War is about killing people.

John Howard has chosen to take Australia into an illegal war, a useless dangerous war of agression and a war that everyone knew would unleash tragedy in various form — from revenge to terrorism. This war has been a deliberate mass murder.

One can scream as much as one wants about Saddam having killed this or that number of his people, but the greater decimation and destruction of Iraq by the US invasion and of the resistance it generated — and in opening the doors of that country to external forces such as "Al Qaeda" was a deliberate and careless act of killing. No matter what the excuses are, John Howard, George Bush and Tony Blair murdered people on our behalf. They destroyed a country on our behalf. This is not acceptable by anyone who has a conscience...

And as the former chief of the Fed Bank in the US says, "everyone knows that the war on Iraq was mostly about oil." Ugly and terrifying reality that should not escape anyone voting in the next election. Anyone voting for John Howard's mob is sanctioning murder, looting and plundering.

We deserve better. Throw John Howard out.  

The US Senate will also consider an amendment proposed by Senator Joe bin Biden (Democrat) calling for the partitioning of Iraq into at least three sectarian enclaves. "You make federalism work for the Iraqis," bin Biden claimed.

But 98 percent of Iraqis oppose the partitioning of their country on sectarian lines. The plan "would alienate huge sections of the Iraqi population. It would be a gross provocation to most of Iraq's neighbors," who view a divided Iraq as a "brittle state structure," notes Iraq expert Reidar Visser.

bin Biden's criminally arrogant proposal echoes Brookings analyst Michael O'Hanlon's "soft-partition" plan, which envisions a long-term occupation of Iraq. Analyst Anthony Cordesman said of the partition plan: "[It is] brutal. It is repressive. It kills people. It injures them. It drives them out of their homes & it drives them out of their country. To talk about this as if it was something that is gentle or non-violent is simply dishonest."

And we just worry about turd blossom & rattus!!!!

There are now an estimated four million Iraqis who have been forced to flee their homes, and the numbers continue to rise, according to the UN refugee agency.

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Gus: Our Rattus is as guilty of this as much as George W Bush is. That Rattus takes on with a heavy heart the death of one Aussie Digger in Afghanistan is fair enough, but if he did not know that his foray in Iraq with Bush would lead to this descent into chaos, he should not be a leader of men. Anyone with a brain would have known that the invasion of Iraq was going to lead to some serious displacement of population, of serious revenge, of dangerous internal conflict and of many deaths (600,000 to one million, "we don't do civilian body count" told us Ducky Rummy) including those of two women accidentally shot by some Aussie guard contractors... By siding with George Bush, Rattus johnii howardeus has led Australia into a totally immoral and illegal invasion of a sovereign country, how repugnant its leader was. In four years, the coalition of the killing has opened the door to plenty more damage than Saddam ever did in thirty years. This tragic outcome was obvious BEFORE the invasion ever started. Furthermore, the lies about the purpose of the invasion are despicable, and eventually did not hide what we knew and claimed all along, The invasion was about oil.

Rattus has gotta-go-go-go...

Home and Away: Spreading the Seed of Torture and Tyranny
Written by Chris Floyd
Monday, 15 October 2007

Seen the arrow on the doorpost
Saying, "This land is condemned
All the way from New Orleans
To Jerusalem."

-- Bob Dylan, "Blind Willie McTell"

Truthteller Chris Hedges shines the torchlight on one of the ugliest corners of the "Terror War" being carried out by George W. Bush and his willing executioners in Congress: the rendition pipeline of Bush's captives to the torture chambers of Egyptian despot Hosni Mubarak. While the war of aggression in Iraq has killed a million people in the name of "bringing democracy to the Middle East," the United States has continued its long-running, unstinting support for the brutal tyranny in Egypt. As always, Hedges should be read in full, but here is an excerpt from "Outsourcing Torture":

The extraordinary-rendition program, which sees the United States kidnap and detain terrorist suspects in secret prisons around the world, fits neatly with the Egyptian regime’s contempt for due process. Those rounded up by American or Egyptian security agents are never granted legal rights. The abductors are often hooded or masked. If the captors are American the suspects are spirited onto a Gulfstream V jet registered to a series of dummy American corporations, such as Bayard Foreign Marketing of Portland, Ore., and whisked to Egypt or perhaps Morocco or Jordan. When these suspects arrive in Cairo they vanish into black holes as swiftly as dissident Egyptians. It is the same dirty and seamless process.

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Gus: while many people die — many innocent, some not — because we support Bush and Howard, we can enjoy future tax cuts... Welcome to the future of the fascist buck. It's in our hands.