percentage of overall global income needed to pay for it – has declined for centuries and is highly likely to continue to do so. Even if the rate of decline of energy cost flattened, or even reversed, markets could quickly adapt.

In 1980 the energy industry made up � ball park � nearly 10 per cent of gross world product. Today it constitutes somewhere between three and four per cent. If oil prices soared by a factor of say 4 � to about 160 dollars a barrel � that would only take us back to 1980 in real terms.

Once oil prices rise above 30 dollars � average over a whole 12 months of trading � the incentives for substitution begin to click in � big time.

Non-conventional oil sources � heavy crudes, oil slates etc � are currently producible at between 14 and 25 dollars a barrel. However given the front loaded investment cycle � it costs a lot to start up these projects � investors are not keen until there is a track record of between 12 and 24 months of consistently �high� prices. That has not, as yet, occurred. If and when it does, large numbers of projects based on non-conventional sources ill start to come on stream.

Other forms of hydrocarbon energy � gas, coal also begin to compete more effectively when prices are consistently above 20 dollars a barrel � in all areas except, of course, the transport market.

In addition, the incentives for alternatives � such as hydro, solar, nuclear and � crucially biofuels – grow exponentially. Biotech is likely to prove to be a crucial factor in the generation of new fuel �resources� within just a few decades. All of that, along with continued improvements in energy efficiency and the introduction of new technologies such as fuel cells, means that even if conventional oil �peaks� the long-term implications for the world economy are limited.

Within the oil market itself the competition from other fuels is just as important an influence on price as the overall supply. So, OPEC continues to be caught in its historic cleft stick. They can drive up prices in the short and medium term � but if those prices stay �high� (currently above say 30 dollars a barrel) � the incentives for competitors become too significant. Then competing conventional sources, unconventional sources and alternatives click in. The result? A price crash � very similar to the one we saw in 1986.

It is certainly true that we will continue to see changes in the energy industry – as we have seen continuously over the last few centuries. The dominance of oil is already over � after all, it makes up less than half the energy market � and it will likely continue to decline over coming decades. It will continue to be a very important isues, worth hundreds of billions each year, but in a global economy near 27 trillion, it has to be seen in context.

> As the basis for a doomster, �end of the world as we know it� movement it doesn�t wash. Nor does it wash as the key to any paranoid anti-democratic, anti-free market and anti-American conspiracy theories.

At last, some honesty from the Government on oil! Deputy Prime Minister John Anderson confirmed the guts of my column today, Oils ain’t just oils, they’re to die for. He said on the ABC’sInsider�s program this morning (with no follow up from Barrie Cassidy!):

 

I do share the community’s quite deep concern about the outlook (for oil prices) because it really is related to very heavy demand for fuel around the place, limitations of global refining capacity and, I have to say it, the very real prospect that at some stage in the next few short years global production may very well peak and it may be hard to increase it further at a time when countries like China, of course, are looking for a lot more fuel and even in places like Australia our dependence on oil, on petrol and transportation continues to increase.

This is one of the reasons why I believe, in common with legislators in most other Western countries, that we need to be determinedly looking at alternative fuels, both extenders and new fuels and that includes biofuels. But I don’t want to fudge and say that there is an easy answer to this. The realities of global fuel refining are quite stark.

I got some fantastic feedback to the column, with lots more links and information. Here we go, after general recommendations.

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Recommendations

Tim Gillin: The new bombshell from Seymour Hersh, that Rumsfeld authorised torture in Iraq, is atThe New Yorker. Hersh has been wrong before. I am thinking of his “The Dark Side of Camelot” and the claim that JFK had been secretly married before his marriage to Jackie: see smokinggun.

Scott Burchill: See Pioneers Fill Campaign War Chest, Then Capitalize, on how Bush buys his donations.

Allen Jay: See Brian Cloughley on the Patriot Act in the US at Where are you heading, America?. If he can write for Janes, then I doubt that even your most conservative readers would find reason to object, although they may choke on the opinions expressed. Given a background in the British and Australian Army and a specialist in the region, his views are always worthy of consideration – even if he has taken up exile in NZ. His home page is briancloughley.

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Kerryn Higgs

Your piece on the oil question is very timely. I was taken aback this morning when John Anderson appeared on the ABC�s Insiders and warned of:

…the very real prospect that at some stage in the next few short years global production may very well peak and it may be hard to increase it further at a time when countries like China, of course, are looking for a lot more fuel and even in places like Australia our dependence on oil, on petrol and transportation continues to increase.

As Webdiarist David Mieluk pointed out last week in George Bush: the crouching man is naked, this concern has been raised for many years, by oilmen and geologists in particular, and decades ago by the Club of Rome researchers. Your Cheney quote indicates that the US administration is as well aware of it as the craziest of doomsayers.

If the Iraq strategy has been directed at cornering what�s left � or the greater part of it � it�s still very odd when you realise that, even if the USA did succeed in controlling the declining resource, there�s a big crisis coming in a matter of years, or decades at best, not centuries. Common sense might suggest that now is the time to prepare for a more orderly transition, rather than profiteer from the guzzling of the last of it.

The world�s oil, by the way, is the distilled product of tens of millions of years of plant growth in geological history. That�s way beyond ordinary human comprehension, but what we�re doing is burning millions of years of plant growth every decade � and it�s accelerating.

David�s paragraph which you quoted in your article reminded me of what I felt in 1967 or so when I first came across critics of the Vietnam War. These loonies told me that there was no actual threat to anyone from Vietnam, there were no dominoes and we were being led along by the nose. Our leaders (and US leaders for that matter), I thought, would surely not deceive us and launch a war for spurious reasons. It was shocking, a stretch of the imagination. For quite some time I simply could not credit the allegations.

So, if the world is about to face a crisis of its energy supply (and it�s more than the transport and trade that Anderson mentioned � the entire mass-production sector in agriculture is based on oil-derived fertilisers, pesticides and mechanised farming); why wouldn�t our leaders look for solutions? And how do we force them to do this?

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Anthony Rizk: Just shut up will you………for God sake.

Peter Brown: I thought you might like to read Kurt Vonnegut’s view on this in Cold Turkey: “Here�s what I think the truth is: We are all addicts of fossil fuels in a state of denial, about to face cold turkey. And like so many addicts about to face cold turkey, our leaders are now committing violent crimes to get what little is left of what we�re hooked on.”

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Andrew Mamo

Finally somebody in the Australian media has had the guts to discuss Peak Oil!! Like your reader from Terrigal (my suburb coincidentally), I am constantly confounded by the willful ignorance of our politicians and journalists to deal with the devastating potential of this threat. Well done for breaking the silence, and I hope to see this become the real focus of government and public concern over the next 10 years, rather than any phony wars on terror. (Margo: Andrew is an artist who organised Garage doors against the war before the invasion of Iraq.)

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Michael Ekin Smyth

Yeah, Margo, you�ve finally nailed it. It�s just a giant American conspiracy � powered by those evil Jewish neo-cons.

Congratulations. You just leapt over neo on the path to fully blown Nazi ideologist. I�ll bet there is a good Chinese tailor in Sydney who can run you up a nice black uniform in no time.

The armband? Well, that is a little more difficult. Some find even them morally repugnant. But there are plenty like you lurking in the depths of liberal central Europe. They�ll be able to get you fully kitted out in uniforms, military equipment and anti-American, and free market bigotry in no time. Whoops! No need for the anti-American bigotry is there? You�re fully armed with that already � and a hatred of the Jews, and of capital markets.

Hell, we�ll get a Krystallnacht organised in no time! Sieg Heil!

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Dave Worth, convenor of the Sustainable Transport Coalition, WA

I agree with your comments on what is happening re global oil demand. We organised a conference last year called WA: beyond oil, and we�ll have another one in August called “Oil: Living with Less”. Webdiarist Carmen Lawrence launched our new policy of the same name two weeks ago here in Perth.

I have personally lobbied a number of federal MPs as well as appeared at a House of Reps enquiry in Adelaide 2 weeks ago, and no one wants to know about this topic and its implications for car-using Australians. We have issued a number of media releases which The West Australian has never run. So yes, people just don�t want to know, and when oil goes to the level of what they are paying NOW in Europe- AUS$1.60 to $1.85- they will scream for governments to subsidise the petrol price, especially those with large engined cars and 4WDs.

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Geoff Davies of Canberra (on leave in California)

Thanks for stating the rarely-stated though blindingly obvious about oil and Iraq, and for moving on to the topic of how we can begin to wean ourselves off oil.

In case you missed the brief review of my recent book Economia: New economic systems to empower people and support the living world by Bruce Elder (SMH 24-25 April), check it out atgeoffdavies. It’s a complete reconception of how economies really work, how we can redirect and restructure our societies to have much less impact on the world, how many innovations already move us in that direction, and how ultimately we can aspire to promote the regeneration of cultural diversity and biodiversity.

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John Omaha, an American in Sydney

I appreciated your article in today’s Sun-Herald regarding the place of oil in the causes for my country’s unprovoked, illegal, and immoral attack on Iraq.

There is another cause for the attack however. By attacking defenseless countries the American military-industrial complex successfully hijacks the U.S. budget, diverting billions of dollars into the treasuries of Martin-Marietta, General Dynamics, Boeing, Halliburton’s Brown-Kellog-Root, North American-Grumann, and several hundred other corporations.

This process was begun in Vietnam. Before the Gulf of Tonkin (non) incident, the U.S. defense budget stood at $80 billion (US) per year. At the termination of the invasion, the budget was $400 billion, and it has remained in that range ever since. Regularly, the U.S. military-industrial complex succeeds in duping the easily-flummoxed citizens and the duplicitous Congress into attacking yet another defenseless nation. You may recall that our ambassador suckered Hussein into invading Kuwait by telling him the U.S. would not respond if he did invade, and the instant he took the bait, Desert Story was on.

I think that many citizens around the world do not realize the true horror of the actions of the military-industrial complex. You touch on the issue in your column today. No American commentators ever mention the fight for survival of U.S. corporations.

I believe we no longer live in a democracy in America. We live in a corporatocracy which serves solely the interests of corporations, bureaucracies, congress, both political parties, and the media.

Citizens do not count. Our needs are never considered. We exist solely to fund the corporatocracy. When we get too old to work, we are cast aside without medical care, our pension funds looted, our benefits attenuated.

This is the view of one disgusted American citizen. The majority of my countrymen are too dumbed down to appreciate this argument.

Cordially from Sydney, where I am delivering a couple of workshops in my field of psychology.

***

Ian McPherson

Congratulations! Your oil article goes right to the heart of the matter. Australia is as reliant as the US on foreign oil, and we import most of our needs. That will only increase until world oil supplies are seriously depleted, around about 2050.

NOW is the time for alternative energy solutions.

If you are interested in the link between the placement of US troops (usually couched as military assistance [sic]) and the US’s oil requirements, the expert is Michael T. Klare.

I have assembled as many reliable links as I can on this subject, as I believe it is the most important problem facing mankind (water depletion is possibly the second). From oil dependence stems global warming, global dimming and massive pollution.

For me, one of the most convincing and intelligent articles is by George Monbiot in The Guardian.

It is past time to deal honestly with the issue of oil depletion, whether it occurs within 20 or 50 years. NOW is the time to invest in alternatives, and legislate against oil wastage. The federal government must lead and not just follow the lead of the US – which will lead to endless war.

We must look for energy alternatives now, solutions that do not suffer from the side-effects of war, human rights violations, pre-emptive invasions and the support of dictatorships. Some of these alternatives are now available and there is reason for hope, as shown in How many windmills would $87 billion buy?

The next step, necessarily, will be to research, develop and present real-life solutions. This is the challenge that is facing mankind. If we solve the issue of oil depletion, it is more than possible that we will solve the issue of endless war.

***

Tim Gillin in Sydney

Geologist Colin Campbell, quoted in your article on oil, may or may not be proven right, but one thing is for sure, he is certainly adding another repeat to the chorus of the “we’re going to run out of oil and have a disaster” refrain that has been recycled every decade or so since oil was first discovered. And to date the track record of that refrain has been pretty poor ( see http://www.cato.org/pubs/regulation/regv27n1/v27n1-1.pdf):

In 1875, John Strong Newberry, the chief geologist of the state of Ohio, predicted that the supply of oil would soon run out. The alarm has been sounded repeatedly in the many decades since. In 1973, State Department analyst James Akins, then the chief U.S. policymaker on oil, published “The Oil Crisis: This time the wolf is here,” in which he called for more domestic production and for improved relations with oil-producing nations in the Middle East. In 1979, President Jimmy Carter, echoing a CIA assessment, said that oil wells “were drying up all over the world.

In 2003, world oil production was 4,400 times greater than it was in Newberry’s day, but the price per unit was probably lower. Oil reserves and production even outside the Middle East are greater today than they were when Akins claimed the wolf was here. World output of oil is up a quarter since Carter’s “drying up” pronouncement.

For an alternate take on oil, it is worth examining the myth repeated endlessly by the media that the Middle East is home to two thirds of the world’s oil reserves. A good place to start myth busting is Radford: “The oil reserve estimates …all refer to a narrow category of “proven” oil reserves, not to “every … barrel of oil in the world”

Left, right and center, the messengers who have analysed global energy supply have all focused on the problem through one optic.

According to a US Geological Survey report quietly published in 2000, there is more oil outside the Middle East than inside the region. Certainly two thirds is not at all accurate – it’s 54 percent of identified reserves, possibly 40 percent of ultimately recoverable reserves, and possibly 30 percent or less if you include unconventional heavy oil fields.

As Standard Oil executive Wallace Pratt said in 1944, it is a “fallacy [to] cite proved reserves as a measure of available future supplies.” Yet this is exactly what has animated US policy in the Middle East.

The news media nearly always use the proven reserve figures and omit other categories because the Department of Energy and the oil industry publish reports that include only “proven” oil reserves – as if that is all there is. Most people do not realize that other petroleum geologists – most notably those at the USGS – take a different view.

The war in Iraq may or may not be “for” oil, but there is no question that at some level, it is “about” oil. What if Saudi Arabia, Iraq and the Middle East are NOT the home of the world’s largest oil reserves? What if decades of American foreign policy are based on a faulty premise?

Your column reminded me of a quote from Admiral Gene La Roque of the Center for Defense Information, commenting on the first Gulf War (the one endorsed by the UN and the ALP):

This is a war over the price of oil and I don’t think we want to sacrifice the life of one American boy to keep the price of oil down or the king of Saudi Arabia on the throne.

Is the current “bad” war in Iraq about “oil”? I think the real way to answer that question is to look at other wars in history, like the Great War, WW2 or the American Civil War, and determine if they were about one thing. The answer is “no”.

Oil is a factor in the current war, along with terrorism, islamism, Israel and even the need for the US military industrial complex to maintain its relevance in a post-Cold War world (see Dick Cheney�s Song of America ).

And what do we mean by a war for oil? For control over future supply or for control over current oil profits and revenues? Those two issues are quite different.

The following quote from Gulf War 1 critic, economist Murray Rothbard, emphasises the revenue angle:

… Since the oil shocks of the 1970s, more oil has been discovered, and produced, in non-OPEC countries (such as Mexico, the North Sea), and U.S. and other consumers are using less petroleum per product. The OPEC proportion of world oil output fell from 56 percent in 1973 to only 32 percent today. And since 1973, the amount of oil and gas needed to produce a dollar of GNP in the United States has been cut by 43 percent. All this can be predicted from economic theory: that higher prices call forth a greater supply, and that consumers and other buyers restrict their demands for oil and move to other sources or to more oil-efficient energy uses.

…if oil price increases are the problem, why didn’t the U.S. move in force in 1973 against the OPEC countries, sending troops into Saudi Arabia and Kuwait to take them over and force them to lower the price of crude oil? Why should the U.S. balk at a few dollars a barrel now when it stood still for a quadrupling of the price of oil two decades ago?

The war against Iraq, …has nothing to do with any “national interest” that Americans may have in abundance of oil and in keeping its price low. Does that mean that this war is in no sense an “oil war?

No – it means that it’s a very different – and far more sinister – kind of oil war: a war not for the American consumer but for the control of a supply and of the vast profits from oil. A war, in short, for narrow economic interests against the interests of the American consumer, the taxpayers, and of Americans who will die in the effort.

Specifically, why the U.S. hatred of the cartelist Saddam and its great tenderness and concern for the cartelist Saudis?

First, the long-term “friendship” with the “pro-West” despots of the Saud family. This “friendship” has been concretized into Aramco (the Arabian-American Oil Co.), the Rockefeller company that has total control of Saudi Arabian oil – and long-time heavy influence, if not control, over U.S. foreign policy. After World War II, Aramco (owned 70 percent by Rockefeller companies – Exxon, Mobil, and Socal, and 30 percent by Texaco) produced all of Saudi oil.

Originally, Aramco owed King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia $30 million in royalty payments for the monopoly concession. And so, James A. Moffet, former vice president of Standard Oil of New Jersey (now Exxon), who had been appointed as Federal Housing Administrator in World War II, used his influence to get the U.S. Treasury to pay Ibn Saud the $30 million. In addition the King got an obliging “loan” of another $25 million from the Rockefeller-dominated U.S. Export-Import Bank, at taxpayer expense, to construct a pleasure railroad from his capital to his summer palace. In addition, President Roosevelt made a secret appropriation out of his boodle of war funds, of $165 million to Aramco to do preparatory work for its pipeline across Saudi Arabia. Furthermore, the U.S. Army was assigned to build an airfield and military base at Dhahran; the base, after costing U.S. taxpayers over $6 million, was turned over gratis to King Ibn Saud in 1949. Dhahran, not coincidentally, was close to the Aramco oilfields.

During the 1970s, Aramco was “nationalised” by Saudi Arabia, a process completed in 1980. But the nationalization was phony, because the same Aramco consortium immediately obtained a contract as a management corporation to run the old, nationalized Aramco. More than half of Saudi oil production goes to the old Aramco-Rockefeller consortium, which sells the oil at a profit to whomever they wish, in obedience to Saudi cartel regulations. The remaining part of Saudi oil is run and distributed by the Saudi government directly, through Petromin (the General Petroleum and Marketing Organization), the marketing arm of the Saudi Petroleum Ministry.

It all boils down to a happy case of the “partnership of industry and government” – happy, that is, for the Saud family and for the Rockefeller oil interests.

Iraq, on the other hand, has very little dealings with the Rockefeller Empire. In contrast to heavy dealings with Iran (in the Shah’s day), Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the rest of the Gulf states, the big Wall Street banks reported that they had virtually no loans outstanding or deposits owed, to Iraq. Thus, Citibank (Rockefeller) reported that its risk of loss to Iraq was “zero,” and similar reports came from Chase Manhattan (Rockefeller) and the rest of Wall Street.

And so: the war against Iraq is a war over oil, all right, but not on behalf of cheap oil or abundant oil to the U.S. consumer. It is a war of the Rockefeller Empire against a brash interloper. Bush’s Pentagon speech takes on heightened meaning when he talks about everyone suffering “if control of the world’s great oil reserves fell into the hands of that one man, Saddam Hussein”.

Whether Rothbard, who was talking about the first Gulf War, is right or not, is not my main point. I’m not sure. When blaming war on oil we need to remember that that small word is not so much a definitive answer, as merely a prompt for a lot more questions.

This piece was first published in the Sun Herald today. It was inspired by an email from David Mieluk in Terrigal published in George Bush: the crouching man is naked.

 

Most Europeans have never been in doubt that Iraq is an oil war. As the latest ludicrous excuse for the war lies in ruins – that it is a selfless American crusade to civilise the Middle East – perhaps we can finally start to think about the real issues and what our “leaders” are doing about them in our name.

The mainstream media has hardly touched the looming oil supply crisis, but if you look hard enough, the mastermind of the war, Bush’s Vice-President Dick Cheney did in 1999, as chairman of giant oil services company Halliburton, now ensconced in Iraq. Cheney warned that by 2010 the world would need another 50 million barrels a day, way above our known reserves.

“The Middle East, with two-thirds of the world’s oil, is still where the prize ultimately lies,” he said.

“Even though companies are anxious for greater access there, progress continues to be slow.”

The US props up the corrupt Saudi regime in return for co-operation on oil – despite its funding of extremist Islamic groups abroad – but to insure against an uprising by the unfortunate Saudi people, Bush replaced America’s former proxy Saddam Hussein in his palaces and his torture chambers under cover of September 11.

Cheney’s war plan to put Iraq’s oil in the hands of American companies was counterproductive – the mind bogglingly incompetent Anglo imperial war now threatens to drive US business out of the Middle East altogether.

At a conference on oil depletion in Berlin this year, Colin Campbell, a world-renowned geologist and founder of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas, said: “There are vested interests on all sides hoping somehow to evade the grip of oil depletion, or at least to put it off until after the next election or until they can develop some strategy for their personal or corporate survival. As the moment of truth approaches, so does the heat, the deceptions, the half truth and the flat lies.”

The biggest of the flat lies so far is the Iraq war, where Bush was prepared to increase recruitment to terrorist organisations and increase the risk of terrorist attacks to secure oil.

Bush is so desperate for oil and so unwilling to ask his people to reduce their gluttonous oil use that he tried to allow drilling for oil in one of America’s great natural wildernesses, Alaska.

The Los Angeles Times revealed last week that the US oil industry employed influential former government officials to help mount a successful campaign after 1998 in partnership with the president of Kazakhstan to “convince the world that his oil-rich, authoritarian regime was actually a budding democracy”.

The campaign “seized on America’s need for oil to win US support for a government with a penchant for shuttering newspapers and manipulating elections”, and included commissioning positive stories by corrupted journalists in the mainstream media.

What to do? Enslave the people of oil-producing nations to keep living how we live and abandon our values for the purpose? Have a world war? That’s where we’re heading. How about spending our money not on oil wars, which make the world a much more dangerous place for ordinary people, but on a war against the need for so much oil?

How about spending billions on alternative energy? How about telling citizens the truth about the realities we face, and bring us in on the conversation of how we might be prepared to change our lifestyle and the way our cities are organised to meet the threat through peace, not war?

You know how much the Australian Government spent in the budget to promote renewal energy research? Nothing, effectively. More incentives for oil exploration, of course, but it hasn’t even spent the small amounts it had already allocated for greenhouse abatement to stop our world warming up – partly due to our over-reliance on oil. And shouldn’t we be spending billions on city and country trains, not more road tunnels?

The world can descend into hell to fight over oil, or we can start now in reducing our reliance on it. We can live in peace with less oil, or we can die in war to try to maintain our lifestyle for a little while longer at the expense of our core values.

“Those in power want the bland illusion of ‘business as usual’ so that they may continue to extract support from their traditional constituencies, rather than face the reality of natural depletion imposed by nature,” Colin Campbell said.

“In this they underestimate the resolve of the deprived electors, who would much prefer to be told the truth. ‘Put your trust in the people,’ Winston Churchill said when facing an earlier crisis.”

Reader quote of the week

David Mieluk in Terrigal on the oil crisis:

I do not understand why this situation is not the main current public debate. I am, perhaps, in my young years, poisoned by naivety into believing that if a truly devastating threat lurked on the horizon, politicians would cease playing politics and work together to find a solution. That appears not to have happened.

So, the bloke who designed America�s debacle in Iraq and sent kids without training to Abu Ghraib goes to the scene of the crime to tell his troops that while the small fry will fry, �I�m a survivor�. (See A deepening rift at the Pentagon: Rumsfeld’s surprise visit to Iraq should help buoy troops, but DOD is still riven by the scandal.)

 

I don�t think so. Incredible stuff is going down in America as the nation comes to terms with the fact that its rulers have destroyed the myth Americans live by and are in the process of destroying American power as well. Many Americans will mourn the fact that they didn�t listen to the stream of whistleblowers before the war � the sacked generals and the diplomats who resigned. And maybe some will even read Chomsky as they try to work out how America came to this.

But the idealistic America is fighting back hard, and winning over distraught former believers in the sinister and stupid administration they unwittingly elected.

Tonight, some important and fascinating links to America�s struggle to work out its values in the 21st century.

To begin, prominent pro-war commentator Thomas Friedman of the New York Times writes an extraordinary mea culpa under the headline Dancing Alone:

Do we have any chance of succeeding at regime change in Iraq without regime change here at home? “Hey, Friedman, why are you bringing politics into this all of a sudden? You’re the guy who always said that producing a decent outcome in Iraq was of such overriding importance to the country that it had to be kept above politics.”

Yes, that’s true. I still believe that. My mistake was thinking that the Bush team believed it, too. I thought the administration would have to do the right things in Iraq � from prewar planning and putting in enough troops to dismissing the secretary of defense for incompetence � because surely this was the most important thing for the president and the country. But I was wrong. There is something even more important to the Bush crowd than getting Iraq right, and that’s getting re-elected and staying loyal to the conservative base to do so.

I admit, I’m a little slow. Because I tried to think about something as deadly serious as Iraq, and the post- 9/11 world, in a nonpartisan fashion � as Joe Biden, John McCain and Dick Lugar did � I assumed the Bush officials were doing the same. I was wrong. They were always so slow to change course because confronting their mistakes didn’t just involve confronting reality, but their own politics.

Yes, that’s true. I still believe that. My mistake was thinking that the Bush team believed it, too. I thought the administration would have to do the right things in Iraq � from prewar planning and putting in enough troops to dismissing the secretary of defense for incompetence � because surely this was the most important thing for the president and the country. But I was wrong. There is something even more important to the Bush crowd than getting Iraq right, and that’s getting re-elected and staying loyal to the conservative base to do so.

…Why, in the face of the Abu Ghraib travesty, wouldn’t the administration make some uniquely American gesture? Because these folks have no clue how to export hope…

Why didn’t the administration ever use 9/11 as a spur to launch a Manhattan project for energy independence and conservation, so we could break out of our addiction to crude oil, slowly disengage from this region and speak truth to fundamentalist regimes, such as Saudi Arabia? (Addicts never tell the truth to their pushers.) Because that might have required a gas tax or a confrontation with the administration’s oil moneymen….

… And, of course, why did the president praise Mr. Rumsfeld rather than fire him? Because Karl Rove says to hold the conservative base, you must always appear to be strong, decisive and loyal. It is more important that the president appear to be true to his team than that America appear to be true to its principles. (Here’s the new Rummy Defense: “I am accountable. But the little guys were responsible. I was just giving orders.”)

In George Bush: the crouching man is naked, I reported the torture view of the Bush admin�s favourite right-wing shock jock Rush �they were just letting off steam� Limbaugh, and that Bush wouldn�t repudiate his remarks. The new website monitoring the right wing media has launched aTV ad to let decent Americans know what they�re up against.

In Leaking self-doubt, spiked-online points out that the American (And our) media laid low on the torture for months, and that it was people inside the system who finally forced the truth out:

. Tracing how the photos became such hot public property reveals something striking, not only about the torture scandal, but about the coalition itself. This is a story, not of investigative journalism or antiwar activists exposing imperialist America to the world, but rather of America exposing its own uncertainty for all to see. The photos appear to have come from within US military or political circles; they were effectively volunteered for public consumption by elements within the military or higher up in the Pentagon, seemingly as part of a process of internal unravelling and deep disagreement over aspects of the war. In a sense, the publication of these photos to international outrage can be seen as the externalisation of America’s own self-doubt about Iraq, and about its own mission in the world…

‘The leakers are driving the story’, says Connie Coyne of the Salt Lake Tribune in Utah. ‘I do not think the press would have moved on this story if the leakers had not provided photographs of what was going on.’ Coyne points out that reporters have known of allegations of abuse at Abu Ghraib for months, but did little to investigate…

The failure of the media to expose the torture story earlier, even as Pentagon sources and soldiers’ families leaked information about the torture, reveals much about the balance in this story. It suggests that it came about less as a result of campaigning journalism and more as a result of pushiness on the part of aggrieved elements in the military or close to the military.

Tony Dutton recommends On thinking about war crimes.

And Ross Sharp writes:

I’ve just stumbled across the wackiest thing – apparently the abuses in Iraq are the fault of gay liberals. According, at least, to Robert Knight, director of the Culture and Family Institute in the US, an affiliate of Concerned Women for America.

“None of this happened by accident. It is directly due to cultural depravity advanced in the name of progress and amplified by a sensation-hungry media.”

“We were told homosexuality is harmless and normal, and the military should live with a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy that allows homosexuals to stay in the barracks. We were told that men “marrying” men and women “marrying” women is inevitable � not only for America, but for the world. Imagine how those images of men kissing men outside San Francisco City Hall after being “married” play in the Muslim world. We couldn’t offer the mullahs a more perfect picture of American decadence. This puts Americans at risk all over the world, especially Christian missionaries who are trying to bring the Gospel to people trapped in darkness for millennia.”

Right. That sorts that out then.

In Britain, the New Statesman in America’s gulag, reports on “a secret global network of prisons and planes that allows the US to hand over its enemies for interrogation, and sometimes torture, by the agents of its more unsavoury allies”.

British conservative MP and editor of the conservative Spectator magazine Boris Johnson wrote an incredible mea culpa called How could I have been such a mug?:

I was sitting in the Commons tea room last week, munching a mournful rock cake and studying the accounts of the American bombing of Fallujah. I looked at the charred Humvees, the mutilated corpses, the unnumbered dead, the wailing women and the expressions of immortal hate on the faces of the Iraqis; and perhaps unsurprisingly I found myself cast into a terrible gloom.

 

Just remind me, I said, turning to a colleague and friend, what is the case for this war in Iraq? You voted for it. I voted for it. We both spoke in favour of it. We both saw the merits of sticking with the Americans. We both believed that it was a good idea to get rid of Saddam.

 

 

But is there not a time when we have to admit, in all intellectual honesty, that our positions have been overwhelmed by countervailing data? How on Earth can we now defend what seems – admittedly at some distance – to be a total bloody shambles?

 

 

“Oh come off it, mate,” he said, because he is not only a hawk, but has a keen and impatient mind, “don’t be so wet. You want a single big argument for the war? The key point is that people are no longer being tortured in jails in Baghdad. That’s what we have achieved.”

 

 

It was as if the clouds had rolled back. I felt a sudden burst of optimism. “You’re right!” I said, and thought how silly I had been to ignore that gigantic fact, that we had introduced new values to Iraq, of civilisation and decency.

 

 

The following day I saw the pictures from the Abu Ghraib jail.

 

 

And in Australia? Tony Yegles writes: “Today I heard Howard the lapdog plagiarising best using Rummy’s words – again! Even Rummy’s style of asking the questions himself! Why do we need Howard as a mouthpiece when we have Bush and Rumsfeld doing the thinking and the talking – in other words the spinning?”

 

Prime Minister John Howard says the abuse and torture of Iraqi prisoners by the US military is a “body blow” in the fight against terrorism, echoing the words of US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

Mr Rumsfeld, during a surprise visit to Iraq on Thursday in which he toured the Abu Ghraib prison, said: “It’s been a body blow for all of us”.

…”If you ask me ‘Do I like it?’, no I hate it, ‘Do I think it is a setback?’, yes it is, ‘Do I think it alters the overall moral case?’, no, but I certainly think it makes it a lot harder to argue and I think it’s certainly reduced a lot of the goodwill that did exist in Iraq.”

(In his latest evidence to the US Senate, Rumsfeld said of the planned tranfsfer of ‘sovereignty’ on June 30: “Will it happen right on time? I think so. I hope so. Will it be perfect? No. Is it possible it won’t work? Yes.”)

***

READER COMPLAINT

Dave Kirkby

There was a time that I found your comments amusing, however recently you have degenerated into farce and hypocrisy. Your constant tirades against the governments spin doctors would be far more believable if you were not engaged in exactly the same practice.

Presenting information on your web site which emphasises certain “facts” and ignores or minimises other “facts” in order to inform your readers is text book spin doctoring. You choose to present only that information which supports your case whilst stridently condemning the government for the very same thing.

I have spent a large part of my time in third-world countries (including Iraq) and have many colleagues still working in Iraq. Your articles reveal a complete lack of understanding of the issues involved and an unwillingness to look beyond the tabloid journalism to find out.

You are entitled to your opinion but as a journalist you also have a duty to present the public with all the facts. While-ever journalists continue to pass off personal opinion as fact, they will continue to suffer the lack of creditability that your Webdiary suffers.

One other small thing. Common courtesy is a small thing that goes a long way. It takes very little effort to address the people you are writing about by their full names. “Howard” is actually John Howard, our Prime Minister, and whether you like him or not a little common courtesy goes a long way. The truly great debaters and wordsmiths never resort to cheap discourtesy as a way to make a point and their arguments were stronger for it.

Margo: I’d be happy to publish your views on Iraq.

G’day. Here’s my budget piece, published elsewhere on the site last night. No structural reform, no addressing of the intergenerational crisis Costello used to talk about, no big measures to save our rivers or reduce our reliance on oil, no investment in health and education. Sad, really.

 

I felt almost indifferent to the budget, as if we’re dancing around to the same old tune as the world becomes more frightening and dangerous by the day. There doesn’t seem to be anything anyone can do to stop the slide into world war. I’ve just heard about the beheading of an American hostage in purported revenge for American abuse of Iraqi prisoners. A colleague saw the actual beheading on TV, so be careful if you’d prefer not to have your dreams invaded by the horror.

There doesn’t seem to be any hope for any good coming out of Iraq. The neocon bible in Washington, The Weekly Standard, has published a piece called Democracy Now by the neo-cons’ most authoritative writers, Robert Kagan and William Kristol, which argues that Bush is in denial and that something drastic needs to be tried. They suggest bringing forward the Iraqi elections to September.

I’ll be in Brisbane tomorrow for a forum on journalism education. It’s at Customs House, 399 Queen Street in the city at 2pm. Email j.poulter@uq.edu.au or call 07-33469564 for more info.

***

Springing the money trap

The last time I can remember a political party so blatantly bribing voters it wants to win over was the NSW election before last. The Liberals offered cash to voters once it sold the public’s electricity system. Voters were insulted that the Liberals thought their opposition to privatisation could be bought off, and Labor won in a landslide.

This time, Howard and Costello are combining bribes with blackmail. Here’s $600 in lots of voters’ pockets before June 30, and lots more later. To Labor – feel like saying no to preserve some money for substantial boosts to public health and education? Feel like doing some solid, long-term reform for all of us? Are you that brave?

To voters they want to swing to them – have a beer on us. Have several.

But what’s to stop voters taking the bribe and voting Labor anyway? How many will be peeved that all of a sudden there’s money to burn to ease their budgets? Will they believe that the Libs will keep their promise for ongoing increases in family payments and tax cuts? Is Labor game to take the Libs on?

Basically, the Libs want to give lower income families more for kids, get the middle class to work harder, and give the rich a tax cut. Yeah! Pity the kids won’t have decent public health care or education, but heh, we’ve got an election to win here.

How brave is Latham? Crazy brave? Howard and Costello have laid the same trap for him as they did for Beazley in 2001. Will he cave in, as Beazley thought he had to, and thus leave no surplus for Labor to do important, long-term things for our health and education?

One thing’s for sure. Howard and Costello want Labor to think an early election is on. Mid July for August, during the Olympics, perhaps? They want them to panic, and they want them to split, especially on the tax cuts for people earning over $62,500 a year.

Will Latham dare try to persuade Australians that it’s not worth it to accept bribes to keep this government, and actually proves that the Government deserves to be thrown out? Is he prepared to lay out how Labor would spend the $37 billion Howard’s promised to spend in the next five years? Is there a real difference between the parties?

Underlying all the calculations is Iraq. Howard is to meet Bush in the US next month. As yet, neither he nor Bush have taken responsibility for the nightmare Iraq has become. Will Iraq and the broader issue of how to fight Muslim extremists break through to become the defining issue of the election campaign, dwarfing voters’ consideration of whether this or that dollar will be in their pockets?

Yes, if they come to believe that the stark differences between the parties could mean a safer or more dangerous future for their children. Then, money in pocket won’t make the difference. Maybe Howard and Costello are hoping they’ll so dazzle voters with cash and promises of more that they’ll forget the really big issue of our time.

But that can’t be true, because they’ve given $35 million “for values, civics and citizenship education in our schools”.

The news on America�s torture practices in Iraq keeps getting worse. The latest picture, of two dogs threatening a naked man, and an update by Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker are at CHAIN OF COMMAND

 

And, via Lynette Dumble, see `Our dignity cannot endure this humiliation’:

BAGHDAD, MAY 9: The crouching man is naked, his hands tied and his head covered with a hood. The alabaster sculpture on display at a Baghdad gallery bears a striking resemblance to some of the shocking photographs that emerged last week of Iraqi prisoners abused by their American guards at the Abu Ghraib prison. But the 15-inch sculpture, with the words “We are living in American democracy” inscribed on its base was fashioned two months ago.

“We knew what went on at Abu Ghraib,” Abdul-Kareem Khalil, the artist, said on Saturday. “The pictures did not surprise me.”

Antony Loewenstein recommendsMedia matters, which monitors the right wing media. See White House refuses to repudiate controversial Limbaugh remarks for its refusal to disavow the comment of the Bush administration�s favourite shock jock Rush Limbaugh, who makes Alan Jones sound like a bleeding heart. Rush said of the tortures:

CALLER: It was like a college fraternity prank that stacked up naked men –

LIMBAUGH: Exactly. Exactly my point! This is no different than what happens at the Skull and Bones initiation and we’re going to ruin people’s lives over it and we’re going to hamper our military effort, and then we are going to really hammer them because they had a good time. You know, these people are being fired at every day. I’m talking about people having a good time, these people, you ever heard of emotional release? You of heard of need to blow some steam off?

Makes you winder what the Administration is really sorry about, doesn�t it? The torture, or the fact that it got out? An excellent blog on US politics, talking points memo, is publishing good detail of the unfolding scandal. It published this, from �The Nelson Report�:

We can contribute a second hand anecdote to newspaper stories on rising concern, last year, from Secretary of State Powell and Deputy Secretary Armitage about Administration attitudes and the risks they might entail: according to eye witnesses to debate at the highest levels of the Administration…the highest levels…whenever Powell or Armitage sought to question prisoner treatment issues, they were forced to endure what our source characterizes as “around the table, coarse, vulgar, frat-boy bully remarks about what these tough guys would do if THEY ever got their hands on prisoners….

Let’s be clear: our source is not alleging “orders” from the White House. Our source is pointing out that, as we said in the Summary, a fish rots from its head. The atmosphere created by Rumsfeld’s controversial decisions was apparently aided and abetted by his colleagues in their callous disregard for the implications of the then-developing situation, and by their ridicule of the only combat veterans at the top of this Administration.

Another good blog to follow the story through American eyes is Kevin Drum�s washingtonmonthlyblog. Kevin cites prior warnings of prisoner abuse to the Bush Administration by former US weapons inspector David Kay and Paul Bremer, to no avail.

We now know the Red Cross warned the Yanks about systemic prisoner abuse in Iraq a year ago (see Red Cross report describes systematic U.S. abuse in Iraq and Jailed Iraqis hidden from Red Cross, says US army:

US military policemen moved unregistered Iraqi prisoners, known as “ghost detainees”, around an army-run jail at Abu Ghraib, in order to hide them from the Red Cross, according to a confidential military report.

The report on abuses at Abu Ghraib prison – a copy of which was obtained by the Guardian – described the practice of hiding prisoners as “deceptive, contrary to army doctrine, and in violation of international law”.

Last night on Lateline, Geoffrey Robertson QC said he would expect Australia to have got a copy, as we are also obliged to respect the Geneva Conventions as an occupying power. Did we get it? If not, why not? When did Howard and Downer know this was going on, and did they protest to the Americans? When is the Australia media going to get stuck into this story on the home front????

Over to you.

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Denise Parkinson

Some years back I did a prep course to enter Sydney Uni in psychology, where we were shown a film on the Stanford Prison Experiment which got out of hand in 6 days and had to be closed down. With the recent events in Abu Ghraib jail, it stuck me that an almost identical situation occurred happened during this experiment. I have just gone through the site on the prison experiments and found this photo. The homepage is prisonexp

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Louissa Rogers

My son is two and a half. Due to his age and his developing language skills, sometimes, when frustrated or angry or both, he hits or throws things. I have been teaching him that in no circumstances do we hit, no matter how angry we get. It is okay to not like what someone is doing but we do not use violence, we use our words to sort it out.

My darling young child saw those photographs on the news and heard my gasp of horror. “What’s happened Mum” “Some people have hurt some other people” I told him. “They still learning not to hit Mum?” In the words of an innocent, shouldn’t they have learned this already? How can we expect children to believe violence is not okay, when those very people governing our nation obviously condone it. I’m not talking about the photos; I’m talking about being there in the first place. Shame on you Howard.

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Sally McLaren in Kyoto, Japan

Even before I read Torture as pornography, I was thinking – why are we seeing so many images of Lynndie England and Sabrina Harman and why do we now know so much about them? The writer put it well why we shouldn’t be surprised about these images, and what they tell us about western society, torture and sexuality. However, she is talking about the images in general and what they mean.

I want to know – why are the same images of two female soldiers being used repeatedly by the media? What does this tell us about how the media are constructing the story?

The other degrading images of the Iraqi detainees show male soldiers either posing with the now infamous two female soldiers, or in groups. But we these men do not appear to be named in the published or broadcast images as often, if at all, as England and Harman are. These two faces are representing the disgrace of the US Army and they are female faces.

In patriarchal societies, and I don�t just mean Muslim or Middle Eastern ones, there couldn�t be a more inflammatory image � a female soldier humiliating male captives. I think it says on the most basic level � �look what women with power can do�.

These images are powerful and like disturbing and violent images from other conflicts they will remain with us for a very long time.

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Jenny Green

A bunch of my friends suggested that I read the Taguba report and do a summary, since I�ve nagged them about needing to be aware of what was going on. I am horrified beyond words, and I just want to go home and have many, many gins and get it all out of my head.

It’s full of military abbreviations, and the first few pages are hard going because of it, but around page 15/16 and 18/19, there are quotes from witness statements and from the American suspects. One particularly horrifying thing is that several suspect reservists – although since basing their defence on the line that they were ordered to do these things by military intelligence (who are described as actually being present at one of the interrogations) – claim that they can’t remember who exactly from MI gave them the explicit order.

The report finds that the military police in charge of Abu Ghraib were given no training or instruction on the applicable rules of the Geneva Convention relative to the treatment of prisoners of war. And no copies of the Geneva convention were available to either MP personnel or detainees. In fact, if the excerpts of MP statements I read were anything to go by, the MP would have barely been capable of reading it, let alone understanding it. As for the detainees, I hardly think it would have OCCURRED to the MI or MP that they should provide a copy of the convention in Arabic.

But the most disturbing aspect of the report by far is the suggestion that several mini-investigations were conducted into complaints of abuse within the compound, and although court martial was recommended, there is no evidence that Brigadier Karpinksi ever reminded MP soldiers of the conventions regarding detainee treatment or took any steps to ensure that the abuse was not repeated. THE ABUSE WAS TACITLY APPROVED, EVEN AFTER THE DIRECT COMMANDER OF THE SOLDIERS INVOLVED AND THE BRIGADIER HE REPORTED TO WERE WELL AWARE OF WHAT WAS GOING ON.

The most concrete recommendations are that 1) a “multi-discipline mobile training team” is sent to conduct short training courses for the MP on the relevant Geneva Conventions; and 2) that a single commanding officer be responsible for overall detainee operations throughout the “Iraq theatre of operations”.

The running of several detention facilities, but particularily Abu Ghraib and Camp Bucca are described as inconsistent from detention facility to detention facility, from compound to compound, from encampment to encampment, and even from shift to shift. NO MENTION IS MADE OF THE FACT THAT THESE ARE RESERVISTS, NOT CAREER SOLDIERS!

The whole NDRS (the US system for registering and recording the arrival, processing and transfer of detainees) is fucked. Often detainees are not listed until 4 days after their arrival. Transfers are omitted – on a massive scale. Both Abu Ghraib and Camp Bucca are well and truly over their maximum capacity.

In November 03 the detainees of an entire encampment of Abu Ghraib rioted in protest of their living conditions. The MP battalion attempted something called “Golden spike” – a containment plan (which according to the times listed cannot have gone for that long). When this failed, the use of deadly force was authorised. Twelve detainees were shot – of these, 3 shot dead. This is only one of a lengthy list of escapes. In more than once case, the escape attempts

In one case, 5 detainees were wounded (June 03) during a riot. The riot was said to have been sparked by one of the detainnee’s being subdued by the MP’s after striking one of them. Once the detainee was subdued, a MP took off his shirt and paraded himself in front of the detainees, which further escalated the riot. The guards fired live rounds into the crowd.

The reasons given for these incidents are listed as poor lighting around the compound, overcrowding, poor communication amongst guards and MPs, no clear chain of command between guards and MPs, facility-obstructed view of posted guards, outdated and inadequate emergency procedures, lack of comprehensive training of guards, no formal guard-mount conducted prior to shift, no rehearsals or ongoing training, rules of engagement, unclear lines of responsibility, and ambiguous relationship between the MI and MP, complacency, and lack of leadership presence.

The investigation pointed out that rules and guidelines were not posted in the camps in the detainee’s native languages.

And I’m only halfway through the report. Dear God.

Glenn Condell

I read Cameron Jackson’s comments in The Human Spirit one year after war on Iraq with interest and foreboding. I tried to access the site he mentioned (http://www.albasrah.net/images/iraqi-pow/iraqi-pow) and was likewise unable to get through.

My first thought was admittedly Orwellian but then I found the site’s homepage, albasrah. The photos of the carnage in Fallujah are shocking, more shocking for me than the torture images, which I found disturbing and sad but unsurprising.

Partly the shock comes from the fact that no amount of looking at pictures of mutilated children can inure a normal person to it; but mostly it comes from the absence of these proofs of our atrocities in our media. The torture images shocked because they were images, because they gave flesh to our nightmares. They were impervious to interpretation and spin. Written and oral allegations of abuse had been ignored for months. In a landscape if lies, the photos at least were true.

And that truth, having broken out of the apparatus of news control via the courage of whistleblowers, permitted long dormant American consciences to thaw, as your citation of the piece ‘Lew Rockwell’ site points out:

And now, taking everyone by surprise, a relatively insignificant element in the myriad of blunders that the invasion has visited on that unhappy desert land has brought the entire imperial enterprise in Iraq to teeter on the brink. Corruption, slaughter, and deception all failed to ignite the American domestic imagination. But the revelation that a few Iraqi prisoners might have been tortured by a few inexperienced noncoms from the Appalachian backwoods (where I live), has suddenly brought the careening imperial juggernaut of the world�s sole superpower to a screeching halt.

If the world’s media had front paged the images from Falluja the day after it happened, and emphasised the appalling ratio of US revenge, then the reaction would have rivaled, perhaps even surpassed that afforded the torture pics. They too may have ignited ‘the American domestic imagination’ (and the Australian one too) something this administration, even more than most, has tried desperately to avoid.

It is his responsibility for this ignition that has Donald Rumsfeld on the ropes, far more than any responsibility for the actual crimes.

If the world’s media had front paged the images from Falluja the day after it happened, and emphasised the appalling ratio of US revenge, then the reaction would have rivaled, perhaps even surpassed that afforded the torture pics.

They too may have ignited ‘the American domestic imagination’ (and the Australian one too) something this administration, even more than most, has tried desperately to avoid. It is his responsibility for this ignition that has Donald Rumsfeld on the ropes, far more than any responsibility for the actual crimes.

The regular publication of photos like these would provide a reminder of what we are a party to, of what sticking around to ‘finish the job’ might mean, and a graphic illustration of what feeds the terrorist imagination.

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David Mieluk in Terrigal, NSW tunes into the overhanging issue in Iraq � OIL

I have stumbled upon an argument that has questioned my whole outlook on the war in Iraq, the politics of oil, and the U.S. government policy of hegemony.

A number of commentators on the internet are presenting evidence that the global ability to produce oil will soon fall beneath the global demand. That is, whilst historically, when demand for oil rose it was possible that increases in world oil production could satiate that demand, this may soon not be possible. The consequences would be a rapid, continuous, and sizable escalation of oil prices in the short and long term. A rapid escalation of the price of oil has the potential to catastrophically affect world trade, and if the argument presented, the likelihood is a devastating decrease in standard of living for the entire world population.

One very readable summary of this argument (though four years old) is worldoil and gas. See alsohubbertpeak, peakoil and lifeaftertheoilcrash. (Margo: And see economist Paul Krugman�s latest column, The oil crunch.)

I am not a �protesty� type of person. I consider myself to be extremely sceptical of arguments that might be considered �doomsday-ish�.

I write because I have been deeply affected by this argument. On the one hand, this is because I have been unable to flaw the reasoning presented in the argument. On the other hand, I am utterly flabbergasted that, if the argument is valid, I have not heard about it.

I do not understand why this situation is not the main current public debate. I am, perhaps, in my young years, poisoned by naivety into believing that if a truly devastating threat lurked on the horizon, politicians would cease playing politics and work together to find a solution. That appears not to have happened.

If this argument is accurate, then, dare I ask, how much do things like the ethics of Australian party politics and human rights abuses in Iraq really matter?

Margo: Webdiary discussed this argument at length before the war � it is partly why most people in Europe believe that Bush invaded Iraq for its oil. For example, see Controil. You�d think we�d be focusing on reducing or reliance on oil, wouldn�t you? Not a bar of it.

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Matt Southon

I was hoping that my next comments on this forum would be a retrospective, a ‘what if’ had Jeb and the chads had not seen an illegal occupation of the White House, and instead September 11 had occurred on Al Gore’s watch. The global outpouring of sincere support may have seen us still united behind the US, however, watching Paul Bremer join the growing list of ‘apologists’ for the recent disgusting photos to come from Iraq, I was again struck by the hollowness of the rhetoric. It got me thinking – what is the point of emotionally based language when emotion is no longer a part of leadership?

There have been many comprehensive articles written examining the ‘spin’ of our current crop, but why do we buy it? Why do we continually allow these blatant manipulations of language to enter our thought processes and ‘assist’ us in reaching ‘educated’ decisions? Apart from the fact that we have little choice currently, it has been a long process of doublespeak that has subconsciously trained many to either shut it out or try so hard to glean truth that it becomes a draining exercise in cynicism (at which time one can be easily dismissed as being far too cynical).

These days it is easier to switch to brain candy mode and see what our gardens and houses should be looking like this week, or staring at people we feel have less control over their lives as they compete with, then against, each other in a microcosm all to often designed (supposedly) to reflect the ‘real world’.

I know its a long bow to draw, but public/political life, the area in which people traditionally felt a nation is defined, directed and led, has become a vacuous spin hole, seemingly now all about political survival for the self absorbed individual and not anything to do with the above long held premise.

Therefore, people are (or were) flocking to reality genres in order to replace the distinct lack of leadership that defines our national values. If our leader won�t tell us or listen to us, at least Don Burke and Jamie Durie will give some direction to tide us over till next week. More broadly, reality TV shows are the pointy end of materialism replacing national identity as worn out people define themselves not in the collective Aussie vernacular of past identity, but by their couch or their BBQ or the label on the clothing. Everything else is just too removed from their daily existence.

Nobody really expects politicians to be absolutely free of moral quagmires – politics in the age of globalisation is a vicious game. But at least traditional battles were fought with some sense of moral rightness, therefore the language that stemmed from that essential human belief echoed the emotional sentiments of a person caught up in a difficult process.

We cannot blame spin on this outbreak of war in Iraq. What we can say is that spin has been creeping into every facet of interaction in our lives, personal and political, so that when the spin meter is severely cranked up such as the current case, we yawn and distrust what we are hearing (unless it is about a nice new cafe or product).

War is peace love is hate blah blah blah. It is a bit like that old anecdote about frogs and boiling water, you put a frog into a pot of cold water and slowly boil it, the frog will happily swim about until its environment is toxic to its existence and it dies unaware. Chuck the frog into hot water and it jumps straight back out again unscathed.

We are the frogs, the cold water is the government spin. Our death will be the failure of democratic principles, so spun they (and we) don�t know what they stand for, or who they really should be, leading to a crisis of confidence.

On the current disgusting crisis and the empty language of absent morality, we all now now that the reason for this invasion was not WMDs or terrorism (as Gore Vidal said, how do you declare war on a noun?), not the desire to impart democracy in any real way, not even regime change -except to install a regime nicer to the US.

The most likely reason is to get a strategic position in the Middle East through which to protect the Saudis and Israel, and to prepare for the peak oil crisis that may have already begun. It is also about protecting the outflow of oil being traded in Euros. Perhaps this is a reason why France and Germany were not forthcoming – hardly a humanitarian reason, but what spin did they employ? Humanitarian of course.

Very few in the Western world would regard this these reasons as just, therefore an incredible amount of spin is required. The only way to sell an unjust, sinister war is to telllie upon lie upon lie until the truth is just one more subjective take on events and it too can be clouded by spin – “With us or against us” “Un Australian” “Questioning the war is not supporting the individual on the ground” etc. All these statements force an opposing view to begin from a basis of unpatriotic, treasonous thought processes, thus weakening any cohesive argument put thereafter.

“Yes sir, you might be right but we are there now so there is no point arguing anymore, don�t you want the US to win?� or “We must stay until the job is done”.

By the time we wade through half truths, half facts, internal investigations and half apologies, we have forgotten what all the fussin, feudin and a fightin was about. Or as Homer put it “Before, before! Quit livin in the past Marge”.

In the past, the buck stopped here. Now the world�s most powerful man sees the worlds most powerful army committing terrible acts on 60 Minutes!! C’mon now, really? If that is true, it is appalling, if it is false, it is equally appalling, but in the meantime the finger pointing continues until a good news story rings the Pavlovian bell and the game begins again.

Our leader blames everyone but himself every time. I was not told, I did not know, on and on. And what happens when he finds out? Prevarication to the point that people forget what was going on, realise a dead horse can only be flogged so much, or something else happens – like Ian Thorpe falls into the pool.

Just recapping, spin is in, truth is subjective, reasons for conflict were hidden, reasons given for the conflict were largely ‘humanitarian’ as we were ‘liberating’ Iraqi’s from tyranny. But, as Margo mentioned on Sunday, the only protection afforded in Baghdad was for the Oil Ministry, and undeniably, atrocities are occurring. It is not, I expect, a truly apologetic nation we are now seeing, but a red faced petulant child caught with its hand firmly in the cookie jar. Of course they are sorry, sorry they were busted.

Many opposed to the war were aware of the potential threat of words and actions not matching, and many knew the humanitarian arguments were false. If the Iraqis knew months ago what was happening how can G W Bush not know? My feeling, he did. Further, he is not sorry. Were those that took part in the crusades apologetic for the barbaric conduct in the name of God? No, they believed they were right. Again we have a geo-political situation whereby ideologies are the sock puppets, while under the surface the power brokers get what they came for, oil…power…control.

Herein lies the dilemma. The ideologies have now been unarguably stripped back to reveal the true intention of the power brokers. Unlike any other war, these power brokers are also responsible for perpetuating the myth.

Frighteningly, they are the government! They do not ‘know’ the government, they are it. They peddled one story while acting out another. This time however, the images are too graphic, too cut and dried, too obviously illegal. What has been the response? Some ‘sorries’ mixed in with a further politicisation and filibustering. Some buck passing to the lowest level of authority in Iraq (the soldiers, who get what they deserve), Rummy running out of patience with questioning of his methods and a President going on Arab TV and not saying sorry!

He did eventually but it isn�t washing. No one is buying it. The lead up to these acts has pared back the authority or legitimacy of words, because the acts themselves contravene everything asserted. The lewdness and vulgarity jar the senses, the fact that these methods are thought up by those who purport to believe in democratic principle are shocking and sickeningly awe inspiring in their degrading intent. The repulsion is deeper than political or religious divides now, and a comment from the Iraqi governing council that all prisoners should be released as a show of good faith (not forgetting that many are held without charge) was met with a big fat no.

They did apologise again though, but what�s the point? Paul Bremer may well have come out and said he was a chicken and his favorite past time was taxidermy, George Bush may as well have ignored the issue, or red-necked it up to incite further voter parochialism. What difference do words now make, when the globe has witnessed an illegal conquest so askew with purported truths that no one could believe any word spoken by those at the helm any longer.

PS: I thought recently that Latham�s call to remove troops came after a briefing with Intelligence Agencies and was driven by a fact or facts he was told but could not repeat. There would be nothing to gain in Australia’s opposition exposing these crimes, but plenty for an opposition if they were made public eventually. Do you think maybe that Latham knew or was told what was happening and decided to base his policy on that, while waiting for the public to catch up when the truth comes out as it has now?