blame it on the bullshit: the week in review

A game for all the family, whenever a federal government minister is asked a question about Iraq, count the number of times they mention Al Queda. See if you can keep up.

...................................................

When the Haneef case was first revealed, Little Old Johnie and his first rate team of experts, puffed out their chests and demanded that the electorate look at how big they were in handling terrorism cases, how extra-minty strong they were on national security. Over scenes of blazing cars in the UK, Howard and his minions, trumpeted their credentials, overrode the justice system and did all they could to link their old order to the detention and deportation of a single man, a dusky skinned foreigner at that.

In 2001, they could play that card for all its worth and sit back and expect the voters to lap it up, Tampa showed just how far the voters were willing to suspend all sense of fairness and truth, in the search for that elusive goal of total national "security". How the world has changed.
Nowadays we have had so many lies and blatant distortions thrown in our face in the name of the "war on terror", that even such bastions of suspended disbelief, the herald/sun and the Australian, start to question the underlying assumptions of the governments self serving pronouncements, of courses that's always after trumpeting the government line for a day or so.

Our PM, when Haneef was first arrested: "I will say that Dr Haneef is entitled, like any other person, to a presumption of innocence."

.....but...

"All of this is a reminder that terrorism is a global threat. You can't pick and choose where you fight terrorism. You can't say I'll fight it over there but I won't fight it here. It's also fair to say that the anti-terrorism laws that this Government has enacted are all, to their very last clause needed … If we need to strengthen them, we will … But I am not going to make any comment about Dr Haneef's case."

The PM puffs out his chest and brands the man a terrorist, ties him in with Iraq, ties him in with his own desire to beef up laws that were not needed in any case, but then the case falls apart. Falls apart even though the Immigration minister has told the world that innocence or guilt or justice will play no part in his man handling of the case. In the old days the arrest and deportation of a foreigner would have given Howard an instant boost in the ratings, his declaration would have run along the tampa line, "we will decide who comes to this country" or he might have branded Haneef "the worst of the worst" as he did with David Hicks and then let the matter drag on for as long as possible to get the most traction in the polls. Well the Hicks case, as Michelle Gratten points out in the age today, was probably the straw that broke the camels back. The people are no longer prepared to sit back and allow the lie to continue a minute longer than the burden of proof allows. Perhaps the Hicks case simple allowed the public to grasp hold of a face, a real life person, an individual, upon whom the injustices of the war on terror can be visited and not just a government slogan about their own sheriffs status.

If the government wonders why its falling so low in the polls, its a simple matter of 11 years of outright lies accumulating until even the most blind can see that they are being spun a right load of bollocks, yet again. The perception of the public has shifted and repeating the same falsehoods to an already skeptical public just reinforces the idea that you are being fed a right load of crap, and nothing, except a complete, bald reversal on everything you've stood for can alter that ie: global warming. That then runs the risk that you seen as being in a total, flailing panic, and that's what we have at every turn, the last days of Howard have turned into one crisis after another, from water, to climate, to indigenous affairs, to housing, to interest rates, to ...the list is endless. In the lead up to the seemingly never to come election, the politics of fear are being ramped up to an hysterical level, if you cant win the voters with ideas, you can win them over with a dozen phony crisis, but that then makes people wonder, who's been in power while all these "crisis" have been allowed to occurred.

Of course, then there's the government denial that this or anything else in their arsenal of bullshit has anything to do with politics, the only people who play politics are the opposition. So we have Downer, the incompetent fool Ruddock, and the Pm himself actually blaming Rudd for agreeing with them, declaring a vast conspiracy of Labor leaders in order to play politics with an issue they claim has no political value. For fuks sake.

To add to the complete unreality of the situation, the government claims that its complete stuff up of the Haneef case, is a rationale for imposing even tougher anti terrorism laws, somehow claiming that the right to a magistrate to review any case is a fundamental injustice done to the nation as a whole. In the UK, which has the toughest anti-terror laws in the western world, the people charged have a whole month in confinement, a whole month where the press can only print the word of the governments and polices strategic leaks, then when the matter comes to court, the press is once again muzzled from printing anything. So in the Haneef case, under the UK laws, we would have had a whole month of nothing but the governments underground line, the sim card was found in the blazing truck, not several hundred miles away, the plot to blow up a gold coast highrise and a thousand other lurid lies slowly filtering out through the compliant press.

Howards defence and excuse now is to look at the AFP, saying, well they are independent of us, they are at arms length from the government, we have nothing to do with anything at all. Remember back to when AFP Cheerleader, Bill Kelty, said that the war in Iraq was possibly fueling resentment and terrorism, remember how quickly Howard jumped on the "independent" leader of the AFP. Within 24 hours the spineless government lackey Kelty had completely reversed his position and was forced to retract in a publicly humiliating fashion, everything he had spoken of the day before. But of course, he is utterly independent of the Howard government. There are so many issues at play regarding the blatant politicisation of the public service that only a change of government will bring the vile nature of the incumbents will suffice to add balance.

Its only been in the last few weeks that Dick Cheney has been forced to hand over any documents in relation to his 2001 energy commission task force. The situation was that the energy policy of the entire US was being written by the fossil fuel lobby at the behest of the VP in the first real display of Cheneys power in the US before 9/11. Cheney has fought tooth and nail not to reveal any details whatsoever about even who was at the meetings, keeping everything within the purview of executive privileged. Everything pointed to the modern equivalent of crony capitalism, the chief exec's of the major oil and fossil fuel industries directly writing their own legislation under the loving gaze of the their own bought and paid for president. It set the tone for the rest of the Bush administration, with the Iraq war possibly the first US crony capitalist proxy war of the modern era, just witness who makes the most profit from the invasion, all the old chums of the VP.

We see the same in our own country, the Gunns group in Tasmania, practically dictating the terms of their own legislation to ever so willing pollies, the Hugh Morgans et al, not even bothering to show any decency by waiting until the PM has a chance to announce their agenda in parliament, before registering companies of nuclear intent.

So do we trust this PM to do anything besides look after himself and his cronies, on any matter. Do we trust him to say or do anything, other than that which will play well in the polls? Do we trust the man not to spit in our faces, yet again and tell us its raining. The answers are in the polls, a resounding no.

When it comes to bullshit, the Bushies have no parallel:

Alberto Gonzales, testifying : "The dissent related to other intelligence activities," Gonzales testified at Tuesday's hearing. "The dissent was not about the terrorist surveillance program."

FBI Director Robert S. Mueller, Thursday: the government's terrorist surveillance program was the topic of a 2004 hospital room dispute between top Bush administration officials.

Tony Snow, the bushies offical mouthpeice: "There is no contradiction in the testimony"

Background: House chief of staff Andy Card headed to a Washington hospital room, where a sedated Ashcroft was recovering from surgery. Ashcroft had already turned over his powers as attorney general to Comey. Comey was in the hospital room as well, and recounted to senators in his own sworn testimony in May that he "thought I just witnessed an effort to take advantage of a very sick man, who did not have the powers of the attorney general because they had been transferred to me." Ultimately, Ashcroft sided with Comey, and Gonzales and Card left the hospital after a five- to six-minute conversation. Gonzales denied that he and Card tried to pressure Ashcroft into approving the program over Comey's objections.

The simple rule is, if you say it aint so, it just aint so. The truth is always exactly what you want it to be. Watch out for major terrorism anouncement, made to order, to distract the viewers from the stench. Maybe the capture of a top tenner, or a foiled plot or just another "credible threat", that one always plays well to the news cycle.

.....................................................

On Iraq: the US embassy, the biggest embassy in the entire world, is being bult by slave labour.

During testimony before the House Oversight Committee today, Rory Mayberry, a former subcontract employee of the firm responsible for the construction of the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, said he believes that at least 52 Filipino nationals had been kidnapped to work on the embassy project. He testified:

Mr. Chairman, when the airplane took off and the captain announced that we were heading to Baghdad, all you-know-what broke out on the airplane. The men started shouting, it wasn’t until the security guy working for First Kuwaiti waved an MP5 in the air that the men settled down. They realized that they had no other choice but to go to Baghdad. Let me spell it out clearly: I believe these men were kidnapped by First Kuwaiti to work at the US Embassy… I’ve read the State Department Inspector General’s report on the construction of the embassy. Mr. Chairman, it’s not worth the paper it’s printed on. This is a cover-up and I’m glad that I’ve had the opportunity to set the record straight.

http://thinkprogress.org/2007/07/26/slave-labor-used-to-contruct-us-embassy-in-baghdad/