Fitzy under the whip! - National Social/Political

[But it is the Americans that lost MOST to ‘Chinese business women,’ if memory serves. Before you try your little games ‘Jethro,’ be cognisant of what we are able to release compromising YOU -- it could even precipitate revolution given the current climate! Be aware of the consequences of your actions BEFORE attempting character assassinations over here, mate! And never forget that you are dealing with Aussie patriots -- Rudd is YOUR liability!]

I recall a chance encounter with ‘dragon lady’ one day; our eyes met in mutual recognition, is there no one that isn’t an agent or ‘analyst’ these days!

However, drawing this type of a connection to Fitzy’s ‘friend,’ Helen Liu, is a sloppy exercise in meandering!

We should put this latest character assault on Fitzy in context. The ‘compromising event’ stems from information that ‘sigs’ (the military intelligence/surveillance corps) have conveniently leaked. They are basing their claims/accusations on computer activity in the Minister’s office, very tenuous indeed gentlemen! Notwithstanding that type of deep snooping by the military begs explanation – politicians usually have their IT systems installed and monitored by other government agencies.

It is no secret that Fitzy is extremely unhappy with the yanks; they placed the commercial interests of their armaments suppliers above those of the SECURITY NEEDS of their ‘no better friend/ally, Australia!’ – you know where you can shove those sub-standard Hornets, Jethro!

Our news for Malcolm Turnbull is that the sucker’s purchase was made by HIS PARTY, in fact, by its former leader, Brendan Nelson – conservatives have a long history of servility and compliance with American wishes, as two extra US bases in the North indicate!

So Mal, please, shoot your politically besieged mouth off again and you may find not only Costello’s foot in your arse but the entire nation jumping down your throat.

Joel Fitzgibbon is absolutely correct taking the broom to his John Howard crippled Department – AUSTRALIAN SECURITY COMES FIRST! You can tell that to lackey PM Rudd while he laps INSTRUCTIONS at the feet of the Americans!

[For fuck’s sake, get a grip, Oz!]

Are you so smart that you would compromise yourself (to a minor extent) to draw the spying military out into the open, under the full gaze of journos and the public? Are you a better tactician than sigs, Fitzy? It's hard to believe that you outsmarted 'em -- things ain't what they used to be -- are they, Kilcullen, ('welcome' home!)

Heard your diatribes/assessments on newsradio today re: your very American analysis of the situation in the tribal regions -- but that's what they want to hear, isn't it, dave?

You forgot to mention that the ISI had been modernised and trained by the CIA and that the Taliban had almost eradicated opium poppy cultivation until the idiot yanks intervened.

Is it a coincidence that wherever the US fights its illegal wars that region becomes the world's largest supplier of heroin? First the triangle now the crescent?

Your such a wanker Kilcullen tell 'em more of exactly what they want to hear, mate. You've done well; they are too stupid to realise that the truth is what they don't want to hear. Serve them up more, or have they finally woken up to you? No matter mate it was a great run, they're fucked, good and proper. Another job well done in the Oz tradition!

But Fitzy, a tactician! Surprised us all -- if it was done intentionally, 10 points. A full inquiry is now warranted for spying on ministers and no more obstructions/opposition for his reforms. Too funny!

See you around, mate -- have you guessed my name or the nature of MY game?

[Update:
My mistake, mate, for a min I thought you were silly enough to return home, we live in hope!]

[For those unfamiliar with one of Australia's great shames, a traitor beyond comprehension. One who would not only disregard everything held noble and just in Oz but a person who delights in the company of mass murderers, organised criminals and sociopaths. That person is one David Kilcullen who conveniently disregards Aussie values in order to serve Americans and assist in their illegal wars of plunder and mass murder.

I leave you with the following material, which depicts a tragic Australian disappointment.]

The New Australian Dr Strangelove

You might not have heard of Australian academic David Kilcullen but he's having a major influence on U.S. Iraq war strategy, encouraged by an uncritical American media. Veteran activist TOM HAYDEN on the new Dr Strangelove.

In the depths of the Cold War, Stanley Kubrick created a notoriously-mad scientist character, Dr. Strangelove, whose passion was for dropping atomic bombs. Now there is a rising media and Beltway fascination with a new Dr. Strangelove, whose passion is imposing a mad science of counter insurgency on Iraq.

His name is David Kilcullen, an Australian academic and military veteran whom the Washington Post's Thomas Ricks once described as Gen. David Petraeus' "chief adviser" on the counter insurgency doctrine underlying the surge in Iraq.

Kilcullen advocated a "global Phoenix program" in an obscure military journal, Small Wars, in 2004. For the a historical or uninitiated, Phoenix was a largely off-the-books detention, torture and assassination program aimed at tens of thousands of South Vietnamese who were identified by informants as the Vietcong's "civilian infrastructure." The venture was so discredited that the U.S. Congress denounced and disbanded it after hearings in the 1970s.

But Kilcullen says the Phoenix program was "unfairly maligned" and was actually a success. So inflammatory was his advocacy insome circles that he revised his 2004 paper to rename the Phoenix programone of "revolutionary development." In addition, he advocates "armed social science", which involves a key role for anthropologists and shrinks ofvarious kinds in order to "exploit the physical and mental vulnerabilities of detainees."

The long New Yorker piece by George Packer pictured Kilcullen as a charming, eccentric, and isolated genius of sorts. In the Washington cultureof national security think tanks, he appears to be a familiar and friendly figure. His latest media fan is the Post's David Ignatius, reporting a Kilcullen briefing given "in a private capacity" at the Philip MerrillCenter for Strategic Studies. It was an argument for appearing to get out of Iraq while staying in, expressed in the Kilkullen formula "Overt De-Escalation, Covert Disruption."

Kilcullen argues that the American troop presence is so large that it's counter-productive, only inflaming Iraqi sensibilities. What is required is a combination of U.S. combat troop withdrawals combined with "black" special operations to "hunt terrorists" plus "white" special operations forces training and embedded with the Iraqi security forces, turning tribes against tribes wherever possible. Covert warfare is the future: "over the long run, we need to go cheap, quiet,low-footprint." And, he might have added, off the television screen andfront pages.

What Kilcullen means is a kind of deception-based warfare thatis contradictory to democracy itself, with its instruments of criticalmedia, congressional oversight, and public disclosure of the cost in blood,taxes and honor. The key militarily is to secure the civilian populationfrom the insurgents, in South Vietnam by "strategic hamlets", in Iraq by the"gated communities" with checkpoints, blast walls, concertina wire, fingerprinting, retinal scans and house-to-house population listings.

The insurgents, meanwhile, are to be hunted, killed if necessary, and detained without charges in American-controlled or American-supported prison camps indefinitely, without access to lawyers, journalists, human rights observers, or family members. In most cases, there are no charges against them. Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, who headed the Abu Ghraib inquiry, has more than once suggested that "a systematic regime of torture" occurs in these camps. That's not including the CIA's secret rendition sites or the secret Baghdad prisons under the U.S.-funded Ministry of the Interior, as reported previously in the New York Times.

Naturally the distinction between civilian and combatant is difficult to draw in counter insurgency warfare. But aside from those already killed, it is a fair estimate that 100,000 detainees are currently languishing in such facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan, few with any charges against them. These facilities are incubators for future insurgencies. Last week, after a long hunger strike, for example, 1,100 detainees escaped an Afghan facility after the Taliban blew up the walls.

The Pentagon's plan is to build a permanent $60 million new detention facility on forty acres. The money might be better spent on lawyers for the present defenseless detainees. These are the realities masked behind the almost-sensual description of a "lighter, smaller, more nimble residual force" in Ignatius' summary of the Kilcullen scenario.

How have the USA's once-great newspapers come to virtually sanctify - and obfuscate the real meaning of - these military doctrines, as if there were no alternatives? An explanation is impossible to obtain. But the uncritical acceptance, and even promotion, of counter insurgency as a rational, realistic alternative to the either the status quo or withdrawal draws the Times and Post closer to the very Pentagon news manipulation operation they have recently exposed.

The mainstream media have rarely if ever published anti-war critiques by leaders of protests against U.S. military policy sincethe 2002 buildup, to the 2003 invasion, to the current turn to counter insurgency. On the contrary, both the Post and the Times regularly publish the views of unrepentant neo-conservatives with no military experience whatsoever. The only valid "anti-war" voices apparently must be former military men or White House operatives who have turned against theirformer employers. The spectrum of the "op-ed page" is devolving into center-right insiders.

As a result, the wild frontier of the blogosphere has exploded as the only outlet for dissent, with or without the documentation. The two opposing sides of the Iraq debate now inhabit separate worlds, the anti-war voices having been expelled from the mainstream for being prematurely anti-war or not being attendees at places like the Philip Merrill Center for Strategic Studies.

In the era of Dr. Strangelove, the sociologist C. Wright Mills vented against the national security intellectuals as "crackpot realists." Few realized then [or now] that our lives and future are placed at risk by the unbalanced nature of our national dialogue, including the extreme gap between the reportage in America and the rest of the world.

Will a November election of Barack Obama bring an end to the one-note monotony of the national security debate? I fervently hope so. Obama to his credit favors combat troop withdrawals and diplomacy with Iran rather than obliteration. Obama and John McCain would seem to have totally opposing views of Iraq.

But at a deeper level, Obama seems to be heading towards the counter insurgency trap - planning to leave a "lighter, smaller,more nimble residual force" behind in a wasteland of preventive detention, secret gulags, and advisers like David Kilcullen. For the media and public to fail to recognize, evaluate and debate this likely future during the presidential campaign will mean something beyond tragedy or farce.

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