The so-called “independent” judicial review into the arrest and imprisonment of Dr Haneef has confirmed what most thinking Aussies knew all along: not only was the former Immigration Minister Kevin “Creepy Jesus” Android an incompetent idiot but also that Haneef had no charge to answer.
In other words, Haneef was the innocent victim of a cynical political exercise conducted by the ousted Howard regime, providing yet another example of the calculated, cold-blooded use of power for its own purposes by the Lying Rodent and his cronies and sycophants.
Of course, the judicial review merely reiterates the obvious: that the politicised Australian Federal Police, at the behest of the Howard Government, pursued Haneef, got its facts wrong, withheld crucial information, stuffed the entire “case” up and fulfilled its role as Australia’s very own bungling Keystone Kops.
Although the enquiry whitewashed the former Howard Government’s manipulation of this appalling incident, it is obvious that Kevin Android was merely following the Prime Minister’s instructions, that is, to make of Haneef a convenient scapegoat so beloved of the Lying Rodent in order to trumpet the government’s self-proclaimed national security credentials.
Ah yes, how old Johnny Jingo revelled in the setting up of straw men to take down on our behalf.
Also this week, David Hicks, another victim of the Howard Government’s fear and smear agenda was able to reclaim a little of his humanity:
The former Guantanamo Bay prisoner’s infamous “control order” expired.
Convicted as a terrorism supporter at a politically orchestrated kangaroo court hearing in Amerikkka’s Cuban gulag, Hicks has been living under curfew and strict surveillance since his release from South Australia's Yatala jail last December.
Captured in Afghanistan in December 2001, Hicks was transferred to the US military prison at Guantanamo the following January. In June 2004, he pleaded not guilty to dubious charges of conspiracy, attempted murder and aiding the enemy, but plans to try him by the Orwellian military tribunal collapsed two years later when the US Supreme Court ruled the charade was unlawful.
The dodgy charges were dumped but in October 2006 US Presidunce George W Bogus signed legislation renewing Guantanamo’s kangaroo court (And just a little reminder here, dear Xenox News readers, that only NON-AMERICANS are held at Guantanamo Bay).
Having consistently expressed disdain for the genuine rule of law, and having sought nothing less than unrestrained executive power, GWB – and his psychotic Veep Dick Cheney – made sure that in February 2007 Hicks faced newly fabricated charges of “providing material support for terrorism and attempted murder”.
Hicks had already been locked up for six years in that Amerikkkan hellhole, most of it in solitary.
But the following month, the attempted murder charge was suddenly dumped and, under a plea bargain (for “providing material support”), Hicks was sentenced to seven years jail, but ordered to serve only nine months with the rest of his sentence suspended.
He was returned to Australia in May last year and served out his remaining time in Yatala.
Last December, the Federal Magistrates Court ruled that it would place a control order on Hicks, today a free man.
As Hicks struggles to recover from his grotesque ordeal, physical and psychological, we can only hope that he will finally be able to tell his side of the story. Christ knows, Hicks never did get his day in a real court of law to test the charges that have ruined his life. But such are the “anti-terror” laws we now live under. And at least he is alive.
Pity Jean Charles de Menezes.
Earlier this month a London inquest confirmed that the 27-year-old Brazilian electrician was shot dead unlawfully when Scotland Yard police officers fired seven bullets into his head at point-blank range aboard a crowded Underground train, after literally but mistakenly targeting him as a suspect in a failed bombing plot in July 2005.
Not only did police kill an innocent man but they then also lied about the circumstances. Eye-witness evidence flatly contradicted the police version of events. The de Menezes murder highlights a sickening example of police incompetence and high level efforts to conceal the truth. And this in a civilized, civil society in a city boasting more surveillance cameras than any other place on Earth.
As one mainstream reporter observed, de Menezes was a victim of terrorism: state terrorism, that is.
The three instances related above demonstrate just some of the inherent flaws and dangers to our purportedly democratic societies posed by the slather of so-called “anti-terror” laws that OUR deceitful governments – and other even more unscrupulous ones around the world - have bestowed upon themselves.
For the rehabilitated Chinese Communist regime, the long-suffering Uighur ethnic minority can be persecuted as “terrorists” for seeking human rights and recognition. In North Korea, keeping political prisoners locked up indefinitely is no problem at all and who are we to say otherwise? And in Zimbabwe – once a burgeoning African food bowl, now a bloody dustbowl – that twisted nutcase Mugabe can arrest, detain and interrogate whomever he pleases, now that such methods have been proclaimed legal and necessary by the blessed USA, that global example of military and moral self-righteousness.
And the rancid taint of Amerikkka’s corruption seeps from there to here, just like that.
Remember Sydney family man, Mamdouh Habib, arrested in Pakistan in 2001 and handballed into the tender care of the Egyptian government for interrogation — an Amerikkkan speciality known as “rendition”? He was transferred to Guantanamo Bay, in May 2002 (The Howard government belatedly “requested” for him to be moved when the media found out where he was) and locked up there for almost three years before being released without charge in early 2005.
Questioned during a Senate hearing held in May this year, ASIO director-general Paul O'Sullivan revealed that the US practice of “rendition” (i.e. kidnapping, etc) and its use of torture was known at senior levels of the Howard Government three weeks after the invasion of Afghanistan on October 7 2001.
That’s right! We’re ALL in it together!
No wonder I fecking drink!
Here in Australia, under the mean, tricky and secretive government of ousted Prime Minister John W. Horror, more than 40 items of dubious legislation relating to terrorism have been rubber-stamped, including draconian “sedition” laws and retrospective “control orders”.
Always keen to pontificate about the sanctity of “the Australian way of life” and the need for such laws in order to protect it, the Lying Rodent would never admit that the laws themselves threaten that “way of life” (And as an obvious aside, clearly Johnny Jingo’s way of life was and is a phenomenon unique to his own sick mind, ample material for a David Lynch movie).
Bizarre to realise that after 12 years of Johnny Jingo's discredited lying circus, there are still some Australians who believe that under the anti-terrorism laws if you are not “doing anything wrong” you have nothing to worry about, completely ignoring the fact that innocent people are frequently arrested for crimes they have not committed.
That is what REAL law courts are for in a genuine Democracy: to establish the facts regarding a person's purported guilt.
As well as the examples of Haneef and Hicks, countless cases have been exposed of people wrongly detained as “illegal immigrants” by the Howard Regime, highlighting the very real danger of innocent people being locked away for years, out of sight, out of mind and even driven out of their minds.
John Howard’s laws removed the democratic right we all have of innocence until proven guilty.
Despite our new government, our new PM and (ho, ho, ho!) a new and fairer vision for the future of our wide brown land, those laws remain intact.
Even here in the sleepy, southern state of (yawn!) Victoria, police spies (members of the so-called Security Intelligence Group) have been busy keeping us all safe, relaxed and comfortable by infiltrating such dangerous terrorist groups as Friends of the Earth, Animal Liberation, independent Radio 3CR and the Victorian Childcare Action Group, to name but a few.
As the repercussionss of George W. Bush’s home-grown economic meltdown continue their inexorable slow-mo tsunami across the global marketplace, imagine how much tax payers’ money and police man-power is been wasted to spy on fellow citizens who are NOT involved in criminal acts but are involved in raising public awareness of such issues as global warming, military excess and social justice. In other words, campaigns critical of our beloved government, federal and/or state.
Brothers and sisters, if you are a self-proclaimed "feral" or "anarchist", I would keep a close watch on any newbies wearing white socks who want to buddy-up (But if you regularly attend certain mosques, you are fecked anyway).
But perhaps the plethora of secretive, intrusive “anti-terror” legislation around the world may have some practical use after all...
In the UK, Northampton South council has used the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act - a surveillance law intended for use "in the interests of national security" - to locate dog owners who neglect to retrieve their dog’s excreta from streets and parks.
I’m sure the citizens of the Mother Country sleep safe and soundly in the knowledge that their shit is in the bag.
This was Max Gross for Xenox News, wishing you all a heap of very, merry Christmess cheers, beers and leers, and a slip-slop-slap-happy New Year.
Goodbye Tony. Goodbye Johnny. And a very special goodbye to you George and Dick...
