(continuedfromabove)

Ludwig wrote: "I'd be very careful about labelling anything Howard has said to do with children overboard or the Iraq War as lies." (http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?discussion=830#14360)

If Howard did not too lie in regard to the alleged Iraqi WMDs and teh AWB scandal then he would have to be too stupid to be Prime Minister.

You have clearly not familiarised yourself with the facts of the "Children Overboard" scandal of 2001. Prime Minister John Howard lied over the instance as a senior Public servant Michael Scrafton revealed in 2004. Even Murdoch's slavishly pro-Howard newspaper The Australian labelled Howard a liar in an editorial in 2004 (I believe in order to re-establish some degree of credibility so that it could push its pro-Howard propaganda more effectively in the last days of the 2004 election campaign). In writing this I am well aware that the moral case in favour of the asylumn-seekeers and would-be immigrants is not altogether straightforward, particularly, when some on board clearly deliberately scuttled the ship. Nevertheless, John Howard clearly knowingly lied to the Australian public in regard to one aspect of that incident in order to get his odious Government re-elected in 2001.

And, of course having been re-elected, instead of strengthening Australia's border protection, Howard has done his utmost to destroy it, by allowing Australia's real annual immigration rate to climb to 300,000 as I have pointed out above (see againhttp://www.smh.com.au/news/opinion/backscratching-at-a-national-level/2007/06/12/1181414298095.html).

Ludwig, glad you share my disgust with Howard over this, but you have still not explained why you believe that we should "have a little bit more faith" in a Government led by a man capable of such cynical deceit and of all the other reprehensible acts, only some of which I have mentioned above.

---

One other effective means to prevent terrorism is not to give potential terrorist any grievances in the first place. Iraqi oil workers recently struck to oppose new laws which the United States is pressuring the Iraqi Parliament into passing. They succeeded in blocking further progress of the legislsation until at least October. ... (tobecontinued)

(continuedfromabove) ... According to a union leader Faleh Abood Umara "... the law, ... allows the international oil companies, especially the American ones, to exploit the oil fields without our knowledge of what they are actually doing with it. And they take about 50% of the production as their share, which we think it's an obvious robbery of the Iraqi oil." (see http://www.alternet.org/columnists/story/56301/).

As Howard Government ministers have recently admitted, contrary to the lies they fed us at the time, Australia participated in the invasion of Iraq because of oil and thereby is an accomplice in the U.S. Government's current attempted theft of Iraqi oil that the Iraqi oil workers and opposition politicians are trying to prevent.

Given this, our best chance of preventing future terrorist attacks on Australian soil would be for the Australian public to repudiate the Howard Government's participation in the invasion of Iraq by booting him out at the next election and for the new Rudd Government to make known its support for the Iraqi people's right to control their own oil wealth.

--

Chainsmoker and GlendaBeth: I am glad to her that we are still friends, but are you quite sure that you have read all of my posts carefully?

I have argued against high immigration (admittedly slightly tangential to the topic under discussion) which his considered by many 'progressives' to be politically incorrect. Very often taking this stance as resulted in people being unfairly labelled racist. For my part, I consider the right to control the numbers of people allowed into this country to be a fundamental democratic right, just as much as it was for Palestinian Arabs in the 1930's or Australian Aboriginals in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This fundamental right would be denied to Australians by many left-liberal types because we are held by them to be privileged in comparison to people of other countries. Under this pretext, many ordinary Australians stand to be reduced to third world levels of poverty as housing prices rocket and our environment is destroyed as a consequence of the demands of too many people.

I concur with Sylvia Else. Paul L's posts are nonsense and don't pay any regard to many facts in posts by Sylvia, TurnRightThenLeft, chainsmoker, myself and others.

Perhaps a techincically correct title to Sylvia'as original post might have been "Is Terrorism so bad, relatively speaking" but I think the chosen tile was adequate for the purpose.

In reality the exaggeration of the danger of terrorism, which, in any case, was, to the extent that it is real, was largely brought about by Howard himself, as explained above, is being used to divert our attention from the fact that this Government, has by its policies and negligence has exposed, and continues to expose, all of us to vastly greater perils, namely global warming, resource deplation and environmental degradation and overpopulation.

As I pointed out above, even the Pentagon considers the threat of global warming to be afar greater risk.

Why won't you respond to that, Paul.L?

George Orwell said that in 1984 the masses will be occupied with playing the lotteries ann obeying our telescreens.
Never believe with conviction that about which you cannot be certain.
Guys, Please!

“…but you have still not explained why you believe that we should "have a little bit more faith" in a Government led by a man capable of such cynical deceit and of all the other reprehensible acts...”

Daggett, it is simply a matter of being very careful about seeing each step or proposal in a balanced manner and not just automatically thinking the worst.

Too many people are far too strongly polarised. They encounter something that they disagree with and forever after think the absolute worst of the person or organisation they deem responsible.

I can see a whole spectrum of things from very good to very bad implemented by Howard. The worst is his grossly over-the-top promotion of immigration. But I don’t let this cloud my judgement on other aspects of his governance.

I see the Children Overboard affair as a muddle of unintentional misinformation and a willingness for a large section of the community to grab hold of anything they could against the Howard government and beat it right up. Howard made the statement that children had been thrown overboard based on intelligence he was given at the time. He should have corrected himself when it became clear that it wasn’t the case. He didn’t act properly. But I’m not willing to label his actions a lie. I do think that it was beaten up and turned into deliberate distraction.

The bottom line was that these illegal arrivals needed to be stopped, for the good of all involved. Most of the people condemning Howard were of the view that asylum seekers should be allowed to enter Australia via this illegal channel, which would as a matter of course have encouraged thousands others to make the journey and thus put them in peril on the open seas in the hands of people-smugglers.

The overall actions taken regarding the Tampa and the SIEV 4 were the right actions at the time. And that’s what should have counted far above all else.

Ludwig

The problem is that there have been too many cases of "flawed" intelligence, I didn't know, I wasn't told, for my liking.

No John Howard is not a liar, but he often cherry picks the truth.

I think it is called ministerial responsibility, what we now have is plausable denial.

Remember "Honest John" was not originally meant as a compliment.