$9 Shotgun-Face SQUELCHED Gilligan's FUNERAL-GATE Outrage || AIPAC is THE Puppet-Meister [shhh!]

No way to treat the dead or the living - Opinion - smh.com.au: "Back in 1999, when George War Jr. was beginning his run for the White House, SCI was embroiled in a grisly scandal known as Funeralgate. A whistleblower accused the company of 'recycling' graves. Old corpses had been removed and replaced by new ones. At two Jewish cemeteries in Florida, bodies were exhumed and dumped in the woods to be eaten by wild hogs. *

// http://www.smh.com.au/news/opinion/no-way-to-treat-the-dead-or-the-living/2006/04/28/1146198346140.html

LOSING Private Kovco was not a good look. The Prime Minister was desperately sorry and very sad. It was just one of those incredibly unfortunate things.

The Defence Minister announced that it was a terrible, unacceptable mistake.

The Chief of the Defence Force was very upset. Everything was being done to establish the facts.

And on it went. A Government which so efficiently sends live soldiers to war should have devised a foolproof system for bringing dead ones home again, but not so. The Kovco family had every right to give John Howard an earful.

In fairness, the blunder is probably the fault of the American contractor hired to transport the casket from Kuwait to Australia, a firm named Kenyon International.

Here the plot thickens. Kenyon's parent company, Service Corporation International (SCI), boasts that it is "the dominant leader in the North American death care industry". It is based in Houston, Texas. You will not be surprised, therefore, to hear that SCI's billionaire founder, one Robert Waltrip, is an old buddy of the Bush family and a big-money donor to the two Georges. //

*I am not making this up. The scandal ran through the Texas courts, reaching all the way to, yep, Governor George W. Bush. There were uncomfortable questions about the donations he had accepted from SCI.

Happily, the whistleblower was paid off and everything smoothed over in time for Dubya to win the Republican presidential nomination. SCI later paid compensation of $US100 million to its victims' relatives.

And who fixed this? Why, none other than Harry Whittington, the Texas lawyer shot by Deadeye Dick Cheney on that famous hunting trip in February.

This is the crew handling our fallen soldiers. I don't suppose anyone told John Howard any of this. They never do.

THE truly appalling blunder, though, is home-grown. Last Saturday, Brendan Nelson told us Jacob Kovco had shot himself. The soldier had been "simply handling his weapon, and maintaining it as soldiers are required to do", he said. "For some unexplained reason, the firearm discharged, and a bullet unfortunately entered the soldier's head."

Come last Thursday, that story had changed. "He wasn't in fact cleaning his weapon," Nelson revealed. "It was near him … and he made some kind of movement which suggests that it discharged."

The Government's confusion is unforgivable. Talk about going off half-cocked. Private Kovco's family knew him to be a skilled handler of firearms, and not only through his army sniper training. A country boy, he had been around guns since childhood. They were horrified at the suggestion he had killed himself through carelessness.

"The things in the paper about him accidentally shooting himself, we all knew in our family that he did not do that," said one of his cousins on radio on Thursday.

"I can see the way everybody is talking, the Government and everything, we're never going to be told the truth about what happened to him."

POLITICIANS, of course, love a bemedalled veteran even more than a bemedalled Olympian.

But with the Anzac Day flags put away for another year, here's another story of rank injustice. Civilian nurses who served in the Vietnam War have been left out in the cold by successive Australian governments, callously denied the repatriation benefits automatically available to their sisters in defence force uniform.

I met one of them on Tuesday. Jan Bell was nursing at Sydney's Concord Hospital in 1967 when volunteers were sought to go to Vietnam to help win the locals' hearts and minds. Young, and keen for a bit of adventure, she found herself working in a Vietnamese civilian hospital at the coastal town of Vung Tau, near the Australian base there.

She risked her life in the carnage of war, most especially during the famous Tet offensive of 1968, when the dead and the dying - women, children and infants - were piled in a bloody shambles in her emergency ward. Some 120 of her civilian colleagues gave similar noble service to our country.

Jan is now a handsome, grey-haired woman in her 60s. These many years on, she has been diagnosed as having post-traumatic stress disorder, the result of her wartime experience.

Had she been a uniformed army nurse, she would have been offered all the medical and other benefits available to returned veterans. Instead, she and her colleagues are on the same sort of compo entitlements as a Canberra public servant who stabs himself with a paper clip.

These women have campaigned about this injustice for years, to Labor and Coalition governments, but they get nowhere. Is there no female member of the Federal Parliament who will fight for them?

smhcarlton@hotmail.com

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http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060515/weiss

article | posted April 27, 2006 (May 15, 2006 issue)

Ferment Over 'The Israel Lobby'

Intellectuals can only dream of having the impact that John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt have had this spring. Within hours of their publishing a critique of the Israel lobby in The London Review of Books for March 23, the article was zinging around the world, soon to show up on the front pages of newspapers and stir heated discussion on cable-TV shows. Virtually overnight, two balding professors in their 50s had become public intellectuals, ducking hundreds of e-mails, phone messages and challenges to debate.

Titled "The Israel Lobby," the piece argued that a wide-ranging coalition that includes neoconservatives, Christian Zionists, leading journalists and of course the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, exerts a "stranglehold" on Middle East policy and public debate on the issue. While supporting the moral cause for the existence of Israel, the authors said there was neither a strategic nor a moral interest in America's siding so strongly with post-occupation Israel. Many Americans thought the Iraq War was about oil, but "the war was motivated in good part by a desire to make Israel more secure."

The shock waves from the article continue to resonate. The initial response was outrage from Israel supporters, some likening the authors to neo-Nazis. The Anti-Defamation League called the paper "a classical conspiratorial anti-Semitic analysis invoking the canards of Jewish power and Jewish control." University of Chicago Professor Daniel Drezner called it "piss-poor, monocausal social science." Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz said the men had "destroyed their professional reputations." Even left-leaning critics dismissed the piece as inflammatory and wrong. As time passed (and the Ku Klux Klan remained dormant), a more rational debate began. The New York Times, having first downplayed the article, printed a long op-ed by historian Tony Judt saying that out of fear, the mainstream media were failing to face important ideas the article had put forward. And Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell's former chief of staff, praised it at the Middle East Institute for conveying "blinding flashes of the obvious," ideas "that were whispered in corners rather than said out loud at cocktail parties where someone else could hear you."

The shock waves from the article continue to resonate. The initial response was outrage from Israel supporters, some likening the authors to neo-Nazis. The Anti-Defamation League called the paper "a classical conspiratorial anti-Semitic analysis invoking the canards of Jewish power and Jewish control." University of Chicago Professor Daniel Drezner called it "piss-poor, monocausal social science." Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz said the men had "destroyed their professional reputations." Even left-leaning critics dismissed the piece as inflammatory and wrong. As time passed (and the Ku Klux Klan remained dormant), a more rational debate began. The New York Times, having first downplayed the article, printed a long op-ed by historian Tony Judt saying that out of fear, the mainstream media were failing to face important ideas the article had put forward. And Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell's former chief of staff, praised it at the Middle East Institute for conveying "blinding flashes of the obvious," ideas "that were whispered in corners rather than said out loud at cocktail parties where someone else could hear you."

While criticisms of the lobby have circulated widely for years and been published at the periphery, the Mearsheimer-Walt paper stands out because it was so frontal and pointed, and because it was published online by Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, where Walt is a professor and outgoing academic dean. "It was inevitably going to take someone from Harvard [to get this discussed]," says Phyllis Bennis, a writer on Middle East issues at the Institute for Policy Studies.

What's more, the article appeared when public pessimism over the Iraq War was reaching new highs. "The paper was important as a political intervention because the authors are squarely in the mainstream of academic life," says Norman Finkelstein, a professor of political science at DePaul University dedicated to bringing the issue of Palestinian suffering under the occupation to Americans' attention. "The reason they're getting a hearing now is because of the Iraq debacle." Bennis and Finkelstein, both left-wing critics of Israel, have criticisms of the paper's findings. Partly this reflects the paper's origins: Though it was printed in a left-leaning English journal, it was written by theorists of a school associated with the center/right: realism, which holds that the world is a dangerous neighborhood, that good intentions don't mean very much and that the key to order is a balance of power among armed states. For realists, issues like human rights and how states treat minorities are so much idealistic fluff.

Given the paper's parentage, the ferment over it raises political questions. How did these ideas get to center stage? And what do they suggest about the character of the antiwar intelligentsia?

[3pages more, can You HANDLE the Truth?! ]

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060515/weiss