It’s often been said that it’s inappropriate to speak ill of the dead.

But during Ken Lay’s funeral yesterday, the Reverend Dr. Bill Lawson gave new meaning to that tradition.

The crazy Reverend compared Ken Lay with civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr & Jesus Christ, & said “his name would eventually be cleared."

"History has a way of vindicating people who have been wronged." said Lawson.

‘The cash-for-peerages scandal paralysing Britain's Labour Party moved perilously close to Tony Blair's door when the London Metropolitan Police yesterday arrested Lord Levy, the Prime Minister's confidant, party fundraiser and Middle East envoy.

The news 10 Downing Street has been privately dreading for months came after the police spent all day interviewing Lord Levy at a north London police station before releasing him on bail without charge.

Happy happy day.... I've been skipping around the kitchen since I
heard this on the radio.  Halliburton's army supply deal has been
cancelled, and the global supply job will be retendered later this year.

There's a catch however.  This means that instead of one global corporation
following yank troops around the world, now there will be four or five.

[Reuters extract}

Army officials said they will not renew the contract
awarded in 2001 to Halliburton subsidiary KBR to provide water,
dining and laundry services and transport fuel and other items,
including mail, to U.S. troops.

Prisoners at the US detention centre at Guantanamo Bay
have been subjected to “systematic physical, psychological, sexual, medical
& religious abuse”, according to a report released this week by the US
Centre for Constitutional Rights (CCR).

The report - Report
On Torture & Cruel, Inhuman & Degrading Treatment Of Prisoners At
Guantanamo Bay, Cuba - is the most comprehensive primary-source account
of abuse at the facility. The report cites declassified statements from
detainees still at Guantanamo & from their lawyers. According to the
report, Guantanamo detainees have been:

“The Bush Administration has decided to grant all
detainees at the Guantanamo Bay detention centre protections offered by the
Geneva Convention,” our ABC breathlessly headlined on tonight’s News.

Guantanamo
Detainees Entitled To Geneva rights, Says US

Whilst “auntie” continues to
confirm its superficial role as a message board for government spinmeisters,
real journalists elsewhere were reporting the truth of this latest episode of
bushit “smoke & mirrors” …….

Howard promised me a handover:
Costello .....

Treasurer Peter Costello says
John Howard told him 12 years ago that he would only serve one-and-a-half terms
as Liberal leader.

Mr Costello's comments confirm
former defence minister Ian McLachlan's recollection of a meeting in 1994.

Mr McLachlan says he witnessed Mr
Howard tell Mr Costello that if he won
office he would hand over the leadership after two terms.

‘Little has changed in the imperialist tendencies of
American foreign policy since the founding of the United States of America in
seventeen eighty-nine. The fledgling United States opened the nineteenth
century by stealing the continent of North America from the Indians, while in
the process ethnically cleansing them and then finally deporting the pitiful
few survivors by means of death marches (a la Bataan) to Bantustans, which in
America we call reservations, as in instance of America's manifest destiny to
rule the world.

‘Des Browne, the defence secretary, conceded yesterday
that the deployment of 3,300 British forces into the Taliban heartland of
southern Helmand has "energised" the Taliban.

His sombre assessment came after
a week in which a sixth British soldier was killed in the province, and as he
prepares to announce next week the dispatch of reinforcements to the country,
including extra air cover and engineers.

Lieutenant Colonel Stuart Tootal,
the officer in charge of British troops in the region, also admitted the
resistance was proving unexpectedly tough. He said: "If we were honest, we
didn't expect it to be quite so intense. But at the same time, we have trained
for it. "

‘US evangelical leader Pat
Robertson labels Islam, "a bloody, brutal kind of religion," on the
Christian Broadcasting Corporation’s televised 700 Club. Commentator Ann
Coulter writes in the Jewish World Review that "[T]he government should
be spying on all Arabs, engaging in torture as a televised spectator
sport." Civilized people would like to believe that Coulter is an
anomalous hatemeister, lurking from the shadows of an ill-designed blogsite,
with iron crosses and ads for assault knives in the sidebars. But Coulter is a
welcome guest on cable TV giants like Fox News, MSNBC, and CNN, and her column
is syndicated by UPI.

Why is Newscorp advertising Pine Gap's role in the Korean missile launches?  A bulletin posted 2 hours ago explains how the CIA base in the middle of Australia was used to organise counter-measures.

Aegis class missile ships, similar to those being built in Adelaide, would have received missile trajectory information important in calculating counter-measures, the report says.

The Murdoch story explains how Pine Gap is one of only two U.S. ground stations used to collect infromation from satellites monitoring the Asia Pacific region.  The other station is located in Alaska.

 It has been reported that the body of Australian soldier Jake Kovco returned to Australia accompanied by the identification of a Halliburton contractor.  The body of Juso Sunanovic,the deceased worker from Bosnia was in a bag bearing the correctname and passport number, and had been delivered to the Kuwait morgue by a Halliburton/KBR employee.

A simple scrap of paper with Private Jake Kovco's
name scrawled in Arabic marks the door where his coffin was stored at
the Kuwait hospital's mortuary.
Photo: Jeroen Kramer (from Kuwait blog Hilalya)

‘Five major military contractors are competing to design a
system to tackle up to two million undocumented immigrants a year in the United
States. Boeing, Ericsson, Lockheed, Northrop Grumman and Raytheon are working
on proposals that focus on high technology rather than high fences, but
ignoring some of the fundamental problems of immigration.

At each checkpoint along the path
to citizenship or deportation -- from desert wilderness to urban labyrinth --
private contractors are expected to be hired to detect, apprehend, vet, detain,
process, and potentially incarcerate or deport people seeking economic and
human rights asylum in the U.S.

"I have a message for the people of Australia who are
enjoying the enhanced benefits of AWAs - the leader of the opposition is after
your aspirational prosperity."

John Howard

To celebrate Peter Cosgrove's first day as South Australia's main defence advisor, our Premier gave another fifteen million dollars to The Star Wars Shipbuilding Project.  The project is under the control of Halliburton's former global vice president for infrastructure, Andrew Fletcher.

 "We're actually gearing up to bid for a series of new projects and obviously what we need to do is to have the infrastructure and facilities in place to handle them." said Premier Mike Rann.  Lucky for him that he's got a man with the best infrastructure plans in the world working for him.... or is it vice versa?