The international media ran hot & fast this week with claims that former US President, Jimmy Carter had called for the closure of Guantanamo Bay, following-up with reports that President George Bush would ‘consider’ that possibility.

On the back Bush’s noisy dissembling came today’s announcement by US Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, confirming that Guantanamo Bay will NOT be closed.

A review of the original joint statement made by the Carter Center & Human Rights First demonstrates how easily the media hares are outwitted by the political hounds.

Whether you prefer chardonnay, beer, bottled water or tennessee whiskey, you can now run a personal check on the contemporary settings of your ‘political compass’.

The US has a vast and very expensive Homeland Security bureaucracy with nothing to do. There hasn’t been a terrorist attack in America since 2001. There have been a vast quantity of terror alerts, the purpose of which was to scare Americans into supporting an unnecessary, illegal & aggressive attack on Iraq.

British MP, George Galloway, offers his latest blunt assessment of the Bush administration.

The Editor
Sydney Morning Herald
June 4, 2005

So General Cosgrove feels ‘fiercely protective’ of the people under his command (‘Operation protect, as SAS comes under fire’, Herald, June 4)?

But in losing his cool this week whilst defending the SAS against allegations of bungling & misconduct, the good General confirmed that outmoded & misguided concepts of leadership & governance still hold sway in the ADF, just as they do in the broader reaches of the defence & intelligence establishments & in the highest ranks of government.

‘The enemy aggressor is always pursuing a course of larceny, murder, rapine & barbarism.

We are always moving forward with high mission, a destiny imposed by the Deity to regenerate our victims while incidentally capturing their markets, to civilise savage & senile & paranoid peoples while blundering accidentally into their oil wells.’

John Flynn, 1944

Recently, the Victorian academic, Professor Mirko Bagaric, argued the moral case in support of torture, through his paper “Not enough (official) torture in the world?: The circumstances in which torture is morally justifiable

Something is sure crook in Tobruk ('What Hicks is missing', Herald, June 1)

The latest update from the Democratic Audit of Australia team below.

“When the most powerful country in the world thumbs its nose at the rule of law & human rights, it grants a license to others to commit abuse with impunity & audacity."

Amnesty International

Today, says Howard Zinn, we have a president, who more than any before him, claims a special relationship with God.

Zinn worries about an administration that deploys Christian zealotry to justify a war against terrorism, a war that in reality seems more about establishing a new beachhead in the oil-rich Middle East.

The savage bloodbath engulfing the middle-east today can be traced directly to the mendacity of Great Britain in its dealings with the Arab peoples nearly a century ago.

“Senator [Coleman], in everything I said about Iraq, I turned out to be right, and you turned out to be wrong. And 100,000 people have paid with their lives, 1,600 of them American soldiers, sent to their deaths on a pack of lies, 15,000 of them wounded, many of them disabled forever on a pack of lies. If the world had listened to Kofi Annan, who's dismissal you demanded, if the world had listened, to President Chirac, who you want to paint as some kind of corrupt traitor, if the world had listened to me and the anti-war movement in Britain, we would not be in the disaster that we are in today. Senator, this is the mother of all smokescreens, you are trying to divert attention from the crimes that you supported, from the theft of billions of dollars of Iraq's wealth.

“The average man, whatever his errors otherwise, at least sees clearly that government is something lying outside him and outside the generality of his fellow men - that it is a separate, independent, and hostile power, only partly under his control, and capable of doing him great harm.

The refusal of your government to secure & protect the rights of Mr Hicks confirms its readiness to arrogantly & irresponsibly avoid its obligations under international law & to betray its most fundamental duty: to protect the rights of Australian citizens.