Bringing In The Sheaves

Talk about whistleblowing! In order to save his own skin (or parts thereof) the former AWB chairman has exposed our Prime and Foreign Ministers as liars of the worst kind. This is not a matter of "core or non-core" promises but of a national leader being deceitful regarding his decision to engage his country in a war.

Our leader told us that Australia had not considered invading Iraq until the UN debates that occurred not long before Coalition forces jumped the border (after the Australian SAS's head start.). Now we learn that Australia's ambassador to the UN was laying groundwork for the military action a year before the event.

If UN ambassador John Dauth had his ear to the ground he would have been aware, at least from US intelligence circles if not from the suddenly deaf ASIO, of the AWB payment system. You can guess that Dauth was concerned about that information going public. He was cetainly concerned enough to let Trevor Flugge have what could only be described as extremely sensitive and privileged information.

What Flugge did with this advance knowledge amazes me. While USAid were preparing a program to resuscitate Iraq's agriculture system. Flugge's approach to the same problem was to stuff the boot of his car with a couple of million dollars in cash to give out where he considered appropriate.

At the same time as Flugge was driving around throwing money out the window, our Foreign Minister was trying to keep the wheat boats sailing. Knowing that the boatload on it's way wouldn't be regarded as Food-for-Oil, Downer tried, to the UN's disgust and disallowance, to have it recategorised as post-war aid.

If Australia's ambassador to the UN knew about Australia's invasion plans then it is highly unlikely that our Foreign Minister and Prime Minister did not. If Messrs Howard and Downer kept this knowledge secret and gave us another story then they should hold themselves accountable for such an enourmous deception.

While we're talking about lies, I'd like to revisit a big one that Downer made last April when an Adelaide based Iraqi Professor Of Agriculture Kays Jumas was gunned down by Australian corporate military personnel. At the time Downer downplayed the death as an example of the low-calibre of CMPs when in fact Jumas was shot by an elite Australian outfit.

If Downer was deceiving again then the wheat inquires have been missing a possibly very important witness. I hope that even if Commissioner Cole has been unable to look at this aspect that the new US inquiry will examine the circumstances.

Now that we know that we were mislead by our government in both the motives and the stage-timing of this deathly plundering, a call should be made for our relevant Cabinet members to step aside until exhonorated.

I'm sick of the lies, sick of all the deaths being treated as debating points, and tired of watching our leaders spout the rhetoric without care. Whatever it takes to end this fiasco, it's time to do it.