Author: Kev

Muhammad Dawood (nee Hicks) pleads gulty..uh uh. Doesn’t matter, guilt can be denied….his Australian Cheer Squad will just say he pleaded guilty to get out of Guantanamo Bay. Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t, but guilty is guilty and to suggest he pleaded guilty to get home doesn’t detract from the guilt.

He is a self confessed terrorist.

It is suggested that he may well be able to do his time in an Australian prison for the term the judge gives him. That’s fine, it takes the pressure off Howard and deprives the cheer squad of some oxygen but I can promise you there are whole mobs of human rights lawyers burning the midnight oil right now in preparation for appeals against whatever he is awarded. As soon as he is in Australia there will be a swarm of activity. They won’t let go.

Of course they are going to have to act very quickly because Muhommad’s time in prison won’t be all that nice. Standard crims are also Aussies and won’t take kindly to a self confessed terrorist in their midst. The answer to that, of course is solitary, protective custody…..more ammo for the cheer squad…..inhuman will be their cry but me, I’m barracking for the crims.

sic him boys.

I’ve yet to hear of a criminal claiming his trip to from the the courthuose was inhumane. Never a word about the airconditioning being too high or too low and I’ve never heard of bad guys suffering from dehydration or getting ill to the point of hospitalization on the way to court. Until now.

Victorian Supreme Court judge Bernard Bongiorno gave the caution after being told several of the men became ill after they were transported from court in a vehicle without airconditioning or water in temperatures above 30C. Lawyer Greg Barns, for one of the accused men, Ezzit Raad, told the court the incident occurred last Thursday.

If that’s a grave intended denial of human rights then I trust no-one invloved ever has to endure a long army convoy It’s a well known that terrorist leaders instruct their people to claim “torture” as soon as they can after capture. It creates a queue of human rights lawyers to come to their assistance even if the torture is totally invented. Every time a terrorist suspect is required to answer to the law for his alleged crimes against humanity or his intent to committ such crimes his lawyers modus operandi, the first step for defence, is to appeal to the weak amongst us by claiming “torture” or “lack of human rights” A sound tactic but ethically questionable because it is designed to take the emphasis away from the alleged intent to conduct a terrorist activity and shift it to the conditions of incarceration. Articles waxes philosophically about the accused. Nice guy,…astounded that he would be considered a suicide bomber….. shock and indignation…..their right to a fair trial had been irreparably damaged……His father said his son was an “angel”…. The HRLRC is gravely concerned that the type, length, conditions and effects of the Detainees’ detention amount to serious ongoing human rights violations, including in relation to: and they list a standard litany of rights from the UN’s International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. All of the above is fine and I don’t deny the alleged terrorists their human rights but at the moment the entire debate is about their rights and little mention of their alleged terrorist acts. I’m of the opinion that every article printed in the media should remind readers of the alleged intent as in “poor little Mohamed was denied a glass of water under the covenant of blah…blah…blah but it is alleged he was a part of a plot to blow up Australian infrastructure and/or innocent Australian women and children. Some perspective, don’t you think?

JOHN Howard is expected to announce this week a major increase to Australia’s military deployment in Afghanistan, including a 200-strong special forces taskforce.

The special forces task group, drawn from the Special Air Service Regiment and 4RAR commandos, will be deployed to Oruzgan province, where NATO forces are expecting a fresh offensive from Taliban insurgents in the coming months. They will bolster the Australian reconstruction taskforce currently based at Tarin Kowt. In addition, Mr Howard is expected to announce the deployment of a 150-strong air defence radar unit.

As Afghanistan is accepted by the ALP as a ‘good’ war rather then Iraq which is a ‘bad’ war, I wouldn’t imagine the increase will get much coverage….no political mileage for the ALP here. In fact Iraq, Afghanistan, the Philipines, Indonesia, the Pacific Islands, London, Spain, Australia’s law courts, Iran, Southern Thailand and any where else they raise their ugly heads are all theatres of the one war. I wonder if the ALP Defence policy paper has a stand for each and every theatre based on it’s probablity of making Howard and Bush look incompetant….who knows.

Reading the Sunday papers always leaves me hungering for articles from real journalists but todays Sunday Mail outdoes itself carrying an article by Charles Laurence under the heading “How the Iraq war is destroying America’s fighting men” I couldn’t link to the article in the Sunday Mail but found it in a similarly low grade newspaper, The Daily Mail He quotes 240 of the 665 cases of military indiscipline in Iraq and Afghanistan involved drugs and alcohol. Let’s see now……with about 1,500,000 US GWOT veterans that calculates out at 1 in 6250 troops have been involved in drugs. I would say my North Brisbane suburban area has a far worse drug related crime rate than the 240 for the area and that is with only about 50,000 people. He comes up with some real crime;

To get an idea of how deep into depravity some of these men have sunk, here is just one of the sex offences: in March, 2006, a group of men – again from the 101st Airborne Division – gang-raped a 14-year-old girl, and then murdered her and her family.

In one case as long ago as May 2004, when President Bush was declaring ‘victory’ and the vast majority of Americans were still cheering him on, Private Justin Lillis got drunk on illicit whisky on his base in Balad, stole a Humvee and went on a rampage, shooting up a residential neighbourhood with his M16 rifle, before taking pot shots at the guards on the entrance to his own base.

Unquestionably depraved but there will always be bad eggs in any basket. One depraved crime doesn’t point to a whole army as depraved.

He quotes Seventy-three of those 240 cases were the most serious yet known from these two wars: murder, rape, robbery and assault.

Just a question: how many of these 73 cases were rape and murder and how many were robbery and assault. Lumping them together makes a mockery of statistics and as the Left have claimed, playing music too loud in a cell constitutes assault or torture.

Another remarkable statistic can be no co-incidence: a record number of women soldiers – as many as one-third of the total returning from tours in Iraq – are coming home pregnant.

They are mostly young, fit people. What does Laurence expect them to do when not on patrol – go to prayer meetings? Take along woman to a war zone and it’s going to happen…human nature.

For years, the Pentagon has banned the taking of photographs of returning coffins, while President Bush has refused to attend funerals because honouring the dead was deemed bad for public relations.

The President hasn’t ‘refused’ to attend funerals at all. He has done what all presidents have done and that’s run the country. If he was to attend funerals he’d spend one day every week doing so

It all points to another shocking statistic: almost one in three of troops returning from the Iraq and Afghan fronts in need of health care are wounded not in the body, but in the mind.

The younger the soldiers, the greater the incidence of post traumatic stress disorder, depression, anxiety, alcoholism and drug addiction. This third compares with 10 per cent of Vietnam veterans – survivors of a war so far considered to have produced an unprecedented number of mental casualties.

That is simply wrong. Stats for the Vietnam War indicate about 30% had symptons of PTSD and that nearly 19 percent still suffer from the disorder. These stats are from a Harvard University report and not some Veteran’s group. There are other factors involved here; one is a certain percentage of PTSD suffering has been caused by the general rejection of the troops by the media (such as this report) and their campaign to treat them as inferior veterans simply because they fight terrorists or in my time, communists. Another factor is that Veterans and Veteran’s Affairs departments now recognize PTSD whereas before it took Vietnam Veterans 20 odd years to get the disorder recognized. The Iraq veterans are being diagnosed as they return home. Ther is no question that the events descibed by Charles happen in a war. An army is a reflection of society with all it’s faults and no one expects every soldier to be an angel. To take some isolated stats and spin them negatively only points out the obvious. To misrepresent stats as he has done only points out another obvious fact – he is biased against the US and Bush for ideological reasons making anything he says as just static in the background of a complicated problem. Still, it is the Sunday papers.