Howard ‘Fundamentally Evil’~MP

Howard ‘Fundamentally Evil’~MP

 

Throwing people into the abyss

 

Aspat” occurred this week when the Groveller General broke with longstanding international convention to meddle in the domestic politics of another country, saying that if he ran Al Qaeda, he would “put a circle around March next year and pray”1 for US Democrat and Presidential Candidate, Senator Barack Obama, to win.

His comments have raised a storm both in Australia and the US.

US Senator Ron Wyden said,

“The most charitable thing you can say about Mr Howard’s comment is it’s bizarre. You know, we’ll make our own judgements in this country with respect to elections”

The Groveller General, the paint flaking off him as he visibly crumbled and deflated, appeared nonplussed by this remark, being unused to the concept of making judgments without directions from the Americans or the Indonesians.

However, a Liberal colleague unfortunately came to what he thought was his rescue.
Queensland Liberal backbencher Cameron Thompson [Member for Tony Blair2] says he is proud of Mr Howard’s statement and pulling out of Iraq would herald

“the greatest disaster since the Rwandan genocide.”

“To throw people into that kind of abyss is, I think, amoral and I think John Howard is absolutely correct when he says that Barrack Obama’s policy is not just wrong, it is I think fundamentally evil.“

Values Australia was moved by the MP’s remarks and determined to learn just how bad things would have to get in Iraq to be as bad as the Rwandan genocide, because anyone who could help to create or to support such horror and calamity must indeed be evil. Values Australia’s research produced some alarming comparative figures.

 

  RWANDA
1994
IRAQ
2006
Violent deaths 800,000 654,965
(392,979 – 942,636     95% CI)
Refugees 2,000,000 2,000,000
Internally displaced 1,000,000 1,700,000

 

Rwanda
In the Rwanda genocide it is estimated that:

up to 800,000 had been murdered, another 2 million or so had fled, and another million or so were displaced internally

Iraq
…whereas in Iraq a study by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health published in the prestigious and influential Lancet medical journal estimated that in 2006

655,000 more people have died in Iraq since coalition forces arrived in March 2003 than would have died if the invasion had not occurred. Or more accurately:
654,965 excess deaths related to the war, or 2.5% of the population, through the end of June 2006 [with] a 95% confidence interval of 392,979 to 942,636 excess Iraqi deaths.

In addition
The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees estimated in a report last month that there were as many as 2 million Iraqi refugees in neighboring countries, primarily in Syria and Jordan. An additional 1.7 million people are displaced within Iraq, the agency said.

So it would seem that the situation in Iraq is already at least as bad as Rwanda was during the genocide.

And, as Cameron Thompson MP’s remark suggests, anyone who aids, abets, supports, urges, fails to speak out against, but especially anyone who contributes to and participates in “throwing people into that kind of abyss” is “fundamentally evil”.

Values Australia, which has always been a staunch sycophant of whoever is in government, does not know where to look or which way to turn.

Meanwhile, the increasingly hysterical, but sadly increasingly irrelevant, Minister for overseas affairs and getting really stroppy with the Pacific blackfellas, Robin Boywonder, has done a predictable “me-too ditto”. Nothing more can be expected. In parliamentary, media and particularly international circles he is becoming known as “The Pilotless Drone”.
____________________________
1 Unnamed Liberal Party sources claimed that that wouldn’t matter because everyone knows their prayers would not be answered because they pray to the wrong imaginary friend in the sky.
2Blair encompasses Kingaroy, ex-Qld Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s old home town (not to mention Pauline Hanson territory) where – not to put too fine a point on it – they have ‘a certain turn of mind’. It’s a bit like Tamworth, only nuttier.
In his maiden speech the MP shared the unwritten code of the Australian values we all respect: “mateship, a fair go, a helping hand and a fair day’s work”. Mr Thompson surely knew enough about his government’s industrial relations agenda when he left off the now redundant words “for a fair day’s pay”.
Mr Thompson can be contacted on (02) 6277 4412 at Parliament House, (07) 3813 0088 in his electorate office or send him an electronic message.

 

 

John Howard: Strong or Weak?

John Howard: Strong or Weak?

Choose Your Favourite War Criminal

 

What extraordinary influence our Groveller General enjoys with US President Bush. 
Mr Howard said he will raise the Hicks issue when he meets the US President George W Bush on Tuesday…Mr Howard says he will urge the US Government to hear the case as soon as possible.

That was as recently as 2005 – 16 July – only a year and a half ago!

Mr Howard has been “relaxed and comfortable” that the Military Commissions process is appropriate, legal and being handled justly and sensitively. Because the Americans have assured him so.

“George, I am concerned.”
“Wha, don’t be concerned, little buddy.”
“George, do you torture people?”
“John, Ah am shocked! How could you aks such a thang?”
“Do you?”
“Little Johnnie buddy, I assure you we do not.”
“Then George, (mmm, I like it there, yes just there…) you will have a perfectly acceptable explanation for these photographs taken at Abu Ghraib?”
“John (would you mind just reaching around there for a moment? Aaaah! That is goood!) These were bad apples who should never have obeyed ma orders or revealed our secret and systematic interrogation techniques which we do not and never have used or sent people to secret prisons in Syria, Pakistan, Egypt and Poland and such, to render them speechful.”
“Really?”
“I promise! Would I tell a lie? Oh! Oh! Oh my God!”
“Oh! Oh! Oh George! Oh! I love you George!”
“Have you got a cigarette, darling?”

Guantánamo chief, Rear Admiral Harry Harris, has told the ABC’s PM program that Hicks poses a real security threat and there are no innocent detainees.

Greens leader Bob Brown says he is “outraged” that the head of the Guantánamo Bay detention centre has described David Hicks as a dangerous terrorist, prejudging him guilty without any legal process and

“the rights of Hicks have been removed, he’s had no legal rights – he’s been judged guilty by Admiral Harris himself.”

He should not be outraged. This is old news. Brown is so behind the times.

Said Hicks’s lawyer, David McLeod,

“This suggestion, that because detainees are there, that that is in itself evidence of terrorism, or their being a terrorist, simply puts the lie to any attempt to deal with them in a fair and open manner.

“To suggest that a prisoner in the Australian criminal courts is guilty would in itself amount to a mistrial or an inability to proceed appropriately and fairly before a court.”

They should not be outraged. It has all been said before. Charles Stimson, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defence in charge of detainee policy at Guantánamo Bay said as much in an interview in January:

Jane Norris: Is there a possibility that there are some folks on Guantanamo that don’t belong there?
Stimson: Not now.

He claimed in the interview that the roughly 400 prisoners in Guantánamo Bay are

“the very terrorists who hit [American corporations’] bottom line back in 2001”.

This came as quite shock. The Australian Government had not realised that there were an additional 400 evil dudes plotting 9/11 and that the US had rounded up every last one of them and these ones are the very ones who slammed the planes into the buildings. But they said nothing at the time. Americans are so modest!

(Stimson says in this interview that

“something like 340 others have previously been released to their home countries”.

Countries like Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Britain. But John Howard has stood strong and insisted that a citizen of his own country should be made an example of to the recalcitrant …um…Saudis and Pakistanis…?)

In a previous interview, June 2006, Stimson said Guantánamo prisoners are

“not entitled to anything more than determining whether they’re enemy combatants or not, which we’ve done”.

See, what Brown doesn’t seem to get is that guilt or innocence has already been determined. There was no need for a trial. Hicks is guilty and that’s that. And we’ve known it for years. We decided it years ago. Even John Howard has been saying so for years.

Oddly enough, elsewhere the US is reported to be having trouble releasing detainees because of “the refusal of other nations to accept Guantanamo prisoners“. Strange that John could claim to be finding it so hard to have Hicks return home to Australia to be dealt with.

You Are a Threat to US Security

You Are a Threat to US Security

Boulleda Hadj

If you can use a computer,
you are a threat to the United States

 

 

Melissa Hoffer is one of those lawyers intentionally slandered in January by Charles Stimson, the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense, the subject of our next post. Hoffer, a Boston lawyer, represents six Guantanamo detainees. Read their story. Read her story.

This is a little known piece, at least to us. Just read it. It is chilling.

Read Hoffer’s description of how our “big friend”,  John Howard’s masturbation mate, really goes about “doing its business”. See how the US really considers the rest of the world, including us. Understand the difference between this Administration’s values, in practice, and the values it claims it wants to export to the Middle East, like the rule of law, like liberty, like human rights, like human decency, like human dignity. Compare the claims of the US Defense Department and the Bush Administration (with the collusion of the Howard Government) about the treatment of prisoners, with the reality of what they do.

The U.S. position is that it may seize anyone, anywhere, at any time, if there is reason to believe that person is an “enemy combatant” someone who is part of or “supporting” (even unwittingly) Al Qaeda, the Taliban, or forces “associated” with these groups.

The global dragnet cast by this definition is so broad that an attorney for the U.S., arguing before Judge Green in December 2004, admitted it would include a little old lady from Switzerland who gave money to an Afghan charity organization that – unbeknownst to her – funneled the contribution to Al Qaeda.

And equally, it should be said, you and I could suffer the same fate.

Hoffer’s closing words in an (unavailable) speech:

“If we extinguish that humanity with lawlessness and cruelty, we extinguish hope for the future of humankind. For when we degrade others, we degrade ourselves, and when we take away a another person’s freedom without just cause, we erode our own freedom. But as we join with others around the world, working, fighting, unjust imprisonment and torture, we honor and preserve our humanity. This is the lesson of Guantanamo.”

According to Wikipedia:

“The six men were formally arrested by Bosnian authorities, tried before the Bosnian Supreme Court, and acquitted of all charges. Even so, upon their release from legitimate Bosnian incarceration, following their acquittal, they were captured by American security officials who transported them to detention and interrogation in the US naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The conduct of the Bosnian authorities was formally condemned as illegal by the Human Rights Chamber of Bosnia Herzegovina, the relevant Bosnian court at the time.

The Associated Press has made the Combatant Status Review Tribunals of four of the six men available for download. Transcripts within these documents record the Bosnians reporting to their tribunal officers that interrogators did not believe that there had ever been any substance to the US allegations that they had planned to bomb the US embassy.

And according to the Washington Post:

Since then, the military has conducted annual reviews of the six men’s status.

Each time, court officers have upheld the original decision.

Records from tribunal sessions in December 2005 show the U.S. military is no longer accusing the Algerians of conspiring to attack the U.S. Embassy in Sarajevo. No explanation for the change is given.

The military has listed other factors in its decision to label the men a security threat.

One detainee was judged a threat in part because he was a karate expert and had taught martial arts to Bosnian orphans, tribunal records show. He was also classified as potentially dangerous because he was familiar with computers.

Another detainee was flagged because he had performed mandatory service in the Algerian army more than a decade ago, as a cook.

Boudella was accused by the U.S. military of joining bin Laden and Taliban fighters at Tora Bora, Afghanistan, the mountain hideout where the al-Qaeda leadership escaped from U.S. forces in December 2001. In fact, at the time, Boudella was locked up thousands of miles away in Sarajevo, after his arrest in the later-discredited embassy plot.

One fresh allegation filed against Boudella last year was that he wore a ring “similar to those that identified the Red Rose Group members of Hamas,” the radical Palestinian movement, according to tribunal records.

Boudella’s wife, Nadja Dizdarevic, responded in an interview that the ring is a common anniversary band worn by thousands of Bosnian Muslims. She said she obtained an affidavit from the jeweler in Sarajevo where he bought the ring and submitted it to the U.S. military in hopes that they will drop the charge at his next hearing.

If it is a mark of belonging to Hamas, then 98 percent of the Bosnian Muslims belong to Hamas,” she said. “For every claim they make against him, I have proof to show them they are wrong, so they have to invent something new.”

The Defense Department declined to answer specific questions about the case, saying that some evidence against the men remains classified.

But a Pentagon spokesman defended the decision to apprehend the six Algerians.

“There was no mistake in originally detaining these individuals as enemy combatants,” said Navy Lt. Cmdr. J.D. Gordon. “Their detention was directly related to their combat activities as determined by an appropriate Defense Department official before they were ever transferred to Guantanamo.”

So be careful. You Are a Threat to US Security

The decision will not be made by a court of law, it will be made by “an appropriate Defense Department official” whatever that might be – you’ll never know or ever be able to find out – on the basis of unquestionable, unreviewable, “classified” information, which you will never be allowed to see. In fact, it is so secret that they can do what they like with no information whatever – because its existence cannot be tested – especially if to reverse a decision would be an embarrassment. There is no accountability whatever and that leads to the brazen corruption we see today at all levels of the Bush Administration.

This is American justice and American law at work under this illegitimate neo-con junta which is so beloved by John Howard and his toadying supporters in the coalition.  

 

Who are the true cowards?

The cowards are not those who “do not have the stomach for the war” (as Cheney puts it when blaming the American people for his own failure); not those who publicly oppose, or privately work against, an illegal, unjust, unsupportable, unethical adventure predicated on deliberate lies by an unutterably stupid President and his unbelievably cruel, greedy and dishonest Vice-President.

The real cowards are those in the administration, the bureaucracy and the military who are too afraid to stand up against obvious, monstrous injustice; who would willingly sacrifice other people’s lives in order to protect themselves from embarrassment; who would sacrifice everything that is, or has been, good and great about their country for the sake of their own careers.

The real cowards are those ordinary people who, although they oppose the war and the excesses of the American, Australian and British governments, do not speak up; who say, “she’ll be right”.

The real cowards include those leaders of nations, like John Howard and Tony Blair, who go along with a madman for the sake of the hope of a little better trade deal, and so are complicit in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people and the destruction of the lives of millions more; who have participated in and even applauded the ruination of an entire country, the creation of a more dangerous world, a surge in terrorism and the destabilisation of the entire Middle East.

These are the real cowards. These are the real “evil-doers”.

The Nation That Hangs Together

The Nation That Hangs Together

The Nation that Hangs Together Hangs Together

 

The glorious lynching of Saddam was not meant to be “unprofessional”, and “disgusting”.

No, no!

According to Iraq’s National Security Adviser, the noted humanitarian, Mouwaffaq al-Rubaie:

“This was supposed to be a uniting event between Shia and Sunni.”

Oops!

What a wonderful opportunity this human sacrifice would have been for fellowship and reconciliation between the warring sects! How tragic that it was missed!

Sociologists and anthropologists are at a loss as to why the intended outcome was not realised, unless it was the Shia officials who were present with their cell-phones. If only the mobile-phone-toting hangmen hadn’t shouted and argued with Saddam, and taken video of his plummeting and dangling body and shared it with the world on YouTube.

A Shia-Sunni love-in would have been inevitable, the civil war would have been over and the Americans and their allies could have gone home.

A free Iraq and the future of a fragile democracy would have been assured.

An Iraqi official assured the world that despite the debacle of the execution – carried out at an American camp in Baghdad called “Camp Justice” – the execution itself had been carried out in accordance with Islamic law.

Just so.

Meanwhile the debate over the death penalty rages around the world.

The American public, unmoved by public opinion in civilised countries – which sees them as amongst the last of the barbarians – now proudly keeps righteous company alongside the dwindling number of nations practising ‘judicial murder’ (as Prime Minister Howard calls it):

Botswana, Cameroon, Chad, Comoros, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Egypt, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Guinea, Lesotho, Libya, Nigeria, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Somaliland, Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, China, Taiwan, India, Indonesia, Japan, Jordan, Kazakhstan, North Korea, South Korea, Laos, Malaysia, Mongolia, Pakistan, Kuwait, Iran, Iraq, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Syria, Yemen, Tajikistan, Thailand, United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan, Vietnam, Belarus, Antigua and Barbuda, Bahamas, Barbados, Cuba, Dominica, Guatemala, Jamaica, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana.

And the United States.

And they are a proud member of the enlightened club of nations (mostly Islamic ) which approve the execution of juveniles:

Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Yemen, Pakistan, Nigeria, Bangladesh, China, and the “Democratic” Republic of the Congo.

And the United States.

The US has staunchly refused to sign and ratify the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, which forbids capital punishment for juveniles. In this it stands proudly with Somalia as the last two nations of true principle.

The US is merciful, however, and will not execute the insane. Instead they administer antipsychotic drugs to ensure that the person is sane before administering additional, lethal drugs, which kill them.

While the United States has a proud record, executing 60 people in 2005, of which 19 were killed in Texas, and 53 people in 2006, of which 24 were killed in Texas, they have a long way to go to catch up to World Execution League Champions, China, in the number of annual executions.

In China execution is a huge and lucrative industry, providing fresh organs to western transplant patients at a bargain price. Western human rights monitors believe the Chinese kill about 15,000 a year, more than the rest of the world’s government-sponsored murders combined.

China is leading the way in efficiency, also, by equipping its courts with mobile execution vans as it shifts away from the communist system’s traditional bullet in the back of the head, towards the more “civilised” lethal injection. China expects that this will improve its international image and show it as a more modern and civilised society.

The United States could also learn a lot about commerce and cost recovery from China where families who want to reclaim the body of their dead relatives killed by a bullet to the head are charged for the bullet. It makes sense, don’t it? A triumph of “user pays”!

But let it not be said that there is no debate in the USA about the death penalty.
For example, in the measured, carefully considered words of one American citizen, chiding another who is opposed to the death penalty:

“Listen sperm breath: Take your withered prick, renew your Viagra prescription and go fuck that 6-year-old boy you’ve had the glow for. You get your facts the same place you get your man-love: from your wart-ridden syphilitic bung hole.”

Nevertheless, there seems to be growing legislative opposition in the U.S. to such opinions, despite their obvious literary qualities:

A legislative commission recommended on Tuesday that New Jersey become the first state to abolish the death penalty since states began reinstating their capital punishment laws 35 years ago. Its report found “no compelling evidence” that capital punishment serves a legitimate purpose, and increasing evidence that it “is inconsistent with evolving standards of decency.”

The report [came] amid growing unease among politicians and the public about capital punishment.

Will this be “cut and run” from the death penalty, or “a phased withdrawal”?

 

Update:

Al Jazeera has claimed that Muqtada al Sadr’s Mahdi Army replaced all the security officials responsible for executing Saddam. Sunni pro-Baathist website Iraqi Rabita has claimed that one of the masked men who put the noose around Saddam’s neck was in fact Muqtada al Sadr and this is why there were chants of “Muqtada! Muqtada!”

Blameshifting 101

Blameshifting 101

You’ve got to hand it to our Prime Monitor.

He is the absolute guru of blameshifting and that’s something to be proud of.

You know, he has a position to maintain, an aura to protect, an air of infallibility to project. We can’t have him looking weak and fallible. 

He has masterfully avoided saying “Sorry” for Australian authorities stealing generations of Aboriginal children from their families. They had only themselves to blame, for being black.

He has cleverly avoided any responsibility for the AWB Wheat for Weapons scandal and ensured that the blame falls on a few unfortunate individuals and certainly not on him or his ministers or their sirhumphreys.

He did it – it was a joy to watch – he did it by saying that in the terms of reference of the inquiry (which he set up) the Commissioner couldn’t make any findings about him, the government, or government departments.

Brilliant!

And now as the dark days in Iraq seem to slide into an apocalypse, a hell on exploding wheels – which we all thought at the time he had abetted and co-invented with George and Tony – with almost surreal prestidigitation he has ensured that he cannot be held responsible for the (no longer “impending”) disaster:

Howard ‘horrified’ by Iraq car bomb killings: Prime Minister John Howard says he is disturbed by the latest mass killings in Iraq.…

“It’s certainly going through ‘a very bad phase’, I acknowledge that,” Mr Howard said, “and nobody is other than horrified at the continued loss of life. The question arises, what to do? I do think the path ahead lies in a greater assumption of responsibility by the Iraqi military forces themselves.”

Not only is it not total carnage, a completely fucked over disaster but just a “phase” it’s going through (and as you know, phases are predictable and you always recover from them).

And there is light at the end of the tunnel. We are not being sucked into the quicksand of a civil war, stuck in a quagmire of blood, guts and a destroyed culture. No! There is a “path”! And for sure it is pretty as a picture with grass and daisies on either side, a warm sun shining, fluffy little white clouds in the sky and a cooling zephyr wafting!

My god, Howard is the wonderful Wizard of the south if ever there was!

But the Grand Masterstroke is that it’s the Iraqis who must be held responsible for the bloody chaos they are in! No blood on John’s hands! No splattered bits of human offal or brain on his starched, white, stuffed shirt.

Watch as it becomes the ungrateful, incompetent Iraqis’ fault (between now and the next Federal Election).

We are in awe. Absolutely in wide-eyed, jaw-on-the-floor awe at his brilliance.

Watch and weep. True Australian political values. Howard-style.

A Beautiful Thing

A Beautiful Thing

US Policy Adviser redefines “Beauty”

We have noticed a report that Kenneth Adelman has claimed that what the Coalition has done in Iraq is “a beautiful thing”. And we agree whole-heartedly. It’s a pity so few people now are able to see it this way. It just takes a little readjustment of the meaning of “beauty”.

As you know, the Australian Government applauds, approves and supports all things concerned with and initiated by the US Administration. We are desperate to be part of (and it is Australian Government policy to try as hard as we can to keep up with) their Grand Scheme of Things, and although its purpose is a mystery we have faith and trust in their goodness and wisdom. And you know that George has personal audiences with the Almighty, right there in the Oval Office!. God told him that Shock and Awe was what Jesus would have done.

“God told me to strike at al Qaida and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did.”   [New York Times, 24/9/2006]

Iraq; Kyoto; gay marriage; support for hypocritical closet homosexuals; inappropriately blurring the distinction between Church and State; scaremongering about terrorism; rewriting indigenous history, and now capital punishment — we’re with them.

Step for step. Lock step. Every step of the way.

We in the Howard Australian Government are pathetically grateful for any attention that the US may give us from time to time. For example, recently George W. Bush looked down at us and said, “You still here? I’d forgotten all about you! Look, we’re having a picnic. Why don’t you come along? In fact, you have to come along. It’s just over there in Iraq. Don’t forget to bring your sandshoes.” And then he patted us on the head and you should have seen our little governmental tail wagging!

Anyway, although we have faith and belief and trust, we are now confused.

When George asked us on the picnic, two of his top advisors were Richard Perle and Kenneth Adelman. They told us George was right. We believed them utterly because George told us to. And they said the nicest things about George and his Grand Scheme of Things.

When George told us that Donald Rumsfeld was the greatest military strategist who ever lived, of course we believed him. And no serving General ever disagreed. Until now.

It’s just that we’re a little confused about how the current situation in Iraq, which the US Military says is sliding swiftly towards chaos, fits into Rummy’s strategy. But then, he’s Rummy and George insists he’s still the greatest. What would little old us know? Probably chaos is part of Rummy’s strategy to confuse the enemy (that is, the Democrats).

But now the Military Times has an editorial calling for him to go. Vanity Fair has quotes from Richard Perle and from Kenneth Adelman saying that the Admninistration is “dysfunctional”. and these are people whose word we have accepted without question until now.

The editorial, “Time for Rumsfeld to Go”, says:

Rumsfeld has lost credibility with the uniformed leadership, with the troops, with Congress and with the public. His strategy has failed, and his ability to lead is compromised.

The time has come, Mr President, to face the hard bruising truth; Donald Rumsfeld must go.

Richard Perle is a former Assistant Secretary of Defense, and an advisor to Mr Bush on the Defense Policy Board, a member of the American Enterprise Institute, the Project for the New American Century and the Hudson Institute. I mean, if you can’t trust these people, who can you trust?

And yet he told Vanity Fair magazine that incompetence in the Administration had turned Iraq policy into a “disaster”. A disaster!

Kenneth Adelman is a member of the Project for the New American Century, Assistant to the Secretary of Defense, 1976-1977, member of the Committee on the Present Danger, the RAND Corporation and the Institute for Contemporary Studies.

I mean. that’s high-powered right-wing cred, okay? And he says he is “crushed” by the performance of Rumsfeld and the Administration.

“They turned out to be among the most incompetent teams in the postwar era,” he said. “Not only did each of them, individually, have enormous flaws, but together they were deadly, dysfunctional.”

So you can understand why we’re a little confused. We bet on these guys and now they’re saying “don’t put your money on Bush”.

Well, We still don’t know. If you don’t remember, Adelman is the guy who said,

“I believe demolishing Hussein’s military power and liberating Iraq would be a cakewalk,” 

and

“Measured by any cost-benefit analysis, such an operation would constitute the greatest victory in America’s war on terrorism].

And you know that glorious victory will come, we’re certain of it. Well, we hope desperately for it. It won’t heppen overnight, it may not even heppen this century, but it will heppen.

Kenneth Adelman, who looks like a kindly family doctor, is also the man who said about the war in Iraq:

“It bothers me that people in Britain don’t see it as people in America see it. We did a beautiful thing.”

And you know, we don’t think people are as aware as they should be of just how beautiful the thing we have done in Iraq is.

Should we agree with the US Military, Perle, Adelman, now or stand by George? Is George a dead duck like they say? If we stick with him like a mate, could we get burnt and look as stupid as him?

And then there’s the question of war crimes. People are starting to talk about them. Those civilian casualties are starting to bank up a bit, you now. They’re starting to look a bit untidy.

In 1946 the judges at Nuremberg who tried the Nazi leaders for war crimes left no doubt about what they regarded as the gravest crimes against humanity.

The most serious was unprovoked invasion of a sovereign state that offered no threat to one’s homeland. Then there was the murder of civilians, for which responsibility rested with the “highest authority”. [Pilger]

Now we would like to agree with Laura Rediehs:

“So, although both sides in this Great Cosmic Battle employ similar techniques – violence that includes the killing of innocent civilians – our doing this is justified because we are good; their doing it is unjustified because they are evil.”

… although we think she might have been being ironic. But she’s right. George talks to Jesus. The enemy only think they do.