Nemesis

By Con George-Kotzabasis

Supreme Court judge Bernard Bongiorno, who is presiding over the biggest terror trial in Australia of the twelve radical Muslims (The “Dirty Dozen” bombers) who were allegedly preparing themselves to be holy martyrs in their jihad against Australia by killing innocent civilians, has been persuaded by SC (Senior Counsel) of the defendants, Jim Kennan and Mark Taft, that the alleged terrorists are being treated inhumanely by the authorities and are at a state of mental collapse.

Before we go into the ruling of the judge I think it would be appropriate to know few things about the two SC of the accused,. Jim Kennan, and MarkTaft. The former was a minister in the Kane and Kirner Labor governments in Victoria who held the portfolios of Attorney General and Transport in the mid-eighties. Melbournians will remember the Tramways Union strike in 1989 when trams had blockaded the metropolitan streets of Melbourne for more than a month preventing commuters coming into the city and threatening many small shops with bankruptcy. The strike lasted that long only as a result of Kennan being a weak minister as well as of the incompetence and languid state of his advisors. One example which I remember vividly, was his press secretary watching the Commonwealth Games with his feet on his desk whilst John Halfpenny ( the then Secretary of The Trades Union Council), who was leading the strike, was besieging with his goons the minister and threatening the livelihood of many small shop keepers. At the end of the strike, Jim Kennan was removed from the Ministry of Transport and was placed back to his Attorney General’s position. And Bernard Bongiorno was appointed to the Bench of the Supreme Court by the Brack’s Labor government in 2000. ( Birds of a feather flock together.)

The other SC Mark Taft was a member of the Communist Party following the footsteps of his father Bernie Taft, who, as the Victorian Secretary of the Party dissolved it in 1991 in the wake of the collapse of the Berlin Wall. But he dissolved the Communist Party not for the purpose of expressing his political mea culpa for the millions of peoples who were slaughtered by the Leninists doctrinaires Stalin and Mao, but for the purpose of conceiving its bastard sibling the Socialist Forum hoping that its members would become an influential part of the left of The Labor Party. In the latter goal the older Taft succeeded completely, while the younger Taft as a member of the executive of the Socialist Forum and as one of its foremost ideologues, second only to his father, was ideologically grooming many members of the left of the Labor party, among whom were the present Minister of Finance, Lindsay Tanner, and the Deputy Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, of the Rudd Labor Government. Now that both SC Jim Kennan and Mark Taft have abandoned the heavy burdens of the public sector, which for both of them were a total failure, and have chosen to be lured by the entrepreneurial temptations of the private sector and gratify themselves with its rich tastes, they decided to open their appetite for the latter with the “aperitif” of being the defenders of the “Dirty Dozen”, in Australia’s biggest terrorism trial. But enough of this minuscule biographical diversion of our two attorneys of defense, and let us now deal with the “unprecedented “ruling of the presiding judge of the trial.

Justice Bongiorno being a practical judge and not an ivory tower one, was not satisfied of being convinced merely by the “theoretical” pleadings of the two SC that the defendants were treated inhumanely by the authorities, especially when they were shackled hand and foot while they were transported from prison to the Court locked in the steel compartments of the prison vans, and wanted to test this allegation in a practical way. So when he visited Barwon prison where the twelve were being held he had himself locked up in “the small steel compartment…in one of the prison vans… to get a better understanding of their treatment”. Convinced now “beyond a reasonable doubt” by his own “travailed” experience during his own “transportation” to Barwon prison that the alleged would-be terrorists were treated by the authorities brutally and inhumanely he issued his ukase to the latter that unless they stopped this “intolerable” treatment of the prisoners his honor would “suspend the hearing indefinitely and consider releasing the men on bail”.

Victoria’s Department of Corrections under this hovering threat expeditiously responded positively to the Jupiterian ruling of Justice Bongiorno and implemented most of his directions. In doing so it negated the possibility that some of the twelve defendants would jump bail and break away from the “forceps” of Australian justice and disappearing in a Muslim country. But it did so paradoxically at the expense of the Judge. As it deprived his Honor of the honorific that Muslims, moderate and radical alike, at least in Australia, would have bestowed on the Justice as an indelible sign of their gratitude for this service, i.e., giving the opportunity to their co-believers to escape from the unjust Australian terrorist laws, by replacing their traditional greeting of Salam with Bongiorno, for ever after.

What was most interesting and amusing moreover, was the forensic evidence of the psychiatrists whose painstaking analysis had found the defendants to be psychologically and mentally disturbed—as if people who were prepared to kill hundreds if not thousands of innocent people for their messianic goals and in chase of the seventy-two virgins were not already incurable cases of mental disturbance–and “believed that their condition would deteriorate as the trial progressed”. Needless to say Justice Bongiorno was deeply influenced by this forensic evidence extracted from the “psychiatrist’s couch” and was a decisive element in his “extraordinary”, to quote him, ruling.

Thus we will be told as an entertaining and jovial story, that the twelve bearded fanatics who were “toying” with ideas how to blow up Australians, now that they are standing before the bar accused of planning this atrocity they have metastasized themselves into mere “naughty boys” playing among the skirts of the “libertine” legal profession and claiming from the loose garments of the latter their human rights

Bongiorno Australia:Have a nice day

I rest on my oars: Your turn now.

The following essay was written on March 14, 2003, and was first published in my book titled Unveiling The War Against Terror, on May 9, 2004. It’s republished here on … Shoot Out as a result of the publication over the internet of documents by the U.S. Institute for Defense Analyses. A serious reading of the documents, not a superficial one with its catch all misleading headline that “No Smoking Gun Found Of A Connection Between Saddam and al Qaeda”, under whose caption many of the “liberal” media published selectively some of the content of the documents, clearly shows by indisputable evidence the links that the regime of Saddam had with regional and global terrorism.

As readers of the essay will see, we foreshadowed and argued that Saddam had strong links with terrorist organizations, including al Qaeda, with the designated purpose to control and use them for his geopolitical ambitions.

By Con George-Kotzabasis

The critics of the war against Iraq are, or pretend to be, blind of the fact that this war is directly correlated to the war against global terrorism and its state sponsors. One cannot comprehensively defeat global terror without linking it to its state sponsors and the rogue states which have the potential to deliver weapons of mass destruction ( WMD ) to their terrorist clients. Even if at this moment, there is no unqualified evidence of such a link between terrorists and rogue states, one can reasonably estimate from recent terrorist attacks the high probability that the coupling of these forces will soon be consummated, especially if the terrorisrs will continue to be successful in their operations. This probability will be even more amplified, if the rogue states happen to be of muslim provenance.

In the case of Iraq, although as yet there is no conclusive evidence linking the regime to September 11, there is ample evidence that this link with terrorists affiliated with bin Laden already exists, as Iraqi intelligence was involved both in the first bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993, and in the bombings in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. More recently, evidence has been excavated, that the Jordanian terrorist al Zarqawi, with links to al Qaeda, has been given aid, succour, and domicile in Iraq. According to one suspect arrested in Italy, he told interrogators that a Zarqawi group was supplied with toxins by Iraq, which could kill Americans like flies. It has been reported also, that two dozen al Qaeda affiliates followed Zarqawi to Baghdad, after the fall of the Taliban, and remain there. The Zarqawi connection was part of Colin Powell’s presentation to the U.N. Security Council in mid February 2003 when he made his case against Iraq. And in this context, more ominous is a CIA analysis predicting ‘a 59 percent probability that an attack on the U.S. homeland involving WMD would occur before March 31 2003, and a 35 percent probability an attack would occur at a later date’.

It is this risk of cosmic dimensions that statesmen have to countenance and countervail before it happens. But in the club of statesmen, whose exemplary members are Blair and Bush, as a result of their political acumen, historical insight, and moral strength to swim against the populist tide, Chirac, Schroeder, Putin and all the other minions, including the Australian variety, are ineligible to enter as members in this club of spiritual fire. – even if they entered by some populist whim, they would be singed into ashes by its flames – Chirac, as an outcome of his supercilious cultural pride, pretensions of grandeur, and political ambition to be the leader of a United Europe. Schroeder and Putin, as an outcome of their distorted political pragmatism, and lack of historical insight. Tony Blair and George Bush, and might one include our own PM John Howard, have dared to enter the dark cave of the twin dragons of terrorism and its state sponsors, and have seen the potential great danger that would befall upon the civilized world by this coupling of monsters. Chirac, Schroeder, and Putin like blind bats in the same cave, only by their hooting cries, temporarily, can avoid from crashing into the dragon’s teeth.

In the realm of human affairs uncertainty is the absolute sovereign. No individual or human collectivity, no matter how intelligent and knowledgeable, can attain certainty and make its decisions on its basis. To borrow a term from quantum physics, probability is the axis upon which intelligent and knowledgeable people consider and make their decisions. No serious political leader worth his salt, would temporize his crucial decisions until he caught the elusive butterfly of certainty into his net. Statesmen, in contrast to political shysters, whose play with politics has one aim only, the acquisition and holding of power, even if this acquisition is at the expense of the vital interests of their nations, dare to make their decisions on the odds of probabiliy, especially at critical times. Timorous temporization and avoiding to grasp the bull by its horns is not of their making. It is enough for them to know that usually a red cloth in front of a bull will make the beast aggressive, and act on that probability.

After September 11, and October 12 in the Bali bombing, can any one doubt that if these fanatics would ever possess WMD they would not use them unhesitatingly agains the infidels of Western civilzation? And can any one doubt the high probability that these WMD would eventually be delivered to the terrorists by rogue states, if the latter are not prevented, such as the regime of Saddam Hussein? Moreover, can any one reasonably argue, that if this nexus between terrorists and rogue states is likely to occur in the near future, that the plausible future victims of an attack by this “lethal mixture” should not take preventive measures to foil this nexus? And why do all the civil libertarians and the anti-war protestors get so terrified and get shivers in their spine, whenever they hear the phrase pre-emptive attack? If one had asked them whether they would support the taking of preventive measures against disease and against crime, they would all answer to one with a resounding live Yes. Yet for some inscrutable reason, they are responding with a resounding deadly No, in regards to taking preventive measures, pre-emptive action, against a biological or nuclear attack, which would be by many orders of magnitude more devastating for the future of mankind than disease and crime. It is by this meretricious inconsistency, that the civil libertarians and anti-war protestors are carrying the banner of liberty and of humanity on their wobbling and rickety feet. And it would hardly be a long shot not to expect of them, that with the first onslaught against their principles and beliefs, as it has already been foreshadowed by the events of September 11 and October 12 in Bali, they would quickly throw this banner of liberty and democracy off their hands, crying simultaneously that they are pacifists and they are unwilling to go to war, take note, in defense of the values they so strongly believe in. But the “warmongers” will do this for the pacifists. So the latter will continue to indulge in the illusions of their “wet-dreams”, as well as continue to be “free riders” on the back of the values of freedom.

The war against Saddam Hussein is morally, politically, and historically, totally justified. The defeat of his brutal regime will not only liberate millions of Iraqis from his dictatorship, but will also liberate hundreds of millions in the rest of the world from the fear of being attacked by terrorists with WMD. It is necessary to emphasize and to remind people who are not convinced of the case for war against Iraq – although this is as tiresome and embarrassing as it would be to a teacher repeating a lesson several times to slow witted pupils – that this war became a casus belli only after the murderous and ominous events of September 11. Hence, the arguments that the motivations of the war, as Gore Vidal asserts, lie in American Imperium, and as others claim, in the interests of oil cartels, are a base canard and a bedtime fairy tale.

The Bush administration is awake and alert–in contrast to the self-satisfied administration of his predecessor Bill Clinton, who would not allow any action carried out by global terrorism, no matter how heinous and portentous, to disturb his blissful soporific complacency and his dalliance with populism–to the mortal danger that global terrorism poses to America and to the world at large, and has the moral and intellectual strength to take decisive, per-emptive, and relentless action against this great threat. It is aware, that the ultimate and decisive defeat of global terror will only be accomplished with a two front war, involving also its state sponsors. And the strategic offensive of its military power against one rogue state, in this case Iraq, and its complete defeat, will have domino effects upon all other rogue states. Hence, making it unnecessary for the U.S. to go to war against another rogue state. Lastly, it will inflict a devastating blow on the morale of global terrorists and will abate, if not stop, the deadly actions of the latter against the cities of the West, as well as accelerate their total defeat. One must recognise, that it is the ability of terrorists to launch successful operations against America and against the cities of the West, that attracts suicidal recruits into their ranks. But once one deprives them of this ability, one also dries up the well that supplies these recruits of death, as the terrorists themselves will realize, once they lose their potency to launch successful operations against the infidels, that Allah is no longer on their side. Moreover, the inability of terrorists to undertake successful operations against the West, will in turn totally discourage rogue states to finance and supply terrorists WMD. This is the way to defeat global terrorism!

The Bush’s administration strategic foresight to fight on two fronts, both against global terror and its state sponsors, will be a win win against this twin monster on all fronts. The defeat of Hussein will lead to the defeat of global terrorism and to all rogue states. This is why the war against his regime is so necessary. And in the years to come, humanity will be grateful that the leadership of Bush, Blair, and Howard, did not falter and abdicate from the historical responsibility to carry the world, like Atlas, on its strong shoulders against the populist tide, to a safer place, and deliver it from the scourge of terrorism.

I rest on my oars:Your turn now