‘The US has a long-standing (and accelerating) policy of arming, training and aiding some of the world's most repressive regimes. As insecurity mounts from Najaf to New Orleans, more weapons and high-tech military equipment are flowing into some of the globe's most vulnerable and war-torn regions.  

The Congressional Research Service recently found that global arms sales rose to US$37 billion in 2004 - the highest level since 2000. US companies such as Lockheed Martin and Boeing rang up $12.4 billion in weapons contracts - more than one-third of the total and more than twice what Russia - the second largest exporter sold. The Departments of State, Commerce and Defense are all involved in different aspects of approving licenses, managing logistics and (in many cases) loaning or granting funds to nations as they seek weapons from US corporations.  

The time was five years ago, to be exact, and in these memoirs, titled "A World Transformed," the former President, George Herbert Walker Bush, father of George W. Bush, wrote the following to explain why he didn't go after Saddam Hussein at the end of the gulf War:

"Trying to eliminate Saddam ... would have incurred incalculable human & political costs. Apprehending him was probably impossible. We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad & in effect, rule Iraq ...

The Australian Prime Minister Mr Howard will unveil plans to increase aid to $4 billion a year by 2012 from the current level of $2.7 billion.

The increase will take Australia close to the 0.7 per cent of GDP set at the Millennium Summit five years ago.

Source: Melbourne Herald Sun 

The main Australian aid provider would possibly  be the company in the
process of settling a new foreign aid administrator into its Adelaide
office.

Aid  contracts have been given to Halliburton KBR in Adelaide over the last three years under the pretext that they were being given to a local company.   But the way, the minister's contact in that  media  release is now a senior journalist for the Adelaide Advertiser.  He is also a former conservative member of Parliament, and led the newspaper's campaign to invoke support for the Adelaide Warship Contract

Scary times, in which a man is arrested in for the crime of protesting against Halliburton.  I wasn't aware that legislation had been already been proclaimed.

Six Federal police and immigration officials were needed to arrest Houston history teacher Scott Parkin at a Melbourne cafe. Parkin was on his way to present a workshop about the U.S. peace movement and companies involved in the Iraq war. Australian Greens leader Senator Bob Brown has claimed that orders for Parkins' arrest and presumably imminent deportation orignated from the U.S. Government. The Howard Government will do anything the U.S. Government asks... because he's a thorn in the side of of Dick Cheney, Halliburton, and profit making deals that apply in Iraq"

On the 4^th anniversary of September 11, more than 200 detainees at the US concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay are continuing a hunger strike to protest their ongoing treatment.

 
Among the Guantanamo Bay inmates is Australian, David Hicks, who has been held by the US for nearly 4 years: tortured; denied his legal & human rights & abandoned by his own government.

 
In the face of strenuous opposition from Bush administration lawyers, 3 federal appellate judges yesterday expressed doubts about the US government's assertion that hundreds of foreign nationals imprisoned indefinitely in Cuba have no right to challenge their detention in US courts.