printable version PDF version

The active Australian Independence Movement
by dingo Tuesday, Jan 27 2009, 7:12pm
international / imperialism / commentary

Before the days of overt rebel expression in Australia -- the Eureka Stockade and the Kelly gang -- Imperial England had developed a plan to criminalise and exploit a downtrodden and oppressed underclass and utilise them as a slave labour force for newly ‘acquired’ colonies. Similar methods are utilised today by America. Labelling victims as criminals and ‘TERRORISTS’ allows for modern colonialists to steal land, commit mass murder and plunder the valuable resources of weaker nations. It becomes apparent that European Monarchs and today’s Western ‘democratic’ governments are merely fronts for mercantile, commercial and corporate interests. The formula of invasion, mass murder, installation of compliant regimes and EXPLOITATION hasn’t changed an iota in hundreds of years!

So it is not surprising to learn (story below) that an Aussie plan to assassinate or kidnap the Queen came very close to succeeding in the early 70’s.

Australia, as this site exemplifies, maintains a vibrant independence movement to this day – it is to Australia’s great shame that it continues to cling to colonial models of government. The nation is considered a laughing stock by other nations that have severed the colonial umbilical cord and achieved full independence.

We need not refer to the disgusting exhibitions of servility displayed by the former Howard and current Rudd governments to emphasise the point. Australia’s REBEL TRADITION will continue until the matter of INDEPENDENCE is RESOLVED. Our lackey politicians seem oblivious to that fact.

We are One.

Lithgow's night of Anarchy

from the Lithgow Mercury
by Len Ashworth

On the night of April 29, 1970, an event occurred on the rail corridor through Lithgow that had the potential to change the course of world history.

It was an incident on such a scale of international significance that an ironcast wall of secrecy was thrown up by Federal and State authorities when they responded to a curious media who had been ‘hearing whispers’ of something amiss.

When Det Sgt Cliff McHardy received a phone call that Autumn night the implications were immediate; someone had made a serious attempt to derail the Royal Train that was conveying Queen Elizabeth and Prince Phillip to an official visit to Orange, due to be the only Central Western venue on that year’s Royal Tour.

Now long retired after 11 years in charge of Lithgow detectives and living in the Blue Mountains, Mr McHardy — who left the Force with the rank of Detective Superintendent — this week recounted his memories of the frantic investigations and bemoaned the fact that the culprit was ‘óne that got away’.

“It was one of the big regrets of my police service,” he said.

On the night of the drama the Queen and the Duke were traveling on what was known as the Commissioner’s Train.

It was an era before the arrival of sophisticated international terrorism and the security largely consisted of uniformed police who were ordered to man every railway station along the route and railway personnel on duty at every level crossing.

On board were members of the Royal entourage and Federal and Special Branch police.

The schedule was for the train to spend the night under tighter security in a siding in Orange, ready for a two and a half hour visit next day.

The train almost didn’t make it.

As the train passed at speed through a winding cutting at Bowenfels the locomotive struck a large log that had been placed across the tracks.

The train continued on under brakes for about 200 metres with the log still wedged under the front wheels before finally coming to a halt at the level crossing near Bowenfels station.

When Det Sgt McHardy and Detectives Barry Antill and Doug Bentley arrived they found the hardwood log had not splintered under the heavy impact and had deep indentations from the locomotive wheels.

But the locomotive had remained on track and largely unscathed.

The derailment attempt was no spur of the moment example of vandalism taken to the extreme.

Whoever was responsible had surveyed the area as marks indicated where the log had previously been resting at the top of the embankment in an area not often frequented by the public.

It had been rolled from there onto the tracks and manoeuvred into place, possibly by more than one person.

The offenders had also somehow been aware of the time schedule for not only the Royal Train but a security ‘sweeper’ locomotive that had gone through a short time earlier to guard against just such an incident.

The obstruction was placed on the tracks sometime between the passing of the sweep loco and the arrival in the cutting of the train carrying the British Monarch and her husband en route to Orange.

The incident caused a sensation in official circles and although numerous suspects were investigated there were no real clues.

Among those targeted in the investigation were persons known to Australian intelligence as IRA sympathisers.

While the hunt for the culprit was under way Government officials were as much concerned for the embarrassment to Australia if the story leaked to the media as they were with the incident itself.

Government gags were placed on the release of any information to the public.

“I was constantly reassuring my superiors that the local media would cooperate if we asked them to,” Mr McHardy said. “I told them that the Editor of the Lithgow Mercury, Bede Leighton, was man of total integrity who would abide by his word when told anything in confidence.

“They were used to dealing with the Sydney media and remained sceptical.”

But the official suppression order worked and there was never a mention of the incident — until now.

This was even more surprising as most Lithgow railwaymen knew of the incident but went along with orders from their department to say nothing.

Mr McHardy said that the wall of secrecy actually worked against the police and seriously hampered the investigation.

“ We never came up with any decent suspects because if we interviewed people we seemed to be talking in riddles. We couldn’t disclose what our inquiries were about,” he said.

The investigations included an inquiry into possible links with an earlier incident when detonators were placed in the path of the Royal Train as it approached Blackheath.

Such was the priority given the derailment attempt at Bowenfels that the officer in charge of country detective operations for the then CIB, Det Inspector Maurice Kelly, came to Lithgow to take charge of investigations.

Detectives also had to send daily progress reports to the Government and to the CIB.

The remainder of the Royal Visit to Orange went off without incident with thousands of people coming from across the region to greet and meet.

It is unknown whether the Queen was ever made aware of the furore left in her wake or the reason for that unscheduled stop at Bowenfels.

With the passing of the years this act of urban terrorism is well and truly a cold case — but there are few cold cases in regional NSW that provide such a level of deep intrigue.

Mr McHardy, who revisited the scene of the crime with the Lithgow Mercury this week, said that most of the high level Sydney police who came to Lithgow for the investigation were now deceased.

He said the case that literally derailed the Press if not the Royal Train will probably never be solved.

“Perhaps now that the story has gone public someone might come forward,” he said with the true optimism of an old policeman.

Murdoch and Rudd

http://tinyurl.com/arurm4

COMMENTS

Bush Family Tentacles Undermining US Democracy -- Obama must pursue War Crimes!
by Russ Baker via reed - Alternet Tuesday, Jan 27 2009, 10:54pm

As George W. Bush leaves office and Barack Obama takes over, we are in danger of missing the opportunity for change our new president has promised -- unless we come to grips with what the great historian and Librarian of Congress Daniel Boorstin called our "hidden history," not just of the past eight years but of the past half-century and more.

President Obama will face a staggering array of challenges, most, if not all, of which stem from the policies of Bush. But efforts at reform will fall short if we fail to probe and confront the powerful forces that wanted this disastrous administration in the White House in the first place -- and that remain ready and able to maintain their influence behind the scenes today.

Like most people, I took the failings of George W. Bush at face value: an inattentive, poorly prepared man full of hubris, who committed colossal blunders as a result. Then I spent five years researching my new book, Family of Secrets and came to see that the origins go much deeper. This backstory is getting almost no attention in the talking-heads debate over the Bush legacy. Yet it will continue to play, affecting our country and our lives, long after Bush leaves office.

A more profound explanation for the rise of George W. Bush came as I studied the concerted effort to convince the public that he was independent of, and often in disagreement with, his father. The reason for this, it turned out, was that exactly the opposite was true. W. may have been bumptious where his father was discreet, but in fact the son hewed closely to a playbook that guided his father and even his grandfather.

Over much of the last century, the Bushes have been serving the aims of a very narrow segment from within America's wealthiest interests and families -- typically through involvement in the most anti-New Deal investment banking circles, in the creation of a civilian intelligence service after World War II, and in some of that service's most secretive and still-unacknowledged operations.

Through declassified documents and interviews, I unearthed evidence that George W. Bush's father, the 41st president of the United States, had been working for the intelligence services no less than two decades before he was named CIA director in 1976. Time and again, Bush 41 and his allies have participated in clandestine operations to force presidents to do the bidding of oil and other resource-extraction interests, military contractors and financiers. Whenever a president showed independence or sought reforms that threatened entrenched interests, this group helped to ensure that he was politically attacked and neutralized, or even removed from office, through one means or another.

We are not dealing here with what are commonly dismissed as "conspiracy theories." We are dealing with a reality that is much more subtle, layered and pervasive -- a matrix of power in which crude conspiracies are rarely necessary and in which the execution or subsequent cover-up of anti-democratic acts become practically a norm.

In 1953, 23 years before he became CIA director as a supposed neophyte, George H.W. Bush began preparing to launch an oil-exploration company called Zapata Offshore. His father, investment banker Prescott Bush, had just taken a Senate seat from Connecticut; and his father's close friend Allen Dulles had just taken over the CIA. A staff CIA officer, Thomas J. Devine, purportedly "resigned" to go into the oil business with young George.

Bush then began to travel around the world. His itineraries had little apparent relationship to his limited and perennially unprofitable business enterprises. But they do make sense if the object was intelligence work. When his company at last put a few oil rigs in place, they ended up in highly sensitive spots, such as just off Castro's Cuba before the Bay of Pigs invasion.

As part of his travels, Bush senior even appeared in Dallas on the morning of the Kennedy assassination, although he would famously claim that he could not recall where he was at that historic moment. After leaving the city, he called the FBI with a false tip about a possible assassin, pointedly emphasizing that he was calling from outside Dallas. It is also intriguing to learn that an old friend of Bush's, a White Russian émigré with intelligence connections, shepherded Lee Harvey Oswald upon his return to America in the year preceding the assassination. In any event, when Lyndon Johnson replaced Kennedy, the oilmen and the intelligence-military establishment once again had a friend in the White House.

The pattern continued. New evidence suggests that Bush senior and his associates in the intelligence services, far from being the loyalists to Richard Nixon they claimed to be, had turned on the 35th president early in his administration, unceasingly working to weaken and eventually force him out. These efforts culminated in what appears to have been a deliberately botched Watergate office burglary -- led by former CIA officers.

Ironically, Nixon's career had been launched with the quiet backing of Wall Street finance figures upset with the man Nixon would defeat, a leading congressional supporter of banking reform, and Prescott Bush himself had played a key role. Yet, when Nixon finally achieved the presidency, he became surprisingly resistant to pressure from the very power centers that had helped him get to the top. He turned a deaf ear to the demands of the oil industry, battled with the CIA and cut the Pentagon out of the loop as he (and his aide Henry Kissinger) negotiated secretly with Moscow and Beijing.

These acts estranged Nixon from those who felt he had betrayed his sponsors -- men who had the means to do him in. Bush senior, it turns out, was closely allied with the surprising number of White House officials with covert ties to the intelligence service that surrounded Nixon. Through it all, Bush senior would routinely claim to be "out of the loop," as he would later pretend during the Iran-Contra scandal of the Reagan era, although we know that as vice president he was at the center of that and other abuses of power.

None of this let up after Nixon was forced to resign. His pliant successor, Gerald Ford, brought in young staffers named Richard Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, and the two participated in the so-called Halloween massacre, which saw the administration veer in a far-right direction on foreign policy, a development that paved the way for the appointment of Bush senior as CIA director. This happened just as Congress was launched into the deepest investigation ever of intelligence abuses, and public voices were clamoring to reopen official inquiries into the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, his brother, Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.

Then came Jimmy Carter, whose plans to reform the CIA were an echo of JFK's intent to scatter the CIA to the winds after the ruinous Bay of Pigs invasion. When Carter defeated Ford, ousted Bush from the CIA helm and sought to bring the intelligence juggernaut under control, he ended up deeply compromised by complex financial shenanigans orchestrated by figures from the same intelligence circles -- and undermined by the crisis with Iran, exacerbated by covert dissident CIA elements tied to Bush. Carter was a one-term president, defeated by a ticket with none other than George H.W. Bush, backed by a phalanx of CIA officers, as vice president. And then Bush senior became president himself.

Bill Clinton apparently grasped the pattern. He cultivated a friendly relationship with the elder Bush and instituted virtually no significant reforms in, or issued challenges to, either the intelligence or military establishments.

All this is relevant today because the furtive forces and pressures that haunted, and ultimately dominated, these past presidents have not abated.

Indeed, what the presidency of George W. Bush truly represented was the unfettered, most reckless manifestation of the objectives this group has pursued for many decades. In Bush 43's trademark pattern of showing the old man how it's done, the son was bringing virtually into the open the kinds of things his father preferred pursued sub-rosa. But behind the different façade it was the same game all over again.

The dirty tricks of Karl Rove, who got his first job under Bush 41 at the Republican Party during Watergate; the use of the Supreme Court to force an election their way; an early move to suppress the records of prior presidencies; the maniacal secrecy of Vice President Cheney; the false rationale used to justify the seizure of Iraqi oil reserves through invasion; the clampdown on dissent and the unauthorized domestic eavesdropping, the efforts to smear independent voices like Joseph Wilson (the husband of CIA officer Valerie Plame) and newsman Dan Rather; and last and perhaps most significant, the unleashing from government oversight of their friends and allies in finance and industry -- these and more emerged from the old dreams and methods of this anti-democratic culture.

Now, as a new president enters the White House promising reform, how much will he be able to achieve if his reforms step on the same big toes? We must begin to take seriously, and speak openly about, the true nature of the forces behind the Bush family enterprise. If we do not, we will find ourselves, several years from now, shaking our heads at new disaster, still unable to comprehend what has happened -- and why.

© 2009 Independent Media Institute

http://www.alternet.org/story/121243/