‘Twelve hours: one circuit of the sun from horizon to
horizon, one course of the moon from dusk to dawn. What was once a natural
measurement for the daily round of human life is now a doom-laden interval
between the voicing of an autocrat's brutal whim and the infliction of mass
annihilation halfway around the world. 

Twelve hours is the maximum time
necessary for American bombers to gear up and launch an unprovoked sneak attack
– a Pearl Harbor in reverse – against Iran, the
Washington Post reports. The plan for this "global
strike," which includes a very viable "nuclear option," was
approved months ago, and is now in operation. The planes are already on
continuous alert, making "nuclear delivery" practice runs along the
Iranian border, as Sy Hersh
reports in the New Yorker, and waiting only for the signal from
President George W. Bush to drop their payloads of conventional and nuclear
weapons on some 400 targets spread throughout the condemned land. 

‘You ask about the motivations, and that is one of the
patterns that comes through when you look at these things all together. 

There’s really a three-stage
motivation that I can see when I watch so many of the developments of these
coups. The first thing that happens is that the regime in question starts
bothering some American company. They start demanding that the company pay
taxes or that it observe labor laws or environmental laws. Sometimes that
company is nationalized or is somehow required to sell some of its land or its
assets. So the first thing that happens is that an American or a foreign
corporation is active in another country, and the government of that country
starts to restrict it in some way or give it some trouble, restrict its ability
to operate freely. 

 As the Australian Prime Minister's opinion polls sag from the mud of a
bribery scandal, a flag-draped Australian hero is brought home to be
honoured on our annual day of war remembrance.....

It was bad luck that I was re-watching "Wag The Dog" while reading
about the death of the Aussie sniper... maybe otherwise I wouldn't have
been feeling so cynical. For those who don't know the movie, it's about
the media staging of a war to save the US President's election
campaign. Anyway, I was listening to Dustin Hoffman uttering the words
in the title as my eyes fell on this Melbourne Herald-Sun paragraph:

‘Usually watching CNN with one
eye as we blog from our undisclosed location doesn’t give us much new fodder,
except for the occasional "stuck landing gear" crisis. But
this week we were aghast at the coverage of Chinese President Hu Jintao at the
White House. 

At an outdoor ceremony, Bush told Hu: 

 
From the ABC ….. 

22/04/06

Beazley urges Howard: stay on until election

The Federal Opposition Leader Kim
Beazley has issued a challenge to John Howard to contest the next election. 

There has been more leadership
speculation in the wake of the Prime Minister yesterday declaring he was not considering
retirement. 

As Former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage sticks up for the
Howard Government again, I start to wonder about him. Armitage, who has
ties to the company that provided the commercial torturers working in
Abu Graibh (including the one from Adelaide)
has attempted to draw a curtain over the Howard Government's
negligences revealed in the AWB Inquiry. Armitage says that nobody in
the USA gives a damn about Australian Government corruption.

Wow, they are just like us Aussies after all

 
As our great holy men of faith
leapt about the landscape this past week, loudly protesting the cruel &
inhuman treatment visited on refugees from West Papua by our evil neighbours,
the Indonesians, the rest of the world, including Great Britain, was busy
complaining about the inhuman treatment being meted-out by our great friend
& ally, the US, on the detainees held at Guantanamo Bay (Guantanamo
Detainee List Draws Wave Of Complaints).

‘How extraordinary. Something is
happening here that has never happened in America's history. A consensus is
sweeping the nation. Not that the war in Iraq is wrong, or that oil companies
are screwing us blue, or that the climate is going to hell, or that good-paying
jobs are being replaced by low-paying jobs, or that our national health care
system is a disgrace, or that that the rich are getting a lot richer while the
middle class gets poorer. 

 
‘Last but not least, before deciding to bomb Iran's
nuclear installations the Bush administration must seriously question whether
the intelligence on which its decision is based is reliable. Those of us who
have followed reports on the development of Iran's nuclear program know that
the warnings from American and other intelligence agencies about Tehran
building a bomb in three and five years have been made again and again — for
more than 15 years. 

 
‘It’s both fascinating and
dismaying watching the manufactured `crisis’ over Iran reach new intensity each
week. 

Iran poses no real military
threat to anyone, but listening to the Bush Administration or the US media one
would think that that Tehran was about to unleash a nuclear holocaust on the
world. 

What we are seeing is a rerun of
the administration’s massive propaganda offensive that led to the invasion of
Iraq. There is also no doubt that the Bush Administration has been planning a
major air war against Iran. 

 
Richard Clarke flags
consequences of bombing Iran 

Reporter: Maxine McKew 

MAXINE McKEW: ‘While the UN
Security Council tries to grapple with Iran's open defiance of nuclear
regulators …..’ 

The protesters who broke into Pine Gap are about to be treated as "examples" This is going to be a major warning to protesters that contravention of law will not be tolerated.

Here's tomorrow's Daily Telegraph story. 

A GROUP of anti-war
protesters claim "operational secrecy" is hindering their efforts to
defend themselves against charges of breaking into a top secret
Australian spy base.

Donna Mulhearn, 37, Jim Dowling, 50, Adele Goldie, 29, and Bryan Law,
51, have faced a committal hearing in Alice Springs Magistrates Court,
charged with breaking into the Pine Gap spy base in central Australia.

‘Thirteen years ago the federal government of the United
States ended its altercation with a group of peaceful religious separatists – a
conflict the government had initiated – by driving a tank through the Branch
Davidians’ home and church, pumping the interior with poisonous gas, and
keeping the fire engines at a distance while the building and the people inside
burned. 

For many Americans, Waco
represented the nightmare their government had become. In those days, it was
the right that spoke out against unchecked government power, erosions of the
Bill of Rights, and the imperial executive. Such criticism was tempered in its
radicalism over the next decade, for a variety of reasons.

 
‘"I listen to all voices, but mine is the final
decision," he said. "And Don Rumsfeld is doing a fine job. He's not
only transforming the military, he's fighting a war on terror. He's helping us
fight a war on terror. I have strong confidence in Don Rumsfeld. 

"I hear the voices, and I read the front page, and I
know the speculation. But I'm the decider, and I decide what is best. And
what's best is for Don Rumsfeld to remain as the secretary of defense."’