THE FACTS CLOSE IN ON HOWARD

John Howard now needs enough major issues to obscure the embarrassment over the Iraq war; and they're in the pipeline. 1200 troops and 300 police to the Solomons, the sale of the remainder of Telstra, a new Governor-General, health and education will all serve to erase memories of the great deception over going to war. As politicians remind themselves regularly, a week's a long time in politics, and the memory of voters is notoriously short.
The only trouble is that events in the "coalition of the willing" keep popping up regularly, leaving an increasingly nasty taste to remind us of the lies and prevarication. A steady attrition of casualties among Americans and British still in Iraq are a reminder of how lucky Australia is that its troops are home. An explosive situation in Afghanistan serves to raise the question of what was achieved by the massive aerial bombardment that killed so many civilians and produced so many refugees
Can it really be said that the situation stretching from the Eastern side of the Mediterranean to Afghanistan is more stable now than at the beginning of the 21st Century? After hundreds of billions of dollars in warfare and rehabilitation, the answer can only be "No".

HOWARD'S OPINIONS: In a three-page Question-and-Answer interview with Fred Benchley (The Bulletin, 6/5/03) Mr Howard made two significant points:
"Question: In economic rebuilding, what about a new currency for Iraq? They now have the dina with Saddam's portrait.
Mr Howard: Well, we're very good at printing banknotes. We've done about 20 nations'. We have offered some views on the form of their currency. I would hope that after an interim period where I guess they'll use American dollars, whatever currency emerges is one that the Iraqi people want. …..
Question: Do you think the Australian people will much care if no weapons of mass destruction are ever found?
Mr Howard: I remain of the belief that evidence will be found but it may take time. I'm sure they tried to hide them. The public's support for our involvement was a mixture of things. The WMD was an important element, and a lot of people will be looking to see the outcome of that, let me put it that way. I do think the humanitarian and nature of the regime became stronger as time went by …."

Nothing since that time has given any indication that Howard is prepared to modify his views - at least publicly. But the issue won't go away. More and more examples of the duplicity over the war are destined to keep popping up, niggling away at "honest John's" frankness. In response the Howard statement on June 16, i.e."We went to war in a just cause, on a proper legal basis, to liberate an oppressed people", Paul Kelly (The Weekend Australian, June 21-22, 2003) under the heading WHY WE FOUGHT - REALLY, started by saying:
"Australia went into Iraq because of its alliance with the US, not because of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction and not to liberate its people.There was a rationale for the war and a motive for war. The rationale for the war, Iraq's WMD capability is in serious doubt. But the bigger story is that motive for the war - the US's strategic decision to remake Iraq - is also in strife. The historical judgment on the Iraq war will be that it involved a degree of duplicity. No other conclusion is tenable …."

That's a serious charge from a lead article in one of Australia's major dailies. Paul Kelly went on to say that Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz - key members of what has become known as "the Cabal" - were the main instigators of the plan to "do" Iraq.
He added that Howard's present justification for the war on humanitarian grounds were negated by his remarks to the National Press Club on March 13, when he said:
"I would have to accept that if Iraq had genuinely disarmed I couldn't justify on its own a military invasion of Iraq to change the regime. I've never advocated that."
But, as the evidence of WMDs vaporizes, he's saying it now.
A withering full-page article in The Weekend Australian Financial Review (14-15/6/03) headed THE WEAPONS THAT WEREN'T by Brian Toohey went even further:
"Did American and British intelligence agencies play John Howard for a sucker before the invasion of Iraq? Why did Howard's own intelligence agencies fail to spot some of the more glaring errors served up as established fact in the Australian parliament? Can the public trust that it will not be manipulated by false intelligence in the future?"
These questions have added potency now it is clear that many of the specific pre-war claims about Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction and their whereabouts were incorrect. Other claims look highly dubious. In one case the "evidence" amounted to no more than crude forgeries. …..
Unlike his US and British counterparts, however, Howard is in the fortunate position of coming under almost no political pressure over the accuracy of his pre-war assertions about Iraq's alleged WMD. As more and more questions are raised in Britain about the use of intelligence, Blair faces intense criticism from the intelligence services, his own Labour Party and the Conservative Opposition. Bush is also facing a chorus of complaints from within the US intelligence community, and from both Republican and Democrat politicians, that his administration misled the public over the issue ….
In a major speech to parliament on February 4, Howard explicitly embraced a British intelligence committee claim that Iraq had tried to obtain uranium from Africa as proof of its continuing effort to develop nuclear weapons. US National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice has since acknowledged that this claim was based on forged documents and that this was known at the time to at least some US intelligence personnel. The forgeries, relating to the alleged supply of 500 tonnes of uranium, were so blatant that one letter was purportedly signed on October 10, 2000 by the foreign minister of Niger, Allele Ellhadj Habibon. The dead giveaway was that Habibon had left that job more than a decade earlier …."
(The details of the Niger forgery were carried in the League's New Times Survey in April, and had been widely circulated on the Internet much earlier.)
In the face of this international duplicity and manipulation of intelligence, now prompting public questions overseas, Prime Minister Howard maintains his aura of invincibility, possible only because of the cowardice of his own Coalition members, who huddle like frightened sheep under the Party Whips.

THE LAST STRAW: What Howard's craven party colleagues refuse to question is now breaking out in Britain. The Australian (26/6/03) carried the following under the heading DODGY DOSSIER AND IRAQ DEATHS EMBARRASS BLAIR:
The British Government admitted yesterday it was embarrassed by some of the material it used to justify its participation in the war on Iraq, then took a second blow as it struggled with the news that six military police had been killed in a guerilla attack in southern Iraq.
Foreign Secretary Jack Straw apologized to a committee of MPs for the misleading nature of an intelligence dossier on Iraq's weapons programs used in February to justify the invasion.
Prime Minister John Howard also turned to the material at the time to help justify Australia's participation in the war ….
The affair was an embarrassment to the Government and he wished the dossier had never been produced, Mr Straw said….
Mr Straw sought to play down the significance of a pre-war claim by the Blair government - later cited by the Howard Government - that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction that could be deployed in as little as 45 minutes …."
Hanging like a Sword of Damocles over Howard's had is the stand of Intelligence officer Andrew Wilkie, who resigned because he believed the intelligence served up to the Government was 'bodgy'. It's no use attacking Wilkie when overseas governments are corroborating his stand, and publicly apologizing.
So when will John Howard come clean?

BARTER GROWTH SOARS

THE ABUSE OF POWER - ASIO BILL PASSED

QUEENSLAND PROPERTY RIGHTS

BUSH'S VIETNAM

by John Pilger

New Statesman, June 22, 2003: America's two 'great victories' since 11 September 2001 are unravelling. In Afghanistan, the regime of Hamid Karzai has virtually no authority and no money, and would collapse without American guns. Al-Qaeda has not been defeated, and the Taliban are re-emerging. Regardless of showcase improvements, the situation of women and children remains desperate. The token woman in Karzai's cabinet, the courageous physician Sima Samar, has been forced out of government and is now in constant fear of her life, with an armed guard outside her office door and another at her gate. Murder, rape and child abuse are committed with impunity by the private armies of America's 'friends', the warlords whom Washington has bribed with millions of dollars, cash in hand, to give the pretence of stability…
American troops are rarely seen in Afghanistan's towns. They escort US officials at high speed in armoured vans with blackened windows and military vehicles, mounted with machine-guns, in front and behind. Even the vast Bagram base was considered too insecure for the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, during his recent, fleeting visit. So nervous are the Americans that a few weeks ago they 'accidentally' shot dead four government soldiers in the centre of Kabul, igniting the second major street protest against their presence in a week.
On the day I left Kabul, a car bomb exploded on the road to the airport, killing four German soldiers, members of the international security force Isaf. The Germans' bus was lifted into the air; human flesh lay on the roadside…

In Iraq, scene of the second 'great victory', there are two open secrets. The first is that the 'terrorists' now besieging the American occupation force represent an armed resistance that is almost certainly supported by the majority of Iraqis who, contrary to pre-war propaganda, opposed their enforced 'liberation'
The second secret is that there is emerging evidence of the true scale of the Anglo-American killing, pointing to the bloodbath Bush and Blair have always denied… This month, "Iraq Body Count", a group of American and British academics and researchers, estimated that up to 10,000 civilians may have been killed in Iraq, including 2,356 civilians in the attack on Baghdad alone… The day I watched children skipping through what might have been an urban minefield, I saw Tony Blair on CNN in the lobby of my hotel. He was in Iraq, in Basra, lifting a child into his arms, in a school that had been painted for his visit, and where lunch had been prepared in his honour, in a city where basic services such as education, food and water remain a shambles under the British occupation.
Hundreds of children sick and dying:
It was in Basra three years ago that I filmed hundreds of children ill and dying because they had been denied cancer treatment equipment and drugs under an embargo enforced with enthusiasm by Tony Blair. Now here he was - shirt open, with that fixed grin, a man of the troops if not of the people - lifting a toddler into his arms for the cameras.
When I returned to London, I read "After Lunch", by Harold Pinter,
from a new collection of his called "War" (Faber & Faber).
And after noon the well-dressed creatures come
To sniff among the dead And have their lunch
And all the many well-dressed creatures pluck
The swollen avocados from the dust
And stir the minestrone with stray bones.
And after lunch They loll and lounge about
Decanting claret in convenient skulls.

Editor's note: We are sometimes accused of being unpatriotic because of our criticisms of western leaders such as Bush, Blair and Howard and Australia's involvement in the war of aggression and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq. After all, we are reminded, they are 'our' troops in the war zones. Yes, much to my shame. My answer is summed up in a scene from Shakespeare's "Henry V".
King Henry's army captain Fluellen, in confirming his allegiance to his king declares:
"By Chesu, I am your Majesty's countryman, I care not who know it; I will confess it to all the world: I need not to be ashamed of your majesty, praised be God, so long as your majesty is an honest man." To which Henry V replies: "God keep me so."

And there you have it. When the so-called 'leaders' of our 'so-called' Christian nations act with honesty and integrity we will not be ashamed - as we now are! When their policies are based on Christian civilised values, when we see the good fruit of their policies, when they adhere to the Golden Rule, they will be accorded that respect.

THE DEVIL CAME FOR MUGABE by YKW

They spiralled down to a wasteland, and Mugabe sprawled on his face,
"Spare me, spare me" he whimpered, "spare me this terrible place."
For he saw charred beams and scattered bricks, filth and ruin and weeds,
And through the dawn came children, sifting the dust for seeds.
"Three years ago" said the Devil, "this place was heavy with maize,
There was fruit on the trees and crops in the earth and grass for the cows to graze,
It was farmed by those who loved the soil, who knew it and tended it well,
And now it's farmed by cellphone, from the Monomotapa hotel."
"Racist" screamed Mugabe, "Imperialist, Colonist, Queer!
These people are free, that's down to me and that's why I rule here!"

"Free to do what?" asked the Devil, "to cower and cringe to survive?
The farms are going, the work is gone, now only your thugs can thrive,
Preying on women and children, feeding on horror and fear,
Flying flags of hate and despair that had no business here;
Look at your mindless militias, look in each alien face,
Condemned by their own inanity, exiled for life from the race,
Watch them go into action, cheer as they take up the fight,
Beating up Zimbabweans for the crime of being white,
Red-eyed from drink, thick-tongued from drugs, watch them go off on a spree
Burning the homes of Africans who dared to be honestly free."

Mugabe licked his lips and whispered "all freedom comes at a price,"
"Indeed?" said the Devil "And for the record" what was your sacrifice?
Did you give blood to the struggle? How many times were you mortared?
Or did you play politics in a hotel, and wait till your rivals were slaughtered?
If ever you tasted honour or pain those tastes were long since forgotten,
Eclipsed by the flavours of power and greed, the aromas of all that is rotten.
Come, Mugabe" and up they flew and soared over country and town
And each time they swooped, hunger and horror reached up to pull them down,
And the souls of children streamed past them, and on and up into the light
And Mugabe whimpered and twisted, to shield his eyes from the sight.

"Sons of despair" said the Devil "and daughters of desolate shelves,
It's the West that gives food to your people, while your cronies are stuffing themselves,
The West you despise and prosecute is the innocent's sponsor and friend,
But when your young 'veterans' seize the supplies, these fragile lives have to end;"
"I did not know," croaked Mugabe and the Devil applauded with glee:
"Save your lies for Mbeki, they make no impression on me.
"Now, look at the shuttered factories, look at the overnight queues,"
"Blame the British" Bob stammered, "the whites, the Norwegians, the Jews"
But the streets sent up a whisper, a whisper as loud as a roar:
'The old man who stole two elections' it's time that we showed him the door!"

A scream rose up from the city, a scream rose up from a cell,
And the Devil plunged them into the earth and a cameo from hell
Of shadowed figures with smiling lips that shone with delight and disdain,
Of a body convulsing and wrenching, shaking apart from the pain;
"Applaud your police" said the Devil, "corrupted beyond repair,
And caress the electrodes, the batons and guns, and the innocent tied to the chair."
But as Mugabe stretched out his hand the scene was gone in a flash,
And he stared instead at a drive full of Mercs and a house full of money and trash,
And then at the gloom of an upstairs room, heavy with malice and lies,
Where fat men sat and talked poison, avoiding each others' eyes:

"Here are your generals" the Devil hissed, "your ministers, judges and hacks,
They have fortunes and forex and farms they can't farm, it's only a future they lack,
Do they flee for Malaysia, Libya, France with their women and all they can pack?
Or do they just turn and remove you, and claim dispensation for that?
Look at the wealth that seeps from them, and then hold your nose at the stench
Of the paltry crew that cleave to you, the cowards, the fools and the French;
See them plotting and scheming, hear your folly despised,
Even your reptiles want you gone - you made them, are you surprised?"
"Now do you know what you are Mugabe, now do you understand?
You're the Lord of the bloated thousand, and King of an empty land."

"What gave you most pleasure Mugabe? Which wickedness tasted most sweet?
The murder of the Ndbele? The children with nothing to eat?
The whites you had casually butchered? The election results that you changed?
Or the war that you fought in the Congo, for diamond commissions arranged?
The perversion of half of the system? The enrichment of those you despise?
The limos and money and power? The lies and the lies and the lies?
I ought to admire you Mugabe, you've certainly earned your hellfire,
And all for small motives, self interest and fear, that aspect I have to admire;
Better by far that you never had lived, Robert Gabriel,
The world will heal the wounds you've left, but I cannot heal you in hell!

Then the Devil's right hand grabbed Mugabe, and Mugabe he screamed in his fright,
And scrabbled and pleaded and whimpered and begged; and awoke to an African night,
And sweated and panted and shuddered, calling his aides to his side,
Reconstituting his ego, his vanity, evil and pride,
But then screamed again, recoiling, from that he could not bear to see:
The calendar burning his eyes from the wall and the figures '2003.

The Devil meandered down Second, and strolled up Samora Machel,
"The brave will inherit" he murmured, "when I have Mugabe in hell:
And the dawn will return to Zimbabwe, and children will learn how to smile,
Zimbabwe is one of God's countries'… but at least it was mine for while!"

BASIC FUND

ADELAIDE CONSERVATIVE SPEAKERS'CLUB:
The next CSC will be held on Monday 7th July 2003. Guest speakers will be Mr. Jim Cronin & Mr. Bill Carey of "Bankwatch". The title of their joint address is "Update on Bankwatch". In the late 1980s at an 18th Birthday celebration and idea started to ferment and led Jim Cronin and Bill Carey to attempt the impossible -- to get some desperate farmers out of trouble with the banks. The story of what happened after that was set out in detail in a book "Operation Bankwatch".
The League is in the process of setting up a new website dedicated to such men as Jim and Bill so they have been invited to bring us up-to-date on the present situation as they see it.
Venue is: The Public Schools' Club, 207 East Terrace (cnr. Carrington) Adelaide.
Dinner 6.30pm and Public Address 7.40pm.
Dinner bookings must be in by Thursday 3rd July. Phone/ Fax 8395 9826/7. $18 per person. There will be a wide selection of books, audios and videos for sale. The Mayo Tape Library will tape the message as usual. A collection will be taken to help cover costs and the work of the League.

GIPPSLAND, VICTORIA REGIONAL DINNER:
The 34th Gippsland Regional Dinner will be held on Wednesday 9th July 2003. The venue will be P J's Colonial Café, 22 Church Street, Traralgon (halfway between Seymour and Hotham Streets). Guest speaker will be the National Director of the Australian League of Rights Betty Luks who will be speaking on: "The Usurping of Power by Politicians World-Wide".
Dinner will be $30 per person and drinks to be purchased from the bar. Please make out cheques to Gippsland Socred, (a group set up to promote Social Credit in Gippsland). Remittances to D. Sykes, 225 Neaves Road, Callignee Vic. 3844 before 2nd July, 2003.

BETTY LUKS FOR TASMANIA:
National Director Betty Luks will be in Tasmania for a number of League 'in-house' meetings, plus the Launceston Conservative Speakers' Club, Wednesday 16th July 2003. The visit will be from Friday 11th through to Wednesday 16th July.
Details are: Hobart Friday, 11th July; Launceston Monday, 14th July, North/West Coast Tuesday, 15th July, Launceston Conservative Speakers' Club Wednesday, 16th July.
For further information please phone: 03 6331 6414.