drumbeats..and the inevitable headache

Perhaps John Ashcroft was right when in his "retirement" speech after being booted out of power said that "we have won the war on terror and the war on drugs". Most just thought that it was another sign of the ultra fundementalists slip into the abyss of madness, another sign pointing towards a mind that was already planning to quietly slip into the bunker where the "saved" would gather and start to write memoirs al la The Book of Revelations. But today we have proof that maybe, just maybe, he was right, batshit crazy, but somehow right.

In Sydney, the tight circle of terrorism is emphasised by a man who pleaded guilty to terrorism in the US, identifies one of the accused as having been in his circle. Ignore the fact that in 2003 he had no idea who the "alleged terrorist" was and only remembered in 2005 after having his sentence reduced, also ignore the fact that the terrorist was convicted of basically playing paintball and his arrest was part of an FBI operation that resembled entrapment, as so many US terrorism convictions do.

(see john delorean for a good example of what entrapment is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_DeLorean )

In France, Willie Brigette is sentenced to 9 years for a plot in Australia on the back of evidence gathered from those who pled guilty and further evidence gained through "coercion". He is charged with a "crime" commited in Australia, yet wasnt prosecuted in Australia?

Meanwhile, the man who really did it all, and I mean all, is sort of paraded before the "court", ecluding the fact that is what not a court and what we recieved was a redacted statement read out by his prosecutor. Khalid Sheikh Mohamed has confessed to every major and minor terrorist attack since 1993, so all we needed to do was invade him and the Iraq/Afghan wars would have been rendered invalid. And since he has been in custody since 2003 that just proves that John Ashcroft was right all along, the war on terror has been won, in as little as 2 minutes.

"CIA officers told ABC News that 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed lasted the longest under water boarding, two and a half minutes, before beginning to talk."

Now what does this say about the techiques for judging the War on Terror and all those who have pled guilty, or hung by their own words or hung others on the evidence of those words?

One moment Sheikh Mohammed is the brilliant mastermind of 9/11, the next he is the utter dunce who recruited and instructed Richard Reid, the shoebomber, who failed miserably to the point of forgetting to pack a match and is clearly a loon of the lowest order of merit .

Our government and the US government love to point to guilty verdicts and "confessions" as reasons to continue prosecuting the long war, as reasons to continue to scare old ladies as they walk down to the shops, yet so few of the guilty verdicts are untainted by torture, false evidence, paid informants, suspect deals and just plain proscector malfeasance and paranoia that it is hard to credit them for anything like what they appear to be. When Bush stands before the US congress and touts in his state of the union address "successes" in the war on terror that turn out to be utter shit, each and every one, (look up his "successes" and trace thier level of bullshit) and our own transvestite foriegn minister, Downer, ties such claptrap to his own parties success in steering a course of action, can anyone wonder why the public and media are starting to seriously question the entire premise of this intergenerational struggle. So much of it is just hogwash from start to finish.

Thats not to say that terrorism doesnt exist, its just to point out that conflating random acts into global policy and then using it for purely party political reasons is a truly absurd. Acts of violence in Kashmir have a completely different basis to acts performed in indonesia, chechnia or iraq, yet we are constantly bombarded with reasoning based upon the idea that all are intricately intertwined. There is something so grubby about this supposedly "war of civilisation as we know it" that it will take a thousand scholars a thousand years of throwing monkeys at typewriters just to sort plain everday bullshit into a semblance of truth.

Like the war on drugs, the cures proscibed are so much more deadly than the disease, the cures all involve blanket deprivation of individual and societal liberty, invasions of nations on flimsy or false pretexts, torture, assasinations, lowering the standards of evidence to obtain guilty verdicts, undermining our court systems and blatant politicisation of national security (see cheney et al for that) and corruption on a massive scale. In fighting this war of ideas we have proven ourselves bankrupt by forgetting that ideas do not flow from the barrel of a gun, and yet that appears to be the basis of all we do.

Can you fight for freedom with shackles, internment without trial, torture, assination and the corruption of our laws and just plain old fashioned corruption as your main weapons?

Unfortunately all major parties have succumbed to the disease, with few prepared to call the war on terror what it is, bullshit. On the ABC on tuesday night, an ex-sas man Peter Tinley, standing for pre-selection for the ALP, was brave enough to say exactly that, to call out those in power in the hope that the direction we are currently heading in will change. Change is more than overdue, I suspect that a major part of the world sufered a nervous breakdown after the 9/11 attacks, and people durring a breakdown are not the most rational ones to turn for credible answers. Or any answers, just a lot of flailing, moaning and calls for help. Thats why we have laws which resemble pre-emptive strikes, you dont need to prove a crime has been committed, just that there was a possiblity of a crime being committed and then conflate the idea into lives saved (and votes gathered). This futhers the notion at later trials and makes it easier for juries to jail a man for downloading images from google, sending teams of "terrorists" to jail for playing paintball, convicting on the basis of a doodle not even scribled by the accused, giving six people 20 years jail for daring to video a holiday to disneyland or coercing any and all into pleading guilty on the basis that they will either be sent to gitmo forever or get sentences of forever if they dont. The war on terror feeds on these supposed threats and most are just paranoid lies, yet feed the appetite for the next "plot" brought before a soften up public.

John Ashcroft was right, the war on terror was won three years ago, but the damn thing just plays so well on so many levels for so many people to profit, that it would be a shame to waste any dollars or sense on a victory parade, after all that would be seen as a victory for the terrorists.

eg: France's anti-terror tsar Jean-Louis Bruguiere - who led the investigation into Brigitte's activities - announced that he would stand in France's legislative elections in May for the conservative UMP party of presidential aspirant Nicholas Sarkozy.

or ask any indonesian police chief who benefitted most from the Bali bombings, follow the millions in new equipment, uniforms, prestige, greenbacks and you may get closer to the truth.

or ask the seven innocent pakistani's gunned down in one of the Stans and the billions that brought in......

the sound of shit hitting the fan

Two for one scandals
Shadow treasurer Wayne Swan said that if "Mr Howard wants to attend a meeting with a porn king, (At the time he was facing charges of torture and grievous bodily harm; he has since been jailed) that's entirely up to him". I love porn and I vote, PM Puff Nipples has one right up him from me, now.

The fund-raiser was for candidate Andrew Laming, now being investigated over allegations of misusing his printing allowance. Phillips was invited to the lunch, for which guests paid about $2000 a head, because the partner of Ross Vasta, another MP recently raided by federal police, had invited a girlfriend, who asked Phillips.

Meawhile: In what should be the easiest election win of the year, the NSW liberals concede defeat two weeks out from the election

The Opposition Leader used a hastily called media conference in his Sydney office this morning to plead with voters for support.
Appearing shaken, he said: “All I say to the people of NSW is if you're about to elect Labor, that is very bad news.”

Perhaps climbing into bed with bizarre christian cults, being terminally stupid and without a single redeeming feature or policy could be the reason. Declaring that public transport is hardly a priority, then scrambling to say the exact opposite two days later, points to the deeper malaise inside the state liberal parties, the extreme right has hijacked the party and requires a complete rethink on every issue. Better luck in 2011 or a few decades later.

Furthermore: DUMPED federal minister Gary Hardgrave has claimed a free trip to Taiwan with his former private secretary just a week after denying she was his partner.

"If you print this story wrong, baby, I will see you in court. There is absolutely nothing incorrect."said the philandering, Mr Hardgrave, adding "bugger off" to underline the moral certanties.

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,21390681-2702,00.html