It takes a lot to silence the Israel Lobby, but a well-chosen question can do the trick.

Al Jazeera should be complemented on assigning independently-minded journalist Clayton Swisher to cover the recent AIPAC Policy Conference. Nice work all round.

It’s an oddity of the human character that brain surgery, a very serious matter, is often the subject of jokes.

Perhaps it’s our way of dealing with the frightening and unthinkable.

The notion of an utter incompetent engaging in something as delicate as tampering with our brains makes us squeamish. What might he do to our minds? Ouch! So we joke about it.

Communications Minister Senator Stephen Conroy: mash-ups by Bob Whidon

In similar vein, many informed Australians have been making jokes about Senator Stephen Conroy for some years now.

The sniggers began almost as soon as he begame Australia’s Communications Minister, after the Rudd Labor Government was elected to power in 2007. They took off the next year, when it became apparent the Minister was quite insistent on imposing a mandatory internet ‘filter’ on all Australians.

The internet can be viewed as the neuronal structure of a globalizing humanity. It provides the basis for closely interwoven global society. Information streams through the network – information about people, activities, ideas, money and other data. It travels at the speed of light. This is the information flow that binds us together and makes our interconnected world work.

Our generation has grown used to the technology and participated in its growing sophistication. We are alive at a most remarkable time in human history. It’s a time when the mind of humanity is literally coming together, in ‘real time’. We’re still at the beginning of this extraordinary metamorphic process.

Like other people around the world, many Australians quickly embraced the new technology and have been enthusiastically exploring its potential ever since. It connects us to each other – and to the world. In a large and isolated continent, both are important. The internet opens up a global market for buying and selling, a global information exchange for giving and receiving, a global playground for fun and creativity.

So far, so good. Then along comes Senator Conroy c 2007. As the newly-appointed Communications Minister of the incoming Rudd Labor Government, Conroy announced his intention to impose a mandatory filter on the internet connection entering Australia from the outside world. His rationale for proposing this was purportedly concern about ‘child pornography’.

The Minister has a unique style

At first, his proposal gained traction. Who, after all, wants to be branded a peodophile? Who doesn’t want to protect children? A handful of well-promoted supporting voices popped up to push the case for the ‘filter’ and for a short time all seemed to be going well for the Minister and his censorious schemes.

But a civil libertarian reaction of unparalleled ferocity slowly erupted. It has been spurting giant blobs of angry lava ever since. Conroy’s simplistic scheme for fencing off Australia’s internet ‘feed’ by mandatory filters, forcing ISPs to ban a secret government list of web pages, has provoked a quite unprecedented furore of outraged opposition from technologically literate Australians.

Quite soon, Conroy found himself despised by his natural constituency as Communications Minister: the IT industry and experienced IT users.

A Minister at odds with his industrial (and even his public) constituency can be just what’s needed, if a government believes urgently-needed reforms are blocked ny an intractable bureaucratic log-jam and shameless vested interests. But a Minister at odds with his constituency had better be competent. He’d better know what he’s doing – and been seen to know what he’s doing. Otherwise, he’s in trouble.

In Stephen Conroy’s case, there has been precious little sign throughout his term in office that the Minister has much of a clue about modern communications. His spoken contributions to debates are frequently the butt of ridicule. When he waxes lyrical about IT, it often sounds ridiculous.

By April 2009, with the Rudd Government’s three year term half over, there was no discernable progress towards new broadband. The Minister was bogged in negotiations with major Telcos (most notably Telstra) that seemed to be going nowhere. Most noticeable of all, he kept pushing an increasingly unpopular mandatory government censorship scheme. It seemed the wheels might be coming off for Stephen Conroy’s Ministerial career.

The Minister's new credit card

Then came a remarkable turn-around. Just at the moment when it seemed he was most in peril, Senator Conroy managed to extract an agreement out of Prime Minister Rudd for a MASSIVE new public investment – potentially more than $40 billion – to create a new government owned wholesale monopoly: the National Broadband Network.

This was upping ante in the Government’s broadband infrastucture spend by an order of magnitude.

A Minister who can extract a LOT more money for his portfolio is usually regarded as a hero by his constituency. Access to large pot of public loot is a good way to make industry lobbyists respectfully polite. Rudd and Conroy presumably calculated that the $40+ billion honey pot would calm the bees, and the IT industry could be expected to fall into line and back a man who’d turned out after all to be a very effective Minister.

That happened, to some extent. But by mid-term, Conroy was already a seriously tainted brand. Even though the NBN gave him a new story to tell – he still had to deal with the ‘filter’ issue.

If Conroy and the ALP Government had backed down on mandatory internet censorship at almost any time between then and the recent Federal election, I think Labor would now be back in power with a clear majority. That’s despite its much-reported failures in other important policy areas, most notably climate change.

The NBN was a huge advantage for Labor in the election campaign. It may still be decisive in pursuading cross-benchers to support Labor in forming Government now, after the knife-edge August 21st election. But Labor’s stubborn insistence on hanging onto the ‘filter’ policy took the shine off the NBN. Many IT fans would have pushed hard for Labor at this election because of the size of its NBN commitment, which dwarfed the Coalition’s counter-pledge. As it was, many of us had split loyalties. In general, we want a major new public investment in telecoms infrastructure. But many Australians – myself included – regard issues of censorship, net neutrality and data privacy as even more significant.

Unexpectedly – and to its credit – the Liberal-National Party Coalition came off the fence during the election campaign on the ‘filter’ issue. It opposed the mandatory ‘filter’,  reaffirming its Howard era policy of assistance to home-users wanting ‘filters’ and no mandatory censorship. The Coalition undoubtably gained votes as a result. The number of votes that shifted is unknwon, but even one in two hundred would have proved decisive in this very close election. Interestingly, the much vaunted ‘Christian backlash’ against the Coalition never happened. Few Christians who’ve thought about the issue share the extreme pro-censorship views of their would-be spokeman, ex-SAS Commander Jim Wallace. The case for censorship had always been based on hype and exaggeration.

Viewing the internet as an evolving global brain explains why the internet-using public reacted as we did to the threat of censorship – to such an extent that in the pre-election peridod, articles published about the ‘filter’ attracted hundreds of comments and online polls showed an anti-filter sentiment as high as 99:1.

As the internet evolves, its needs sophistication in regulation. As a general rule, let freedom rule! Freedom to trade. Freedom to exchange information and ideas. Freedom to play.

The Minister and his new boss

Any attempt to interfer with these freedoms must be rational, demonstrably necessary, evidence-based and implemented with broad consent. If not, it will encounter staunch resistence – and rightfully so.

At this time, a week after the election, it’s still not clear who will form government from a parliament in which no single party has a majority.

Prime Minister Gillard and the ALP may have the best chance. Ironically, the NBN is a key issue which may give them the edge with the five or six cross-benchers. But with almost every political force in the country  now opposing the ‘filter’ apart from Labor and the one-Senator ‘Family First’ party, it would seem the public have dealt this unpopular proposal a fatal blow.

Let’s hope the Prime Minister is not so cocooned by out-of-touch advisers that she misses the significance of the filter issue.

A poll on Australia's 'Whirpool' IT website; it's based on a small self-selected sample of IT fans. Even so...

During the election, on one of the few occasions she fielded a question on the ‘filter’, Gillard made  idiotic remarks implying the internet can and should be regulated like cinemas. If that’s what she truly believes Gillard is not up to the job. Perhaps, as she ponders her tenuous hold on power, Ms Gillard can find a better adviser than Stephen Conroy on the way forward for her communications policy.  She could do a lot worse than talk to EFA activist and telecoms engineer Mark Newton.

Australians won’t tolerate a lumberjack posing as a brain surgeon messing with our share of the evolving global mind.

The global communications web is a delicate miracle. Please show respect, Ms Gillard.

Tens of billions of dollars of new NBN neurones may well help speed up Australia’s mediocre data transmission speeds. That will be a blessing.

Even so, brain stimulus is no substitute for an enlightened mind.

This morning I woke up thinking of my old friend Huw Davies, who took his own life in early 1994.

Huw Davies: via PhotoAccess, Canberra

Huw was a talented art photographer and ‘life artist’.

His friends adored him for his kindness, his compassion, his amazing energy and above all for a wonderful sense of humour.

About a year before his death, I had an intense debate with Huw about prospects for humanity. I took the optimist side, arguing we’re not only part of creation, but a special and significant part – for all our faults and weaknesses.

Huw – in blacker mood than I’d  seen him before – countered that humans are more like a lethal virus. I clearly remember him saying that if humans ever truly escape from the bounds of this planet, we’ll screw up the rest of the universe too.

I still can’t agree with Huw about that. Yet 15 years on, it’s hard to adduce much evidence he was wrong. I don’t think Huw believed all humans as intrinsically evil. His point was about the powerful (those most likely to head for the stars).

Perhaps our outward progress is stalled until we develop the wisdom to coexist and co-evolve?

I wish Huw was still around to continue the discussion.

In the last years of his life, Huw Davies developed a style for retouching photos by fingerpainting. The similarity with the painting style of Vincent Van Gogh was obvious. Somewhat later, he became intensely depressed and took his own life, like Vincent before him.

Along with a self portrait (copied from the website of the PhotoAccess in Canberra, a community organisation of which Huw was a founder-member), I’ll illustrate this tribute with a moving retrospective of the work of Van Gogh, accompanied by the haunting lyrics of Don MacLean.

With a persistance that does him credit, veteran investigative journalist and founder of Consortium News Robert Parry has been nibbling away at the 1980 ‘October Surprise’ story for a long time.

Each time he revisits the saga, Parry bites another chunk off the cookie.

Jimmy Carter - Worst President Billboard

His latest article – The CIA/Likud Sinking of Jimmy Carter – draws more confident and far-reaching  conclusions than before.

Parry makes a solid case that Jimmy Carter’s Administration was brought down by a conspiracy involving elements of the CIA and the far-right Israeli Government of the day. The former were ultimately answerable to George Bush senior, Vice Presidential candidate for the Republicans in the 1980 election. The latter were presumably under the control of Israel’s Prime Minister Menachim Begin, a former Irgun terrorist.

The Israeli connection helps explain how this story has taken so long to break. Parry relates (emphasis added):

As the Official Story of the 1980 October Surprise case crumbles – with new revelations that key evidence was hidden from investigators of a congressional task force and that internal doubts were suppressed – history must finally confront the troubling impression that remains: that disgruntled elements of the CIA and Israel’s Likud hardliners teamed up to remove a U.S. president from office.

Indeed, it is this disturbing conclusion – perhaps even more than the idea of a Republican dirty trick – that may explain the longstanding and determined cover-up of this political scandal.

Too many powerful interests do not want the American people to accept even the possibility that U.S. intelligence operatives and a longtime ally could intervene to oust a president who had impinged on what those two groups considered their vital interests.

To accept that scenario would mean that two of the great fears of American democracy had come true – George Washington’s warning against the dangers of “entangling alliances” and Harry Truman’s concern that the clandestine operations of the CIA had the makings of an “American Gestapo.”

It is far easier to assure the American people that no such thing could occur, that Israel’s Likud – whatever its differences with Washington over Middle East peace policies – would never seek to subvert a U.S. president, and that CIA dissidents – no matter how frustrated by political constraints – would never sabotage their own government.

I’ll add a personal note to this story.

I was a visitor in the USA for several months in the Autumn of 1979. I found the experience surreal. Major TV networks ran two separate current affairs programs each evening: The Iran Hostage Crisis and The News. Both were of roughly equal length.

Each day, the public was reminded how many days the crisis had lasted. For example, the opening screen image might read: “Iran Hostage Crisis: Day 25″. I left the States to return to Europe at the end of 1979, but presumably that imagery continued throughout the year of 1980. Everyone knew – although it was rarely emphasised – that Day 365 was November 4th 1980: the date of the 1980 US election.

It was as though the entire circus was custom-designed for TV, which I suspect it was.

By the end of the year-long saga of Jimmy Carter’s helpless inability to bring the American hostages home, support for his presidency had collapsed. The Reagan-Bush ticket  swept to power at the November 1980 election.

Jimmy Carter: tried to inject decency into American foreign affairs

Few had expected that outcome in the late 1970s. On my travels around the USA, I found the Carter Presidency was generally popular. Despite an economically troubled 1970s, Americans seemed to be feeling better about themselves after the traumas of the 1960s and the Nixon era. The Vietnam war was over. Carter was even reforming the intelligence agencies and attempting – with some success – to inject a note of morality into American foreign policy.

One can be critical of Carter’s record; many progressives were critical at the time. He didn’t go far enough or fast enough for many. On the other hand, his Presidency was during the Cold War era and suffered from the constraints accompanying that distorting global fission.

Overall, there was a general sense that Jimmy Carter was moving America in a more caring and progressive direction. Most people liked it. He’d used his power to push for peace with a modicum of justice in the middle east, resuming earlier attempts by earlier Presidents, including his most recent predecessor Gerald Ford, but with notably greater success.

Two things eventually turned Jimmy Carter’s decency-first approach to foreign polity into damaged goods. The resulting disillusionment was sufficient for a large numbers of Americans in the ‘center’ of politics to desert Carter in droves and opt for the hard-line, bombastic, pro-military agenda of Reagan and Bush.

Both were foreign affairs issues. The media amplified and put an anti-Carter spin on them, making his Administration seem weak and incompetent. One of the issues were Afghanistan, ‘invaded’ by Soviet troops in late 1979. The other issue, arguably more he Iran hostage crisis.

We now know, from subsequent disclosures by then National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, that the Afghanistan debacle was tantamount to a deliberate act of entrapment on the part of the USA. Whether Carter was party to that is less clear. I suspect he wasn’t. The ensuing frosty relationship with the Soviet Union, which continued on to the Olympic Games held in Moscow the next year, was not favourable to Carter’s image domestically. Instead of a ‘peace president’, he was made to look like a mug.

The Iran hostage crisis was even bigger news – and the story ran right up to election day. In fact, it was to reach a conclusion only on President Reagan’s inauguration day in January 1981, when the US hostages were finally released, signifying the beginning of a new political era.

When I visited the USA in late 1979, I asked a few Americans if they thought it likely Reagan would be elected. They generally laughed. The former California Governor was regarded as figure of fun. Bush caused more concern to Democrats, but he was clearly associated with the CIA. The general sentiment was that Carter would win again in 1980.

The US Administration of Jimmy Carter - defeated by treason

But in the event, the once-popular President was decisively defeated in November 1980. His well intentioned foreign policy – a policy that gave a new primacy to human rights – had been made to seem little more than naive weakness. After all, the Russians had ‘taken advantage’ in Afghanistan and the Iranian revolutionaries were laughing at Carter in Tehran. By election day in November 1980, Jimmy Carter was political dead meat

The shift to a Reagan/Bush Administration made a huge difference on numerous policy fronts, from military expenditure to energy policy. The military spend was ramped up to an unprecedented extent. Pressure to reform was relaxed for the intelligence agencies. Solar panels were ripped off the White House roof. Big oil was back in DC – in style.

I recall having suspicious at the time about the snapshot of history I was observing. It all seemed too neat; just a few too many co-incidences. Yet the idea that the US Republicans were able to pull off a coup d’etat on their own was too hard to believe. I hadn’t reckoned on the significance of the Bush-intel connection. Above all, I’d missed the role of the Israelis.

Thirty years on, knowing what I know now about Zionist media dominance in the the USA and having waded through a number of Robert Parry’s well-written and well-sourced articles, it’s clear to me now what happened. Anyone with the time, interest and intellectual open-mindedness can check the documentation for themselves. The early 1980′s October Surprise /Iran Contra saga is a most definitely a ripping yarn – an educational political thriller with plenty of villains, some of whose names may be surprisingly familiar!

In 1979/80 – not for the first time and not for the last – the Zionist leadership changed the course of American history. It exchanged a Democratic Administration for a Republican Administration. The electorate was systematically manipulated to achieve this objective. George Bush senior, a man later to become Vice-President and President (1988-92) in his own right, committed acts of treason against the US Administration of the day to gain unfair political advantage.

It’s true that Israel had friends – and some sceptics – in both the Carter and Reagan Administrations. The 1980 election did not bring about a shift in America’s middle east policy anything like as decisive as the bloody coup of November 1963. Yet overall, the demise of the Carter Administration served Israeli interests – at least it served the interests of hard-line, right-wing Israelis and their allies in the Jewish community worldwide.

Those are the interests who would go on the collaborate with criminals in the US Government in the unconstitutional crimes of ‘Iran-Contra’. Two decades after that, re-branded  as  ‘neocons’, they were to orchestrate the 9-11 atrocities and the illegal invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

January 20th 1981: US Hostages released at the dawn of the 'Reagan Era'