The template was first set with the demonisation of Noriega and the "kindler gentler" invasion of Panama by Bush senior. It was developed further for Kossovo and Bosnia. It flowered into full madness with the invasion of Iraq and is being used to prepare for interventions in Darfur and Iran. The junior cops downunder have borrowed the template for use in East Timor and the Solomons. What am I talking about? The doctrine of "humanitarian intervention" of course. Now we have a new twist, where the doctrine is being used to apply – not to an imperial war – but to a war against a section of our own citizenry.
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The ink is barely dry on reports of the disgraceful acquittal on 20 June of Senior Sergeant Chris Hurley, killer of Mulrunji, a 36 year old Palm Island Aborigine in November 2004.
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The ABC reports that WA CFMEU official Joe McDonald has been suspended from the Labor Party for a remark captured on video.
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An excellent post by Mark in Larvatus Prodeo on Noel Pearson has set me thinking about the debate about Aboriginal welfare. There’s no particular need in this forum to rehash all the arguments against Pearson. His position is little more than a superficially sophisticated reworking of the old Nineteenth Century idea of the deserving and the undeserving poor. The indigenous population, according to Pearson, are responsible for their own plight. They have to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and make themselves fit for integration into the capitalist economy. In short: they need to stop whinging about the capitalist bulldozer that has ridden roughshod over their communities for two centuries and go and apply for a dozer licence.
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This show might help explain a few things:

"Tonight Dateline reveals how Australian spy agency ASIO manipulated the media in the past and asks: is it still happening today? ASIO files recently declassified and obtained by Dateline’s Thom Cookes show that from the mid 60s to the early 70s, ASIO deliberately blocked the careers of ABC journalists it disliked – with full cooperation from the boss of the ABC. In one instance in 1972, ABC journalist Peter Moore was picked up by an ASIO wiretap when he called a Communist Party official. That resulted in ASIO head Peter Barbour tipping off ABC boss Sir Talbot Duckmanton. The memo reads:
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When Tony Abbott spoke about union leaders visiting people in the middle of the night with hammers and sickles, millions were no doubt angered and bemused by this bizarro mental concoction of young fogie Tony Abbott.
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Some might have heard that Jill Sparrow and I are writing a novel. (Don’t ask me what it’s called.)  Friends often ask us, "But how could you write a novel that way?"  Behind this is the assumption that there is something completely individual about the novelistic art. Well, that may be so. Or it may not. There is a long answer involving collaboration and commercial imperatives, bourgeois art and individualism, and "trash" and literature of ideas, but the short answer is, she and I have complementary strengths.
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In news just to hand, Jennifer Howard reports in the Chronicle of Higher Education that de Paul University’s Board on Promotion and Tenure decided not to grant tenure Norman Finkelstein. University president the Rev. Dennis Holtschneider upheld the tenure board’s recommendation.
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After a harrowing ordeal at the hands of his captors, civil rights campaigner Syed Mohammad Iqbal Kazmi was released yesterday morning.
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Armour clad South African soldiers are trying to protect those scabbing on the 500,000 strong public sector strike, while police wounded three strikers with rubber bullets, according to the BBC, which also implicates the army itself in the scabbing.
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In his Council of Europe report, ‘Secret detentions and illegal transfers of detainees involving Council of Europe member states: second report’, released yesterday, rapporteur Dick Marty begins
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Further to this morning’s post, among the hundreds of political activists rounded up in recent days is Farooq Tariq, General Secretary Labour Party Pakistan. He was taken from his home on Tuesday without a warrant. Yesterday, in a transparent attempt to preclude visits, he was moved to Bahawalpur Jail where he is to spend the next three months by order of the Punjab Home Secretary. Bahawalpur is eight hours’ drive from Farooq’s home in Lahore (see map).
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On Wednesday, US President George W Bush, the leader of the free world, and champion of freedom for the unfree world, addressed a press roundtable at the Kempinski Grand Hotel in Heiligendamm, Germany. In answer to the question, ‘But if you think democracy is the best way to confront radicals and terrorists, shouldn’t we be pushing hard for democracy to really get established in Pakistan?’ he replied
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Peter W. Rodman is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and until recently was assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs. William Shawcross is the author of "Allies: Why the West Had to Remove Saddam" and many other books.
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Just yesterday, US Vice President Richard "Dick’ Cheney was caught in the act of trying to delude a group of 100 high school students in Wyoming into the old myth of Iraqi involvement in 9/11.
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