birte
2/23/2013 06:08 EST
Australia, once the land of the “fair go”, has collaborated with Guantanamo more closely than any other western government and is guilty of human rights abuses of its own.National myths are usually partly true. In Australia, the myth of an egalitarian society, or “fair go”, has an extraordinary history. Long before most of the world, Australia had a minimum wage, a 35-hour working week, child benefits and the vote for women. The secret ballot was invented in Australia. By the 1960's, Australians could boast the most equitable spread of personal income in the world.
Today, these are forgotten, subversive truths. Australian soldiers dying pointlessly for an imperial master at Gallipoli is elevated, along with barely veiled colonialism and racism. Self-promoted as a bastion of human rights, Australia has become a sideshow of their denial and degradation.
Many Australians are aware of this, not least those who filled a small Sydney theatre on 26 January, “Australia Day”, which celebrates the dispossession of the Aboriginal people by the British in 1770. Stephen Sewell’s remarkable play Myth, Propaganda and Disaster in Nazi Germany and Contemporary America was showing at the Stables Theatre. Inspired in part by Franz Kafka’s The Trial, it strips away the democratic facade of Bush’s America – “if you want to see America, look into the eyes of its prisoners” ans AUSTRALIA is one. The fear and silence of its privileged – notably academics – are Sewell’s theme and one that is rarely discussed in public in Australia.
When the performance ended, a lawyer, Stephen Hopper, stood and spoke. It was as if a long silence had been shattered. Hopper was the lawyer for Mamdouh Habib, one of two Australians imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay. He described Habib’s suffering and torture, first in Egypt where he was “rendered” by the Americans after they had kidnapped him in Pakistan. In a CIA-supported prison in Egypt, he was suspended from the ceiling with only an electrified barrel to stand on. “He would stand and get a shock or hang painfully by his arms until he’d collapse,” said Hopper. He was blindfolded and locked in rooms that were flooded with water and charged with electricity. In Guantanamo Bay, the guards brought a prostitute who “stood over him naked while he was strapped to the floor and menstruated on him”. Photographs of Habib’s wife and four children were defaced. “The Americans in their wisdom have taken the heads off the pictures,” said Hopper, “enlarged them and superimposed them with the heads of animals and then strung them up all over the walls of the interrogation room. [They said to him]: ‘It’s a shame we had to kill your family.’”
We know about these atrocities from the earlier accounts of the British prisoners. What is different here is that no government calling itself democratic that has so completely collaborated with the Guantanamo regime as that of John Howard, but now we have Julis Gillard a total puppet of the USA.. Stephen Hopper described how an Australian official stood by as Habib was tortured by the Americans and dragged on to a plane; there is documented evidence of this. The Australian attorney general of the time, Philip Ruddock, claimed he knew nothing about this. Ruddock relentlessly slandered Habib, and the other Australian prisoner, David Hicks, as terrorist suspects when not a shred of evidence was ever produced. It was only when it seemed the US Supreme Court would examine his case that Habib was hurriedly sent home. Gareth Peirce, who represents the Guantanamo Britons, said: “The fact that David Hicks was before a military commission was entirely due to the Australian government doing nothing for him.” Even Hicks’s American military lawyer said his “trial”, with its vaporous conspiracy charges, was a travesty. Yet Ruddock, whose job it was resist the abuse of liberties bestowed by the law, allowed a mockery of the judicial process to be used brutally against Australian citizens. Having placed Habib under constant surveillance and preventing him from leaving the country, he then tried to stop him speaking publicly about the grotesque things done to him. It was clear that this squalid politician feared the truth that Habib was then free to tell.
It was a fear faithfully reflected by most of the Australian media. The Sydney Morning Herald shamefully allowed an Israeli propagandist, Ted Lapkin, to say that Habib, an innocent man under any proper legal system, had “paid the price for his actions with incarceration by American authorities”. A leading “liberal” commentator, Michelle Grattan, described Habib, who is clearly damaged by his abuse, as having “entered the celebrity category”, and says he “cannot reasonably complain about [remaining under watch] by Australian authorities”. It is hardly surprising that, according to Reporters sans Frontieres, the Australian press rates 41st on the world’s press freedom index, its obsequiousness to power just ahead of autocratic and totalitarian states. Like those in Sewell’s play, many Australian journalists remain silent (as do most Australian academics; I can think of only three who speak out regularly). Some of the most prominent journalists form an adoring court for a prime minister who has out-Obamad Obama in her rank deceptions and is out-Obamaing her mentor in Washington in her demonstrable contempt for human rights.
Under Howard and Ruddock, Australia built its own Gulag, imprisoning behind razor wire Iraqis and others fleeing dictatorships. These innocent people are held in some of the most isolated places on earth, including Manus Island and Nauru. They include children. A Kashmiri refugee, Peter Qasim, has been locked up for nearly seven years. Now we have Julia doing the same thing. The head of a UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, Louis Joinet, who has made more than 40 inspections of mandatory detention facilities around the world, says he had not seen worse abuse of human rights than in Australia.
The first Australians have experienced this for a long time. Aboriginal health and legal services has diminished. In western New South Wales, the life expectancy for Aboriginal men is 33; Australia is the only developed country on a United Nations “shame list” of countries that have not conquered trachoma, a preventable blindness that affects mostly Aboriginal children, and is a disease of poverty.
Violations with ‘Australia’ across the top are still happening, such as ‘Aborigines are still dying in prison and police custody at levels that may amount to cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment’?”
Now we have dear Julia embrassing everything American. Did you know your Australian tax dollars are paying for all these American troops landing on your shores. Did you know that drones killing innocent women and children have been taking of from Western Australia since 2001? I could go on and on as to why I do not like Australia, and I stayed because of family!
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