Kangaroo court gags Hicks

David Hicks gagged

Playing along with the criminal United Stupids government in order to come home to Asstralia post haste, Hicks has acquiesced to a laughable token 9 month sentence in addition to time already served, with a total 7 year sentence, provided he shuts his mouth for a year and withdraws claims he was mistreated by the torturing septics.

He will serve his time in Australia under a plea deal and must arrive in Australia before May 29, 2007.

This means he’ll be free at the end of December 07, after the next federal election. The rodent will be able to lie that he has supported a Asstralian citizen’s rights whilst protecting the infantile Whorestralian public from the Hicks menace.

Terry Hicks however pointed out that

his son was forced to undergo a plea-bargain and his case was never properly tested in court.

“Nobody will ever know what the evidence was.”

Hicks home soonAnd that’s how opaque, dictatorial regimes like it.

Greens leader, Bob Brown foresees the action to come:

“However the minute Hicks arrives in Australia, our legitimate justice system kicks into action. It may hold some nasty shocks for the Howard government which has endorsed this illegal process at Guantanamo Bay.”

Hicks is bound by the “court” orders consequent to his plea bargain which have been strongly criticised by civil rights lawyers:

They were especially critical of the order forbidding Hicks from protesting any mistreatment, saying such a requirement would be unconstitutional in a civilian US court.

“If the United States were not ashamed of its conduct, it wouldn’t hide behind a gag order,” said Ben Wizner, staff lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union.

“The agreement says he wasn’t mistreated. Why aren’t we allowed to judge for ourselves?”

David Hicks guilty of being fatTerry Hicks commented

“The Americans made David sign a paper to say he was never abused… when we knew he has been – David told us.”

Mr Hicks said David would have to think about whether he would want to tell his story.

“Once David’s home he’ll have time to think about that,” he said.

“Who knows, he may want to change his mind.”

We can but hope so … we can be pretty certain the rodent will attempt to capitalise on a silenced Hicks’ misfortunes to boost his woeful electoral position.

Of SubPrimes and Pigs in Shit

Howard Wallowing

With the passing of the Ides of March, we have strong suspicions that the second market correction may be over – will there be a third? It is possible the subdued buying of resources – first copper, then zinc – by the Chinese in the past little while was deliberately orchestrated to engineer prices down to coincide with the beginning of the Year of the Gold Pig. Of relevance here may be the decision by the Asstralian government last December to remove capital gains taxes for foreign investors and the more recent Chinese government decision not to impose capital gains tax on their investors. Metals prices rose strongly last night. Will the bull market resume or will the crazy crazy selloff of our precious resources continue unabated?

A Porky MonarchyWho wouldn’t like to have been a cashed up Chinese investor this year, rolling in US dollars, eager to drop them into cheap physical resources as the United Stupids economy sags under the weight of precarious hedge and subprime mortage funds and a tenuous bond market?

And where better to invest than in relatively insulated CGT free rich Australian resources at bargain basement prices – particularly uranium (Citic has been buying up more SAU this week), gold and zinc.

Kiss goodbye to your birthright treasures, fellow Asstralians – and don’t expect to reap any of the proceeds of the fire sale in additional community services in this election year – Howard’s mudslingers need every cent to artificially deflate the trade deficit, to buy more crappy US jet fighters and electioneering pork. And as for you pathetic, whinging Asstralian mortgagees, get ready to wear another interest rate rise you have to have, trust me, it’s for your own good,.

The Great Iraqi Oil Robbery

Iraq Oil Liberation

The Coalition of the Gobbling has now set the scene for massive exploitation by its vampirish associates of Iraq’s oil without so much as a murmur from the Iraqi puppet government.

The law is set to be approved in March.

On Monday, Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki’s cabinet in Baghdad approved the draft of the new Iraqi oil law. The government regards it as “a major national project”. The key point of the law is that Iraq’s immense oil wealth (115 billion barrels of proven reserves, third in the world after Saudi Arabia and Iran) will be under the iron rule of a fuzzy “Federal Oil and Gas Council” boasting “a panel of oil experts from inside and outside Iraq”. That is, nothing less than predominantly US Big Oil executives.

The law represents no less than institutionalized raping and pillaging of Iraq’s oil wealth. It represents the death knell of nationalized (from 1972 to 1975) Iraqi resources, now replaced by production sharing agreements (PSAs) – which translate into savage privatization and monster profit rates of up to 75% for (basically US) Big Oil. Sixty-five of Iraq’s roughly 80 oilfields already known will be offered for Big Oil to exploit. As if this were not enough, the law reduces in practice the role of Baghdad to a minimum. Oil wealth, in theory, will be distributed directly to Kurds in the north, Shi’ites in the south and Sunnis in the center. For all practical purposes, Iraq will be partitioned into three statelets. Most of the country’s reserves are in the Shi’ite-dominated south, while the Kurdish north holds the best prospects for future drilling.

Iraq Freedom

The approval of the draft law by the fractious 275-member Iraqi Parliament, in March, will be a mere formality. Hussain al-Shahristani, Iraq’s oil minister, is beaming. So is dodgy Barnham Salih: a Kurd, committed cheerleader of the US invasion and occupation, then deputy prime minister, big PSA fan, and head of a committee that was debating the law.

But there was not much to be debated. The law was in essence drafted, behind locked doors, by a US consulting firm hired by the Bush administration and then carefully retouched by Big Oil, the International Monetary Fund, former US deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz’ World Bank, and the United States Agency for International Development. It’s virtually a US law (its original language is English, not Arabic).

Scandalously, Iraqi public opinion had absolute no knowledge of it – not to mention the overwhelming majority of Parliament members. Were this to be a truly representative Iraqi government, any change to the legislation concerning the highly sensitive question of oil wealth would have to be approved by a popular referendum.

In real life, Iraq’s vital national interests are in the hands of a small bunch of highly impressionable (or downright corrupt) technocrats. Ministries are no more than political party feuds; the national interest is never considered, only private, ethnic and sectarian interests. Corruption and theft are endemic. Big Oil will profit handsomely – and long-term, 30 years minimum, with fabulous rates of return – from a former developing-world stalwart methodically devastated into failed-state status.

Once the insurgents, guerillas and Iraqi public become aware of the impending oil rape by the Coalition of the Gobbling, it is quite possible that there will be a strategic unification and uprising against the common colonialist enemy which no Doodoo surge will be able to suppress.

Coalition of the Gobbling vs Iran V11

Hate in mediaThe United Stupids are now pushing for more pressure against Iran in the UN Insecurity Council, while

Iran’s top nuclear negotiator again signaled that Tehran would be willing to engage in “constructive and logical” negotiations with the United States.

Additionally

Iran’s proposal to cap its enrichment at very low levels may be winning some support in Europe.

This is not enough apparently for the Coalition of the Gobbling, who want complete suspension of enrichment. There is a distinct possibility that the United Stupids and United Kooks are choosing precisely the same deliberate path of deception which led to their illegal invasion of Iraq.

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice reiterated this weekend that she would negotiate with Mottaki as soon as Iran had suspended enrichment.

Iran is not in breach of the NPT – and even the US does not claim it is. The US claims rather that Iran is untrustworthy, and therefore should be denied the rights it has under the treaty.

Like all non-nuclear weapons signatories, Iran maintains the right to have access to nuclear technology, to build nuclear power plants, and to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes.

Hans Blix, the last weapons inspector in Iraq before the illegal invasion, warns that

“humiliating” Iran over its uranium enrichment could spawn intransigence. “It’s an observation I’ve made before regarding Iraq,” he told reporters in New York today.

“Why did the Iraqis behave as they did in the 1990s (and) send away the UNSCOM inspectors and close the door to them?” he asked, referring to the UN Special Commission mandated to inspect Iraqi weapons of mass destruction after the 1991 Gulf War.

“One element was ‘humiliation’,” he said. “It was not rational of them to stop the inspections, it really worked against their own interest and yet I can see that the humiliation, the fury, was such that they said, ‘To hell with it’,” said Blix.

Iran does not have the capacity at this time to produce nuclear weapons and such capacity by all authoritative sources is years away. The UN’s nuclear watchdog (IAEA) continues to call for de-escalation of the rhetoric and reliance on negotiations, and has reported that there is no evidence of nuclear weapons production.

Israel on the other hand has an arsenal of 200-400 nukes, a threat to the rest of the region for decades. There are no guarantees that at some point in the future, religious and/or political fundamentalists won’t be in power in Israhell. At present, in its continued violation of international law in regard to its occupation of Palestine and Syrian territory, Israel remains an extreme provocation to its neighbours to develop nuclear parity, and if not nuclear parity, chemical or biological weaponry for deterrence.

On several occasions since 1974, countries in the region lobbied in the UN for the Middle East to become a nuclear weapon free zone. The only dissenting voice was Israel. If we are to have peace in the world, and especially if we are to avoid a nuclear holocaust, there must be a universal, not a selective, commitment to the rule of law and international security.

It is important to stress that it was the United States which first introduced nuclear weapons to the Middle East starting in 1958 and has continued to bring tactical nuclear weapons on its planes and ships ever since.

Other countries in the Middle East which are predominantly Sunni, including the fundamentalist Saudi tyranny, are not keen on Iran becoming a dominant power in the region either. The United Stupids and Israhell have both met recently with Saudia, (and so has Iran). With the demonisation of Iran by United Stupids, United Kooks and Israel in full swing, Israhell and the neoziotards are palpably keen for the Coalition of the Gobbling to do the dirty work, with the main impetus coming from AIPAC.

Israeli Defense Force chief artillery officer Gen. Oded Tira has griped that “President Bush lacks the political power to attack Iran,” adding that since “an American strike in Iran is essential for [Israel’s] existence, we must help him pave the way by lobbying the Democratic Party (which is conducting itself foolishly) and US newspaper editors. We need to do this in order to turn the Iran issue to a bipartisan one and unrelated to the Iraq failure.” Tira urges the Lobby to turn to “potential presidential candidates … so that they support immediate action by Bush against Iran,” while Uri Lubrani, senior advisor to Defense Minister Amir Peretz, tells the Jewish Agency’s Board of Governors that the US “does not understand the threat and has not done enough,â” and therefore “must be shaken awake.”

Fundo rabbis in Israel are leading children into prayers against Ahmadinejad – the media propaganda machine is running at full bore to demonise Iran

claiming its leader is a new Hitler and that Jews are threatened with another Holocaust.

A more accurate reading of the situation might be to say that Israel is determined to protect the monopoly of nuclear weapons, which it has enjoyed in the Middle East for more than 40 years.

Concurrently, the Israeli government warns of a regional arms race. Guess who started it, mate? here comes the old blowback denial again.

Condisleazer

Update:

The United Stupids are to have talks with Iran, Iraq and Syria in Baghdad about Iraqi security. The old carrot and stick approach – while the Iranians are threatened with fleets and sanctions, the Stupids will expect them to be cooperative especially since they are deigning to parley with them. What will the Stupids offer? There is doubt about whether Iran is actually destabilising Iraq anyway – the propaganda the Stupids tried to sell that the Iranians were back the insurgency was laughable. The insurgency is predominantly Sunni, and Iranians are Shite. The Iraqi government is majorly Shite as are the Sadr nationalists. Do the Stupids want the Iranians to start backing the Sunnis?

Whilst any talks are a positive sign, the United States may well be sussing out the enemy at close hand under a false pretext. It’s probably too much to hope for that the Stupids might have woken up that the only real, workable long term solution for the whole region, before things go too far, is to start lobbying for a nuke weapon free zone. Whether Israhell would cooperate is another matter, yet if the Stupids insisted, Israhell must follow or risk its benefactor’s largesse and support.

Coalition of the Gobbling vs Iraq 11

Dick and John deals

The Iraqi prize – its oil – is about to come under Coalition of the Gobbling companies’ control.

… Now comes new evidence of the big prize in Iraq that rarely gets mentioned at White House briefings.

A proposed new Iraqi oil and gas law began circulating last week among that country’s top government leaders and was quickly leaked to various Internet sites – before it has even been presented to the Iraqi parliament.

Under the proposed law, Iraq’s immense oil reserves would not simply be opened to foreign oil exploration, as many had expected. Amazingly, executives from those companies would actually be given seats on a new Federal Oil and Gas Council that would control all of Iraq’s reserves.

In other words, Chevron, ExxonMobil, British Petroleum and the other Western oil giants could end up on the board of directors of the Iraqi Federal Oil and Gas Council, while Iraq’s own national oil company would become just another competitor.

The new law would grant the council virtually all power to develop policies and plans for undeveloped oil fields and to review and change all exploration and production contracts.

Since most of Iraq’s 73 proven petroleum fields have yet to be developed, the new council would instantly become a world energy powerhouse.

“We’re talking about trillions of dollars of oil that are at stake,” said Raed Jarrar, an independent Iraqi journalist and blogger who obtained an Arabic copy of the draft law and posted an English-language translation on his Web site over the weekend.

More recently from Raed’s blog:

My contacts in the Iraqi government, in addition to some fellow Iraqi bloggers, confirmed that the oil law draft was submitted to the Council of Ministers last week, and is expected to reach to the Council of Representatives (the Parliament) very soon after it gets approved in the Council of Ministers. The law will be considered active in case it gets approved by the parliament.

For a clear analysis of the Coalition of the Gobbling’s proposed endgame for the current episode of the Great Game and its plans for global oil dominance, read William Clark’s stunning article of December 06.