$20 A Barrel!

May 13, 2007 | Australian Values, Democracy, Economic Values, Media Values, OzPol Values, USPol, Values, War

$20 A Barrel!

 

The Murdoch interview with Max Walsh

 

The way we were

On Wednesday, February 12, 2003, Max Walsh conducted an exclusive interview with Rupert Murdoch.

“   Max Walsh: Let’s start with Iraq and the war because that looks like being one of those inflection points in history, with the world, financial markets and the business environment all being affected by what happens. How do you see events unfolding at this stage?

Some “inflection point”!

How about “Catastrophuck”?

Two smug, self-congratulatory bulls of the financial world, oblivious to the impending and utterly predictable suffering of millions of Iraqis discussing the carnage as if it was as moving as a financial chart.

Let us imagine for a moment that America owns the world by default and that it is theirs to give or take away parts of it as they see fit, because this is the only way you could understand Murdoch’s answer, that

“   Oh, I believe Bush is right, certainly. Well, we can’t back down now, where you hand over the whole of the Middle East to Saddam…

But why does he really think Bush was acting “morally”?

“   The greatest thing to come of this to the world economy, if you could put it that way, would be $US20 a barrel for oil. That’s bigger than any tax cut in any country.

Damn! if only Costello had thought of somewhere to invade, before the budget. He could have given an even bigger insult bribe to the Australian people! Maybe Howard is thinking of invading Zimbabwe before the election! The way he’s been talking about Mugabe is if anything more strident than his condemnation of Saddam, even to the point of invoking the Nazis.

Sadly, Murdoch was slightly off in his calculations.

 

In fact, if you look closely at the graph above you can just discern that the price of oil did not go “DOWN” but edged slightly in the direction of “UP”. With a bullet.

The price of oil when he spoke was around $25 a barrel.

The price of oil now is about $66 a barrel.
And Murdoch’s 2003 crystal ball reading for Bush’s Iraqi “cakewalk”?

“   I’m not close enough to know what they really are planning. They’d certainly want to establish a democratic regime as soon as possible and they’d want to get out as soon as they can.

Double damn! Wrong again!

Let Them Eat Yellowcake

May 9, 2007 | Democracy, OzPol Values, USPol, Values, War

Let Them Eat Yellowcake

Carlo Bonini          

STATE OF THE UNION 2003:

” Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of Uranium from Africa.”
Or not …

 

Well, as Bill Moyers reminds us, it wasn’t true. It was all a forgery, perpetrated in Rome. And Carlo Bonini, the Italian journalist who blew the story, co-author of Collusion — the story about the junk intelligence that led us all to war — is interviewed on Bill’s latest show.

The video and transcript are available here.

Here are some excerpts:

“   MOYERS: Collusion, by Italian journalists Carlo Bonini and Giuseppe D’Avanzo, takes you to the streets of Rome where the fake documents were cooked up by a motley band of conspirators whose scheme revolved around SISMI, the Italian equivalent of the CIA.

 

[….]

 

BONINI: You put a piece of raw intelligence in the circuit of the intelligence – allied intelligence agencies. And what happens is in the morning what is false in the morning turns into true facts at night. This information is given to the US intelligence. In the meantime, the same information is given to the British intelligence. The US intelligence checks the informations with the British intelligence. And the British intelligence says, “Yeah, we have the same information.” The point is that the two intelligence agencies, they don’t have to share their sources. So nor the Americans nor the Brits are going to say from whom they got the informations. But they got a confirmation…

 

Then they talk to the Italians. And the Italians say, “Oh, you had a confirmation from the British?” Rome talks to London, “Hey, you got a confirmation from Washington?” So the same piece of junk obtained in 48 hours, two different confirmations. It’s a mirror game. I can say briefly when US intelligence received the informations from the Italians, they – I mean, the CIA urged the DGSE – the French intelligence, the French CIA – to check the informations because Niger is a former French colony. There’s no better intelligence agency than the French one to double check a story like this. They worked hard on the information, and they came back saying, “There is nothing. This intelligence you received is simply junk intelligence. There is no evidence of such a deal between the Niger government and the Iraqi government.”

 

[….]

 

And the lesson is journalism matters. In wartime your enemy is the lies, is the propaganda. No matter if it’s the propaganda of your enemies, or if it’s the propaganda of your government. I mean, propaganda never gets good to the people, to the army, to anybody. And, if you want, and the lesson is this one: we have to protect the public opinion, and in last instance, the democracy from propaganda.”

So the Americans had it from both the French and from Joseph C. Wilson, the American diplomat who went to Niger to investigate the claim and found nothing. (Wilson was punished for telling the inconvenient truth by the leaking of the identity of his wife, Valerie Plame, an active CIA operative.)

And where was the American press? Where was the Australian press? Well, basically jostling each other for the honour of holding the dicks of their respective Presidents and Prime Ministers. Can it really be true that the only journalists interested in holding propaganda up to scrutiny are Italian?

Spelling It Out

Apr 30, 2007 | Australian Values, Corruption, Democracy, OzPol Values, Terrorism, USPol, Values, War

Spelling It Out

 

Okay, no surprise…

The Bush White House lied to the American people.

…Except that one of the people who knew it at the time, a US Senator, has dropped a “Bombshell on the Senate Floor”.

So here it is at last. Not the smoking gun we had before but the political mushroom cloud which should explode George Bush’s presidency and John Howard’s career. Should…but…you know…

US Senator Dick Durbin, who was on the Senate Intelligence Committee during the lead up to the Iraq war, explained the truth of what was actually going on behind the scenes in top secret intelligence briefings in 2002-2003 and how it compared with what the White House was spruiking publicly.

Durbin and his fellow committee members knew that George Bush and his administration were intentionally misleading the world but they couldn’t say anything:

Excerpt from Durbin’s statement:

“  The Intelligence Committee was meeting on a daily basis for top-secret briefings about the information we were receiving and the information we had in the Intelligence Committee was not the same information being given to the American people. I couldn’t believe it.

Members of this administration were in active, heated debate over whether Aluminum tubes really meant that the Iraqis were developing nuclear weapons, some within the administration were saying, “Of course not. It’s not the same kind of aluminum tube,” at the same time that members of the administration were telling the American people to be fearful of mushroom-shaped clouds.

But unfortunately, as a member of the Committee, he was sworn to secrecy.

“  We can’t walk outside the door and say, “The statement made yesterday by the White House is in direct contradiction to classified information that’s been given to this Congress…

And so in my frustration I sat here on the floor of the Senate and listened to this heated debate about invading Iraq, thinking, “The American people are being misled. They’re not being told the truth.”

Who also knew what Senator Durbin and his colleagues knew?

The President, George W. Bush.

The National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice had to know.

Cheney. Rove. Rumsfeld. Wolfowitz. Feith. Chalabi.

Obviously the Secretary of State, Colin Powell, had to know. What sort of a “man” will intentionally and knowingly lie, not just to his own country but to the entire world, knowing that the lies he tells will certainly lead to the premeditated, and unjustified, deaths and maiming of hundreds of thousands of innocent human beings? How does such a “man” choose to do that? How does such a “man” live with himself?

And then there are Tony Blair and John Howard. They must have been told the truth. After all, they are the United States’ most respected allies and George Bush’s best friends. He would not have lied his best mates into such a war.

So Howard knew there was no substance to – or at the very least, serious disagreement about – the so-called “evidence” which he used to take Australia to war (against the wishes of the people, by the way). Blair and Campbell even sexed up and fabricated evidence because even the lies weren’t convincing enough.

If Howard knew the truth he was murderously reckless with other people’s – and other people’s children’s – lives.

If Howard was told the truth he has no respect for, belief in, or sense of responsibility to the Australian people.

Or if Howard did not know the truth then the only alternative is that he is a gullible fool who credulously bought a pack of lies.

If Howard was not told the truth the so-called close and special relationship between the USA and Australia is a sham and an embarrassment.

If Howard was not told the truth the USA has no respect for Australia, and the alliance has no value.

If Howard was not told the truth he is a shocking judge of character with an appalling choice of friends.

A person who tells such lies to his country is a traitor and a criminal.
A person who premeditates the deaths of innocent others is a murderer.
A person who lies to commit premeditated slaughter on this scale is not just a mass-murderer. He is a criminal psychopath.

Sadly, although I believe this statement by Senator Durbin is explosive – because it blows away the last remnants of Bush/Blair/Howard’s pretence – I don’t expect to see it repeated on Page One in the mainstream media. But I would love to hear how the usual suspects play it down and excuse it. Let me guess.

“It’s old news.”

“I think the Australian public has moved past that.”

“How we got there is no longer the issue. What’s important is what we do now.”

Swallowing Bullshit Whole

Apr 27, 2007 | Australian Values, Corruption, Democracy, Media Values, OzPol Values, Terrorism, USPol, Values, War

Swallowing Bullshit Whole

Buying the War – Bill Moyers

How did the mainstream press get it so wrong about Iraq?

 

This may be the most “important” video you will see this year.
It’s a special program from Bill Moyers Journal on PBS.

Buying the War is a careful, thorough, chilling expose of how the American, and in fact almost the entire Western, mainstream media lost their scepticism, their perspective and their judgment along with all their highly-trained journalistic principles, swallowed whole the Bush administration’s predigested Iraq scam and palmed it off onto a gullible, frightened and sometimes hysterical public.

It is particularly urgent because the men who took us there are still in power and still in denial, still refusing to admit they made a mistake despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary – in stark contrast to the almost total lack of factual evidence which could support the pre-emptive invasion of Iraq in the first place.

John Howard stakes his career and his credibility on the assertion that he made a wise and well-informed decision. How excited he was that Australia had been part of providing solid evidence – the aluminium tubes, remember? – of Iraq’s nuclear program. Except they weren’t for a nuclear anything. He has never apologised for that. Never admitted it was a mistake. He will never apologise to the families (what is left of them) of the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis whose death he is by collusion responsible for, or the 2 million Iraqi refugees, or the 2 million Iraqis internally displaced. Or to the thousands of coalition soldiers and civilians killed and maimed in Iraq.

But he made a big, big mistake.

Either he was a willing co-conspirator in the Iraq catastrophe or he was duped. In either case that is not good enough to be Prime Minister of Australia.

The same is true of John Howard’s echo-chamber, the right-wing commentariat of people like Albrechtsen, Ackerman, Bolt, Devine all the other friends of Rupert – apologists for the Groveller General who nevertheless will never (like him) apologise for the egregious errors of judgment and fact that they have made and propagated for so long.

[One of the arguments given by those who supported the war, including Howard and his sycophantic media cheer-squad, and current US Presidential candidates like Clinton, is that “everyone believed Iraq did have WMDs”. That is not true.

Values Australia didn’t believe it for a minute, not just because we are a government-certified political clairvoyant but because we studied the political context, we looked at the so-called evidence and the way it was presented, the people who were presenting it and their probable motives, along with the evidence against it and the credibility of the people who presented that.

Values Australia was not alone. Millions of people around the world agreed. The difference is that these people are not afraid of the US Administration, or Murdoch, or the electorate. The difference is that we did not think the deaths of others and the carnage which we predicted would be a fair price for others to pay to protect our careers.

Moyers talks to the most senior journalists, including those who bought the Administration’s line, like Dan Rather, and those who didn’t, like Knight Ridder and those who claim to be pawns, like Tim Russert.

He shows how the propaganda was manufactured. For example, the White House needed to “prove” that Saddam Hussein had an atomic weapons program. There were those intercepted aluminium tubes, but that was top, top secret. Even Cheney couldn’t talk about them. So what he did was to leak the story to the New York Times who, of course, published it and Cheney was then able to comment on the story the next day on Meet the Press with Tim Russert.

“    It is now public that he has been seeking to acquire … the kinds of tubes that are necessary … in order to build a bomb.”

The guy has balls. But they’re huge bags of bullshit. What he doesn’t have is a conscience or morality. He is a professional liar who has forgotten, if he ever knew, how to tell the truth. And he is one of John Howard’s greatest mates.

What is especially chilling is the masterful way in which the Bush administration, probably under the guidance of Karl Rove, manipulated a willing, compliant media and engineered the stories. Remember the “smoking gun” that was about to turn into a “mushroom cloud” – the urgency in that which supposedly justified the pre-emptive invasion? Over and over again. Al Qaeda/Iraq/al Qaeda/Iraq/al Qaeda/Iraq repeated and repeated until with no evidence whatever, and after any link had been soundly disproven, most Americans still believed (as many still do, and as Cheney to this day suggests) that Iraq was responsible for 9/11.

 

Watch the video here.

Perhaps the most telling moment is Dan Rather‘s admission of:

“  …the fear that if you don’t go along, you get the reputation for being a troublemaker. There’s also the fear that, particularly in networks, they’ve become huge international conglomerates. They have big needs, legislative needs, regulatory needs, in Washington. Nobody has to send you a memo to tell you that that’s the case. You know. And that puts a seed in your mind of, well, if you stick your neck out, if you take the risk of going against the grain with your reporting is anybody gong to back you up?”

Or to put it another way, you can’t trust the mainstream media, whether so-called “liberal” or not, because everyone is looking out for their own career. Doing your job honourably, by practising actual journalism and telling the public what you discover, comes a distant second. What you are always going to get is the administration’s line. And it’s exactly the same in Australia. (I know.)

Here’s part of the transcript of the program:

“  Four years ago this spring the Bush administration took leave of reality and plunged our country into a war so poorly planned it soon turned into a disaster. The story of how high officials misled the country has been told. But they couldn’t have done it on their own; they needed a compliant press, to pass on their propaganda as news and cheer them on.

 

Since then thousands of people have died, and many are dying to this day. Yet the story of how the media bought what the White House was selling has not been told in depth on television. As the war rages into its fifth year, we look back at those months leading up to the invasion, when our press largely surrendered its independence and skepticism to join with our government in marching to war.

 

How did the mainstream press get it so wrong? How did the evidence disputing the existence of weapons of mass destruction and the link between Saddam Hussein to 9-11 continue to go largely unreported? What the conservative media did was easy to fathom; they had been cheerleaders for the White House from the beginning and were simply continuing to rally the public behind the President – no questions asked.

ANZAC Reflections

Apr 25, 2007 | Australian Values, Democracy, Global Warming, OzPol Values, Values, War

ANZAC Reflections

 

We’re made of “Digger” stuff

 

M y father was in WWII. He went to Borneo, landed at Balikpapan.
Like most of those who went, he didn’t tell us much about the War.
But he did tell us one story.

They landed on the beach and because he was a Major he had a jeep and a driver.

The Japs had retreated but were still firing at the Aussies landing.

At the back edge of the beach was a small hut with its door open. As they drove past Dad noticed ropes hanging inside.

Now, Dad loved rope. And hoses and things you could “use for something”. He thought those ropes just might come in handy. So he told his driver to stop and he went to take a look. It was full of lovely huge hanks of rope all neatly hanging on their hooks. Just the thing for…something.

As he was looking around, getting ready to borrow one or two hanks of rope his driver came up and said,

“We don’t have time, Sir. We need to go on.”

So Dad sadly turned around, hopped in the jeep and drove off.

Less than a minute later the hut blew up.

An equally inquisitive soldier had entered the hut and lifted one of the booby-trapped hanks of rope.

And was blown to pieces.

What most amazes me about this story is that I and my younger siblings had not even been conceived. I owe part of the very fact of my ridiculously unlikely, extraordinary, magical and endlessly fascinating existence to that driver’s urging my father to eschew the rope. If he hadn’t, it would have been Dad who blew up and I wouldn’t be here.

Which blows me away every time I think of it.

So now thinking about ANZAC Day I think of the political profiteering that’s going on with the ANZAC legend.

It’s no longer a legend. It’s a myth.

It’s not only a myth; it has, as someone said, become secular religion with formal observances and complete with unquestionable dogma.

It’s now becoming increasingly difficult to engage with anything like the reality of the diggers’ experience. They are no longer real Australians. They have been beatified.

They inhabit the battlefields like flying saints, like angels. They were all as perfect then as they are portrayed now.

But they weren’t perfect. They were just Australians. Ordinary Australians. Mostly blokes. They didn’t really go to war because they had some highfalutin idea about the ‘ultimate sacrifice’.

It seemed like a good idea at the time. Everyone was doing it. You didn’t want to look bad amongst your mates. And of course, yes, it was ‘the right thing to do’.

They were larrikins, some of them. It was a cheap way to see the world. They were kids. It was exciting. It was an adventure. It was worse to stay than to go. The last thing they expected was to be killed. Death in a distant country seemed…distant. And when they were faced with the ugly, terrible, terrifying reality of what they had got themselves into, then they faced the challenge in the way that makes us all Australian.

And if these things are not true they are more true than many of the things people are making up about them.

What I find especially offensive is the way children — too young and protected to be able to understand even dimly the horrors of war — are groomed and trotted out to spout the formulaic, cliche-filled, propaganda-ridden mythology about the heroes who just wanted to sacrifice their lives for their country.

The men and women who fought for Australia were heroes. But they didn’t feel like heroes. That’s not how we are. We do what needs to be done. How much of what we do on ANZAC Day is not after all about them? How much is it about us and the warm inner glow we give ourselves?

There are real and moving lessons to be learnt from this day. About us. About them. About the world. About war. I fear what it is becoming; because it is a misrepresentation of how it was and who they were; because it removes us further and further from the truth. That does not serve us at all. We are learning false lessons.

So their memory has been hijacked by profiteering politicians who cynically wrap themselves in the flag and smear themselves with diggers’ blood. And I’m not just talking about Howard. I’m talking about all of them and their various favourite media platforms.

Politicians do what they think is the pragmatic, clever thing. The diggers just did what they thought was “the right thing”.

That’s a real Australian Value.

We like to think that we do “the right thing” – or that we would do the right thing if the situation arose, even if it’s difficult, inconvenient or costly. We like to think that’s part of the Australian character.

That is why John Howard is backing the wrong horse with his climate change rhetoric. He’s betting on Australians’ selfishness. And it would be wrong to say that Australians aren’t selfish. Of course we are. We’re human. But one of the ways we are particularly selfish is for our children’s futures, and their children’s.

Australians do see global warming as a serious – really, a deadly serious – problem. We know that something should be done, has to be done, and that we should do it and have to do it. We know it’s up to us right now. We accept that we need to show leadership.

So we’ve been sucking in our breath and getting ready for the sacrifices that we know we will have to make in order to do the right thing.

In fact, in a way we’re kind of looking forward to meeting a challenge. We’re a resilient people. We’re resourceful, we’re clever. We’re ready. We’re ready to show what we’re made of – “Digger” stuff.

And then along comes John Howard and tells us it’s not so bad, we should wait for others to go first, it will be too uncomfortable, it won’t work, it’s too hard. It’s like telling the Swans to take it easy in the last quarter because they’re 30 behind and there’s no way they can make it up, so they may as well save themselves for the next game.

That’s just not how we do things around here. We put our bodies on the line and give it everything we’ve got, even if it seems hopeless. Even if it seems pointless. Defeat is not failure. Look at ANZAC Day.

Failure is not having a go.

John Howard is selling us short. He’s telling us that we are less than we know that we are, less than we truly believe we can be.

And we don’t like it. We take it as an insult. And so it is. He is showing us that he is less than we are.

We won’t like it when Costello throws money at us in the budget and in the lead-up to the election, either. We will take that as an insult. And so it will be.

We are ready to do the right thing about global warming and if Howard can’t be the leader he needs to be, we will choose someone else who better understands who we are — descendants of Diggers.

Signed With Their Honour

Apr 25, 2007 | Arts, Australian Values, Cultural Values, Values, War

Signed With Their Honour

For ANZAC Day

 

 

Two poems about the madness of war:

Mental Cases by Wilfred Owen

Naming of Parts by Henry Reed 

and a poem for the truly great – in our case the diggers:

I Think Continually by Stephen Spender.

_______________________________

 

 

 

For fourteen hours yesterday I was at work, teaching Christ to lift his cross by numbers and how to adjust his crown; and not to imagine the thirst till after the last halt. I attended his supper to see that there were no complaints and inspected his feet that they should be worthy of the nails. I see to it that he is dumb, and stands at attention before his accusers. With a piece of silver I buy him every day, and with maps I make him familiar with the topography of Golgotha.

~  Wilfred Owen, just before he was killed, in the last days of the war