The acquittal by a Melbourne jury yesterday of Jack Thomas, who was alleged to have had a plane ticket paid for with funds from Al-Qaeda, is another blow to the multi billion dollar ‘war on terror.’
The Australian government spent millions of dollars and six years on the Thomas case, including deciding to retry him after he had won an appeal, on the basis of an interview he had done with the ABC.
The victory for Mr Thomas should provide a warning to the Rudd government and state governments that the ‘war on terror’ is misguided.
In these tight economic times why is, for example, the Rudd government wasting more taxpayers money on fear mongering advertising at railway stations and other public places about dobbing in a terrorist and breathlessly telling you to ring a hotline if you see anything suspicious – you know, like a group of young Muslim men congregating together as they wait for a train.
According to the Commonwealth Attorney-General’s Department’s David Finlayson, the Rudd government is proposing to update the Howard government’s anti-terrorism advertising campaign.
Finlayson told the Senate Estimates hearing on Monday, “With any campaign there’s a need to refresh advertising approaches to continue to have the impact you desire, and consideration is being given to whether we need to look at refreshing.”
What Finlayson’s political masters should be doing is abandoning the multimillion dollar advertising campaign and the hotline and putting that money instead into eliminating prejudice against Muslims in our community.
It is time we got over the ‘war on terror’ — it is nothing more than a gross over reaction to the events of 9/11. As the former head of MI5 Stella Rimington told The Guardian last Saturday, the response by the west to 9/11 was a huge over reaction. It is time, she said, to acknowledge that as shocking as it was, 9/11 was no different to any other major terrorist event.
Rimington observed “You know, it was another terrorist incident. It was huge, and horrible, and seemed worse because we all watched it unfold on television. So yes, 9/11 was bigger, but not … not …” Not qualitatively different?
“No. That’s not how it struck me. I suppose I’d lived with terrorist events for a good part of my working life, and this was, as far as I was concerned, another one.”
Rimington has made the right call on 9/11. If it were not the US that was hit but a developing world country, then we would have been spared anti–terror laws and the billions of taxpayers’ dollars spent on ‘security measures’
Politicians, Ms Rimington says, are now using national security as a political weapon “to get at the other side. You know, ‘We’re more tough on terrorism than you are’,” she said.
And, she might have added, heads of security agencies are spooking politicians about terrorism, so they can keep increasing their funding. A prize example of that happened yesterday when ASIO tabled its Annual Report in Parliament. According to ASIO chief Paul O’Sullivan, “If not for the action of ASIO and its partners in recent years I believe there would have been a terrorist attack or attacks in Australia.”
The problem with this boast is that the taxpayer will never know if it is true or not, because of the secretiveness of ASIO.
And ensuring that ASIO keeps its massive funding base – courtesy of the 9/11 over reaction – O’Sullivan warns that a terrorism attack remains the great threat to the security of Australia. Well compared to what? And on what basis is that assertion made?
We will never know.
Krudd assured/warned us prior to the election that he was Howard lite, just slightly more hair. Why the surprise that the Gov. & bureaucracy are trundling along the same well worn ruts?
Look at the continued pursuit of Kessing the (alleged) Customs whistleblower (but not in the SMH which has never reported a word on the case). At the recent appeal against conviction, the full panoply of Gov provided two QCs whilst Kessing payed his own way.
What credence to the crocodile tears and support during Labor’s oppostion? Zilch ‘twould seem.
Mr Herbert has it about right; and well done for being the first I have seen to use the proper 11/9 format. That event was a bonanza for ‘the controllers’. I have been saying for 20+ years that terrorists and even ‘everyday’ criminals are small fry compared with the calumnies of virtually all administrations throught all history. Add to that the other large institutions should as religious bodies and now ‘the corporates’ and individual rights tend to get trampled deliberately or otherwise at every turn. It is all those very institutions that promote anomie and anger and help to produce the very behaviour we all abhor. If strongly atheistic me feels sympathy for the dreadful behaviour exhibited towards Arabs in general and Muslims in particular, we ARE in a fine mess.
I wonder whether Kevin Charles Herbert is a LIHOP (“let it happen on purpose”) or a MIHOP (“made it happen on purpose”) type conspiracist loon?
Finally, someone is talking publicly about the the true global context of 11/9.
It’s taken 7 years, but hey….what does the US military industrial elite care…..they’ve had 7 bountiful years of gross over spending on the US annual defence budget, despite the futility of even more sophisticated weaponry in the face of asymetric war. Bush’s Iraq folly was barracked into fruition by these sleazebags.
The biggest threat to Obama’s Presidency, and indeed to his life, is the military industrial elite. These amoral bastards are my tip for the murder of President Kennedy.
Today, after 7 years, there is more and more certainty, that 9/11 was an inside job: it is confirmed on the `qui bono` test (who profited), through forensic evidence, eye witness reports and the way the US authorities acted, and still act. Of course, it gave a rationale for two wars, besides a `war on terror` without end, as well as a war against it`s own people. Governments around the world sensed a chance not only to prove their allegiance to the US, but also to ratchet up their control over their own population. The idea is to frighten the people, by conjuring up an `enemy`, and then present themselves as as their saviour and defender. It works nearly every time, especially before elections. Here, in Australia we have something like 20 `anti-terrorism` laws, a Howard legacy, with the Government sowing the seeds of suspicion and distrust to confuse people. Still, you can fool some of the people some of the time, but these seeds have turned against the powers-that-be. It`s surely time for that elaborately constructed `terrorism` house of cards to be blown down along with those 20 laws.