One of the great moments of Australian media legend came when the Daily Telegraph in Sydney was announcing to its readers the death of Joe Stalin in 1953. They prepared a banner reading “Stalin Dead - Official”. The Tele’s owner, Frank Packer (father of Kerry, grandpop of Jamie) ordered the banner be altered to read “Stalin Dead - Hooray”.

Half a century later, put together the death of another self-serving power-hungry economy-destroyer, Ken Lay, and a Daily Telegraph alumnus, its former editor Col Allan, now in the saddle at Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post. And voila.

All I have to say on the passing of Kenny Boy is to re-visit a joke that was doing the rounds a few years ago:

Feudalism: You have two cows. Your lord takes some of the milk.

Fascism: You have two cows. The government takes both, hires you to take care of them and sells you the milk.

Communism: You have two cows. You must take care of them, but the government takes all the milk.

Capitalism: You have two cows. You sell one and buy a bull. Your herd multiplies, and the economy grows. You sell them and retire on the income.

Enron Capitalism: You have two cows. You sell three of them to your publicly listed company, using letters of credit opened by your brother-in-law at the bank, then execute a debt-equity swap with an associated general offer so that you get all four cows back, with a tax exemption for five cows. The milk rights of the six cows are transferred through an intermediary to a Cayman Island company secretly owned by the majority shareholder who sells the rights to all seven cows back to your listed company. The Enron annual report says the company owns eight cows, with an option on one more.

What was the answer to the following question, asked at the Cole Inquiry on Thursday:

MR AGIUS: Q. Prime Minister, your full name is John Winston Howard?

Was it:
(a) “It is.”
(b) “I have no recollection of that.”
(c) “Disclosure of my identity would be a threat to national security.”
(d) “No that was the last bloke, I’m Peter Costello.”

Answer at this end of this article.

After the agony of Mark Vaile’s amnesia on Monday, and the slapstick buffoonery of Alexander Downer’s arrival for Tuesday’s hearing via the Sydney monorail, we had an appearance by the Prime Minister on Thursday so perfectly choreographed that Ric Birch could not have staged it better.

From his morning power walk, to the triumphal front-door entrance to the courthouse, phalanxed by the usual crowd of security bovver boys, to the meticulously crafted answers under John Agius QC’s unusually powder-puff questioning, it was all predictable. And irrelevant.

Howard calls this inquiry “transparent”. It’s not. He set it up basically as a set-up, to investigate the conduct of companies directly implicated in the oil-for-food scandal. But not into a government under whose watch it all happened.

AWB’s reputation is in ruins and several of its executives have quit, some of them likely to spend their retirement years in custodial accommodation. Other companies, including BHP Billiton, are likely to get their wrists slapped.

However, the conduct of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and its “responsible” ministers are not accountable to the Cole inquiry under its existing terms of reference. Thanks to JWH’s carefully-worded terms for the inquiry, there can be no findings made in respect to the government’s role in this mess.

DFAT’s culture appears little different to that of the Immigration Department and that of the Attorney-General’s Department - a dangerous cocktail of slackness, “whatever it takes”, and reactionary ideological bias. The responsibility for all this rests solely with the man who rules his cabinet with an iron fist.

Every day I have more and more trouble understanding why anyone could think John Howard is a good prime minister.

In any decent Westminster-based democracy, the responsible ministers, and possibly the government as a whole, would have fallen on their swords by now. Howard has torn up the Westminster system in Canberra, made a mockery of the concept of ministerial responibility, and made selective amnesia an essential part of the job description for any politician or senior company executive. And, quite separately to all this, he is systematically dismantling democracy in this country.

Howard’s legacy to Australia is that he has turned impropriety and deceipt into acceptable “Australian values”, and made decency subservient to wealth accumulation and ideological jihad.

Don’t rule out a snap early federal election some time in 2006.

David Marr and Marian Wilkinson’s brilliant dissection of the AWB story so far appears in today’s Sydney Morning Herald. All the hearing transcripts can be found on the Attorney-General Department’s website.

(The correct answer was (a). As boring as the man himself.)

“Short of a neon sign flashing ‘Saddam bribes hidden here’ it is hard to imagine what more Mr Downer and DFAT would have needed to comprehensively investigate AWB, long before the Volcker inquiry belled the cat. The most innocent explanation of Mr Downer’s behaviour is that he has been at DFAT too long, and, like his senior public servants, did not want to rock AWB’s boat. A worse one is that Mr Downer did not want to know what was going on and hoped that nobody would notice how renegade Australians were trading with the enemy, right up until the shooting started in 2003.”
- Editorial, The Australian, 29.3.06

Over the last couple of days I’ve highlighted some of the right-wing rhetoric emanating from The Australian’s op-ed pages (and, let’s face it, The Australian is a Murdoch outlet), but in fairness they have pursued the AWB scandal with a great deal of diligence. To the extent that yesterday’s editorial page called for the Global Village Idiot’s resignation.

Downer, of course, is not the only minister who should walk the plank over this astonishing episode. Mark Vaile and Warren Truss should both be there right behind him. John Anderson’s forgetfulness in not disclosing his ownership of AWB shares, which he disposed of last year, deserves a lot more scrutiny.

And then there’s the man with whom the buck, in any self-respecting democratic government, would stop. If John Winston Howard is to escape from this with his hands clean, then history is obliged to remember him as the Prime Minister who was unable to control, or effectively communicate with, his public service, and only ever made decisions based on incorrect advice.

Note for future reference: Terrence Cole, head of the inquiry investigating the AWB imbroglio, was a member of the Class of ‘61 at Sydney University’s law school. So too was John Winston Howard. This item in yesterday’s Australian does a fair bit of straw clutching, but keep it in mind just in case…

Cheney Shoots Fellow Hunter In Texas Accident

It begs the question… why wasn’t Dick Strangelove chosen for the US Olympic Biathlon team?

US mediawatching is going to be fun this week!

It may be a bit extreme, but let this be a deterrent to others…

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Osaka groper dies after being caught by commuters

This in over the weekend from Human Rights Watch about the House of Bush’s old chinas at the House of Saud:

Saudi Arabia: Court Orders Eye to Be Gouged Out
Torture Sentence for Indian Migrant Worker Follows Clash With Saudi Citizen

(New York, December 9, 2005) – King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia should take urgent steps to ensure that a court sentence to gouge out a migrant worker’s eye is not carried out, Human Rights Watch said today.
The Greater Shari`a Court of Dammam sentenced Puthan Veettil `Abd ul-Latif Noushad, an Indian citizen, to be punished by having his right eye gouged out in retribution for his role in a brawl in April 2003 in which a Saudi citizen was injured. A court of appeal in Riyadh has reportedly merely asked whether the Saudi man would accept monetary compensation instead.

“This literal eye-for-an-eye sentence is torture masquerading as justice,” said Joe Stork, deputy director of Human Rights Watch’s Middle East division. “King Abdullah must prevent the imposition of corporal punishment in violation of the country’s obligations under international law.”

Saudi Arabia acceded to the Convention against Torture in 1997. However, Noushad’s case is the third known instance over the past year in which a Saudi court has issued a sentence of eye-gouging, Human Rights Watch said. Saudi law allows for maiming, including the severing of limbs and severe flogging, as judicial punishments.

The injured Saudi man, Nayif al-`Utaibi, has so far insisted that the sentence be carried out, refusing to pardon Noushad or accept monetary compensation. Noushad’s Saudi employer, Abu Muhammad al-`Umri, has reportedly offered to pay over $25,000 in compensation. He told Human Rights Watch that he had no faith that the appeals court would overturn the verdict, and that only a pardon could save Noushad’s eye unless the plaintiff decides to accept compensation.

Noushad worked at a shop near a gas station outside Dammam. One witness to the altercation between the two men told Human Rights Watch that on the morning of April 1, 2003, Noushad told `Utaibi that he would not be able to obtain a refund once he used the jumper cable he had just purchased. When `Utaibi demanded a refund after using the cable, Noushad advised him to speak to the shop owner, who was not there at the time. The witness said `Utaibi replied heatedly that he could not wait that long and lunged at Noushad. In the course of the ensuing struggle, Noushad struck `Utaibi on the head with the cable, hitting his eye. Bystanders called the police, who arrested Noushad on `Utaibi’s testimony, and called an ambulance for `Utaibi.

During the trial, Noushad claimed that he was acting in self-defense and did not intend to injure `Utaibi, according to acquaintances of Noushad who are familiar with the proceedings. The witness, also a worker from India, told Human Rights Watch that the court refused to admit his testimony backing up Noushad’s account.

The judge reportedly said that non-Saudis were barred from testifying in cases involving Saudis. Noushad’s Saudi employer confirmed that the judge did not fully take into account the circumstances of the brawl. Noushad did not have a lawyer
during trial, but his Saudi sponsor retained legal representation for the appeals phase.

“The court’s verdict virtually allows Saudi citizens to assault migrant workers with impunity,” Stork said.

News of the verdict has caused a political uproar in India. On December 6, the day after the verdict was made public, the chief minister of Kerala state, Oommen Chandy, promised to raise the case with Saudi authorities. The Indian embassy in Riyadh has announced it will appeal to King Abdullah for clemency.

On September 16, 2004, the Saudi newspaper Okaz reported that a court in Tabuk ordered the right eye of Muhammad `Ayid Sulaiman al-Fadili al-Balawi to be gouged out, but gave him the option of paying compensation within one year. In 2001, Balawi had intervened when he saw youths pelting his brother with stones. In response, he also threw stones, hitting one youth in the eye and causing him to lose vision in one eye. Balawi helped carry the youth to the hospital. Two months before the sentence was to be carried out, he had managed to collect only 550,000 Saudi riyals (US$147,000) of the 1.4 million riyals (US$373,000) demanded by the victim. Human Rights Watch was unable to verify whether the sentence had been carried out.

Another Saudi newspaper, ArabNews, reported on December 6 that a court had recently sentenced an Egyptian man in Saudi Arabia to having his eye gouged out after he allegedly threw acid in the face of another man, who subsequently lost his eyesight.

Saudi Arabia and Iran are the only known countries that consider eye-gouging a legitimate judicial punishment. The United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture, Manfred Nowak, has stated that “any form of corporal punishment is contrary to the prohibition of torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.”