15 August 2006

TRANSCRIPT OF THE PRIME MINISTER
THE HON JOHN HOWARD MP
INTERVIEW WITH JOHN LAWS

RADIO 2UE, SYDNEY

PRIME MINISTER:

Well there's no easy solution to this problem and I don't hold out the LPG subsidy as being a silver bullet, as being the answer to high petrol prices. It's doing something at the margins to help, I suspect, a reasonably large number of people. I guess the best way of helping people in relation to high petrol prices generally is to put more money in their pockets through things like tax cuts. I remember at the time of the Budget, there was a debate about whether there should be a cut in the petrol excise. I don't mean a debate within the Government; I mean a debate in the community. And I said at the time, as did Peter Costello, that we both thought the best way of helping people a little with high petrol prices was to make sure everybody got some tax relief, because that's putting money in the pocket, and people can then use that money in whatever way they think fit. Now I'm not representing to the community that what I announced yesterday is an answer to high petrol prices. What I announced yesterday will help at the margins. There is no cure-all answer to high petrol prices, absent a fall in the price of crude oil, which of course is influenced by forces beyond our control.

Halliburton, the scandal-plagued oil company, that Vice President Dick Cheney used to run, sold an Iranian company key components for a nuclear reactor, Halliburton sources revealed.

Cheney was CEO from 1995 to 2000, during which Halliburton Products and Services set up shop in Iran.

Halliburton, which sells about $40 million a year worth of oil field services to the Iranian Government, was secretly aiding one of Iran’s top nuclear program officials on natural gas related projects and provided the official's oil development company with the components last April, the sources said.

Bear in mind when you read this that there are Raytheon people wandering around Antartica, and that the reasons that Raytheon have identified Adelaide as a hub are probably similar to those I gave in Halliburton's Adelaide.  

Reprinted from Raytheon's website, this speech explains South Australia's new military role in the world better than I can:

An address by Mr Ron Fisher, Managing Director Raytheon Australia

To

Does anyone know what happened to Steve?  Why didn't he face trial with Lindy England?  I read somewhere that he was actually in Adelaide on secondment to the Australian Rail Track Corporation from Halliburton.. better find it, I guess.   Anyway when you know that operatives like this have been hiding in woodpiles, it makes you wonder what else is going on little old Adelaide.

Have a look at this extract from Wayne Madsen's piece on Counterpunch (10/504) 

A CACI employee identified in the report, Steven Stephanowicz, is referred to as "Stefanowicz" in a number of articles on the prison abuse. Stefanowicz is the spelling used by Joe Ryan, another CACI employee assigned with Stefanowicz to Abu Ghraib. Ryan is a radio personality on KSTP, a conservative radio station in Minneapolis, who maintained a daily log of his activities in Iraq on the radio's web site before it was taken down. Ryan indicated that Stefanowicz (or Stephanowicz) continued to hold his interrogation job in Iraq even though General Taguba recommended he lose his security clearance and be terminated for the abuses at Abu Ghraib.

‘Hysteria over the barbarians at the gate has destroyed republics from Rome to Germany. Will President Bush's post-Sept. 11 America meet a similar fate?

In the name of stopping the new bogeyman of international terrorism, our government has claimed an unfettered right to torture foreigners, eavesdrop on citizens and reorder the world with our military might. It is a policy that depends for its domestic political success on the specter of an enemy whose power and purpose must never be subject to logical and factual inquiry, lest it lose its power to alarm.

‘We are Israel. We are untouchable. No matter what we do the international community will not act against us. Oh, there will be talks at the United Nations but we know that the United States will intervene on our behalf. There will be Arab League discussions but we know that no state will take action against us. There will be mass protests and demonstrations; there will be activists and advocates begging for peace; there will be rallies and fundraisers to help the targets of our bombs. And we know that nothing will make a difference because we are Jews - we are victims of the Holocaust. We have suffered such that we have the right to make the rest of the world pay (even though organised Zionism officially declared war on Germany in 1933, long before Hitler's Final Solution): because we are victims.

August 13, 2006
 
today’s Buzzflash editorial ….

’As BuzzFlash has repeatedly editorialized, the Bush Administration is a detriment to America's national security. Our lives are increasingly at risk every day that they are in office.

They will never seriously battle the sources of terrorism in an effective, strategic fashion. That is because politically they need the terrorists as much as the terrorists need them. And the goals of the Bush Administration are the consolidation of power and the acquisition of natural resources and economic dominance, not the eradication of terror.

whilst “the great decider” & Amerika’s middle-east catspaw, Israel, continue to condemn Hizbullah as a “terrorist organisation”, demanding that they surrender their arms in return for Israel agreeing to a ceasefire, no-one has been able to point to a single terrorist incident for which Hizbollah has been responsible for more than a decade.

Of course, Rupert Murdoch’s SKY News is as determined as his Fox network to push the bushit lies & distortions, trying to create the impression that poor little Israel is only struggling to defend herself from the dreadful terrorists.

‘Meanwhile, back in reality-based reality, anti-terrorism experts around the globe are growing more convinced everyday that al-Qaeda is less an organization now, and more a movement. This, of course, means that everyday onetime harmless Western citizens, due to Bush-Republican Neo-Conservative foreign policy insanity, are taking it upon themselves to create their own al-Qaeda-like terror cells. Bush's policies have created an atmosphere in which Islamic people everywhere feel threatened so, rather than wait on bin Forgotten to call them, they simply take it upon themselves to join the fight. Yet, Bush and the Neo-Con madmen enjoy making wild claims that Democrats endanger American citizens' security. It flies in the face of all known evidence and makes one want to ask the Neo-Con madmen, just where the hell is Osama bin Forgotten? 

‘The news is full of little else than the foiled terrorist plot to blow up a number of airliners in midair. Every official who can possibly justify it is popping up before the cameras with something to say, including, of course, the president.

Does Mr. Bush ever consider that, perhaps, he has become so accustomed to glib platitudes that he has actually come to believe them? I just saw him emerge from Air Force One and tell us, with appropriate solemnity, that Islamo-fascists (as distinct from Red-State-fascists?) are again trying to destroy us because we are free.

Computer Expert Testifies Before Congress That Florida Elections Were Fixed .....

The programmer claims under oath that he designed and built a "vote rigging" software program at the behest of then Florida Congressman, now U.S. Congressman, Republican Tom Feeney of Florida's 24th Congressional District. 

Later he testified that another computer company he was working for sold NASA secrets to the Chinese.

We know it happened in OH, because in one place there were more votes than voters, and in another there were already 4,000 votes on the PC machine before the polls opened, but our Republican Secretary of State Ken Blackwell refused to investigate, and he's running for governor in 2006.  Bev Harris tried to tell everyone, but no one listened.

‘The UN Security Council resolution draft on Lebanon reflects a new stage of Western colonialism in the Middle East, and perhaps a historic precedent: for the first time, the UN Security Council – should the resolution draft be endorsed – breaches the fundamental principle of the right of people under occupation to resist, and in fact legitimizes the violent partition of the sovereign state of Lebanon.

  Last year all we were given for September 11 was an Al Qaeda tape and the arrest of a terror threat named Scott Parkin.  This year I reckon we're in for a suprise party.

A month away, and the celebrations have started already.  People are being made to carry their personal effects onto planes in sealed plastic bags.  What I wan't to know is if this liquid explosive idea was known, why weren't we told.  OK so it might have alerted the would-be terrorists- but it would also have caused a cancellation of plans and perhaps averted the current state of fear that all of those travellers are enduring.  And it might have averted an escalation in hostilities instead of potentially provoking such a possibility.

‘I’m wondering. Help me wonder. Either Georgie Bush is the minor, depressing, witless ferret I think he is, or I am. It has to be one or the other. If things don’t start looking up pretty soon internationally, I’m going to be pretty sure which.

As best as I can tell, what the Maximum Cipher lacks, among an inexhaustible list of other things, is a hop-toad’s understanding of how people work. Here we have the explanation of just about everything he does. He’s dealing with a world full of people, but has no idea what people are. He probably couldn’t recognize one. So he doesn’t take their predictable behaviour into account.