Sucked Dry

Mysterious Pulsar clouds in the upper atmosphere.

I've just been reading two books, How Bush Rules by Sidney Blumenthal and Who Killed Channel Nine by Gerald Stone; both books about the naked use of power and both very revealing in their own ways. How Bush Rules is a collection of columns, mostly written for the Guardian in the UK. Blumenthal was a former staffer of Clinton but writes very well; and while he was probably never going to be kind to Bush offers a devestating critique of the Iraq War and the way the US government has bumbled from one disaster to another; led by a bunch of extreme rightwing ideologues and who are now responsible for the deaths of thousands and thousands; not just the three thousand plus now of their own soldiers, Minnesotta farm boys and urban poor hisbanics, who joined the army as a noble way out of poverty and who are presenting themselves blindly as Bush's sacrifice to his ideological insanities.

And our Prime Minister John Howard not only went along with it all, but joined the US and the so-called coalition of the willing. Willing to do what? Torture; which the Americans appear to be clearly participating in at Guantanamo and else where; willing to manipulate intelligence to suit your political ends; willing to sacrifice lives so you can look the big man?

It's an election year here in Australia and our aging Prime Minister - unable to recognise that the country thinks he's an asshole and wants rid of him - unable to let go of the moment of grandiosity when history and politics collided and he looked for a moment like a decent person and a noble leader - is, as they say, "fighting for his political life". While the left have always hated Howard, sometimes simply because he refused to accept their propaganda, Australia is now full of former converts who hate him even more; small business people who thought he was a pro-business conservative but have seen their businesses strangled in red tape and additional costs; small employers and aspirational voters who fought he was on their side and are now drowning in debt; separated dads who believed the rhetoric that he was going to fix the far-left lunacy of the Family Court of Austrlia and the brutal bureaucratic bastardry of the so-called Child Support Agency.

As you travel around Australia you can feel the dead hand of the bureaucrats everywhere; dying towns, closed shops; enterprise sucked dry. It's an election year and no one can wait to give Howard the boot; the only problem being there ain't much faith in the other side either; particularly for my generation; who have seen it all before; the great white hopes turn into monsters; even worse than the hapless conservatives who preceeded them.

THE STORY CONTINUES:

"It's a long time since you've surprised us," he said. Yeah, it's a long time since I've been surprised, he thought, you fucking little creep. You have no idea what it's like to write to daily deadlines, year in, year out.

"Alone at last, and despite being saddled with children, he looked for ways to exploit his freeedom."


THE BIGGER STORY:

ABC:

Pakistan's Army says the remains of 19 people charred beyond recognition are among the 75 bodies they have found at the radical Red Mosque after a two-day raid.

The Army says the bodies raise the death toll from the two-day operation to 86. There are fears women and children are among the victims.

Soldiers cleared the pro-Taliban mosque complex of militants in a fierce 36-hour battle that ended on Wednesday night, in which 11 soldiers were also killed and 44 were wounded.

Guiding journalists through the battle-scared compound for the first time since the raid ended, the military has revealed a massive arsenal of the militants' weapons, including suicide vests, grenade launchers and mines.

Military spokesman Major General Waheed Arshad showed journalists a burned-out room in which he said a suicide attacker had blown himself up as troops tried to get in.

He said the Army found the bomber's head and five of the charred bodies inside the room.

Earlier reports had suggested there were hundreds of women and children inside the compound at the time of the Army assault but only two of the bodies found have so far been identified as children.

But Maj Gen Arshad said: "Out of these 75 bodies, 19 are beyond recognition and they could be anybody, any gender, any age."

Authorities had previously said there were no women among those killed at the central Islamabad mosque and Islamic seminary compound.

Maj Gen Arshad said 39 of the 85 people that surrendered during the raid were under the age of 18.

He said two suicide bombers blew themselves up in the raid and two fully-primed suicide jackets packed with explosives were found that had not been detonated.

Deadly blasts

Meanwhile, officials say a suicide blast and a separate roadside bombing have killed eight people in Pakistan, after the Red Mosque raid sparked Islamist anger.

Authorities say the bomb killed five people, including three police, and wounded several others outside a religious centre in the Himalayan tourist town of Mingora.

They say the policemen were clearing traffic at Mingora town, 130 kilometres north-west of Islamabad, when a bomb exploded in a white car.

Mingora is in Swat district, a stronghold of Tehrik Nifaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammadi, a banned extremist group with close ties to the clerics of Islamabad's Red Mosque.

In the other attack, officials say a suicide bomber blew himself up, killing three people and wounding three more in Miranshah, the main town in North Waziristan, a troubled tribal region bordering Afghanistan.

The man set off explosives strapped to his body in the office of the local administration chief when a junior worker stopped him from entering, killing the office worker and another person instantly and wounding three others.

Officials say one of the wounded men died later in hospital.

Islamist protests broke out in several parts of Pakistan after the raid on the pro-Taliban Red Mosque.

- AFP