Escaping public scrutiny by again blaming “advisors” for yet another failure of his "leadership", Australia’s mendacious Prime Minister John Howard gratefully jets his way back into the open arms of his pyschopathetic mentor in the Oval Orifice. This time the issue is what and when the Howard government knew about the US policy of torture at Abu Ghraib in Iraq and elsewhere. A key Oz defence official has been gagged and banned from giving evidence to a Senate hearing on prisoner "abuse" at the US-run jail.
As more information squirts from cracks in the Howard government’s besieged fortress of deception, Johnny Germ slipped and slimed his way around the growing controversy by claiming he had been misinformed by Defence Department apparatchiks. He knows nothink, NOTHINK, Colonel Klink!
It's the same cheap shot he used during the so-called Tampa Affair when our shonky shyster PM excused himself after lies about refugees hurling their own children into the sea were exposed as yet another example of his mean and tricky government. As with Tampa, the Howard government is desperately trying to suppress the facts. As with Tampa, we’re going from a whisper to a scream.
We all know the Howard government politicised the public sector, intelligence services and defence forces with a strict policy of "tell us what we want to hear and skip anything to the contrary".
We all know at least three government departments knew of prisoner "abuse" issues at Abu Ghraib well before the dates claimed by the PM and his pointy-headed acolytes.
We all know the Suckhole of Steel is once again hiding something. And I don’t mean just Hicks and Habib - those Aussies kidnapped by U.S. forces and trapped in Bush's Guantanamo Gulag for the past two and half years and suddenly of "concern" to our vainglorious King Rat.
Indignantly calling a press conference before cutting and running for the airport, the PM puffed himself up like Toad of Toad Hall and protested his innocence/ignorance. Eyebrows bristling, saliva flying from his thin, barely-smirking lips, he declared “I’m not happy at being misinformed.”
Neither am I, Johnny, you lying piece of rancid old political offal. I hope you choke on your white wine spritzer. I hope the Shrub gags on another bloody pretzel!
You do remember the Tampa, don’t you, Johnny, and the government secrecy, deceit and outright lies that accompanied it?
As if to defend the nation against an Indonesian invasion, you sent armed commandos to stop the approach of asylum seekers rescued at sea by the Norwegian cargo ship Tampa. The terrified refugees - families, children - had been saved from drowning when their flimsy craft sank.
Yep, Johnny Germ won the 2001 election on that issue alone. Ah, the good old Aussies, always ready to give a bloke a fair go! Ah, the lucky fucky ducky country!
John Howard instituted Australia’s infamous gulags in Nauru and New Guinea, spending undisclosed millions in bribe money to these poor, corrupt countries to avoid Australia’s responsibility for accepting asylum seekers fleeing from Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, the Taliban’s Afghanistan, and other such popular tourist destinations.
In doing so, the Rancid Rodent undermined a half century-old United Nations treaty aimed at protecting refugees fleeing persecution, and cynically fanned the flames of Australia’s underlying historic xenophobia. It was worth a vote or two!
Like his bum chum US Presidense George W(hat-the!) Bush, Howard scorned the UN and international conventions that clashed with his narrow, blinkered anal-retentive view of life. He dismissed the fact that, as a party to the convention, Australia must grant asylum to refugees who arrive here fearing persecution in their homelands.
No Way! Rotten Johnny and his Tory robots would rather see men, women and children drown at sea than find safe haven in the Lucky Country. Failing that, he made sure they would rot in concentration camps while sycophantic, intimidated and politically compromised bureaucrats dawdled and fudged the processing of refugee claims.
Hell, Johnny even redrew the map of Australia to keep the poor buggers out!
The nation's chief point-head dehumanized asylum seekers in the eyes of an ignorant, gullible and just plain hateful public, he called them “queue jumpers” in the immigration stakes. But in Iraq and Afghanistan, there were no queues for people to jump. Australia had no diplomatic representation in these countries. Capitalising on a climate of fear and stupidity, Johnny Germ slyly instilled in Australians what sociologists call "moral panic".
The truth is that the vast majority of all refugees imprisoned by the Howard government are eventually proved to be genuine asylum seekers, just as the vast majority of Iraqis imprisoned by US forces have been admitted by US authorities to be innocent civilians. Even that mindless machine Immigration Minister Amuddla Vanstone, has acknowledged that most Afghan asylum seekers on Nauru recently granted refugee status were likely to be resettled in Australia.
Some 260 asylum seekers are still held captive on that desolate, bankrupt island of calcified birdshit, including men, women and children. They have been imprisoned there for 2-3 years.
However, the last man to be released from Australia’s Manus Island prison camp in New Guinea, has arrived in Australia, after four years of torment. The long-suffering 26-year-old Palestinian has spent the last 10 months in desolate isolation, after all other inmates were granted refugee status and set free. His only companion was a cat. And some prison guards.
What has been gained by Australia to have kept this poor bloke locked up for nothing in the middle of nowhere? What has been lost? What dreadful karma – in the shape of a real terrorist attack, maybe? – awaits Australia around the corner like a speeding car with our names on its bumper bar?
Between 1999 and late 2001, more than 2000 asylum-seeker children were sent mainly to Australia’s notorious desert prison camps. The average stay was more than a year. Some were held three years; one child imprisoned for more than five.
Innocent children. Frightened children. Traumatised children, most of whom had fled from Saddam Hussein or the Taliban. In these isolated camps, hidden from the eyes of the nation and the world, these poor kids witnessed scenes no kid should ever see.
These kids watched desperate adults slashing their wrists, sewing their lips together, starving themselves, bashing their heads against walls, throwing themselves at razor wire fences, hanging themselves. All these people – yes, PEOPLE - wanted was to be recognised as human beings longing for a taste of the freedom they sought in a land they had thought would help them.
Freedom? Isn’t that the excuse for what we’re doing in war-ravaged Iraq and Afghanistan?
Ah, yes, Afghanistan, so rarely in the news these days. How soon we forget, how little we learn, and how quick to take advantage of it all is… the Rodent.
In an ABC interview on Monday night’s 7.30 Report (31 May), the Oz PM declared “mission accomplished” in Afghanistan. Interviewer Kerry O’Brien had asked Johnny-the-human-cane-toad if invading Iraq had distracted the US from its “war against terrorism” and the hunt for those responsible for the hijacked plane crash attacks of 11 September 2001 in New York and Washingtoon.
Mission accomplished in Afghanistan, Johnny? Let me count the fucking ways!
Sure, improvements are evident in the capital, but Afghanistan as a whole (as a hole, that is) remains a dangerous basket-case. The Taliban have regrouped, the puppet President can’t take a bloody piss without an armed mercenary escort, warlords have reclaimed their old stomping grounds, opium production is at a record high, and US troops continue to be killed - and continue to kill… mostly civilians, as in Iraq, that other “mission accomplished”.
And as for all that promised abundance in foreign aid, the cheque’s still in the mail.
Oh, and one other small detail: Osama bin Laden - the man claimed by the Bush regime to be the mastermind behind the 11 September 2001 attack on US dominance - is still at large. And al Q’aeda’s found a new playground. And the bodies and the bullshit continue to pile up aplenty.
“This area is not secure!” proclaimed a US soldier warning bystanders away from the site of yet another lethal car bomb blast in Baghdad recently. He may well have been describing the entire bloody country.
Oh what fun it is to lie in a half-arsed open slay! Oh to be caught between Iraq and a hard place!
Together again, Johnny Suckhole and Jerk-off George will snuggle and canoodle, murmur sweet nothings each other’s rears, and coo affirmations of their tainted fucking love for one another. But Johnny must give stressed-out George a really good, solid professional suck this time, or he might just end up like that other US favourite, the heroic Mr Chalabi! And let’s hope they wear condoms, the sick bastards!
With the US "handover of power" to the Iraqi "interim government" just around the corner, let's all rise to the occasion, raise our glasses and toast George and Johnny's pending declaration of PISS IN OUR TIME!
The 60th D-Day commemorations should show these clowns up for the repugnant, incompetant, self-serving opportunists that they are. Don't expect any fucking humility from these bastards, they'll milk the occasion for all it's worth! As he has proved time and again, the Texas Deranger ain't a-skeered of walking over the corpses of the fallen to torture the English language (not to mention torturing human beings and historic facts).
Hmm. maybe I should take up an anger management course? Nah, another Stoly should do the trick. This was Max Gross for xenoxnews.com, accomplishing his mission, fishing for compliments, and messing with the confusion.