lying your way towards democracy

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Lockerbie/Story/0,,2105327,00.html

Its hard to believe, but prior to the War on Terror, there were unfair, politically motivated trials of "terrorists" whose charges were the result of political expedient fixes and manipulated outcomes, but this would have to be one of the worst. The lockerbie bombing was one the worst terrorist act prior to September 11, 2001, and probably the biggest miscarriage of justice ever seen under the international criminal justice system.

Nothing much about it made any sense, unless you took into account the happenings on the political stage, none of which should have made one bit of difference if justice were to be truly served. The trial and its ridiculous out come have tainted the international courts and coloured international diplomacy for nearly two decades.

Without going into all the too many details, the trial judges accepted as proof the word of a man whose story changed with each payment he received, called the man and firm who made the timer on the bomb (an international firm) unreliable and mistaken while ignoring all proof which said they were completely correct, discounted the most likely outcome in favour of a far fetched fantasy and generally behaved as though they were lapdogs to the wishes of the Thatcher/Regan/Bush agenda. The story the judges accepted as true in the delivery of the bomb, even they admitted relied upon a set of circumstances that were to say the least tortuously bizarre, went along these lines, the bomb arrived in Malta and was placed aboard a pan am flight, unseen (except by the paid informant), traveled to germany through two stops, unseen and uncounted, was placed aboard another flight, unseen and uncounted, to london, where it was then placed aboard its final pan am flight. The ignored a witness who said that he had not only noted the bag being placed aboard the flight directly in london, they ignored the only document which stated explicitly that the only unaccompanied brown bag was to be found in the london leg of the flight.

Not only this, the initial suspects, a PLO splinter group (contracted out by the Iranian Government) who had a history of making and using the exact same devices (and who had one of the bombs of the exact same make go missing), were mysteriously overlooked as suspects, despite all evidence pointing to them. Why? Because by the time the need for suspects to be tried came around, the political circumstances had changed. Initially the suspected instigators of the bombing where Iranian, seeking revenge for the US downing of one of their passenger liners over the gulf by the USS vincennes, however the US/Brits needed Iran on side for the first gulf war against Iraq, so we end up with Libya as the culprit, being as they were, the Hitler De Jour of the time.

So if the defendant Megrahi is finally proven innocent, will the international community apologise to Libya for forcing the country to pay reparations for a crime it did not commit, do some soul searching and clean up the international courts or will the US and Brits simply move onto Iran, today's Hitler de jour, as though nothing has happened. That's my favoured outcome, forget the corruption of justice with a further blast of politically expedient nonsense. Like the invasion of Iraq, the true story will not be told for a hundred years.

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Straining the bounds of credibility is hardly a new thing for the Howard government, outright blatant, lying to the electorate in the face of months of bad polls is now becoming the norm for this font of devious scumbags.

"and the governments plans for broadband will not cost the public purse a cent" Peter Costello has repeated said, even as he rolls out a further $1.9 billion to give to his preferred supplier on top of the $4.1 billion to add to the $600-900 million. So nearly $7 billion dollars given over to supplicant telcos just does not register in the eyes of our treasurer. Is this because it is all going to shore up support in liberal marginal electorates it can be wiped out as a phantom expense?

Not only are their spin on the costings a complete lie, their spin on coverage is a complete lie. The only way that their wireless technology can deliver the speeds they are "promising" to 99% of the population, is if only 10% of the population uses it, anything above that will slice gigabytes off the supposed speed of the downloads.

Senator Coonan admitted last night that the Government's rural and regional wireless network could become overloaded. "That can happen to any system," she said.

Combine this with the knowledge that anyone who lives beyond the optimal range of the relay towers, 20 km, will face a coomensurate reduction in rates and the governments admission that its plans for 99% coverage relys upon a 50km range with an unproven technology and we have a plan that adds up to a complete crock of shit. An expensive, pre-election quick fix, aimed purely at marginal liberal electorates. How much more of my money will this flailing, useless, vision less, retrograde government throw at getting itself re-elected? How many more lies are in store besides those already being trotted out on unions, global warming, the state of the economy and the sun shining from that hole in the PM's constantly shifting arse?

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"The chances of democratic progress in the broader Middle East have seemed frozen in place for decades," Bush said at the National Defense University at Fort McNair. "Yet, at last, clearly and suddenly, the thaw has begun."

Bush, putting Mubarak on the spot, delineated what he would consider acceptable conditions for elections in Egypt: "freedom of assembly, multiple candidates, free access by those candidates to the media and the right to form political parties."

"It should be clear that the advance of democracy leads to peace because governments that respect the rights of their people also respect the rights of their neighbors," he said. "It should be clear the best antidote to radicalism and terror is the tolerance kindled in free societies."

GW: A free Iraq will not destabilize the Middle East. A free Iraq can set a hopeful example to the entire region and lead other nations to choose freedom. And as the pursuits of freedom replace hatred and resentment and terror in the Middle East, the American people will be more secure.

With all the talk of democracy flowing like very cheap wine from the lips of our power drunk overlords, you would think that it meant something. Instead, we know from experience it means nothing. In Iraq, 80% of the population say that they had no idea who they were voting for in their much vaunted election, between 70 and 80% also say that they would not vote for the same crowd of bickering clowns again. When the PLO recognised Israel and were voted into office, they were ignored and sidelined by Israel, who preferred to give concessions to Hama's over Mahkmood Abbas, then when Hama's were elected, they refused to deal with them and hermetically sealed them into the twin prisons of the West Bank and Gaza.

When Egypt held sham elections, the Bushies endorsed the sham. When the Saudis held sham elections, and backtracked on even those, the Bushies held them up as signs of "progress". Donald Rumsfeld held up Algeria's military dictators and their obliteration of democracy as a guide to how they should rule Iraq. When Ms Marcos 2 rigged and blatantly stole the Philippines election, the Bushies increased her military budget and increased their ties. While Putin has spent years whittling away at even the pretence of having an open, honest and democratic system, GW has practically given the guy a handjob with each passing meeting (until his mild little rebuke a couple of weeks ago). The Bushies endorsed the fraudulent Ukrainian election, before backtracking and belatedly supporting the Orange revolution.

Despite a hundred threats to the Palestinians to cut off funding if they didn't hold elections, the second they did and Hamas was overwhelmingly elected, they cut off funding. In Iran, they are spending vast amounts of money and calling for the overthrow of the democratically elected government. In Lebanon, they are doing the same by sidelining 60% of the population who voted for Hezbollah.

This list of hypocrisy is not by any stretch of the imagination complete (indeed it is barely a start), we simply need to acknowledge one fact, the Bush call for democracy is not a call for democratically elected governments, its a call for nations to elect governments that the US wants to be elected. Anything else will simply be rejected and punished accordingly, in the new american century, would we expect the myth to be any less. Bush, like Howard, is a masterpiece of spin over the any semblance of truth or honesty or sense.

"Olmert and President Bush want to seize the opportunity offered by recent events in the Palestinian territories in order to move forward towards future peace talks," a senior Israeli official said.

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice yesterday said that "we're at a critical juncture for the Israeli and Palestinian peoples, one at which the choices are ever more clear". "We must take hold of this moment to make new progress toward the vision that President Bush laid out five years ago this week: two states, Israel and Palestine, living side by side in peace and security."

spin, torture, lies. all in a days work for democracy.