“The Bush Administration has decided to grant all
detainees at the Guantanamo Bay detention centre protections offered by the
Geneva Convention,” our ABC breathlessly headlined on tonight’s News.

Guantanamo
Detainees Entitled To Geneva rights, Says US

Whilst “auntie” continues to
confirm its superficial role as a message board for government spinmeisters,
real journalists elsewhere were reporting the truth of this latest episode of
bushit “smoke & mirrors” …….

Howard promised me a handover:
Costello .....

Treasurer Peter Costello says
John Howard told him 12 years ago that he would only serve one-and-a-half terms
as Liberal leader.

Mr Costello's comments confirm
former defence minister Ian McLachlan's recollection of a meeting in 1994.

Mr McLachlan says he witnessed Mr
Howard tell Mr Costello that if he won
office he would hand over the leadership after two terms.

‘Little has changed in the imperialist tendencies of
American foreign policy since the founding of the United States of America in
seventeen eighty-nine. The fledgling United States opened the nineteenth
century by stealing the continent of North America from the Indians, while in
the process ethnically cleansing them and then finally deporting the pitiful
few survivors by means of death marches (a la Bataan) to Bantustans, which in
America we call reservations, as in instance of America's manifest destiny to
rule the world.

‘Des Browne, the defence secretary, conceded yesterday
that the deployment of 3,300 British forces into the Taliban heartland of
southern Helmand has "energised" the Taliban.

His sombre assessment came after
a week in which a sixth British soldier was killed in the province, and as he
prepares to announce next week the dispatch of reinforcements to the country,
including extra air cover and engineers.

Lieutenant Colonel Stuart Tootal,
the officer in charge of British troops in the region, also admitted the
resistance was proving unexpectedly tough. He said: "If we were honest, we
didn't expect it to be quite so intense. But at the same time, we have trained
for it. "

‘US evangelical leader Pat
Robertson labels Islam, "a bloody, brutal kind of religion," on the
Christian Broadcasting Corporation’s televised 700 Club. Commentator Ann
Coulter writes in the Jewish World Review that "[T]he government should
be spying on all Arabs, engaging in torture as a televised spectator
sport." Civilized people would like to believe that Coulter is an
anomalous hatemeister, lurking from the shadows of an ill-designed blogsite,
with iron crosses and ads for assault knives in the sidebars. But Coulter is a
welcome guest on cable TV giants like Fox News, MSNBC, and CNN, and her column
is syndicated by UPI.

Why is Newscorp advertising Pine Gap's role in the Korean missile launches?  A bulletin posted 2 hours ago explains how the CIA base in the middle of Australia was used to organise counter-measures.

Aegis class missile ships, similar to those being built in Adelaide, would have received missile trajectory information important in calculating counter-measures, the report says.

The Murdoch story explains how Pine Gap is one of only two U.S. ground stations used to collect infromation from satellites monitoring the Asia Pacific region.  The other station is located in Alaska.

 It has been reported that the body of Australian soldier Jake Kovco returned to Australia accompanied by the identification of a Halliburton contractor.  The body of Juso Sunanovic,the deceased worker from Bosnia was in a bag bearing the correctname and passport number, and had been delivered to the Kuwait morgue by a Halliburton/KBR employee.

A simple scrap of paper with Private Jake Kovco's
name scrawled in Arabic marks the door where his coffin was stored at
the Kuwait hospital's mortuary.
Photo: Jeroen Kramer (from Kuwait blog Hilalya)

‘Five major military contractors are competing to design a
system to tackle up to two million undocumented immigrants a year in the United
States. Boeing, Ericsson, Lockheed, Northrop Grumman and Raytheon are working
on proposals that focus on high technology rather than high fences, but
ignoring some of the fundamental problems of immigration.

At each checkpoint along the path
to citizenship or deportation -- from desert wilderness to urban labyrinth --
private contractors are expected to be hired to detect, apprehend, vet, detain,
process, and potentially incarcerate or deport people seeking economic and
human rights asylum in the U.S.

"I have a message for the people of Australia who are
enjoying the enhanced benefits of AWAs - the leader of the opposition is after
your aspirational prosperity."

John Howard

To celebrate Peter Cosgrove's first day as South Australia's main defence advisor, our Premier gave another fifteen million dollars to The Star Wars Shipbuilding Project.  The project is under the control of Halliburton's former global vice president for infrastructure, Andrew Fletcher.

 "We're actually gearing up to bid for a series of new projects and obviously what we need to do is to have the infrastructure and facilities in place to handle them." said Premier Mike Rann.  Lucky for him that he's got a man with the best infrastructure plans in the world working for him.... or is it vice versa?

Howard dismisses 'fluctuating'
polls …

Prime Minister John Howard has dismissed an opinion poll that shows
a surge in support for the Federal Opposition.

The Newspoll, which has been
published in today's The Australian newspaper, shows Labor has a six-point
advantage over the Coalition on a two-party preferred basis.

Labor has 53 per cent support
compared to 47 per cent for the Coalition.

The rockets red glare,
Bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night
That our flag was still there.

Oh, say does that
Star spangled banner yet wave,
O'er the land of the free,
And the home of the brave.

‘When I look at the star-spangled
banner I think of my son who began wearing a uniform with the flag on it from
the time he went into scouting at the age of 6. I also think of one of the last
pictures taken of Casey when he was awaiting deployment to Iraq from Kuwait. He
was standing in a tent holding a bottle of water, wearing his desert cammies
with an American flag patch on the chest. When we buried him a few weeks after
that picture was taken, I was handed a folded flag that reminded me of the
swaddling blanket that I wrapped him in to bring him home from the hospital
almost 25 years before.

‘A black flag hangs over the "rolling" operation
in Gaza. The more the operation "rolls," the darker the flag becomes.
The "summer rains" we are showering on Gaza are not only pointless,
but are first and foremost blatantly illegitimate. It is not legitimate to cut
off 750,000 people from electricity. It is not legitimate to call on 20,000
people to run from their homes and turn their towns into ghost towns. It is not
legitimate to penetrate Syria's airspace. It is not legitimate to kidnap half a
government and a quarter of a parliament.