Haneef, Whores, ‘Howard with Hair’

Haneef, Whores, ‘Howard with Hair’

 

“This glorious fat trout of an election godsend…”

 

He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.”,
Thomas Paine, great American patriot 

In March 2007, Deputy Secretary, Bob Correll, of the Department of Immigration and Citizenship (DIC) wrote to Values Australia, charging that Values Australia was offensive and could “seriously damage” Australia’s international reputation.

Values Australia responded that DIC’s “callous disregard for humanity, basic morality and decency…have resulted all by themselves in immeasurably more damage to Australia’s reputation than the Values Australia website could possibly do…”, enumerating some of the more egregious examples.

We now say that DIC is at it again, with Haneef.

Former New South Wales Liberal Party leader John Dowd QC says Australia’s reputation is at stake after the Federal Government’s action.

Mr Dowd says the international community will now be questioning Australia’s credibility after the government’s move.

“This is a high-profile international series of cases,” he said.

“People in other television stations – the Al Jazeeras and so on – that go to millions of people throughout the world, are going to know that in Australia, the executive comes in and takes people into custody, even after the courts have allowed them out.”

  

Here is what we think:

The government is blatantly using Mohammed Haneef to push its – now desperate – re-election agenda.

Many MSM commentators claim AFP Commissioner, Mick Keelty, is dead straight, “meticulous” and so on. We, on the other hand, can understand how people might think that the AFP has been irreparably politicised and is doing John Howard’s bidding.

Keelty is reported to have stressed that Haneef must be considered to be innocent unless proved guilty.

Of course.

Some time ago Haneef gave his mobile phone sim card to a second cousin who is somehow implicated in the alleged, failed London-Glascow bombing attempts. Even Keelty says “the specific allegation involves recklessness rather than intention”.

This raises the question of how vulnerable ordinary Australians may be if they, for example, inadvertently do something, meet or assist someone in some way who later turns out to be a criminal. That homeless person, for example, you gave a dollar to for “a cup of coffee”. What if it turns out he is a terrorist in disguise? Does the law now allow for a prison term of 15 years for that “reckless”, inadvertent act of charity? It seems to.

Nevertheless, as Keelty claims, Haneef should be considered innocent until proven guilty.

And apparently that is exactly how the AFP and the government felt until some maverick magistrate who didn’t understand the main game applied the law instead of the politics to the matter.

She granted bail!

This did not fit the game plan. This was an embarrassment, surely. 

After so long grilling the man – this glorious fat trout of an election godsend, this putative terrorist from whom John Howard wants us all to think he is so bravely protecting us – it turns out he was merely ‘reckless’ and not at all intending to terrorise anyone.

The AFP had no more admissible information, had no further charges to lay, it appears, and so the man was released on bail.

How could John Howard look brave and grave and fatherly and win back the love of his (newly) frightened people when the boogeyman was apparently just…reckless.

It had to be made bigger. This, after all, might be the government’s last throw of the dice.

The AFP had been made to look bad, the government too.

So did the AFP whisper, like Grima Wormtongue, in the ear of the Minister for DIC about information that was inadmissible in court and which was insufficient for any charge to be laid about this reckless Indian – information which the Minister for DIC never has to reveal and which therefore can never be tested?

It was enough for the Minister for DIC (and Re-Electing the PM) to revoke his visa and bravely consign him to one of DIC’s finest helliday camps.

If people of questionable character ought to be in detention, surely most of the Government front bench would be checking themselves into the nearest DIC concentration camp.

It won’t work, of course.

The coalition will lose the election.

Howard will lose his seat.

And all they will be left with is a shattered life, sacrificed to their pride.

But what of Labor?

They’ll come storming in like the cavalry to save the day.

Won’t they?

No.

It is now clear that Labor policy is “me too, only moreso”. They are gutless and as shallow and self-serving as the other mob – unless we insist that they take up the real challenge, the real reason we want a change, which is to restore decency and to honour true Australian values.

If Labor is indistinguishable from the coalition, if Rudd is merely Howard-with-hair, why vote for them? 

They are turning into the worst disappointment since Latham.

The SIEV X-Factor

The SIEV X-Factor

“A Certain Maritime Incident”

 

Richard Fidler interviewed  Tony Kevin on ABC’s Conversation Hour  last week.
Tony Kevin is an activist who was one of the driving forces behind the campaign to uncover, and especially to tell, the truth about the sinking of the SIEV X in which approximately 353 children, women and men drowned.

He was a highly commended and respected Ambassador, including to Russia, and to Cambodia in the 90s. He has written a book, Walking the Camino, about the experience of travelling the pilgrim route from Andalusia to the north of Spain.

However, his reputation as a diplomat was no defence against the vitriol which was spat at him when he dared question the government’s morality and border protection policies.

  I guess I identified very closely with the human rights of refugees and Australia’s obligations… I was denounced in the parliament as a person of no credibility; I was abused by three senators in a senate committee…”

But Tony Kevin said some things that really struck a chord with us.

  In a democracy every citizen is responsible for the conduct of their government and if their government behaves in unethical or even criminal ways every citizen has a responsibility within their capacity to challenge that and that’s why I was one of the forty-three former diplomats and former senior military personnel who signed the statement condemning the Australian involvement in the war in Iraq, which I believe was a criminal activity. And I guess you’ve just got to basically, sometimes, stand up and be counted. That’s the entry ticket we pay for continuing to enjoy a democracy.

And he says something about the illusion in which we all, journalists and pundits included, live and take for granted – that while most of us are decent and reasonably honest and fair-minded we assume politics and politicians are also.

Many of us have assumed that what has been going on in Australian politics has been business as usual with a right-wing twist. We have been in denial, in our complacency, that what has been going on in the past eleven and a half years has in fact been a shift to the extremist right and the debauching of basic Australian political and civil service standards. Surely there could not have been such a shift, not in our country.

Tony Kevin saw it clearly.

  What I’ve tried to do myself is to challenge the idea that the last eleven years have been years of normality. I don’t believe they have. I believe they’ve been years of moral dysfunction in Australia and to the extent that I can continue to convey that, without blaming people, without pointing fingers at people, I plan to continue to do that.

In fact, in a speech at the Manning Clark House Weekend of Ideas in April, Kevin spoke about the fragility and transparency of our illusion about our system and our way of life.

  Confronting the SIEV X cover-up forced me to look down into the abyss that lies beneath our “presumption of regularity” – the phrase is Jack Waterford’s – a presumption that we rely on in our daily lives in society.

I understand now that my exposure to this abyss was a full grief trauma…Walking through Manuka, seeing people enjoying themselves in restaurants, I wanted to scream — “Wake up to the horrors of what our government is doing to defenceless people in our names! How can you still pretend that we live in a normal decent country”? It is hard to look into that abyss for a long time without damage, without succumbing to depression or self-destructive rage.

In this speech he also described what happened to him as a result of his outspoken dissent and activism.

  These are the refugee dissent suppression strategies I encountered:

 

1. Put out claimed facts that are actually untrue, relying on the public’s presumption that governments normally do not lie to the public, except in grave national security emergencies.

2. Force truth-seekers into the roles of advocates or activists. Blur debates about the facts in specific cases of abuse of human rights, by trying to move the debate into unresolvable discussions about values.

3. Drive wedges to weaken the solidarity of dissent. Use frightener words to marginalize and discredit passionate or influential dissenters, words like “extremist”, “fanatic”, “conspiracy theorist”, “Howard-hater”, “disloyal”, “un-Australian”.

4. Workplace or NGO-funding sanctions. Implied threats against those in government or government-funded employment, or threats to cut off funding to NGOs that support refugee activism.

5. Guilt trips. Accuse dissenters of prolonging victims’ distress through holding out false hopes, or of undermining national security. Play games with dissenters’ minds, aimed at undermining their belief in the justice of their causes. Seek to make them feel more isolated.

6. Never give credit to dissenters when they succeed. Always pretend that any decisions to soften the system were not taken under pressure.

 

On point 1, the SIEV X public history is full of examples of false and shifting stories put out by government:

 

On where the boat sank: First, that it sank in Indonesian waters. Later, that “we don’t know where it sank”. Then, an admission that it sank in international waters. But then, a later reversion to “we don’t know where it sank”.

 

On what we knew about the voyage. First, that we knew nothing till we saw the TV news of the sinking. Then, that we knew the boat was coming, but we did not know when or from where. We cannot tell you what we knew, because it’s intelligence; or, because it is the subject of an ongoing investigation. Or a variant from Mick Keelty: that you will just have to take our word for it that we did not know about the boat until it was too late to save the passengers. Because it’s “operational”, we cannot offer proof of this claim.

 

Were we expecting the boat? Yes, we were expecting the boat at Christmas Island on 21 October and that is why we sent a distress message to Indonesian Search and Rescue when it failed to arrive on time. But later – no, we did not put out a distress call to the ADF or to all shipping, because we then assumed that the boat had never left or it had turned back.

 

Did we ever look for the boat? No, we didn’t. Yes, we did – and here to prove are the RAAF surveillance maps and records of boat sightings, plastered all over the front page of the Weekend Australian on 29 June 2002, when media concern about SIEV X was at its peak But later – Yes, we did fly over the area, but only as part of routine RAAF surveillance patrols, because our aircrews were never tasked to look for a missing boat. And the flight charts and sightings data we tabled in the Senate and that the Senate accepted as fact were really just approximate flight paths. No, you cannot see our aircrew flight reports or know the names of the crews, because that’s all classified information. And according to the Defence Minister in 2005, the evidence the ADF gave in 2002 — despite all the conclusively forensic analysis by Marg Hutton of its many inconsistencies — was the whole truth.

 

Do we know the names of the dead? Initially, as reported — the UNHCR is preparing and collating lists of the dead and survivors. Later from the AFP — there are no such lists. Later — there are some lists but it is unlikely they will ever be made public.

And so on and on. One phoney smokescreen was put up after another until a frustrated and jaded media abandoned the story, having found no way to distinguish between truth and lies.

You can read Kevin’s testimony to the Senate Inquiry into “A Certain Maritime Incident” at the SIEV X site.

Fidler asked Kevin whether his SIEV X research and advocacy since 2002 had been worth it.

  Yes. I think my work achieved useful results going beyond SIEV X. It helped more people to see the truth behind the now discredited myth that John Howard is just another Australian politician trying to do his job more or less decently. Australians know the real Howard now. I think my SIEV X research and advocacy helped to expose the ugly truth about this man.

Quite so.

 

 

WTF

WTF

What do we want? Freedom!

 

When do we want it? When it’s ok with the police!
Mr Howard, to his cheer squad at the Sydney Institute:

   Freedoms and rights, especially for women and children, are little more than cruel fictions without the rule of law and some semblance of social order enforced by legitimate authority”

What does this mean? Read it again.

Freedoms and rights rely on enforcement by legitimate authority? If they are enforced how can they be freedoms? How can they be rights?

As we have said before somewhere, any “freedom” or “right” which is in the gift of another and bestowed at their whim is neither truly a freedom nor a right but a favour dispensed as a reward for obedience to the rulers who own us.

Our freedom is our birthright and it is not in the gift of anyone, least of all an anally-retentive Little Lord Fauntleroy, a jumped up squirt like Howard.

Dis-Honoris Causa

Dis-Honoris Causa

 

In all its splendor and majesty

In September 2006 the US right pushed the country “a step toward totalitarianism” when the Republican Senate majority passed a bill which essentially stripped the US Constitution of the protection of habeas corpus, one of the foundational guarantees against executive injustice and abuse of power which has been an essential part the British legal tradition for hundreds and hundreds of years.

As Chicago Tribune columnist Garrison Keillor said at the time:

  Last week, we suspended human rights in America, and what goes around comes around. Ixnay habeas corpus.

The U.S. Senate, in all its splendor and majesty, decided that an “enemy combatant” is any non-citizen whom the president says is an enemy combatant, including your Korean greengrocer or your Swedish grandmother or your Czech au pair, and can be arrested and held for as long as authorities wish without any right of appeal to a court of law to examine the matter.

[…]

The Senate also decided it’s up to the president to decide whether it’s OK to make these enemies stand naked in cold rooms for a couple of days in blinding light and be beaten by interrogators….[T]hey have no right to see the evidence against them, and there is no appeal.

[…]

None of the men and women who voted for this bill has any right to speak in public about the rule of law anymore, or to take a high moral view of the Third Reich, or to wax poetic about the American Ideal. Mark their names. Any institution of higher learning that grants honorary degrees to these people forfeits its honor.

[…]

To paraphrase Sir Walter Scott: ‘Mark their names and mark them well. For them, no minstrel raptures swell. High though their titles, proud their name, boundless their wealth as wish can claim, these wretched figures shall go down to the vile dust from whence they sprung, unwept, unhonored and unsung.’

 

Three Republican senators made a show of opposing the bill and after they’d collected all the praise they could get, they quickly folded. Why be a hero when you can be fairly sure that the court will dispose of this piece of garbage.

 

If, however, the court does not, then our country has taken a step toward totalitarianism. If the government can round up someone and never be required to explain why, then it’s no longer the United States as you and I always understood it. Our enemies have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. They have made us become like them.”

There were 65 Senators who voted in favour of the stripping of habeas corpus.

Three of them are now Republican Presidential candidates (none are Democrat candidates).

They were Brownback, Hagel and McCain. None of them now, as Keillor says, “has any right to speak in public about the rule of law anymore, or to take a high moral view of the Third Reich, or to wax poetic about the American Ideal.

Indeed, such “wretched figures” surely agree with the American military that the question of whether the Guantánamo prisoners – whose Military Tribunal cases were recently dismissed – were “Enemy Combatants” or “Illegal Enemy Combatants” is mere semantics. Of course. It is merely the law, and — as we know from the way that John Yoo, Alberto Gonzalez, Andrew Card, George Bush and Dick Cheney (not to mention McCain, Brownback and Hagel) view the law in general — when it gets in the way of their own agenda the rule of law and basic democratic principles are of small importance and the law itself (even though passed by the same vile and obsequious Senate) merely a minor hindrance when it comes to the Machtergreifung ¹.

But the law is not nothing, and the difference between an “illegal” and an ordinary “enemy combatant” is neither trivial nor semantic, as “rmj” clearly explains at Adventus [and also here].

(These are the people and the sort of people, by the way, whom John Howard’s government – especially Billy Bunter Downer, Darth Ruddock and the man who has lost any idea of morality or democratic principles, Michael Joseph Keelty – uses as its moral, legal and ethical benchmarks.)

Garrison Keillor went on to say, “Any institution of higher learning that grants honorary degrees to these people forfeits its honor.

So, speaking of universities granting honorary degrees to dishonourable people…

One-time Acting-Attorney-General James Comey “testified before both the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, and the House Judiciary subcommittee on Commercial and Administrative Law on the U.S. Attorney dismissal scandal…In early January 2006, the New York Times…reported that Comey, who was Acting Attorney General during the March 2004 surgical hospitalization of John Ashcroft, refused to “certify” the legality of central aspects of the NSA program at that time…After Comey’s refusal, the newspaper reported, Andrew H. Card Jr., White House Chief of Staff, and Alberto R. Gonzales, then White House counsel and now Attorney General, made an emergency visit to the George Washington University Hospital, to attempt to win approval directly from Ashcroft for the program”.

(Ashcroft refused. See Comey’s description here).

Nevertheless, about three weeks ago, “Andy” Card got his reward from – to its eternal shame and disgrace – the University of Massachusetts. But not without the almost universal condemnation of students and faculty in perhaps the most astonishing display of opposition and dissent ever, certainly recently, in a formal academic ritual.

[See the video above]

 

 

¹ Machtergreifung is a German word meaning “seizure of power”. It is normally used specifically to refer to the Nazi takeover of power in Weimar Germany on January 30, 1933.

The term Machtergreifung was first coined by the Nazis themselves in order to portray their accession to power as an active seizure”

A Troll! A Real Troll!

A Troll! A Real Troll!

Values Australia is proud to welcome its very own new pet Troll!

 

Our new Troll is very sophisticated.
It can even fill out a Contact form!

Here is its latest message:

you are
a dickhead

You are a fucking gronk
go home
outrageous
lefty

[Not surprisingly our Troll also indicates it is a Ford fancier.]

We do wish to correct our troll on a teeny tiny detail in the nicest possible way (so as not to alarm it – we would be very sad if it went away).

We are, you see, very much at home already.
Values Australia has “still called Australia home” for many many more decades than Trollie.

We stole this country first, you know, and don’t you forget it.

If our widdle trollie-wollie is upset with, or does not understand, democracy, free speech, robust debate, or even (apparently) rational thought, then perhaps it might, sadly, be best if it did, itself, slink away to a more appropriate habitat such as, um….one of our favorites….say, Zimbabwe, Burma, China, Sudan, Russia, or Iraq, all of which more suit the belligerent, authoritarian temperament.

But really, please stay. You are funny.

[UPDATE: It just occurred to Values Australia that our new pet troll might be someone senior from the Department of Immigration and Citizenship! What do you think?]

 

Herald Accuses Values Australia of ‘Rhetoric’

Herald Accuses Values Australia of ‘Rhetoric’

 

Nothing whatever to do with the Government

Values Australia does not want to pretend any false modesty. It is delighted to have been mentioned by its favourite page in the Sydney Morning Herald: Stay in Touch. We think that most people are probably like George W. (and us) and quickly scan the headlines before flipping over to the back page for something a little less depressing. Still, Values Australia is not aware of ever having been accused of being rhetorical and is not sure whether that is a criticism or a compliment. Whatever, Values Australia is determined not to let its newfound fame go to its head. (On a side note, if you found your email running slowly yesterday, it was probably caused by Values Australia emailing all its friends.) As a special celebratory gift to our visitors, we offer this video which we discovered today.   The part of the “Prime Minister” is taken by T Rex;  “Foreign Minister” is played by Ornitholestes,  and “The Next Prime Minister” is played by Pig.   You’re welcome