Protected: Scary If True

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Scary If True

Read this in the paper this morning –

The kingdom of America
July 30 2003

The United States increasingly believes it acts with divine sanction and therefore should not be questioned, writes George Monbiot.

‘The death of Uday and Qusay,” the commander of the United States ground forces in Iraq told reporters last Wednesday, “is definitely going to be a turning point for the resistance.” Well, it was a turning point, but unfortunately not of the kind he envisaged. On the day he made his announcement, Iraqi insurgents killed one US soldier and wounded six others. On the following day, they killed another three; over the weekend they assassinated five and injured seven. On Monday they slaughtered one more and wounded three. This has been the worst week for US soldiers in Iraq since George Bush declared that the war there was over.

Few people believe that the resistance in that country is being co-ordinated by Saddam Hussein and his noxious family, or that it will come to an end when those people are killed. But the few appear to include the military and civilian command of the US armed forces. For the hundredth time since the US invaded Iraq, the predictions by those with access to intelligence have proved less reliable than the predictions made by those without. And, for the hundredth time, the inaccuracy of the official forecasts has been blamed on “intelligence failures”.

The explanation is wearing a little thin. Are we really expected to believe that the members of the US security services are the only people who cannot see that many Iraqis wish to rid themselves of the US Army as fervently as they wished to rid themselves of Saddam? What is lacking in the Pentagon and the White House is not intelligence (or not, at any rate, of the kind we are considering here), but receptivity. Theirs is not a failure of information, but a failure of ideology.

To understand why this failure persists, we must first grasp a reality that has seldom been discussed in print. The US is no longer just a nation. It is now a religion. Its soldiers have entered Iraq to liberate its people not only from their dictator, their oil and their sovereignty, but also from their darkness. As Bush told his troops on the day he announced victory: “Wherever you go, you carry a message of hope – a message that is ancient and ever new. In the words of the prophet Isaiah, ‘To the captives, “come out,” and to those in darkness, “be free”.’ ”

So American soldiers are no longer merely terrestrial combatants; they have become missionaries. They are no longer simply killing enemies; they are casting out demons. The people who reconstructed the faces of Uday and Qusay Hussein carelessly forgot to restore the pair of little horns on each brow, but the understanding that these were opponents from a different realm was transmitted nonetheless. Like all those who send missionaries abroad, the high priests of America cannot conceive that the infidels might resist through their own free will; if they refuse to convert, it is the work of the devil, in his current guise as the former dictator of Iraq.

As Clifford Longley shows in his fascinating book Chosen People, published last year, the founding fathers of the US, though they sometimes professed otherwise, sensed that they were guided by a divine purpose. Thomas Jefferson argued that the Great Seal of the United States should depict the Israelites, “led by a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night”. George Washington claimed, in his inaugural address, that every step towards independence was “distinguished by some token of providential agency”.

Longley argues that the formation of the American identity was part of a process of “supersession”. The Catholic Church claimed that it had supplanted the Jews as the elect, as the Jews had been repudiated by God. The English Protestants accused the Catholics of breaking faith and claimed that they had become the beloved of God.

The American revolutionaries believed that the English, in turn, had broken their covenant: the Americans had now become the chosen people, with a divine duty to deliver the world to God’s dominion. Six weeks ago, as if to show that this belief persists, George Bush recalled a remark of Woodrow Wilson’s. “America,” he quoted, “has a spiritual energy in her which no other nation can contribute to the liberation of mankind.”

Gradually this notion of election has been conflated with another, still more dangerous idea. It is not just that the Americans are God’s chosen people; America itself is now perceived as a divine project.

In his farewell presidential address, Ronald Reagan spoke of his country as a “shining city on a hill”, a reference to the Sermon on the Mount. But what Jesus was describing was not a temporal Jerusalem, but the kingdom of heaven. Not only, in Reagan’s account, was God’s kingdom to be found in the United States of America, but the kingdom of hell could also now be located on earth: the “evil empire” of the Soviet Union, against which His holy warriors were pitched.

Since the attacks on New York, this notion of America the divine has been extended and refined. In December 2001, Rudy Giuliani, the then mayor of that city, delivered his last mayoral speech in St Paul’s Chapel, close to the site of the shattered twin towers. “All that matters,” he claimed, “is that you embrace America and understand its ideals and what it’s all about. Abraham Lincoln used to say that the test of your Americanism was… how much you believed in America. Because we’re like a religion really. A secular religion.”

The chapel in which he spoke had been consecrated not just by God, but by the fact that George Washington had once prayed there. It was, he said, now “sacred ground to people who feel what America is all about”.

The US no longer needs to call upon God; it is God, and those who go abroad to spread the light do so in the name of a celestial domain. The flag has become as sacred as the Bible; the name of the nation as holy as the name of God. The presidency is turning into a priesthood.

So those who question Bush’s foreign policy are no longer merely critics; they are blasphemers, or “anti-Americans”. Those foreign states that seek to change this policy are wasting their time: you can negotiate with politicians; you cannot negotiate with priests. The US has a divine mission, as Bush suggested in January: “to defend… the hopes of all mankind”, and woe betide those who hope for something other than the American way of life.

The dangers of national divinity scarcely require explanation. Japan went to war in the 1930s convinced, like Bush, that it possessed a heaven-sent mission to “liberate” Asia and extend the realm of its divine imperium. It would, the fascist theoretician Kita Ikki predicted, “light the darkness of the entire world”.

Those who seek to drag heaven down to earth are destined only to engineer a hell.

British author George Monbiot is a columnist with The Guardian, where this article first appeared.

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A Mixed Bag of Weekend Reading

A story of contrasts in my readings this weekend. There was this article about a Muslim writer talking about the fundamentalism of Western Society at the Adelaide Festival of Ideas. Showing up our rather contradictory view of reality in most English-speaking Western Countries with our indomitable belief that everything about Western society is right and at the same time applying a blanket description of fundamentalist to Muslim societies showing how truly “fundamentalist” our leaders and some of our people are –

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A Mixed Bag of Weekend Reading

A story of contrasts in my readings this weekend. There was this article about a Muslim writer talking about the fundamentalism of Western Society at the Adelaide Festival of Ideas. Showing up our rather contradictory view of reality in most English-speaking Western Countries with our indomitable belief that everything about Western society is right and at the same time applying a blanket description of fundamentalist to Muslim societies showing how truly “fundamentalist” our leaders and some of our people are –

The scepticism of a believer
By Angela Bennie
July 26 2003
“I like going into the lion’s den, I spend a lot of time in the lion’s den. That is where the fun is.”
“Fun” might be Ziauddin Sardar’s word for it, others might call it the fight of his life. Armed with sharp wit, an almost evangelical zeal and an intuitive grasp of when to move in for the intellectual kill, the sceptical Sardar, 51, takes on all-comers, no matter which side of the fence they stand. He thrives in the lion’s den.
You could say the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, pushed him there, and to the recent Adelaide Festival of Ideas – although he would probably disagree with this. A leading Muslim scholar and writer, Sardar’s body of work is testament to a lifetime’s restless need for intellectual inquiry and critique.
Born in Pakistan, and brought up and educated in Britain, Sardar’s first degree was in physics. But his work and writings encompass everything from Islam to the philosophy of science to the shape of the future. He writes for British newspapers and magazines, and co-wrote the international bestseller Why Do People Hate America? He edits Futures, the monthly journal of planning and futures studies, and is a broadcaster, cultural theorist and professor of post-colonial studies at the City University, London. No wonder he was once dubbed “Britain’s own Muslim polymath”.
As it did everyone else, September 11 shocked him to the core. “How am I to comprehend this colossal act of terrorism?” he wrote in the New Statesman within days of the attack. “Senseless suicide and slaughter by fanatics are no part of my faith.”
As “Britain’s own” Muslim, he finds himself called on again and again to explain the event, as if, he writes, “by some strange process of osmosis, all Muslims are supposed to have some sort of shared understanding of what makes terrorists tick. Islam cannot explain the actions of the suicide hijackers, just as Christianity cannot explain the gas chambers, or Catholicism the bombing at Omagh.”
Yet Sardar, in a way, occupies a unique position: “My self is in two parts. I am a Muslim and I am a Westerner. There is no question that criticism must start with the self. I am a Muslim, so I critique Islam. I am a Westerner; I critique the West.”
Since the events of September 11, he has become an unambiguous, fiery critic of both Islam and the West. In essay after essay, in broadcasts and public debate, Sardar has repeatedly called for reform within Islam, for Muslims to take a critical look at themselves, their practices and their ossified interpretations of Islam.
Believers have become passive receivers, he says. Islam cannot survive as a static faith, buried in history. Pluralism was always intrinsic to the Islam world view – it has always been an ethical faith, offering individual and collective freedom.
But Islamic fundamentalism offers the reverse. Islam today is the product of a ruthless encounter with modernity. Insisting as it does on a single interpretation of Islam, it has been transformed into a totalitarian, theocratic order.
His message does not fall on deaf ears. His books are widely read, he is in demand as a speaker, both in the West and in Muslim countries – especially Malaysia, where, he says, young Muslim groups are passionately interested in what he has to say.
If he is tough on Islam, he is damning of the West. And at Adelaide, the West – and Australia – copped it hard. But, it has to be said, they copped it sweet. Sardar was a star turn: “Fundamentalists believe there is only one great culture, one way to believe, only one truth, one way to do science, one history. This kind of civilisation is supremely fundamentalist, and you,” stabbing the air toward his audience, “you belong to that civilisation.
“Western culture is so used to being right most of the time that it now thinks it is right all the time. Westerners think there is only one way of being, and that is their way. All other ways are inferior. The dominant culture of the West allows no space for difference, it is afraid of difference.”
In panel after panel he pushed his message hard. “Take this question of ‘truth’: there are people who search for truth, there are those who believe in truth, and there are those who believe they own the truth. This last group has absolute certainty. Those people who believe they own the truth are you. You are the most fundamentalist of all the people on this earth.”
The nature of beliefs, facts, truths, ideas – these are the constructs strewn about the lion’s den after Sardar has entered it. What is interesting is that his attacks do not destroy the constructs. Rather, they appear to recharge them with new possibilities, where belief and fact, for example, can no longer seem oppositional, but propositional.
Sardar believes that, after the September 11 attacks and the war on Iraq, we are on the edge of what he calls “a chaos situation”. “Before September 11, we were in a ‘crisis of management’ situation. We lurched from crisis to crisis. In a sense, September 11 moved us from crisis to the edge of chaos.
“Only two things can happen. We collapse into absolute disaster or the system flips over. We may remain on the edge of chaos for 20 or so years, but I think it will flip over.
“At the core of Western belief is the individual. At the core of my belief system, Islam, is the collective. I do not see these two beliefs in opposition … We, both as individuals and members of a collective body of people, we are in a unique position at this moment in our history to flip the world over into a new structure of existence. It is up to us, together.”
Why Do People Hate America?, by Ziauddin Sardar and Merryl Wyn Davies, is published by Icon Books, $21

In comparison there was an article in the supplement section about Ann Coulter, described by the columnist as bright, blonde, brazenly bigoted as well as the poster girl for the Republican “babe-ocracy”, a new American conservative movement that makes George W. Bush look almost moderate. This little charmer is suspicious of “swarthy males” and non-Christians and thinks America would be better off if women didn’t vote and the Republicans, wait for it, were more right wing. Is this woman for real? Or is she just a blonde bimbo, another white upper middle-class princess seeking attention and lots of loot from publishing this sort of bigotry and crap? You can only shake your head in disbelief at the level of public debate in the US if this is the sort of creature being presented as a credible speaker for the Republicans. Maybe it’s a plot to make Dubya look more soft and cuddly in comparison. Her forthright belief that the US is No 1 on the planet and that anyone who stands in the way is either a terrorist or an appeaser of terror and should be knocked out maybe more honest than the mealy-mouthed Rumsfield but is no less terrifying. I suppose she is a perfect example of what Ziauddin Sadar would refer to as a fundamentalist. She has the same mind-set as the terrorists who she condemns.

But here is an example of an American of generosity and goodwill and who in comparison makes you see why America is great. A pity there are not more like him or at least more of these type of people have a greater voice in the US media. It is a pity the type typified by Ann Coulter seem to predominate at the moment.

Why is goodness just too good to be true?
July 27 2003
By Terry Lane
What constitutes good news? To go by the papers of the past few days, you can’t get any better news than the deaths of Uday and Qusay. Sadly, even a pacifist with an abhorrence of the death penalty can’t find it in him to be terribly upset about the deaths of these two men.
But, having said that, it would have been better, and entirely within the power of the US army, if they had been brought to trial in the International Court of Justice. But as the US doesn’t recognise any jurisdiction but its own, there was never any chance of that.
However, tucked away on page 11 of The Age on Thursday was a truly amazing and inspiring piece of good news. You may have missed it, so here are the facts.
Dr Zell Kravinsky of Philadelphia has given away one of his kidneys. No one asked him to do it. He just volunteered. No strings attached, except that he stipulated that the recipient had to be black and poor. Mr Kravinsky is white and rich. Or at least he could be rich if he wanted to.
Dr Kravinsky says that he gave away one of his kidneys because he reckoned he could get by on one and, in any case, “it was the moral thing to do”.
You read something like that and you cannot help but suffer moral shock. Never mind Uday and Qusay – there is no shortage of bad guys in the world – who is this remarkable good guy?
When I read about him I had to Google him forthwith. And here is the story.
Zell Kravinsky used to be a lecturer in renaissance literature at the University of Pennsylvania. One day he started to dabble in real estate and found that he was good at it. He made U$15 million from buying and selling property. He says the money was burning a hole in his pocket, so he has given it to good causes. Researchers into diseases that affect the poorest people of Latin America have benefited from his largesse, as have schools for disturbed children.
Just as well there is a Mrs Kravinsky. When Zell looked like giving it all away, she put her foot down and said something like, “Think of me and the kids”. So he keeps enough for a normal income from what must be a massive return on his rental properties.
We must spare a thought for the recipient of the Kravinsky kidney. Her identity is a secret, but Dr Kravinsky has met her and he declares: “She is a wonderful woman. I know with her life secure with a new kidney, she’s going to help others. She’s a woman after my own heart – or maybe I should say after my own kidney.”
How’s that for a moral obligation to have to carry around for the rest of your life?
Anyway, I Googled on, and can report that cynicism is alive and well in the US and on the global information superhighway.
“Monju-bosatsu” (don’t ask me) writes in an Internet discussion group: “He must be feeling really guilty about something . . .”
And “widdershins” says: “Now, I’m all for charitable giving and I think generosity on this level is remarkable – but I don’t see why a family with means would not choose to give their kids funds for a better start. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that the kids grew up very resentful that dad gave his money to everyone but them.”
We live in troubling times. We read hair-raising stories of the brutality of Uday and Qusay and we have no trouble believing every word, even though much of it is obviously self-serving US propaganda. Then we read of exceptional goodness and we are immediately suspicious. We must deduce from this that the natural condition of man is wickedness, which never surprises us, and that goodness is bafflingly unnatural. Please say it isn’t so.

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My Week’s Break

I have the week off. I can’t afford to go anywhere so I’ve decided to take my month’s annual leave a week at a time in July, September and November. Went up to Newcastle to visit my parents over the weekend but must have come down with something. Last night I was up late going through my mail and as my ISP was providing the usual “not” sterling service it took ages to view as well as the usual lists, so it wasn’t till 3:30 am before I went to bed. My feet were frozen and I lay in bed freezing and then suddenly started shaking and could not stop, nausea and the whole lot. Turned on the heater full blast but it didn’t seem to make a difference. What a way to start the week.

Felt a little bit better by the afternoon and thought I’d go in to see a movie,

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My Week’s Break

I have the week off. I can’t afford to go anywhere so I’ve decided to take my month’s annual leave a week at a time in July, September and November. Went up to Newcastle to visit my parents over the weekend but must have come down with something. Last night I was up late going through my mail and as my ISP was providing the usual “not” sterling service it took ages to view as well as the usual lists, so it wasn’t till 3:30 am before I went to bed. My feet were frozen and I lay in bed freezing and then suddenly started shaking and could not stop, nausea and the whole lot. Turned on the heater full blast but it didn’t seem to make a difference. What a way to start the week.

Felt a little bit better by the afternoon and thought I’d go in to see a movie,

It is set in an unnamed South American country but from the story line and from the shots of Lima you could work out it was in Peru. The film is John Malkovich’s directorial debut and is very good. Javier Bardem quite an attractive man in a mature way, rather than the usual pretty boy they put in leading roles in many films. The rest of the cast from the name is mostly Spanish/Latin American and are equally effective. The movie is based on a book of the same name written by Nicholas Shakespeare based on the Maoist Shining Path terrorist group’s activities in Peru. The policeman searching for the leader of the group(played by Javier Bardem) and his life I assume is fictional but the movie very effectively shows the terror created by the group with some of the obligatory explosions demanded of films to display the indiscriminate nature of the violence directed against innocents and corrupt authority figures alike. It also shows how this group like many others of its ilk use impoverished children to carry out some of their acts of terror in one very shocking sequence. If the level of violence was this bad I can see why the US Embassy in Lima is like Fort Knox. I could not believe how much like a bunker it looked when I went past it a few years ago when I was in Peru. There is also a nice theme going on with who can you trust? The policeman is not portrayed as some vigilante. He is a very humane man trying to beat the military in order to do his job of arresting the leader but at the same time trying to ensure he was prosecuted under the rule of law and not just summarily executed.

I liked the statement of one of the characters –

“Fourth Flame of Communism? He is not the Fourth Flame of Communism. He is just a fat guy in a cardigan.”

It expresses his contempt for an academic who has organised a terrorist group theoretically to free the people but is more interested in just applying his academic theories and has no interest in real people at all, just ideas.

Also liked some of the songs and music used in the film as well.

I’ll probably get the book. I want to read it as the movie impressed me so much.

It was a nice evening walking back from the cinema around Circular Quay. The air, still and clear and the lights from the bridge and the city twinkling on the harbour water with the ferries shuttling to and from the wharves, people rushing to them to get home on the north side of the harbour. It was very pleasant.

It’s half-price day at cinemas tomorrow so might go see another movie before I do the grocery shopping. I’d like to see “I Capture The Castle”. Might also see if I can get the video of “Before Night Falls” as Javier Bardem was in that as well. Anyone out there seen this one? Is it any good?

Might go to see the Wim Wenders Photographic Exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art later in the week and that exhibition at the Australian Museum on Death and Funerary Rites. We’ll see how active I am or whether the weather holds. If it turns rainy and cold I’ll just hibernate at home.

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Protected: Have We The Right to Preach Democracy Considering Our Governments’ Behaviour?

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Have We The Right to Preach Democracy Considering Our Governments’ Behaviour?

Hugh Mackay expresses it so more clearly than me. The shame that I feel as an Australian and the depths we have sunk to in this country with this current government. We truly are a frightened little nation and a frightened little people with no compassion, hearts the size of peas if we do not stop this horrendous mockery of a PM and his government. We loudly proclaim our love of democracy and freedom and yet we imprison innocent children. –

Look around. Is this really Australia?
July 12 2003
All Australians will be judged by history for what our Government is doing to detained children, writes Hugh Mackay.
With increasing frequency and growing vehemence, you hear people saying they are ashamed to be Australians.
I’ve never felt that way myself and I still don’t. I know too many passionate, committed, wonderful Australians ever to feel ashamed of being part of the place. I am too full of admiration for our scientists, our writers, artists, poets, playwrights, directors and film-makers, our comedians, our farmers, our doctors and nurses, our school teachers and academics, our students and even our smartest entrepreneurs to feel despair about our long-term future.
But, this week, I came closer than ever to wondering what I am doing here. When I read the news that almost tipped me over the edge, I found myself asking: is this really Australia?
The news, of course, was that the Federal Government – our Government, the one we freely chose in a democratic election – is proposing to go to the High Court in an attempt to keep five children, aged six to 14, in an immigration detention centre.
The Family Court had ruled that it had the power to set the children free, on the grounds that their detention was unlawful. But the Federal Government, via the terminally tragic figure of its Immigration Minister, wants to overturn that ruling. It wants to keep the kids locked up, like the rest of the 100-odd children who are still behind razor wire and, in some cases, have been for years.
When the story of these children is finally told – when (if we live long enough) we finally learn the whole truth about the physical privation and psychological damage inflicted upon the children in these camps – it will become clear that this was a shameful period in our nation’s history.
Who will hang their heads then? Will you? Will I? Will Philip Ruddock or John Howard? Those who allowed it to happen will be as culpable as those who made it happen: that’s the way the judgement of history works.
If we don’t care about this, then I find myself asking, all over again: is this really Australia?
Is it really Australia, this place where the freely elected democratic Government – our Government – is being evasive about the amount of money – our money – it is spending on the detention facilities being established at Christmas Island?
And was it really an Australian prime minister who, this week, asserted that whatever it cost to prevent 53 Vietnamese asylum seekers landing at Port Hedland was money well spent because it would “get the message through” that boat people would never make it to the mainland?
Boat people never make it to the mainland? The hapless Vietnamese were already within our migration zone when they were diverted to Christmas Island by the navy. So people who struggle across an ocean in a primitive vessel, in a desperate attempt to make it to the safety of Australia, will be discouraged, by force if necessary, from reaching our shores.
There are an estimated 25 million refugees adrift in the world – 25 million people who, tonight, have nowhere to call home – and we’re worried about the tiny handful that try to come here in little boats?
All those illegal immigrants who cheat the system by flying in on short-term visas and then disappearing into the community are, presumably, not worth bothering about. We must focus exclusively on these poor blighters in leaky boats who transparently throw themselves on our mercy. (People like John Yu, chancellor of the University of New South Wales and one of our most distinguished pediatricians – a man who arrived in Australia in just such a boat but, luckily for him, did so in more humane times.)
It hasn’t been a good week for believers in a just and open society. Apart from our continuing national humiliation over our treatment of asylum seekers, we appear to have abandoned one of our citizens to his fate before a military tribunal in Guantanamo Bay.
Much further down the scale of offences against our core values, but still symbolic of a disturbing culture-shift, has been the fresh outbreak of pro-censorship frenzy. Is there really anything left to say about the right to free speech in this society? Are there still people in our midst who seriously want to curb our freedom to see or hear whatever we choose?
Is this really Australia? Is this the place we once thought was an example to the world of how a liberal, democratic society could function; a society committed to the humanitarian principles of justice, equity, fairness and freedom?
If it is no longer that place, then, if it’s not too late, we’d better start asking ourselves whether this is the kind of society we really want and, if not, what we are going to do about it.
Hugh Mackay is an author and social researcher.

And the abandonment of Australian citizens to dubious American justice indicates what frightened, spineless wimps our government ministers are. Anything Dubya wants they’ll bend over to ensure its fulfilled, not a peep out of any of them to question the outrageous Kangaroo Court to be set up at Guantanamo Bay –

When lawyers abandon justice for Howard

By Adele Horin
July 12 2003
Of all people, you would expect lawyers to be outraged by the treatment of David Hicks and the detainees at Guantanamo Bay. Of John Howard’s 17-member cabinet, 10 are lawyers. Of his 30-member front bench, 18 are lawyers.
But these lawyers have maintained a shameful silence as the US Government stripped two Australian nationals – Hicks and Mamdouh Habib – of the basic legal rights of a civilised society. With them are about 680 other detainees, including three children.
Now that Hicks – with five others – has been singled out as eligible for a military trial that many jurists believe will be unfair, the cowardly lawyers on the Howard Government front benches seem past caring. In Britain it is a different story. The Labour Government and former Tory ministers have joined to condemn the US’s idea of a fair trial, and to defend two British citizens caught in a similar web.
A former Tory cabinet minister, Douglas Hogg, QC, condemned the US plan as “wrong, potentially unjust and gravely damaging to America’s reputation”. A British Foreign Office parliamentary under-secretary, a lawyer, Chris Mullin, said he had “strong reservations” about the secretive trial and all but accused the US of breaching the Geneva Convention.
The Australian Government, top heavy with lawyers, has accepted the US assurances that the trial will be “fair and transparent”. It is hard to understand how they can trust the Americans, who have not played by the rules so far.
More than anyone, lawyers understand the issue. To the hoi polloi, Hicks may already stand condemned for being a Muslim, for fighting with the Taliban government against the Northern Alliance, for having been in the wrong place at the wrong time when the US, after September 11, declared the Taliban its enemy for harbouring Osama bin Laden. The hoi polloi may believe Hicks was a member of al-Qaeda. It may wish him dead. But the lawyers on Howard’s front bench know what is at stake: the very principles for which the war on terrorism ought to be fought.
A fair trial is one of the foundation stones of a civil society. Whatever people are alleged to have done, whatever despised minority they belong to, they are assured their day in court. And the law is applied in a time-honoured transparent way in countries like Australia and the US. The US has thrown away the rule book and made up new laws for the detainees. If applied to an Australian national trapped in Iran or North Korea, they would be deemed dictatorial.
Hicks has been held for 18 months in a camp where 34 people have tried to kill themselves. He has not been charged and has had no access to lawyers – a gross violation of the principles of fairness from the start. If such treatment had been meted out to Hicks on the US mainland, any evidence gathered would be deemed inadmissible in a court.
Now he may be subject to a secret trial where US military officers serve as judge, jury and prosecution. It is important that Hicks be charged – it should have happened a long time ago. But what justice can he expected? Under the rules which govern the military panels, Hicks’s civilian defence lawyer must be approved by the US Defence Department, and the conversations between Hicks and his lawyer can be wire-tapped, abrogating the fundamental right of client confidentiality.
The rules of evidence favour the prosecution; there is no right to appeal to the US Supreme Court or to the US Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces. And while the proceedings, in principle, will be open to the public, there are significant restraints on disclosure of information. The court can be closed on several grounds, with even Hicks and his civilian lawyer excluded.
If Hicks confesses to the charges he may serve 20 years; if not he faces an unfair trial and possibly death. The White House is the final arbiter of conviction and sentence. George Bush, the former hanging governor of Texas, will decide who lives or dies.
Even if found not guilty, Hicks may stay in prison indefinitely as an “unlawful combatant”. The American Association of Criminal Defence Lawyers is so concerned about the lack of procedural fairness that it has advised its members not to take part in the military trials.
Lawyers throughout the world have protested. But not the lawyers on Howard’s front bench. These are the same lawyers who backed Howard to the hilt when he fiddled with our own laws to create a subclass of humans without legal rights: the Government excised Christmas Island, Ashmore Reef and other islands from the Australian migration zone in order to thwart access to Australian courts by asylum seekers who reached those places. In a similar way, the US uses a military base it leases from Cuba to create a legal limbo land for the detainees.
The Australian and US governments have created netherworlds they control which are conveniently beyond the reach of both countries’ laws. There is no end to the special relationships between our governments. And no peep of protest from the frontbench lawyers who understand exactly what has been lost.

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Protected: The Question We all Want Answered and American Justice?

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The Question We all Want Answered and American Justice?

Well I don’t think we will be getting any straight answers concerning WMDs from Dubya any time soon –

Answers are as elusive as the weapons
By Peter FitzSimons
July 10 2003

So anyway, trailed by the ubiquitous cameras of the White House press corps, President George Bush goes to a primary school in Texas to have a “photo-op” chat to the children about this and that and nothing in particular. When he is done, one little boy at the back of the room puts up his hand to ask a question.
“And what is your name, young man?” Dubya asks him.
“Billy.”
“And what is your question, Billy?”
“I have three questions. First, why are you president when Al Gore got more votes? Second, what is the connection between Iraq and September 11? And third, where are these weapons of mass destruction, anyway?”

Suddenly, the bell rings for recess. Dubya informs the kiddies that they will continue after recess, and is as good as his word.
They begin again. Dubya: “OK, where were we? Oh, that’s right – question time. Who else has a question?”
This time a different little boy puts up his hand. Dubya points him out and asks him what his name is.
“Steve.”
“And what is your question, Steve?”

“I have five questions. First, why are you president when Al Gore got more votes? Second, what was the connection between Iraq and September 11? And third, where are these weapons of mass destruction, anyway? Fourth, why did the recess bell go 20 minutes early? And fifth, what happened to Billy?” THANK you, thank you, all. (And my particular thanks to the reader who sent the genesis of the story to me.)
As it happens, there really are some big questions to ask both Dubya and his many mini-me minions around the world, questions to which we would all love clear answers, free of spin and obfuscation – and the first one is the most obvious of all.
How much longer will the killing go on in Iraq – with coalition soldiers being killed at the rough but rising rate of one every other day in recent weeks – before it can be acknowledged that the whole disastrous occupation is exactly that?
For all the focus three months ago on the rejoicing of some Iraqis as the statue of Saddam Hussein toppled, what does it say now when American “humvee” military vehicles are taken out by grenade launchers in the streets of Baghdad and the local population are seen to be dancing on the ruined remains?
When you say, Mr Bush – in your defiant and taunting response to the attacks of the growing Iraqi resistance movement – “Bring ’em on!”, how well do you think that plays with your troops on the ground? There you are, engaging in macho posturing on the other side of the world while you have an entire wing of the executive government devoted to your personal protection. And there they are engaged in a tragically flawed exercise, walking every hour in the shadow of the valley of death, with no relief, and losing their comrades one by one. And you say “Bring ’em on!”?
And when you, on behalf of your Government, frequently refer to America’s “sons and daughters” who are under arms in Iraq, they’re not really the Government’s sons and daughters are they? At least not personally. In all of the members of the House and the Senate there is only one senator who has had offspring serve in Iraq. Do you think there is any chance that you would all be a little less cavalier if it really was your own children on the front line?
To the real question, though, the one that just won’t quit. What chance, George Bush, after all the searches, all the interrogations, all the rewards that have been posted, that your weapons of mass destruction are going to turn up at this point and so save what is left of your credibility?
At what point will you acknowledge what is already bleeding obvious to anyone looking at it objectively: they’re not there?
You say you need more time to find them. Wasn’t that exactly what Hans Blix and the UN weapons inspectors were saying before you roughly pushed them aside and sent the troops in?
Seriously. How likely is it that not one of the 10,000 people who would have had to have been involved in such a program hasn’t come forward at this point and said, “They are in yonder silo – so, can I have my $5 million please?”
These are just some of the questions we’d love to see answered.
What we most want to see, though, is for the geniuses who got you in there to find a way out.
pfitzsimons@smh.com.au

And oh yes will there be American justice or just straight out revenge on those hapless fools rounded up in Afghanistan and dumped in the cages in Guantanamo Bay. I doubt any of them would have had knowledge or a part in the planning of the September 11 attacks. I doubt Osama Bin Laden would trust anyone from a Western nation whether they were Muslim or not –

Hicks’ trial will not be justice as we know it
July 10 2003

Why is Howard satisfied with the US “protections” when Britain is not?
Last week’s revelation that Australian David Hicks might be tried by a US military commission at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, prompted Attorney-General Daryl Williams to claim every effort was being made “to ensure procedures for any possible trial will provide the fundamental guarantees of normal criminal processes”.
That will be a big ask. President George Bush’s November 2001 order that initiated the military commissions to try those accused of involvement in terrorism stated categorically: “It is not practicable to apply in military commissions under this order the principles of law and the rules of evidence generally recognised in the trial of criminal cases in the United States district courts.”
That is, normal criminal processes simply do not apply, unless US Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld decides otherwise.
Rumsfeld subsequently issued a military commission order in March 2002 that provides some basic protections to the accused, including a presumption of innocence, a standard of proof beyond reasonable doubt, a right to silence, a right to cross-examine prosecution witnesses, and a US military lawyer paid for by the US Government.
But even taking these into account, we must not lose sight of how alien these military commissions are to Australians’ expectations of a fair trial, based on our experience of our own criminal justice system. The processes are chalk and cheese.
Australian trials are conducted before legally qualified, experienced and independent judges and magistrates. Rumsfeld’s order allows him to appoint a military commission of between three and seven members, of which only the presiding member need be a military “judge advocate” – the others are simply serving or retired US military officers.
If tried in Australia, Hicks would be represented by a lawyer of his choice, with a safety net of legal aid. At the military commission, Hicks can retain a US civilian lawyer to assist his US military lawyer, but only if he can afford one.
Williams has said he “understands” that Hicks “may be able to retain an Australian lawyer as a consultant to his defence team”, but it remains to be seen what this vague statement would mean in practice. In Australia, communications between a criminally accused person and their lawyer are confidential. It appears that before the military commission, that confidentiality must be waived.
The Australian criminal justice system depends on comprehensive rules to prevent the admission and misuse of unreliable evidence. Rumsfeld’s order makes everything potentially admissible before a military commission, including unsworn statements, if it meets the fairly nebulous standard of having “probative value to a reasonable person”.
In Australia, a guilty verdict must be unanimous. At the military commission, it requires only a two-thirds majority, with unanimity only required to impose a sentence of death.

In the Australian system a miscarriage of justice can be rectified by an independent appeals court. A decision of the US military commission can be reviewed only by a panel of three military officers appointed by Rumsfeld. The panel deliberates behind closed doors and is not required to consider any submissions from the accused.
These practices are alien to our criminal justice system and the Howard Government’s ambivalence has undervalued the rights we associate with Australian citizenship.
While Williams and Foreign Minister Alexander Downer refer constantly to their “discussions” with US authorities, it is impossible to see what these discussions have produced. David Hicks and Mamdouh Habib have been in detention for more than 18 months, facing serious allegations of involvement with a terrorist organisation and a potential death sentence. They have not been given consular assistance, or access to their lawyers. They have not been charged, nor is the Australian Government able to say what they might be charged with.
There is no evidence that the limited protections that would apply in any trial, announced by Rumsfeld in March 2002, are due to the intervention of Williams or Downer.
Why is the Howard Government satisfied with these protections when Britain, the other member of the “coalition of the willing”, is still expressing its strong reservations about the trial of its citizens by a military commission?
At the very least, with trials now a possibility, the Government should be ensuring Hicks and Habib have full access to consular assistance and their Australian lawyers, and should be pressing for their return if they will not be afforded a standard of justice that meets the expectations of the Australian community.
In fighting a war on terror we must show by our actions, and not just our military might, that we will defend all aspects of the Australian way.
Robert McClelland is the federal shadow attorney-general.

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