"My God, American people would not accept this. The American Government would not accept this for one of its own citizens. -- Major Michael Mori, US military lawyer acting for David Hicks.

The penny has yet to drop for most Australians. But it is slowly being dislodged from its safe perch on their altars of apathy and greed. With each passing day of arrogance, corruption and incompetence, the disengaged electorate -- so relaxed and comfortable they have become comatose -- are beginning to realise that while the rogue, extreme right wing government they have kept in power for the last ten years has fattened their wallets, it has sold their souls to market forces and made them the unnecessary target of terrorism.

Richard Baker writes in The Age, What US says about Hicks is OK by Canberra, that, in effect, the pompous peacock, Alexander Downer, the cadaverous crow, Philip Ruddock, and the shopping strip solicitor turned strutting fool hen, John Howard, have handed over our national pride and sovereignty in the person of David Hicks -- and by inference any other Australian who differs from their views -- to the most cretinous bully in the schoolyard, Umeruhca's tinpot turkey, George W. Bush. In return, they get his protection to pose as important sub-lieutenants in the arse end of the world

The government of Czar Howie (a fitting name for terminally embarrassed Australia's leader) has continued to turn a blind eye to the brutal injustice inflicted on Hicks. You would think that he was the most evil person who ever lived, and that no punishment was too good for him, to hell with due process. And yet, he has never been tried, only held prisoner against the Geneva Convention -- for five bloody years.

Now we find that this traitorous government of ours has relied on assumptions without proof that Hicks was not being held in solitary confinement (typically euphemised as a "single-occupancy cell"), when all along he has "been held in a cement cell with a steel door for 23 hours a day," and that, according to a visit last week by Major Mori, he was fat, pasty, unfit due to lack of exercise and had poor eyesight and mental health. "They put him in there to isolate him, sensory deprive him and break him. Unfortunately, I think it is working."

Interestingly, those quotes are not in the online edition referred to above. You will have to buy the Monday, October 9, 2006 edition of The Age to read the full account.

LINK:
If you ever doubted that the arts are central to a free society, read this: Doing the Guantanamo shuffle.
MORE LINKS
Letters to Hicks censored, lawyer says
Lawyer says Hicks abuse covered up

Meanwhile, Robert Manne has returned to last week's infamous Quadrant speech to assess Howard's claimed victory in the culture wars:

During the past 10 years Australia has undergone a profound conservative-populist transformation. The Howard Government has abandoned the quest for Aboriginal reconciliation. It has ended discussion of the meaning of multiculturalism. It has closed our borders, by the use of military force, to all those seeking refuge by boat. It has adopted a foreign policy of a more uncritically pro-American kind than was seen even in the era of Menzies. And, by its refusal to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, it has turned its back on the international fight against global warming.

Howard is a man of old-fashioned and dogmatic opinions and emotions. He will act on these principles at least up to the point where adherence to them seriously threatens his grip on power.

His prime ministership now reminds me of Sir Robert Menzies' in its final years. Because of a certain stubbornness and inability to respond to the winds of change on racial questions, such as apartheid and the White Australia Policy, Menzies quite suddenly began to look like a man from a bygone era.

The same is happening to John Howard. Through a romantic attachment to American civilisation and a lazy commitment to the American alliance no matter what, Howard has led Australia to a humiliating foreign policy of automatic loyalty and into complicity in the moral and strategic disaster of Iraq.

Accompanying Manne's opinion piece is this cartoon by Australia's currently most biting cartoonist (a pity they no longer allow decent reproductions):

Courtesy, John Spooner, The Age

-- Olney Garkle