I suppose it stops anyone looking too closely at state sponsered terrorism.... as a potential major cause, I mean.

Kipp, the answer may be found in descriptions of other countries. NZ is the land of the long white cloud but I have seen photos of NZ bathed in sunlight. Australia is said to be down under but as you know a lot of us live on the surface. The USA is said to be the land of opportunity but what opportunities are available to those citizens who are residents of Sunnybank Nursing Home or citizens who have passed over to the other side?

Ain't it a paradox.

Dear Tony

I studied Peace and Conflict at UQ, with a subject called Terrorism and Insurgency, suffered from a lack of evidence from the 'opposing' point of view and too slavishly accepted that government/military/intelligence 'security discourse' disseminated by George W Bush, Tony Blair and John Howard.

One lecturer, David Martin Jones, told us that the Chechnyans were 'terrorists' and tried to ignore my question when I asked why we should accept this version of the narrative since the Russian Army had destroyed the Chechnyan capital Grozny and massacred many of its inhabitants. Surely this was state terror.

As you say, "Taken together, these make terrorists of the Jewish armed resisters to Nazi troops in the Warsaw ghetto or French Resisters attacking German military facilities, and rule out as terrorist any acts committed by Russian troops in Chechnya or Serbian troops in Kosovo".

The Bush administration has accepted that the persecuted Muslim West China minority, the Uighurs, are terrorists and locked seventeen of them away in the psychological torture experiment centre at Guantanamo Bay.

The Bush administration also believes that the Hmong refugees now living in the USA are ‘terrorists’. This may seem a bit rich if you got your first gun from a kindly CIA aid worker when you were nine years old. Yes, state terror knows no boundaries - just ask the Apartheid-era South African Special Forces, who received plenty of support from the US government.

I have met Mamdouh Habib. I also hope to meet former Taliban foot soldier David Hicks. I am not drawn to terrorists, but I am gravely concerned when people like the former Minister for Immigration, now Australia’s Attorney General, Phillip Ruddock, take upon themselves the task of identifying terrorists.

Another former lecturer in Terrorism and Insurgency, Carl Ungerer, believes I "should be watched". I reminded him that I am a lifelong practitioner of non-violence and our government’s resources are expensive. He retracted the jibe, but the threat remains current.

As you imply, governments with powers of censorship will distort and reinterpret what they term seditious material. We cannot trust them.

Willy Bach
http://willybachpoeticthoughts.blogspot.com

R.I.P Democracy.

Wily,

Next time you speak to Mamdouh Habib ask him why he wore an Osama Bin Laden t-shirt after the brutal attacks on African embassies which killed hundreds of Africans.

Does he hate blacks or something?

Ask him why he laughed on the phone to his wife in the immediate days after 9/11, which ASIO thankfully tapped.

Ask him why he is such a scumbag who hates the western world he lives in Australia on the pension.

Ask him why he brought his son up to kidnap his female cousin, shave her head, and threaten her because she didn't wear the hijab.

Ask him why he was friends with Islamic supremacists convicted of the first WTC bombing in 1993? His phone records show that he regularly spoke to such vermin even after they were convicted from the US prison they were being held in.

Ask him why he thinks the Taliban deserve to exist, given their misoginistic treatment of women, racist treatment of minority Afghan tribes, and so on.

It seems like you've engaged with the very definition of the term bigot, racist, homophobe, misoginst.

If you don't ask him these things, your a coward.

Oh, you mention apartheid too, yet say nothing about Islamic aparthied.

Aparthied of Palestinians, those who Muslims are supposed to love dearly, and who live behind razor wire in camps that they can't leave, even to work, or to buy a home. They have no rights in their Arab brothers' nations.

Apartheid against women in nearly every Muslim nation, especially in Iran and Saudi Arabia - where if caught driving, are charged bizarrely with prostitution.

Aparthied against religions, with Saudi Arabia making it illegal for any citizen to be a non-Muslim, and Iran not allowing non-Muslims into many professions.

Or do you think so little of Muslims, are they so child-like, in-bred, that they know not what they do?

Condemn apartheid, don't just condemn white people.

Tony Coady

As a “constitutionalist”, not a lawyer, I succeeded against the Federal Government lawyers, in a 5-year legal battle, on all constitutional grounds. I publish books about certain constitutional and other legal issues, and my and despite being directed not to publish some of my own writings, still have done so, as nothing they can do to stop me.
Sure, most people would be scared of but I am not. As my website http://www.schorel-hlavka.com makes clear that in my view John Howard is a TERRORIST, and published that in my book and used this in my successful court cases as evidence! See also my blog; http://au.360.yahoo.com/profile-ijpxwMQ4dbXm0BMADq1lv8AYHknTV_QH. Ultimately a weasel they might scare of but with me they can only face defeat!

Hansard 2-3-1898 Constitution Convention Debates
QUOTE
Mr. BARTON.-Yes; and here we have a totally different position, because the actual right which a person has as a British subject-the right of personal liberty and protection under the laws-is secured by being a citizen of the states. It must be recollected that the ordinary rights of liberty and protection by the laws are not among the subjects confided to the Commonwealth. The administration of [start page 1766] the laws regarding property and personal liberty is still left with the states.
END QUOTE

While the Commonwealth of Australia is grabbing more and more power, albeit unconstitutional, I have taking them to task and defeated them in Court!
The more people were to follow my example, to fight for our constitutional rights, the less likely their TYRRANY will succeed.

Then again, those who cave in from onset or out of misconception support the unconstitutional grab of power may just discover one day that it is their turn to suffer at the hands of the Commonwealth of Australia and then it might be too late to resolve it.