The Next Big “Sorry”

Jun 10, 2013 | Australian Values, Border Security, Citizenship, Corruption, Cultural Values, Democracy, Immigration, Legal, OzPol Values, Racism, Terrorism, USPol, Values, War

The Next Big “Sorry”

Sorry Bastards

  Want a long-range heads-up? The question we should be asking Abbott and Gillard and all of their various immigration spokespeople right now is this:  

How do you feel about the inevitability that — possibly in your lifetime — a future Prime Minister of Australia will stand up in Parliament to make a heartfelt apology on behalf of the Australian people 

— an apology for you, for what you did, for who you were and for what you stood for?

Possibly in your lifetime. Certainly in the lifetimes of your children and grandchildren, your nieces and nephews and their children, so that they can share your shame, and hate you for the shame you spill on them?

Many others, and their children and grandchildren, will share the stain of complicity, or of not speaking up against you and your hideous policies.

74 years ago another terrible, vile event occurred. A boat full of refugees left the country they grew up in, fleeing from the persecution and horrors of their homeland and seeking refuge in a safe and welcoming country. They were Jews – 937 of them – escaping from Germany. The ship was the MS St. Louis. The year was 1939. They tried to land in Cuba, Canada and the United States. Each of these countries refused them entry by various means including creating retroactive laws, tightening existing ones, or bureaucratically reinterpreting existing ones, requiring unpayable financial bonds, or invalidating valid entry permits and denying the right to seek political asylum. All of this might have a familiar stench to you. The United States Coast Guard, the ship’s non-Jewish German Captain Gustav Schröder said, forced him to turn the ship back when he tried to land in Florida. Perhaps this rings a bell for you. Hypocrisy runs deep in all societies but no deeper than the United States in this case. Inside the Statue of Liberty since 1903 there has been a bronze plaque, a poem written by Emma Lazarus in 1883.
“ From her beacon-hand Glows world-wide welcome” it says. “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
Of course there was much breast-beating  and public displays of sympathy on the part of all the countries, who met to find a solution that could see the 937 refugees settled safely. Just not in the USA, Canada or Cuba thank you. But anywhere else. Eventually the ship was forced to return to Europe. Many were accepted by the UK, France, Belgium and the Netherlands. As you know, Europe was at war and only the UK was not overrun and occupied by the Germans. It is estimated that 254 of the 937 were slain, mostly in Auschwitz and Sobibór and that of the 620 refugees who returned to the Continent only 365 survived the war. So apart from the human legacy what is the political legacy of this “harsh, pragmatic, no advantage”, hypocritical, boat-discouraging immigration policy 74 years ago towards desperate people fleeing the horrors of their home countries? After the war, Captain Gustav Schröder was awarded the Order of Merit by the Federal Republic of Germany. In 1993, Schröder was posthumously named as one of the Righteous among the Nations at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Israel. A display at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum tells the story of the voyage of the MS St. Louis. In 2009, a special exhibit at the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic in Halifax, Nova Scotia explored the Canadian connection to the tragic voyage. The display is now a traveling exhibit in Canada.   In 2011, a memorial monument called the Wheel of Conscience, was unveiled at Pier 21, Canada’s national immigration museum in Halifax. It was designed by Daniel Libeskind. The memorial is of a polished stainless steel wheel. Symbolizing the policies that turned away more than 900 Jewish refugees, the wheel incorporates four inter-meshing gears each bearing a word: antisemitism, xenophobia, racism and hatred. The back of the memorial is inscribed with the names of the 937 passengers. On 24 September last year US Deputy Secretary of State William J. Burns made a speech.
“ We who did not live it can never understand the experience of those 937 Jews who boarded the M.S. Saint Louis in the spring of 1939. Behind them, shattered windows and lives, loved ones in danger, crimes already underway and those crimes to come. Ahead, the hope of a new life in this country. We all know how this journey ends. The ship was turned away. Its passengers returned to a Europe that fell, country by country, to the cruelty they set sail to escape. Having made it so close to the safety of our shores, nearly one-third of the men, women and children of the M.S. Saint Louis perished, half a world away, in Auschwitz and other camps. … [T]he dangers were visible to those clear-eyed enough to see them. The warnings were already clear for those who cared to listen … And yet the United States did not welcome these tired, poor and huddled passengers as we had so many before and would so many since. Our government did not live up to its ideals. We were wrong. And so we made a commitment that the next time the world confronts us with another M.S. Saint Louis — whether the warning signs are refugees in flight or ancient hatreds resurfacing — we will have learned the lessons of the M.S. Saint Louis and be ready to rise to the occasion. … [A]nti-Semitism, genocide and mass displacement are – sadly – all-too-alive in 2012 … there are other M.S. Saint Louises setting sail right now … there is always more we can and must do.
Or in other words, “Sorry”. So Sir Roger offers the following notes for the future Prime Minister who will — inevitably — say “Sorry” to all those who have sought to come to Australia seeking asylum in boats – legally – as refugees and discovered that the story that we were a warm and welcoming people was a cruel hoax.
“ Many years ago our country was called upon to stand for the values we cherished as Australians.   When people who had lost everything, their homes, their livelihoods, their hopes and their futures came to us;   ~ when people full of terror who had seen, and often experienced, unimaginable horrors, or torture, came to us;   ~ when people who were so desperate that they risked death in leaky boats and violent seas came to asking for our help;   we were called upon as never before to show that we were indeed, and in our deeds, truly the people our story told about us;   a people of humanity, hospitality and generosity,   an understanding and tolerant people immensely proud of our multicultural triumph.     We failed. We proved that the story was a lie.   Our leaders failed us. Our institutions failed us. Our hearts failed us.   Instead, when we saw fellow human beings who so sincerely and transparently needed our help, people who had fled for their lives from wars, religious and tribal violence, and brutal tyrannical regimes, we told ourselves that those people were in fact queue-jumping, disease-ridden, child murdering terrorists and criminals who wanted to rape our women and steal the mineral wealth beneath our feet and the coins from our purse.   So to all those refugees we heartlessly turned away, or who we inhumanely imprisoned to the point where many of you went mad – and to those who never reached our shores but perished in the attempt – we say:   Sorry.   What we did as a people was based on greed, fear, narrow-mindedness, xenophobia, racism, hatred and ignorance. As a people we say:   Sorry.   What our leaders did was not based on any of these things.   It was based on the desire for power, on the desire to defeat an internal opponent in our own country.   You were merely the tool that they used. To achieve their narrow partisan goals they broke international laws and our own laws. They ignored international conventions and treaties.   What those leaders did, along with those in our bureaucracies and agencies who conspired with them and abetted them, was unforgivable, unconscionable and inhumane and it disgraced and dishonoured our country.   Their punishment is that their names and their reputations will be stained forever in the history of our country.   As we allowed them the opportunity to do what they did we say:   Sorry.   As you know, today’s Australia is not that Australia.   We have learnt from that dark time.   Our laws now ensure that it cannot happen again.   Our country truly is today — and thanks to so many of you — a people of humanity, hospitality and generosity, an understanding and tolerant people immensely proud of our multicultural triumph. We are once again true to our story and our values.   Thank you again.   I am so proud to be the Prime Minister of such a country, especially in the knowledge that we will never see such malignant, repugnant people assume leadership again.            

Afghanistan Photos

Apr 19, 2012 | Australian Values, Corruption, Cultural Values, Democracy, Media Values, OzPol Values, USPol, Values, War

Afghanistan Photos

Bad Apples?

or Bad Apple Tree?

 

When will they get it? Or do they get it and try to hide the truth about the Afghanistan photos before anyone notices they’ve got it?
First the disclaimer: To gloatingly photograph yourself with a slain enemy (whether self-slaughtered or not) is obscene.

But then, if the entire situation is obscene . . .  ?

The American political-military establishment — not to mention the Australian and the European/NATO war departments — once again insists that “this is not us”, “this behavior does not reflect our values.”

“This is not who we are,” says Leon Panetta.

“[The Afghanistan photos] don’t in anyway represent the principles and values that are the basis for our mission in Afghanistan,” says Anders Fogh Rasmussen who also said this was “an isolated event.”

Yes, it’s the case of the ‘bad apples.’

The question is, how did these apples pop fully formed – armed and in uniform – into existence? Was it by a miracle of birth, more miraculous than immaculate conception — because apparently they had neither father nor mother nor even country or past?

Of course not. These “bad apples” carry the social DNA of their apple tree: their country, their nation, their society, the situation they have been shoe-horned into by a military establishment that is more concerned with the politics of the game and the public perception of the state of the game than with the human realities of the way war inflicts itself on cannon-fodder.

And the Generals and diplomats¹ think they can sweep the results of their ugly game under the carpet by disclaiming all knowledge and responsibility – while, of course, those who carry the most obscenity and culpability, those who have most truly lost their moral compass, are the ones who initiate, or who endorse, or who neatly fold up their moral sensibility in a shroud and place it carefully out of sight and hearing, in a hole in a dark and hidden corner of their mind.

BUT THAT’S NOT ALL.

What a difference in attitude by the American military/political conglomerate compared to its response to Julian Assange!

With Assange and Bradley Manning the biggest beef was that they had put Americans “in harm’s way”. But we know that they scrupulously had not. As far as we know not a single hair on an American head has been put out of place as a result of the Wikileaks release.

In contrast, the release of the photos by the LA Times is almost certain to cause yet more aggression against Americans and their allies, not just by the Taliban but by others worldwide.

Not that the LA Times should not have shared what it knew — that is in a way its sacred duty.

But that no-one in political/military circles in the US has sworn by hook or by crook to get LA Times staff for publishing the Afghanistan photos, offered their opinion that someone should kill them by contract or “accident”, which numerous high-profile Americans (and a Canadian…oh, and the Alaskan) did about Assange, well, the difference is stark and striking and, frankly, rank hypocrisy and jingoism.

Is Sir Roger the only one to notice this?

 

 

¹So plain the advantages of machination
It constitutes a moral obligation,
And honest wolves who think upon’t with loathing
Feel bound to don the sheep’s deceptive clothing.
So prospers still the diplomatic art,
And Satan bows, with hand upon his heart.
– R.S.K.

Diplomacy: The patriotic art of lying for one’s country.
~  The Devil’s Dictionary

 

Communities Thank Pokie Addicts

Apr 28, 2011 | Australian Values, Corruption, Cultural Values, Economic Values, Legal, Lifestyle & Life, OzPol Values, USPol, Values

Communities Thank Pokie Addicts

You look comfortable under your newspaper . . .

Right around Australia – which is, you know, NSW and a couple of other fairly unimportant (albeit it occasionally charmingly old-fashioned) bits – Community Leaders are in panic over the impending loss of all essential local services due to proposed restrictions on the spending behaviour of poker machine addicts. Particularly in rural areas. The most panic-stricken are the Managers of rural drinking festivals – “pubs”, “RSLs”, “Bowlos” and “Leagues clubs” in the local dialect.

These managers claim that the sky will fall and the earth be swallowed up as earthquakes of doom and the tsunami of proposed poker machine gambling legislation simultaneously devour, desertify and drown their villages.

The playing fields will turn to dust, the cultural centres to rubble, and the cows will stop producing milk.

Country music will no longer be heard. Women will no longer know that they ought to stand by their man. Men will not know when their dog has died.

This is why these beacons of social cohesion, these massifs of Aussie common sense and basic good old Australian values, have gathered together with one voice and with one purpose.

This week they have been seen around the “rule’n’rege’nel” towns of Australia, in its dusty back streets and forlorn parks.

Hundreds of good old Aussie boys in RSL badges and footy jumpers have been talking to down-and-outers throughout the land.

One by one they have approached the homeless pokie addicts who for so many years have taken their life savings, their pension money, newstart allowance, their wife’s money and the money they have embezzled from local businesses, and poured it into the poker machines of the happy-to-oblige no-questions-asked local RSLs, footie clubs and pubs.

“No, don’t bother to get up,” they say to their depressed, broken, often drunken, and emaciated fellow-citizens. 

“You look too comfortable down there under your newspaper in your shit, piss and vomit. 

“We just want to say thank you! Thank you, thank you, thank you! It is only because of you that we are able to maintain the wonderful community services that our establishments provide with a small percentage of the huge profits that we make; thanks to you. 

“We’re sorry to hear about your wife and kids and how they’ve left you. We’re sorry to hear you lost your house and your job.

“But make no mistake, you are the real pillars of our community. Without your addiction to our bright, shiny and excitingly noisy machines our towns would be nothing.

“Without you, how would our townsfolk ever hear mediocre, has-been talent scraping the last few dollars off their careers singing Slim Dusty covers? Where would they learn to do line dancing? How would the old folk spend their last days if your gambling addiction wasn’t funding the perfect manicures of their bowling greens?

“We honour your sacrifice (again, sorry about the wife, kids, house and job).

“In fact at our next board meeting the Committee will discuss naming our poker machines after all the pokie addicts who have given our town so much. So much money.

“You are more than welcome at our clubs and pubs on pension day (or if, you know, one of your estranged kids comes across a little money and forgets to hide it from you) to keep up your important work for the community (but please have a bit of a wash first, okay?)”

And as they return to their comfortable houses on the hill, they smile contentedly over a thoughtful job well done, slide into their leather recliners with a Johnny Blue, scowl at that bastard Wilkie on the news, put on the Céline Dion CD, ponder the pros and cons of a future career in politics . . .

. . . and thank god for the pokie addicts.

 

Assange – Wanted: Dead or Dead

Jan 11, 2011 | Australian Values, Capital Punishment, Cultural Values, Democracy, Legal, Media Values, OzPol Values, Terrorism, USPol, Values, War

Assange – Wanted: Dead or Dead

 

“Why wasn’t Assange garroted years ago?”

 

Sir Roger had thought that there was a limited number of people who had urged or advocated the murder/assassination/execution of Wikileaks’ Julian Assange.

Two people had stood out particularly – Canadian Professor Tom (“Obama should put out a contract”) Flanagan and US Army Lt-Col. Ralph (“Assange should be killed”) Peters.

Now he discovers there is a small website where you can find a much larger number of people involved in what looks to Sir Roger a lot like incitement to murder.

It’s “People OK With Murdering Assange“.

So it’s the usual suspects except it’s not all FoxNews or crackpot Republicans (but I repeat myself).

Australian terrorism law defines a terrorist act as

“an action done or a threat made with the intention of advancing a political, religious or ideological cause including the intention of intimidating the public or a section of the public and where the action causes serious physical harm to a person or causes a person’s death, or endangers a person’s life.”

Advocating a terrorist act means directly or indirectly counselling the doing of a terrorist act, or directly or indirectly providing instruction on the doing of the terrorist act.

The US Code of Federal Regulations defines terrorism as

“…the unlawful use of force and violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives”.

The UN General Assembly resolved (non-bindingly) that

…Criminal acts intended or calculated to provoke a state of terror in the general public, a group of persons or particular persons for political purposes are in any circumstance unjustifiable, whatever the considerations of a political, philosophical, ideological, racial, ethnic, religious or any other nature that may be invoked to justify them…

So in general…

…surveying the various academic definitions of terrorism, Vallis concluded that:

  • “Most of the formal definitions of terrorism have some common characteristics:

    a fundamental motive to make political/societal changes;

  • the use of violence or illegal force; attacks on civilian targets by “nonstate”/”Subnational actors”;

  • and the goal of affecting society. This finding is reflected in Blee’s listing of three components of terrorism:

1. Acts or threats of violence;

2. The communication of fear to an audience beyond the immediate victim, and;

3. Political, economic, or religious aims by the perpetrator(s).”

See if you can discern the vaguest hint of any sentiment or intent described in the definitions above, in any of the following statements made in the American media.

 

BOB BECKEL – FOX News commentator

“A dead man can’t leak stuff…This guy’s a traitor, he’s treasonous, and he has broken every law of the United States. And I’m not for the death penalty, so…there’s only one way to do it: illegally shoot the son of a bitch.”

Reading this over very carefully, one is wondering whether a person can be a traitor to a country of which he is not a citizen and wondering, too, whether it’s actually possible for one individual to break absolutely every law of a country with 50 states and numerous territories, and indeed how a Fox News “analyst” could have completely examined the facts of Assange’s life in relation to every single law of the United States – civil, criminal and corporate – and come to his conclusion so swiftly.

One is left only in awe of such an intellect. And yet one struggles to grasp the logic of a person who is “not for” the death penalty nevertheless advocating the intentional punishment of a person with death by gunfire. But perhaps one is indeed dwarfed by genius and can never hope to comprehend the product of such an advanced intelligence.

  

ERIC BOLLING – FOX News commentator

“[Assange] should be underground — six feet underground. … He should be put in jail or worse, hanged in a public forum.”

 

 JOHN HAWKINS – townhall.com

“5 Reasons The CIA Should Have Already Killed Julian Assange

[ … ]

” … there’s no reason that the CIA can’t kill him. Moreover, ask yourself a simple question: If Julian Assange is shot in the head tomorrow or if his car is blown up when he turns the key, what message do you think that would send … ?”

Sounds a lot like advice – instruction, even – on how to carry out an act, do you think?

 

RUSH LIMBAUGH

“Back in the old days when men were men and countries were countries, this guy would die of lead poisoning from a bullet in the brain.”

Just wondering … does this bring a flutter of recognition? Why does Sir Roger have flashes of Dallas? Tucson?

RUSH LIMBAUGH

“(laughing) Ah, folks, even Greg Palkot of Fox News interviewed Assange, which means that Roger Ailes knows where he is. Ailes knows where Assange is. Give Ailes the order and there is no Assange, I’ll guarantee you, and there will be no fingerprints on it.”

 

WILLIAM KRISTOL Chairman, New Citizenship Project 1997 to 2005, co-founder Project for the New American Century (PNAC), board member of Keep America Safe, a think tank co-founded by Liz Cheney and Debra Burlingame, board member of the Emergency Committee for Israel.

“Why can’t we act forcefully against WikiLeaks? Why can’t we use our various assets to harass, snatch or neutralize Julian Assange and his collaborators, wherever they are?”

You gotta love the political sophistication of the guy who fought so hard to get the “Coalition” into Iraq to root out those pesky weapons of mass destruction at the cost of only several hundred thousand lives.

 

G. GORDON LIDDY – Former White House Adviser

“This fellow Anwar al-Awlaki – a joint U.S. citizen hiding out in Yemen – is on a ‘kill list’ [for inciting terrorism against the U.S.]. Mr. Assange should be put on the same list.”

Sir Roger is musing whether Mr Liddy would therefore logically agree that all people whose statements and actions coincide with the generally agreed definitions of advocating terrorist acts ought to be on the same list? But no, Sir Roger fears that Liddy and the others in this list would subscribe to the doctrine of American exceptionalism.

 

JOHAN GOLDBERG – Editor-at-large of National Review Online

“I’d like to ask a simple question: Why isn’t Julian Assange dead? …Why wasn’t Assange garroted in his hotel room years ago? It’s a serious question.

Is it also a serious suggestion?

 

 DONALD DOUGLAS – Right-wing blogger

“I won’t think twice if Julian Assange meets the cold blade of an assassin, and apparently a significant number of others don’t care for the guy.”

Sir Roger wonders if Mr Douglas realises that a prerequisite of thinking twice is to have thought once.

 

 MARC SCHENKER “Vancouver American Politics Examiner” whatever that means

“So if you look at Peters’ call to have Assange killed analytically, it makes a lot of sound sense, and he probably even has a legal footing to stand on.

What might it mean to kill someone ‘analytically’? Would that mean having a pedant bore them to death, Sir Roger wondered pedantically. What might it mean legally for Schenker to be making the suggestion – to who knows which unstable or merely fanatical mind – that a person who followed his exhortations and actually killed Assange would meet with legal approval?

The question is, when it is clear that all of these people are advocating and urging an illegal and potentially terrorist act and, whether or not the act is done they could be charged with offences under US federal and state laws, why has no action been taken or warning given by any legal or political official in the US, or any representations been made by anyone in Australia?

Sir Roger is left after all this with the most disturbing mental image of a mass of men, of advancing age and declining virility, greying hair, bloated bellies, wrinkling skin, sitting in a circle, their pants around their knees, trying to excite their various and reluctant erections, jerking as fast and hard as they possibly can to the pornography of death in a mutual masturbation society.

“God damn, Earl! Ah hain’t bin so hard since the last time we burnt a cross and linched a nigger! Ah think ah might be a-cummin’!”

 

But that’s Sir Roger’s mind for you.

 

You Can’t Handle the Truth!

Dec 8, 2010 | Australian Values, Citizenship, Corruption, Democracy, Freedom of Speech, Legal, Media Values, OzPol Values, Terrorism, USPol, Values, War

You Can’t Handle the Truth!

 

… This was a lie and we could not let them publish it …

 

We keep thinking of Jack Nicholson‘s character’s justification for the secrecy that governments and their institutions maintain over their citizens – that is to say, their owners, their employers, the “sovereign people”:

“You want The Truth?
You can’t handle The Truth!”

It’s the only possible explanation.

Governments and their functionaries can only be thinking that their citizens – who are the actual authority of the State – are incapable of dealing with reality and need to be cotton-wooled, treated like mushrooms if you like, kept in the dark and fed bullshit, to play with their toys and live their fantasy lives while the powerful look after the real games like big boys, as such people have been doing since long before Machiavelli shone his own light on their games.

 

Rep Ron Paul tweets:

“ Re: Wikileaks- In a free society, we are supposed to know the truth. In a society where truth becomes treason, we are in big trouble.

Daniel Ellsberg (re)tweets:

“ For less than $3 you can buy a copy of the Pentagon Papers from Amazon yet they won’t host Wikileaks.”

Here’s what Hillary Clinton said on the 20th anniversary of Tiananmen Square:

“ A China that has made enormous progress economically, and that is emerging to take its rightful place in global leadership, should examine openly the darker events of its past and provide a public accounting of those killed, detained or missing, both to learn and to heal.

 

This anniversary provides an opportunity for Chinese authorities to release from prison all those still serving sentences in connection with the events surrounding June 4, 1989. We urge China to cease the harassment of participants in the demonstrations and begin dialogue with the family members of victims, including the Tiananmen Mothers. China can honor the memory of that day by moving to give the rule of law, protection of internationally-recognized human rights, and democratic development the same priority as it has given to economic reform.

 

But wait! There’s more! Speaking at the Newseum in January this year she said a lot of fine things about freedom of speech and the internet, and how while it was a great organ of free speech and for good in the world, there were those who were trying to stifle it.

“ On their own, new technologies do not take sides in the struggle for freedom and progress. But the United States does. We stand for a single internet where all of humanity has equal access to knowledge and ideas. And we recognize that the world’s information infrastructure will become what we and others make of it.

This challenge may be new, but our responsibility to help ensure the free exchange of ideas goes back to the birth of our republic. The words of the First Amendment to the Constitution are carved in 50 tons of Tennessee marble on the front of this building. And every generation of Americans has worked to protect the values etched in that stone.

[ … ]

As I speak to you today, government censors are working furiously to erase my words from the records of history. But history itself has already condemned these tactics.

[ … ]

As in the dictatorships of the past, governments are targeting independent thinkers who use these tools.

[ … ]

Those who use the internet to recruit terrorists or distribute stolen intellectual property cannot divorce their online actions from their real world identities. But these challenges must not become an excuse for governments to systematically violate the rights and privacy of those who use the internet for peaceful political purposes.

And much, much more hypocrisy like this on the foreignpolicy.com website

Clinton should take a good hard look at herself and take a leaf from her own book.

So to help Clinton, let’s repeat Nicaraguan Interior Ministry Director of Censorship, Nelba Blandon’s, statement:

“ They accused us of suppressing freedom of expression. This was a lie and we could not let them publish it.

Glenn Greenwald, in his column in Salon disputes The Washington Post‘s Jonathan Capehart’s assertion that there’s nothing new here (and I apologise for reproducing the entire list but please read the whole excellent article).

“ If there’s Nothing New in these documents, can Jonathan Capehart (or any other “journalist” claiming this) please point to where The Washington Post previously reported on these facts, all revealed by the WikiLeaks disclosures:

 

(1) the U.S. military formally adopted a policy of turning a blind eye to systematic, pervasive torture and other abuses by Iraqi forces;

 

(2) the State Department threatened Germany not to criminally investigate the CIA’s kidnapping of one of its citizens who turned out to be completely innocent;

 

(3) the State Department under Bush and Obama applied continuous pressure on the Spanish Government to suppress investigations of the CIA’s torture of its citizens and the 2003 killing of a Spanish photojournalist when the U.S. military fired on the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad (see The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Will Bunch today about this: “The day Barack Obama Lied to me”);

 

(4) the British Government privately promised to shield Bush officials from embarrassment as part of its Iraq War “investigation”;

 

(5) there were at least 15,000 people killed in Iraq that were previously uncounted;

 

(6) “American leaders lied, knowingly, to the American public, to American troops, and to the world” about the Iraq war as it was prosecuted, a conclusion the Post’s own former Baghdad Bureau Chief wrote was proven by the WikiLeaks documents;

 

(7) the U.S.’s own Ambassador concluded that the July, 2009 removal of the Honduran President was illegal — a coup — but the State Department did not want to conclude that and thus ignored it until it was too late to matter;

 

(8) U.S. and British officials colluded to allow the U.S. to keep cluster bombs on British soil even though Britain had signed the treaty banning such weapons, and,

 

(9) Hillary Clinton’s State Department ordered diplomats to collect passwords, emails, and biometric data on U.N. and other foreign officials, almost certainly in violation of the Vienna Treaty of 1961.

 

That’s just a sampling.

The sadness of this is that it was The Washington Post that stood up so steadfastly and courageously for freedom of speech and truth, supporting Woodward and Bernstein and the independence of the Press against the secrecy and lies and machinations of Washington’s most powerful in the Watergate scandal – from which, of course, “Cablegate” inherits its name.

Meanwhile, where is GetUp on the shocking treatment by the Australian government of Assange, an Australian innocent of any Australian crime but nevertheless pre-emptively accused by both Gillard and McClelland of criminal or at least illegal activity. McClelland:

“ From Australia’s point of view we think there are potentially a number of criminal laws that could have been breached by …… the release of this information.”

For goodness’ sake even Rudd and John Howard agree Assange is not at fault.

“ Mr Rudd appears to be in agreement with former prime minister John Howard, who earlier today said Mr Assange had not done anything wrong by publishing cables that contained ‘frank commentary’.”

The Guardian has a live blog of developments which you can follow including a large amount of support for Assange and the leaking of the (previously) secret documents.

 

 

Jefferson Says

Dec 6, 2010 | Australian Values, Citizenship, Cultural Values, Democracy, Legal, OzPol Values, USPol, Values

Jefferson Says

President Kennedy told a gathering of Nobel Prize winners at the White House,

"I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone."

This post was first published ten years ago. Jefferson, 3rd President of the United States, was writing 200 or more years ago. His words were wise and prophetic. Especially today, particularly at this time when tyranny seems more than ever before to be threatening the democracy of the United States.

 

We the People

 

Thomas Jefferson was the third President of the United States, a man of the Enlightenment, the principal author of the Declaration of Independence, one of the most influential Founding Fathers, who envisioned America as the force behind a great “Empire of Liberty”.

Sir Roger knows that his loyal readers are impatient to hear what the great Jefferson, Father of the American experiment and of whom all Americans are so rightly proud [except Glenn Beck] would have said about the Wikileaks matter.

Here is what he did say:

“ Information is the currency of democracy.

[ … ]

If once the people become inattentive to the public affairs, you and I, and Congress and Assemblies, Judges and Governors, shall all become wolves.

[ … ]

The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive.

[ … ]

I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it.

[ … ]

Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms (of government) those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.

Just so.

Sir Roger also notes that the Constitution of the United States begins with the words:

“We the People … do ordain and establish this Constitution of the United States of America”.

Not 'we the politicians', or 'we the Executive Branch', or 'we the diplomats', or 'we the oil companies', or 'we the bureaucrats', or 'we the bankers', or even 'we the military'.

“We the People…ordain”.

Nothing could make clearer the source of all authority in the United States — as it is in every other democracy in the world —  and any authority arrogated otherwise is illegitimate.