October must be the month for memoirs.

Here in Australia, the smiling and unrepentent former Prime Minister John Howard – the PM who sent Australian troops to fight in two wars under false pretences and presided over the greatest assault on the nation’s civil liberties in living memory – has published his memoirs: Lazarus Rising.

Howard doesn’t care if he cops the occasional shoe while promoting his tome. It’s all good publicity. Even public spats with former Deputy PM Peter Costello are grist to his publicist’s mill.

I shaln’t be buying Howard’s memoirs anytime soon.

Or anytime at all, to be more precise.

I try not to put money directly into the pockets of war criminals if I can avoid it.

General Hugh Shelton: US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff 1997-2001

On the other hand, I am more curious about the memoirs of former Chairman of the (US) Joint Chiefs of Staff General Hugh Shelton, also published recently: Without Hesitation: The Odyssey of an American Warrior.

The Sydney Morning Herald ran a story about Shelton’s memoirs last Saturday, relating one of the more gripping yarns in the book. Apparently Bill Clinton parted company with the top secret codes needed to launch nuclear apocalpse (known for some reason as the ‘biscuit’). This security lapse may have happened more than once. Doubtless America’s stand-up comics will be working on this new material. Something like: “Is that a pen in your pants Mr President – or has she been nibbling your biscuit?”

The same story about Superpower America’s risible WMD security also made it into The Australian newspaper: Bill Clinton did lose nuclear strike codes: Hugh Shelton. How wonderfully media diversity serves the Australian public!

But as far as I can see, another significant revelation in Shelton’s memoirs hasn’t been ‘noticed’ by the Australian mainstream media so far. Salon.com has this story: Clinton aide’s idea: Let Iraq shoot down U.S. plane

Justin Elliott reports (emphasis added):

General Hugh Shelton, who was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during parts of the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations, has a new memoir out that contains this significant-seeming story: Back in the late 1990s, Shelton says a member of Clinton’s cabinet asked him to allow Saddam Hussein to shoot down an American plane over Iraq as a pretext for starting a war. The way Shelton tells the story, this was a serious request.

Apparently Shelton was not receptive:

…one of the Cabinet members present leaned over to me and said, “Hugh, I know I shouldn’t even be asking you this, but what we really need in order to go in and take out Saddam is a precipitous event — something that would make us look good in the eyes of the world. Could you have one of our U-2s fly low enough — and slow enough — so as to guarantee that Saddam could shoot it down?”

The hair on the back of my neck bristled, my teeth clenched, and my fists tightened. I was so mad I was about to explode. I looked across the table, thinking about the pilot in the U-2 and responded, “Of course we can …” which prompted a big smile on the official’s face.

“You can?” was the excited reply.

“Why, of course we can,” I countered. “Just as soon as we get your ass qualified to fly it, I will have it flown just as low and slow as you want to go.”

The official reeled back and immediately the smile disappeared. “I knew I should not have asked that….”

“No, you should not have,” I strongly agreed, still shocked at the disrespect and sheer audacity of the question. “Remember, there is one of our great Americans flying that U-2, and you are asking me to intentionally send him or her to their death for an opportunity to kick Saddam. The last time I checked, we don’t operate like that here in America.”

General Shelton does not identify the Clinton cabinet member who made this outrageous request. Secretary of State Albright is the most obvious possibility, but there are others.

Shelton’s military bio informs us that “General Shelton became the 14th Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on October 1, 1997, and served two two-year terms, retiring on September 30, 2001.”

According to Wikipedia: “during the events of September 11, 2001, Shelton was on a plane to London, England. Then-Vice Chairman Air Force General Richard Myers took charge and on October 1, 2001 became his successor.”

One might speculate that the planners of 9-11 didn’t regard Hugh Shelton as sufficiently reliable.

Now we have a better idea why.

Last night Australians had a chance to watch an hour long ‘Q & A’ talkback program on ABC-TV featuring just one guest: former Australian Prime Minister John Howard.

Tweeted before the show began: life imitates Twitter?

Twitter users had been circling the #qanda hashtag for days beforehand, like vultures in anticipation. Quite a few of these more-enthusiastic-than-usual-tweeters were in an ugly mood. I was one of them.

An hour or so before the program I tweeted a simple invitation: ‘Retweet if you agree John Howard is a War Criminal‘. That had roughly 20 takers. Things were warming up.

In the event, while more than half of the show was tedious dross, the carefully staged-managed simulacrum of open-access TV did throw up a couple of surprises.

One was planned. The other was not.

John Howard: enjoying himself

David Hicks – one of the two Australians incarcerated for years in Guantanamo Bay – called in with a pre-recorded question delivered in video format. He asked a fair question and received a characteristically slippery reply.

When you were Prime Minister, you left me in Guantanamo Bay for five and a half years. During that time I was detained without charge for a long time; I was denied a fair trial; I was tortured. Do you believe that I was treated humanely and that the military commission was a fair system?

I won’t repeat Howard’s evasive reply here (it’s in the program transcript), but his opening gambit encapsulates the smugness of the man: “isn’t it a great country that allows this kind of exchange to occur!”

The unexpected surprise was when Peter Gray, an member of the audience from Newcastle, stood up and flung both of his shoes at Howard after receiving an unsatisfactory response to his question about the Iraq War.

This is the second in a series of notable shoe-flinging incidents, as an irate global public expresses growing frustration that  Howard, Blair and Bush still go unpunished. The first, of course, was the epic shoe-throwing of Muntadhar al-Zaidi which I reported on back in December 2008: Bush=Dog Slur Sparks World Outrage. Gray is following in al-Zaidi’s illustrious footprints.

Gray is clear about his motivations:

“I did it so there was a chance that thousands of people, tens of thousands of people, in the rest of the world, particularly in the Middle East, could see that not every Australian was behind the decision to invade and rule in the country of Iraq,” Gray told the ABC. “I did it for tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of dead and those that are still living.“

He told a reporter from 9News: “I wanted to show them that the decision (to invade Iraq) was made by a small cabal of nasty men” and added “I think it’s rather ridiculous to call (shoethrowing) an act of violence when the real subject of the conversation should be Australia’s involvement in an illegal war and John Howard’s responsibility for that.”

Peter Gray: a better face of Australia

Mr Gray speaks for me on this – and for a lot of other Australians.

I bet his plucky action and well-chosen words, already reported overseas, do more for the safety of Australians travelling abroad than any of the bombastic, spook-inspired ‘initiatives’ of the Howard Government during its 11 sorry years. The odious policies of Howard and the people he works for have made the world more dangerous for Australians. Gray shows there’s a much better side to the Australian people.

Howard should be facing a war crimes tribunal – not grumbling that he hasn’t been handed his preferred sinecure in international cricket or satiating his ego at book launches.

Q & A Executive Producer Peter McEvoy said today this was the first ‘security’ incident in the history of the ABC TV program, which always involves audience participation. He noted extra security measures had been taken because Howard was considered ‘controversial’. But if people in the audience want to take off their shoes and fling them, McEnvoy explained, there’s nothing much to be done. Even George Bush got the shoe…

Shoe flinging incidents highlight, in microcosm, the vacuous approach to ‘security’ foisted on the western world in recent years by our courrupted leadership.

Iraq Body Count: low-end estimates

No one would think of flinging shoes at a television panel under normal circumstances. ‘Security’ is unecessary given the respect people normally accord their fellow human beings.

But war crimes are beyond ‘normal circumstances’. Many of us find it deeply offensive to have the likes of Blair and Howard paraded on our screens like elder statesmen. They are not. They lied – so others died (in vast numbers). Their behaviour was despicable in the most fundamental way. Yet to this day their appear unruffled and quite unapologetic. They even spruik for more illegal wars!

Howard was among a group of high-level political operatives tasked – at a crucial time in history – with selling their people the notion that security is found in overwhelming force and that ‘security’ is the best defense of ‘freedom’.

Both parts of the proposition are untrue.

But of course, the lies don’t end there. Related to the topic of Australia’s overseas wars are trigger events that justified them – notably 9-11. Hard questions about that topic have yet to be aired on Australia’s public television.

In that respect, the shoe-throwing incident may have been a relief to ABC management. At least no-one in the QandA audience asked a probing question about the “nothing to discuss” Origin Myth of the War on Terror!

No-one has, so far…

Whenever there’s a bomb blast in Pakistan, Afghanistan or Iraq – and you hear the words ‘suicide bomber’, ‘Al Qaida‘ or ‘Pakistani Talban’ – consider the plausible alternative that it’s likely to have been an atrocity perpetrated by Zionists.

Who? How?

Those are good questions – questions the mass media would be investigating and reporting, if they weren’t themselves part of a chain of disinformation designed to perptuate these very same myths.

Aftermath of the bomb attack in Quetta on an anti-Zionist rally: a cynical game of murdering innocents and blaming the victim

These terrible murderous deeds might be orchestrated by Mossad. More likely, I think, ‘private contractors’ are utilised. Discrete units within the vast US intelligence / special forces morass are another alternative.

‘Suicide bombings’ are most likely explained by deliberate planting of bombs – either inside vehicles or in stationary positions.

The bomb goes off. Often it’s impossible to account for all the corpses. It’s consequently impossible to deny a ‘suicide bomber’ was involved with certainty. The western mass media, however, displays false certainty. It snaps into action straight away, informing us the latest bombing was carried out by a ‘suicide bomber’ , often naming ‘Al Qaida’ or the ‘Pakistani Talban’ as the culprit. There’s no real follow up. The blasts come so frequently any possibility of establishing the truth is lost is a general haze of death and destruction.

How do I know the mass media has this important story so fundamentally wrong?

I don’t… not for sure. I suspect it.

There may very well be individuals or small groups in Pakistan, Afghanistan or Iraq, so desperate about what has become of their society, so angry with the western occupiers and so irate with collaborators among their own people that they’re willing to die while killing for a perceived strategic gain (that’s a trait, incidentally, westerners are encouraged to regard as a sign of high courage when evinced by their own soldiers).

There is also, quite clearly, an authentic and popular insurgency in Afghanistan and Iraq. Most people don’t like foreign occupation. Why should Iraqis or Afghanis? Especially when they see the occupiers bringing violence and ruin to their lands…

'Evil Islam' - Zionist Propaganda on YouTube

But seriously, would authentic ‘Islamic extremists’ bomb a pro-Palestine demonstration in Pakistan?

Would genuine Muslims blow themselves up – with the specific objective of murdering public opponents of Zionism?

The story is plainly absurd.

It’s intended to suggest that the Muslim religion is inherently violent and irrational.

That’s just ugly Zionist/Hasbara propaganda.

This stuff is believable by trusting children, perhaps, but intelligent adults should see through such crude disinformation.

We could all do worse than attend to the remarks of Jesus (1 Corinthians 13:11) on the process of maturation:

When I was a child,
I talked like a child,
I thought like a child,
I reasoned like a child.
When I became adult,
I put childish ways behind me.

Taunted by Jack Straw of the British Labour Party over the Liberal Democrat’s role in supporting a Tory-dominated Coalition British Government, Nick Clegg struck back today with a counter-jibe that stunned both sides of the House of Commons.

Addressing the former Labour Foreign Minister, Clegg said: “may he one day can – perhaps we’ll have to wait for his memoirs – could account for his role in the most disastrous decision of all, which is the illegal invasion of Iraq.

Clegg’s comment is being described as a ‘gaffe’ and his office has since ‘clarified’ that the Deputy Prime Minister was expressing a personal opinion – as opposed to the Government position. Even so, the import of his words is significant.

The Guardian reports the opinion of Philippe Sands, a law professor at University College London, who commented “a public statement by a government minister in parliament as to the legal situation would be a statement that an international court would be interested in, in forming a view as to whether or not the war was lawful.”

It would be satisfying indeed if Nick Clegg’s remarks are used in testimony against Tony Blair, Jack Straw and the rest of the Nu Labour war criminals at trial. But even hearing those words of honesty about Iraq expressed from the government benches is a reminder of how appallingly low the British Labour Party sank under its opportunistic Zionist-stooge leadership.

However bad the current British Government may turn out, it has a way to go before it sinks that low.

The Australian Labor Party, currently facing the electorate, should take note. Labor in Australia also has an obsessive Israel Lobby buzzing in its ear over its pet issues: uncritical support for Israel, hostility to Iran, soft-peddling on Israeli illegality and Mossad interference, censorship etc

In Britain, Nu Labour under Blair and Brown pandered to Zionist Lobby in 2003 and illegally invaded a sovereign nation with appalling and ongoing  consequences. Faith in the British Labour’s Party’s bona fides has been shattered – at least until its current leadership is replaced. That includes all major contenders for the currently vacant Labour Party leadership.

Down under, the ALP had better watch out it doesn’t do the same and suffer the same fate.