The Australian Government's Aid Agency Ausaid, a major Australian employer of Halliburton/KBR, has been warned to tighten its anti-corruption practices in a report released today (Wednesday)

The report follows admission by Ausaid representatives earlier this year that the organision had no internal protocols for reporting detected corruption in aid deals.

The report, released by the National Audit Office, states that funds earmarked to provided relief to Indonesia following the Decenber 2004 tsunami were used to pay Ausaid officers and to cover administration costs.   It includes the statement that "a key risk for activities is that of fraud and corruption" and claims that numerous contracts were not signed until after the provision of services had commenced.

‘Tell me, if you went into
surgery to correct a knee problem and the surgeon mistakenly amputated your
entire leg, what would you think if someone then asked you: Are you glad that
you no longer have a knee problem?

’Great Moments
In The History of Imperialism

Do you think that Dick Cheney's words in the US today are going to be echoed in Canberra in next year?

[from SBS) 

US Vice-President Dick Cheney has said that a
landmark nuclear deal with India will win support of the US Congress
despite strong opposition by critics.

Mr Cheney said in Washington that the deal was "one of the most
important strategic foreign policy initiatives of President Bush's
second term".

Reuters has reported that legislation prepared for action next week
by a key House of Representatives committee would require India to
strongly support US efforts to halt Iran's nuclear ambitions and would
bar lawmakers from amending the formal peaceful nuclear cooperation
agreement still under negotiation by Washington and New Delhi.

The draft bill, which was obtained by Reuters, is "much closer to
the Bush administration's initial cut than things that were being
talked about" earlier by some lawmakers, said a congressional analyst
who closely followed the drafting process.

 Writing the piece Agonies Of A Conspiracy TheoristA and reading the responses both here and on Webdiary has altered the way I go about things.  The main sentiment I was left with was that I should "keep on keeping on".

The trouble is that in my second year of this blog I feel like I'm in a time-loop, almost as if I'm watching last year's script being followed by a sequel.  It even comes down to the sense of "lull" in proceedings I felt last June, which quickly came to an end with the arrival of the London bombings.

For those in our audience who are
too young to remember or too old to want to, a long, long time ago, in a far
off part of the galaxy called Awstralya, there was once a Minister for Defence
- Senator “Wookie” Hill.

Now “Wookie” was in charge of
Awstrayla’s stockpile of second-hand & redundant “boys toys”, acquired for
enormous sums of money from the Amerikan Military Industrial Complex (AMIC),
the people who run the United States government (aka The Universal Policeman –
TUP): Awstrayla’s special friend.

‘Nothing's going better in Iraq.
Everything's out of whack in Afghanistan. The two military interventions in the
greater Middle East that were supposed to bring stability, if not democracy,
clash with a ferocious opposition composed of radical forces that do not
necessarily have the support of the population, but which profit from growing
hostility towards the "liberators." The deterioration of the
situation in Afghanistan at the moment when NATO is taking over the international
coalition led by the United States is not independent of the latter's failure
in Iraq.

From Crikey …..

‘Hello, hello. The Vizard plot thickens.  

Today we're running a correction based on a letter we've received from
the lawyer acting for Steve Vizard's former accountant Greg Lay. Lay, you may
recall, was the sole director and shareholder of the company that made Vizard's
illegal share trades when Vizard was a Telstra director trading in shares of
companies in which Telstra was involved. Greg Lay was the man who bought and
sold shares on oral instructions from Vizard. It was Greg Lay who declined to
sign a witness statement incriminating Vizard. And it was Lay's refusal to sign
a witness statement that ASIC and the Commonwealth DPP cited as a key factor in
their decision not to lay criminal insider trading charges against Vizard over
share purchases made while he was a Telstra director. 

‘"Dictatorships, and there are plenty to choose from,
are referred to as rogue states and threatened vociferously with military
strikes, including the deployment of nuclear weapons. But it only further
stabilizes the fundamentalist power systems in those countries.

"Whether the term `axis of evil' is used
to refer to Iran or North Korea or Syria, politics could not be more stupid and
hence more dangerous. Yet the entire world is watching and pretending to be
powerless."  

ADF 'deeply
regrets' Iraqi shooting

The
Australian Defence Force (ADF) says it deeply regrets an incident where
Australian soldiers in Baghdad opened fire on the bodyguards of Iraq's
Trade Minister, Abdel Falah al-Sudany.

One of the
guards was killed and three others wounded when their convoy followed the
Australians' convoy from Mr Sudany's compound.

Israeli Air Strike Again Kills
Palestinian Civilian

By Ian Fisher & Steven Erlanger

Published: June 21, 2006

JERUSALEM, June 21 - A
Palestinian woman was killed today in Gaza after a pair of Israeli
missiles veered off target, one of them slamming into a house. It was the
latest in a series of botched air strikes that have killed a dozen Palestinian
civilians in the last eight days. 

‘Internal
Pentagon documents on the prison at Guantanamo that were made public
yesterday by the main American organization for the defense of individual
liberties, the ACLU, confirm, according to the ACLU, the prisoners'
despair.

These documents obtained by the
ACLU thanks to the Freedom of Information Act "are the latest evidence of
the desperate and immoral conditions that exist at Guantanamo Bay," the
organization's director, Anthony Romero, declared yesterday in a communiqué. 

Come Mr Alex, man, tell me I'm bananas
Daylight come and me wanna go home
Nuclear missles from Korea gonna harm us
Daylight come and me wanna go home.

May-o, me sing May-ay-ay-oh
Daylight come and me wanna go home

Work all night for a sniff of bum
Georgie-girl gives me a call I come

Love my Halliburton shares
Australia"s ambassador but no-one cares.

Love the old U.S. Of A.
They don't think karaoke's gay.

May, we sing May we sing May we sing May we sing May we sing May we sing May-ay-ay-oh.
Daylight comes and wish you go home.