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Showing posts with label Osma Bin Laden. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Osma Bin Laden. Show all posts

Tuesday, May 24, 2011

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 !

Tuesday, March 8, 2011

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.