This week's stories: Prime Minister's Office Fabricated Evidence on Iraq...This Fine Australian Gets Away With It...Police Corruption Privatised...But I Had To Feed My Starving BMW...US Environmental Report Doesn't Mention Global Warming, Pollution From Cars...Howard Makes Unjustified Ratbag Lefty Attack On Himself...Quote of the Week.
John Howard's office fabricated evidence and deliberately deceived the public in order to justify sending troops to Iraq, according to a former senior intelligence analyst. Andrew Wilkie, a former analyst at the Office of National Assessments, told a parliamentary enquiry that "sometimes the exaggeration was so great it was clear dishonesty". Mr Howard told Parliament in February that Iraq was re-starting its nuclear weapons program and there was evidence that it had tried to buy uranium from Africa. This claim had been discredited by a United States official who visited Africa to investigate almost a year earlier. Mr Wilkie is a former member of the Liberal Party. (The Age, August 23). Wilson Tuckey will remain a Federal Minister despite using his position to try and get his 45 year old son out of paying a traffic fine. Mr Tuckey wrote several letters on Ministerial letterhead to the South Australian Police Minister. Tony Abbott told Parliament that Mr Tuckey "is a man who quite rightly fights for the things he believes in and if from time to time, this minister goes over the top in a cause in which he believes, that is his nature, that is the nature of the man, that is the way this fine Australian operates". Mr Tuckey's nickname is 'Iron Bar', from an incident where he was said to have beaten an Aboriginal man with an iron bar while another man held him down. (The Age, August 23). A US company accused of human rights violations, who fired an employee for exposing a prostitution ring, is handling the policing of Iraq. DynCorp, who has made substantial donations to the Republican Party, was given the contract by the US State Department. DynCorp personnel contracted to the United Nations police service in Bosnia were implicated in buying and selling prostitutes, including a girl as young as 12. Several DynCorp employees were also accused of videotaping the rape of one of the women. When Dyncorp employee Kathy Bolkovac exposed the ring she was dismissed by the company for drawing attention to their misbehaviour, according to the ruling of a British employment tribunal in November 2002. DynCorp has also been heavily criticised over its involvement in Plan Colombia, instigated by Bill Clinton, that involves spraying vast quantities of herbicides over Colombia to kill the cocaine crop. A group of Ecuadorean peasants have filed a class action against the company alleging that herbicides spread by DynCorp in Colombia were drifting across the border, killing legitimate crops, causing illness, and killing children. (originally reported in the Observer (UK), April 13). Welfare fraud costs a maximum of $15 million a year. Tax avoidance through trusts costs an estimated $700 million a year. (The Age, August 23). The White House has removed negative references to global warming from a US government report on the environment. References to health threats posed by exhaust emissions that were part of the draft report by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) have also been removed, according to leaked versions of the report. The EPA head, Christie Whitman, said on Thursday that she had decided to omit a section on climate change because the only language the Administration could agree on amounted to "Pablum" - a popular bland cereal for infants. The New York Times, to whom the draft documents were leaked, said White House officials had cut details about the sudden increase in global warming over the past decade compared with the past 1000 years and inserted information from a report that questions this conclusion and which was partly financed by the American Petroleum Institute. A memo circulated among EPA staff said the report "no longer accurately represents scientific consensus on climate change". One of the most striking changes comes in the report's "global issues" section. In the draft the introduction reads: "Climate change has global consequences for human health and the environment." This has been replaced with: "The complexity of the Earth system and the interconnections among its components make it a scientific challenge to document change, diagnose its causes and develop useful projections of how natural variability and human actions may affect the global environment in the future." (The Guardian, Los Angeles Times) John Howard has described Pauline Hanson as a champion of those who felt left out of the political process. Mr Howard added that "I lead a mainstream political party which I think which I think has identified many concerns of people who felt a bit shut out of the political process". (The Age, August 23). Quote of the week: "(the) bombing of the United Nations headquarters in Iraq was the latest evidence that America has taken a country that was not a terrorist threat and turned it into one". 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