Gay News, Dame Marie and Deviants

She has been one of the most loved reps of Her Maj : Dame Marie Bashir the retiring Governor of NSW.  Last night it was time to honour the Governor herself at Parliament House at a dinner organised by the Gay & Lesbian community- the LGBTI Community Tribute Dinner for ( we love her full title) Her Excellency Dame Marie Bashir AO CVO.
Pictured right is Adrian Bartels and a pal with Dame Marie. Bartels was just pipped at the post at the last state election by current MP  Alex Greenwich. also openly gay.
Aren't we lucky in the Eastern Suburbs ?. A choice between the very David Beckham style Bartels or our favourite descendent of Russian Nobility Alex !

## also pleasing to see Sydney Councillor Christine Foster ( PM Tony Abbott's sister ) at the St Vincent de Paul sleep out in Redern  helping to raise awareness for homelessness.

Dame Marie was described by the LGBTI as a "powerful advocate for the powerless" and this has been evident on so many occasions as evidenced by our exclusive pic taken at the mansion Boomerang at a fundraiser for the Wayside Chapel in Kings Cross. Marie was only too happy to chat to former Guantanamo Bay inmate David Hicks (left).

Dramas in the world of Opera as a twitter outrage grows over Georgian soprano Tamar Iveri, scheduled to sing Desdemona in Otello for Opera Australia in July and Tosca later this year in Melbourne
Iveri has been condemned for an open letter she wrote to the Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili in May last year. In the lengthy diatribe, posted on her Facebook page, she describes LGBT people as “deviants” and suggests that homosexuality is part of the “faecal mass” being foisted on Georgia by the West.
Iveri was commenting after LGBT activists marched to mark International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia (IDAHO) in the city of Tbilisi. The marchers were attacked by thousands of fundamentalist Christians (?) with some barely escaping with their lives. The loopy soprano said she was “proud of the fact how Georgian society spat at the parade” and that  “often, in certain cases, it is necessary to break jaws in order to be appreciated as a nation”. Charming! She really is coming to the wrong town. Somehow I think Ms Iveri's visit may be cut short.
Below is a video from the march-what a contrast to the Sydney Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras !

Hick's Prosecution Dropped

Hicks at Boomerang

 NEWS THAT the Federal government has dropped the case against David Hicks over his book Guantanamo, My Journey under proceeds of crime legislation complicates the claims used against him the US Military tribunal at Guantanamo Bay where the incarcerated Hicks entered an Alford plea, a US technical device where the accused admits the prosecution has enough evidence to find him guilty. In that way, the evidence is never tested in court.

In return Hicks was immediately repatriated to Australia after years of being held in jail on no charge.

NSW Governor Marie Bashi

Hicks was castigated by then PM John Howard   and Foreign Minister Alexander Downer as being the "worst of the worst", an ironic charge from 2 politicians who failed to notice under their watch the Australian Wheat Board was illegally bribing Saddam Hussein with over $200M.
The Shuttle met David Hicks and his wife at a cocktail party in 2010 at the Sydney harbourside mansion Boomerang (where Mission Impossible 2 was filmed) and it was difficult to reconcile the dastardly image painted by politicians with the polite young man. NSW Governor Marie Bashir also chatted to the couple in a friendly manner.

An opinion writer of the right leaning IPA 'think tank' who contributes to the ABC's The Drum also attacked attendees of the 2011 Sydney Writers Festival  for listening attentively to Hicks tale about his treatment at Gitmo where he says he was drugged and tortured. In this piece published in the SMH, "Audience on their feet for a fraud"  he calls them 'incredulous fools".
 The Shuttle tangled with that writer via email but thankfully he has now gone to the bosom of Opposition leader Tony Abbott as an adviser. That's the same Abbott who was also a Minster in Howard's government where he also apparently over-looked a stream of emails indicating that against UN sanctions, the AWB was sending hundreds of millions of dollars in kickbacks to the Saddam regime. Despite the mass of evidence produced during an investigation and Downer's evidence he couldn't 'recall' seeing memos about the scandal, no-one was every charged (or required to enter an Alford plea).
Incredulous fools indeed!.

She's baaack !

Earlier we joked that surely the Institute of Public Affairs ( The Sydney Morning Herald's legal writer Richard Akland says the IPA is often referred to as the "Institute of Paid Advocacy ") should admire Ayn Rand,  just as US Republicans on the hard right have rediscovered the woman who exhibited all the traits of a text book psychopath.

We spoke too soon. For there she is on the IPA's website with her book The Fountainhead  promoted as one of the "100 Great Books Of Liberty" that must be read by all. They claim that Rand's book is one of the books that " laid the foundation for the modern world". Alarmingly, they are right.

Rand described Howard Roark, the hero of her novel The Fountainhead thus: "He was born without the ability to consider others."

To Rand this was an admirable trait. In an interview with Mike Wallace in 1959 she said "you only love those who deserve it". Those who expressed altruism or a love of their fellow man were weaklings according to Rand who abhorred all religions and in particular Christianity which she considered akin to Communism.

Writing in 1927 about a ghastly killer  named William Hickman who strangled a 12 year old girl he had kidnapped and then sadistically set about dismembering her body with a pocket knife, Rand said this :
 "Other people do not exist for him, and he does not see why they should," he has "no regard whatsoever for all that society holds sacred, and with a consciousness all his own. He has the true, innate psychology of a Superman. He can never realize and feel 'other people.'".

She could have been describing the ideals of her weird philosophy 'objectism'.

When she died in 1982 Rand was discovered-as an advocate for the demolition  of social security and government health programmes, to be receiving both.

Her funeral was paid for by an admirer Alan Greenspan who hung on her every word. Greenspan became the Chairman of the US Federal Reserve and as an exponent of the 'free market' like Rand actively promoted the dismantling of financial controls that in turn set-up the USA for the sub-prime financial crisis of 2007 that has wrecked thousands of lives in the US.
Be afraid. Very afraid.

# Fresh from his demolition of Noam Chomsky in that organ of intellectual discussion-the Daily Telegraph, a missive arrives from IPA fellow Ted Lapkin to inform us that the term "enemy combatant" is indeed a legal concept-and he is right. Except an enemy combatant is a fighter for a state that a country is at war with.

Unfortunately it defeats Lapkin's claim that former Guantanamo Bay inmate David Hicks was an enemy combatant as no legal declaration of war has been made against the 'state' of Al Qaeda, Afghanistan or indeed, Iraq.

No problem there for Lapkin though : "the US has fought many armed conflicts without the benefit of a formal declaration of war", he says. So that's all right then. Might is right.

 Here is Mike Wallace's 1959 "I'm Alright Jack' interview with Ayn Rand :

Ghastly Right Wing Think Tank Attacks Writer

Let us introduce you to the Institute of Public Affairs.

David Hicks & wife Aloys

Just as the USA has been plagued by 'think tanks' Australia is beset by these well funded groups who usually sing from the same song sheet : the free market will be our saviour and we should still (despite the GFC) be worshipping at the feet of Hayek and that old phony Milton Friedman.

There's the usual guff about privatised medicine being a god send and currently on it's website, a homage to that nutty historian Geoffrey Blainey who coined the term "black armband of history'.

That's a  re-visionist view of the decimation of the Aboriginal people that basically says the disappearance of the Tasmanian Aboriginals was of their own doing and not a result of hundreds of colonists using them for target practice- that the 'Stolen Generation; is a myth despite it being written into government policy in the early 1900's and anyway, all those little half caste kiddies looked much nicer in their Mission Home smocks and being wrenched from their wailing mother's arms was for their own good.

Blainey all wild-eyed collared the Shuttle one night a few years ago at a party and gave your scribe a potted history of Aboriginal self administered negligence in failing to stay alive and mistook the fact that he was standing by the Champagne Bar from whence we re-filled our flute as a concerned interest in his crack pot ideas. Thankfully the old bugger has retired now,.

If this was the USA no doubt the IPA  too would have elevated that fruit loop Ayn Rand to Goddess like status as the loopy right have recently. Needless to say, they are Climate Sceptics.

Writing as a fellow of the IPA Ted Lapkin in a piece titled "Audience On their Feet For a Fraud " has berated the entire audience who watched former Guantanamo Bay prisoner David Hicks talk about his autobiography at the Sydney Writer's Week on Sunda

Hicks plead guilty ( after 6 years confined in a tiny cell) to 'providing material support for terrorism' (apparently guarding a burned out tank). He was sentenced to time served  plus another 9 months in Australia. His defending counsel including US Army Major Michael Mori said the guilty plea was in sheer desperation to get out of Gitmo.

Despite the Pentagon's  former Chief Prosecutor Colonel Morris Davis saying that the Hicks should never have been prosecuted and his case was replete with political interference from the George W. Bush and John Howard governments, Lapin knows far better.

There was no evidence against Hicks but Lapkin surmises by cobbling together a series of un-related events and throws in a quote from Martin Amis to condemn Hicks in an odd case of 'guilty by association' that somehow proves that Hicks was basically in cahoots with the former Pakistan resident O.bin Laden.

Lapkin isn't too sure if Hicks was an "enemy combatant" or an enemy soldier in the perpetual ( but never legally declared ) War On Terror.

Despite the Bush administration attempts to legalise 'enemy combatant' status  the US Supreme Court has rejected it and Barack Obama has finally abandoned the wording.

Martin Amis

He clutches at straws in his convected outrage that Hicks should be afforded an audience at a writer's forum (despite the concept that it will be an exchange of ideas) and gets to the nitty gritty: the taxpayers funded the event IE : a room and some chairs.

Lapkin has plunged the depths of quotes to justify his hate piece, from former ASIO  director Denis Richardson who during his tenure provided the false claim that Iraq was replete with WMDs to the diminutive writer Martin Amis. who apparently said (long before his embarrassing love letter to Christopher Hitchens)  : "People of liberal sympathies, stupefied by relativism, have become the apologists for a creedal wave that is racist, misogynist, homophobic, imperialist, and genocidal. To put it another way, they are up the arse of those that want them dead."

So there. Amis said that so it confirms all our fears about lefties and Hicks as well.

Lapkin promotes a right wing agenda via something as simple as distorting the tale of the hapless Hicks who was caught up in events way beyond his control.

But why is this tosh being published in an august organ like the Sydney Morning Herald ?.
Probably because they provide free copy yet a few weeks ago Fairfax CEO Greg Hywood said on the ABC's  Media Watch " What I'll be saying is that we'll be investing in creative journalism, the journalism that people read".

Lapkin's piece was certainly creative. He uses a couple of bravado boasting letters Hicks penned years ago as proof. He says we must believe what Hicks wrote then but not what he writes now.
 
Two weeks later Hywood said 300 staff including 80 sub-editors had to accept 'voluntary redundancy'.

At this rate, is it any wonder Fairfax's Canberra Times ran an Trivia Quiz last week put together by Pagemasters-the outfit who will replace the sub-editors and journalists (and 40% owned by Rupert Murdoch) where every answer ended up with a nickname for penis !

Terrible People

Former Foreign Minister under the Howard government, Alexander Downer  still believes David Hicks and Mamdouh Habib were "terrible people' and says 'the government always regarded Mr Habib as the more dangerous of the two" according to today's Sydney Morning Herald.

Alexander Downer

This follows the release of new Wikileaks cables about the inmates of Guantanamo Bay. Both Habib and Hicks spent years confined there without trial. The latest cables proclaim the two men were "dangerous terrorists and that Habib had 'trained the 9/11 hijackers" and had confessed in Egypt that he had "planned to hi-jack a Qantas jet"

When Egyptian students helped overthrew the dictator Mubarak in Egypt secret police files revealed that Habib had been rendered to Egypt  by the USA-despite official denials- where he was tortured for 5 months and questioned whilst an Australian government official was in the room.

Alexander Downer had always emphatically denied Habib's claim that he was sent to Egypt. Habib was eventually flown back to Australia (not by Qantas but in a government leased Lear jet) after being released without charge.

The Julia Gillard government has just made a secret settlement with Habib rumoured to be around the 2 million dollar mark to nip in the bud embarrssing claims about that torture. The exact details still may emerge because Habib is now suing the Egyptian government.

"No, I won't be changing my mind about them. They were both terrible people - absolutely shocking." continues Downer in the SMH.

Hicks was said to "have links to senior Al-Qaeda leaders" (he met Osama Bin Laden once) and he too was flown back by private jet when released on a dodged up charge. He has said of Alexander Downer  :" he is hardly in a position to call me shocking "

Aloysia & David Hicks with Governor Marie Bashir at Boomerang

The Shuttle met David Hicks seven weeks ago at a party at Boomerang, the Spanish style harborside mansion of trucking magnate Lindsay Fox. He seemed a likeable and friendly chap, if somewhat wary of the press but the NSW Governor, Her Excellency Marie Bashir chatted amicably to Hicks and his wife Aloysia and didn't seem at all 'shocked' by him.

Fact : from 1999 tthe Australian Wheat Board paid bribes of nearly $300M to Saddam Hussein in the 'wheat for oil scandal'. During a Royal Commission evidence was heard that the money was used to buy weapons that were used against the allies invading Iraq to depose Saddam.

The minister responsible for the AWB-Alexander Downer claimed that he had never read the hundreds of emails informing him of the bribes. Although the Commission recommended charges against 12 people, no-one ever faced a court.

Liberal Senator In A Tizz Over David Hicks

Just days after we reported that David Hicks who spent nearly 6 years banged up in Guantanamo Bay, attended a party for the Wayside Chapel at Boomerang (and the Daily Telegraph said he was "partying with the jet-set), Liberal Senator George Brandis (left) has accused the ruling Labor government of not moving quickly to recover the profits from David Hicks's memoirs under the "proceeds of crime" laws because it "fears a backlash from the political left."

Oh really ?



Brandis was one of the chief cheerleaders of former PM John Howard who solemnly intoned in Parliament in 2003 that Iraq was awash with WMD and described in detail the non existent "human shredding machines" that Saddam Hussein was prone to use on his subjects.



David Hicks



Howard later indicated that Australian SAS troops had already entered Iraq weeks before a decision to go to war had been made- one he himself decided he had the power to make without a Parliamentary vote unlike our allies the UK & USA - and soon we were participating in a war that has seen a million Iraqis displaced and hundreds of thousands killed on a slew of falsehoods.

Does George Brandis honestly want a case to be pursued against Hicks over the  profits from his 'crime' ?.

 Most except the most pedantic accept that the reason Hicks pleaded guilty was  to get out of the hell-hole in Cuba where he faced year upon year of incarceration without trial.

The US chief Army prosecutor at Gitmo who resigned (one of at least 7) over the disgraceful legal tactics  there has said Hicks should never have been charged and his case was riddled with political interference from both Howard and George W.Bush.

The charges labelled against Hicks were a bizarre mish mash of gobbedlly gook that accused him of being an 'enemy combatant' in a 'war' which was, and wasn't declared and therefore after some Olympian leaps of logic the Geneva Conventions didn't apply to those captured.

A case against Hicks in an Australian court to recover any profits made from his book would surely bring out the most learned legal minds just itching to examine the role of a whole host of US & Australian politicians. The repercussions could be most unpleasant especially for George Brandis' (an intelligent barrister who parrots absurdities that he surely cannot believe) beloved John Howard. ( According to rumour Brandis once referred to John Howard as "that lying rodent Howard".He's never denied it)

Brandis may well find that what he wishes for may just happen. The outcome may not be what he desires.



Ben Ferencz



To read the Alice in Wonderland type case that was mounted against Hicks his Wikipedia entry is most illuminating.

## Now 90 years old the legendary legal mind Ben Ferencz was the US Chief Prosecutor at the Nuremberg War Crimes trials and he sent several Nazis to the their execution after WW2. He eventually went to work for the International Criminal Court and has been an outspoken advocate for the rule of law during his distinguished career as well as a critic of various government's  illicit activities.

Ferencz gave a speech on the 8th March  titled :

"My Government Today Prepared to Do Something for Which We Hanged Germans"

### In a response to the Daily Telegraph's question as to why Hicks had been invited to the Boomerang party, a Wayside Chapel spokesman said "we were honored to have David Hicks as a guest as we were honoured by all who attended"

Boomerang, A Swell Party and the Guantanamo Bay Inmate

"The Worst of The Worst" was how the former Foreign Minster Alexander Downer described him.



Alexander ' worst of the worst' Downer

The  pillar of the Adelaide Establishment who once famously posed on a TV chat show in stilettos and net stockings was speaking of the hapless David Hicks who spent years incarcerated at Guantanamo Bay  after the Northern Alliance pounced upon him in 2001 at a bus stop in Afghanistan and handed him over to the CIA for a $1000 bounty.

 In the hysteria following 9/11 Hicks spent the next 6 years at Gitmo chained to the floor of a cell for 22 hours at a time under fluorescent lights before finally being sent back to Australia after pleading guilty to the trumped up charge of "providing material support for terrorism".

The US chief army prosecutor later claimed Hicks should never have been charged and said the whole case was dominated by political interference from George W.Bush and PM John Howard.

 




David Hicks and wife Aloysia

  Hick's autobiography Guantanamo: My Journey is a harrowing read in which Hicks describes being tortured and beaten while blindfolded and handcuffed, forced to take unidentified medication, regularly forced to run in leg shackles causing ankle injury and being waterboarded by US agents.

Boomerang the amazing Spanish style mansion nestled by the harbour in Elizabeth Bay is far cry from Cuba.

It's owned by the billionaire trucking magnate Lindsay Fox who threw the doors open for a party last night.  Hicks and his wife Aloysia were guests for the launch of the book Stories from the Wayside.

The Wayside Chapel in Kings Cross is a ministry that was begun by the saintly late Reverend Ted Noffs in 1964 and continues to assist the down and outs of the Cross, drug addicts and anyone else in crisis.



Boomerang beauties: Samantha Harris & Jessica Gomes



Current minister Rev Graham Long has gathered together some amazing sucess stories from over the years along with some brilliant photographs by four leading fashion and advertising photographers.

 The concept of Sydney art director Andrew Henderson, Stories from the Wayside celebrates the chapel, the people who work within its walls and the visitors for whom the Wayside is a welcome support system, as well as as a place where all are welcome 'just to be'.



Boomerang



Built in 1928 at a cost of $28000 for music publisher Frank Albert, Lindsay Fox purchased the Hollywood style Boomerang in 2009 for $21M from society hostess Julie Schaeffer who had paid $20M for the house from the Shuttle's favourite former Hong Kong banker Duncan Mount and his wife Sally.

The house featured in Mission Impossible 2 and the film's star Tom Cruise tried to buy the house as an Aussie base for he and then wife Nicole Kidman.

David Hicks is about 5'5", shy and well mannered. He says he met Osama Bin Laden twice but he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. He also fought for the Kosova Liberation Army.

Hicks chats to NSW Governor Marie Bashir

 Alexander Downer comes from a wealthy and privileged South Australian political family. His father Sir Alec Downer was High Commissioner to the UK, his grandfather Sir John Downer state premier twice. When he was Opposition Leader Alexander Downer dropped a clunker in a speech when he guffawingly referred to domestic violence as "the things that batter". When he took the Foreign Ministry he declared the UN an "out of date" body although that was forgotten when he beat the war drums for the disastrous Iraq Invasion. He was positive that WMD would be found.

I think we'd rather share a drink with David Hicks.