Gareth Evans

The main impact of September 11 was to change perceptions, not realities. Some things, certainly, are different: a new sense of vulnerability in Western capitals; more understanding of the interconnectedness of things, that grievances bred elsewhere can have catastrophic consequences half a world away (and, with this, the end of US isolationism, if not unilateralism); and a new recognition that we can no longer treat with erratic neglect the problems of the Arab and Islamic world. And, in the new post-September 11 atmosphere, some old problems – like Sudan and Sri Lanka – have become a little easier to resolve. But some others are in danger of reigniting, not least because of Washington’s new enthusiasm for ‘hot pre-emption’: it’s hard to find anyone else in the world outside the USA (or Canberra) who thinks the lumping together of Iran, North Korea and Iraq as coaxial evil-doers was other than simplistic, provocative and counter-productive.

What have not changed at all since September 11 are the fundamentals of global security and social justice. The distribution of power in the world remains incredibly lopsided, with the USA, just as much after September 11 as it was before, a military and economic hyperpower in comparison with everyone else – and a target, as a result, for a great deal of envy, resentment and outright hostility. In many parts of Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Eastern Europe and Latin America, there are major unresolved political problems – some of them with underlying economic and social causes – that have been inadequately addressed, incompetently addressed or deliberately left to fester, nearly all with the potential to generate violent conflict. As to global social justice fundamentals, nobody made the point better than Kofi Annan in his end-of-year press conference last December: ‘For many people in the world 2001 was not different from 2000 or 1999. It was just another year of living with HIV/AIDS, or in a refugee camp, or under repressive rule, or with crushing poverty.’

These problems cry out for imaginative, engaged commitment by the world’s governments and intergovernmental organisations – acting comprehensively, intelligently and, above all, cooperatively. Whether the issue is terrorist war on states, war within states, war between states, or catastrophic human misery experienced in a dozen other ways, none of these problems can be solved by any government acting alone. Not even by the government of the richest and most powerful country the world has ever known.

Alison Broinowski

We have heard many times that on 11 September 2001 the world as we knew it suddenly changed. Even allowing for the shock and outrage felt by many around the world at the attack on the USA, how unpredictable was it really? How predictable is the next one? What are the implications for Australia? Americans joke that theirs is the country that most people hate and most people want to migrate to, but even their friends and admirers know that outside the USA a vatful of fear and loathing of the global hegemon has been fermenting for years. The hate mail began arriving with the first World Trade Centre bombing, the Lockerbie hijack and the attacks on US Embassies. But those who understood these messages didn’t tell the president. George W. Bush seemed genuinely shocked that anyone should so hate the USA as to attack it.

Americans are probably as ignorant or expert about the rest of the world as any other people, but no others claim to be the superpower. The USA breathtakingly set one standard for themselves and another for everyone else. Americans call for disarmament, free trade, human rights, environmental protection and the rule of law, but refuse to be bound by universal agreements on them. The USA stands for democracy, but American agencies have for years ‘gone after’ leaders in other countries, overthrown, imprisoned, and even murdered them. They sustain corrupt, sexist, authoritarian régimes such as Saudi Arabia and belligerent ones such as Israel. American presidents habitually declare ‘war’ on poverty, unemployment, crime or drugs, and now terror, as if the only way to deal with such problems is to make them the enemy. They arrogate to themselves the right to decide who are ‘evil doers’, ‘rogue states’, ‘evil empires’ and ‘bad guys’. Having decided, they forget about due process, the presumption of innocence, and habeas corpus, even for the citizens of their allies.

Well before September 11, and before the economic rot set in, some of us could hear the distant sound of civilisations clashing. The much-disparaged prediction by Samuel Huntington of a clash of Islamic and Confucian civilisations with the West began to seem less outrageously simplistic. Huntington, like Bush, denied in 2001 that the attack on America represented such a clash. Civilisation, culture and religion are great unifiers of nations against an outsider, enemy or scapegoat. But what else was Bush thinking of when he linked Iraq, Iran and North Korea in an ‘axis of evil’? What else was his ‘war on terrorism’ other than a holy war, a crusade? In such a war, by definition, the enemy is armed with evil ‘weapons of mass destruction’. The crusaders are armed with righteousness. If you’re not with our civilisation, you’re against it.

Where, then, does Australia stand? Not with Al Qaeda, obviously, but we don’t welcome the Taliban either. Nor do we join with the many countries that are urging moderation and restraint on Washington. Australia stands with the USA, uncritically, without public or parliamentary debate, without knowing the cost of the war nor its objective. The Opposition urges no real alternative. Australia’s national interest, apparently, is served by following the US crusade wherever it goes, even making enemies of two important trading partners and a sensitive neighbour with whom we’ve just renewed diplomatic relations. Does Australia have to repeat Vietnam to learn that, in the ‘war on terror’, Australia could become similarly bogged down and itself become a target? 

Patrick McCaughey

Every American knows where they were when they heard about loaded planes flying into buildings, the Pentagon on fire. The following weeks brought images of devastation, stories of despair and despairing heroism, laments for the dead. The New York Times began its ‘Profiles in Grief’, essaying snapshots of everybody killed in the Twin Towers. For Americans, September 11 falls like a blow and feels like a wound as much as an attack on the homeland.

Outside the USA, others with the imagination of sympathy could see the pain and the sorrow but could hardly experience the event as an act of war. Other responses were harder to take. Americans were dumbfounded, as I was, to hear some Brits, some Europeans, saying, ‘America had it coming to them’, barely stopping short of saying, ‘America deserved it’. Three hundred and forty-three firefighters did not hear the order to leave the building half an hour before the first tower fell. Did these men ‘have it coming to them’?

Everything since September 11 has driven a wedge between the US experience and those outside. Despite its mistakes – the bombing of a wedding party misidentified as remnants of Al Qaeda – and its failure to find bin Laden, the Afghanistan campaign seemed inevitable to most Americans. How quickly Australian or British or European, let alone Arab, support dissipated once the Taliban were comprehensively driven from the land. It deepens now into a strident, even fearful, opposition as President Bush rattles the sabres at the Iraqis.

The paradox is inescapable: the fateful blow, the wound of September 11, has borne the strange fruit of an intense anti-Americanness throughout the world. How curiously personalised a form this antipathy takes. Bush is vilified as much as LBJ at the nadir of the Vietnam War, or Nixon after the bombing of Cambodia. Bush sounds so tinny, so lightweight, so lacking in the resonance of the truly purposeful that such vilification seems overblown. For months it looked as though September 11 and its aftermath would guarantee his second term. The corporate scandals, the faltering economy and the deep perturbation Americans feel about the Middle East have weakened that view.

To my astonishment over the last few weeks, I have heard educated, reasonably affluent, mildly conservative Americans voicing scepticism, bordering on derision, towards Bush. This may be the comfort of the north-east, where even registered Republicans regularly vote Democratic.

The truth is that nobody rides in triumph from September 11, except perhaps ex-Mayor Rudy Giuliani – to baseball matches at Yankee Stadium. Like the assassinations of President Kennedy or Martin Luther King, September 11 already belongs to history, to the American experience. It cannot give a sitting president his casus belli for Iraq, nor provide a campaign slogan for the mid-term elections.

It shook the earth
And the clogged underearth, the River Styx.
The winding streams, the Atlantic shore itself.
Anything can happen, the tallest things

Be overturned, those in high places daunted.
Those overlooked esteemed …

So Seamus Heaney in a version of Horace, just three months after September 11.

Allan Patience

In the year before September 11, Professor Chalmers Johnson, a US liberal, published a prescient book, Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire (Metropolitan Books, 2000). The book criticised the blinkered narcissism characterising US foreign policy since the Cold War. Johnson warned that US foreign and defence planners (including presidents and secretaries of state) were cultivating a huge antipathy - hatred even - towards the USA among the dispossessed across the globe, among whom terrorists and fundamentalists were incubating at a frightening rate. Even in countries thought to be friendly, such as Japan and some parts of Europe, there was a growing resentment of US unilateralism. He predicted consequences (‘blowback’) horrible beyond words if the USA persisted in its current arrogance as the world’s ‘lonely superpower’. He urged a more conciliatory US diplomacy towards states that had been left brooding in humiliation and despair, too often caused by ham-fisted strategies (some covert and morally indefensible). He called for an informed sensitivity and respect for non-Western cultures and traditions that should not be expected to ape contemporary US cultural values. The essence of Johnson’s message was that the USA is its own worst enemy. Its superpowerdom leads it to imagine it is invincible, if not perfect. Not so, says Johnson: America is flawed and vulnerable in all sorts of ways.

The ascendant right in America’s intellectual establishment greeted the book with a haughty disregard. And then September 11 happened. They have since gone very quiet about the book. But there are no indications whatsoever that the lessons Johnson was trying to teach theoretically in the book have been taken to heart in any practical way since the terrible events of September 11. President Bush has used the events to justify pursuing terrorism to all the corners of the earth. His discombobulated strategy is one of a cowboy configured war – lengthy, dangerously unpredictable, costly, hi-tech, merciless and jingoistic. His jejune assumption is that the USA is the innocent party following September 11. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Powell demonstrate no acknowledgment of US complicity in the making of monsters such as Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. None of them seems aware of US husbanding of ‘predatory globalisation’, its relentless stomping on the rights of ‘misrecognised’ peoples (‘aliens’) beyond the imperium. And with John Howard’s self-appointment as Bush’s Asia-Pacific cheerleader, Australia is being drawn into the ‘encircling gloom’. Our troops may soon be in Iraq, in a war that will end nothing and start much. September 11 has taught us nothing.

Dennis Altman

Enough already. Even if the USA still sees the world through the prism of September 11, there is no reason for us to do likewise. Even without September 11, there would still be warfare over Kashmir and Palestine, increasing gaps between rich and poor, world hunger and disease, and financial and political turmoil in countries as far apart as Turkey, Argentina and Russia. In our immediate neighbourhood, the possible disintegration of Indonesia is a far greater security risk than the resurgence of Al Qaeda.

What is most distressing is that September 11 has given John Howard the opportunity to rerun the scripts of the Cold War, which identified our interests and our security entirely with those of the USA. In his eagerness to cosy up to President Bush, he reminds me of the class nerd who, by some fluke, finds himself momentarily in favour with the school captain, and fails to understand that he is only one of a number of sycophants.

Perhaps some Australians do see the world differently since the attacks, but I doubt it. Neither terror nor an awareness that the USA is both dominant and vulnerable are new concepts, and, if there was some possible justification for eliminating the Taliban as an act of revenge, it is increasingly difficult to see how this might apply to Iraq. Saddam Hussein’s is a vile and dictatorial régime, and one that probably encourages various forms of terrorism, but the same might be said of some of America’s current allies, especially Saudi Arabia.

We are constantly told that we are at war, and it is a war against international terrorism fuelled by fundamentalism. We are simultaneously told that this is not directed at Islam. The harder question, which our politicians ignore, is the extent to which the logic of all fundamentalist religions and nationalisms leads to events like September 11; and whether Israeli settlers on the West Bank, Palestinian and Sri Lankan suicide bombers, Hindu nationalists, and the right-wing Christian fundamentalists who spawned Timothy McVeigh do not share more than separates them.

The opposition to terror is based upon the principle of the sanctity of life, and the concept that to attack people indiscriminately, whatever the apparent justification, is to undermine the legitimacy of one’s cause. Over the past decade, we have seen far greater loss of life than occurred on September 11: in civil conflicts in Rwanda, the Congo and the former Yugoslavia, and in racial and religious rioting in south Asia and Indonesia. If there is to be an international ‘war on terror’, it should apply the same standards against America’s allies as it does against its foes.

John Carroll

September 11 has forced all of us who were baptised at the cultural altar of the West to engage ourselves in two separate domains. One is practical: how to defend ourselves against further acts of mega-terrorism. The other is metaphysical.

Firstly, to the practical. The two most reliable books to date on Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda global network – Peter Bergen’s Holy War Inc. and Rohan Gunaratna’s Inside Al Qaeda – make clear the grave threat of further attack on Western cities. The entire West is the enemy, with the USA, to use one of bin Laden’s metaphors, as head of the snake. Al Qaeda has cells not only throughout the Islamic world, but also in every country that contains Muslim migrant populations of any size. It has its own intelligence network, as large as some European services. It has its own finance committees, operating in four continents. Its leadership is made up, not of other-worldly clerics, but technocrats (one of bin Laden’s aliases is ‘the Director’). Its operations are meticulously planned – in the case of September 11, over many years.

The US government is now primarily concerned about the threat of a ‘dirty bomb’, transportable in a suitcase. Were one detonated from the top of a tall building in, say, Washington or New York, it could render the city uninhabitable with radioactive pollution. Everything bin Laden has done and said indicates an unblinking mania for destruction – the more infidels who die, the greater the satisfaction.

The US campaign in Afghanistan was essential in closing down the headquarters of mega-terrorism; bin Laden had a dozen training camps operating there. That was the easy stage. It is quite unclear what to do now, apart from a slow, painstaking choice of small, elusive targets, while the West reconstructs its inept intelligence services – a return to using men on the ground rather than reliance on hi-tech surveillance. The gravity of the danger confronting us – Australia almost certainly harbours Al Qaeda cells — demands that we forget petty political differences. Out of self-interest, we should all be wishing President Bush good judgment and good fortune.

My own greater concern about September 11 is with its psychic impact. The World Trade Centre symbolised the pride and achievement of industrial civilisation. An age that knew no upward limit on how high it could build is now over. Bin Laden, who has arrived as our nemesis, mocked that his god had created the heavens without pillars. Disciplined men unafraid of death could not bring down his culture.

It is too early to chart the extent of our deflation. The trinity of monuments that once symbolised New York and the USA – the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building and the World Trade Centre – has been replaced by a hole of discomposure. Symptomatic of current derangement in the West is the absence of any plausible idea as to what to do with the sixteen-acre site. Paralysis is the likely result.

The US title for its campaign – Operation Enduring Freedom – is a further sign of blindness. The metaphysical challenge of September 11 is not about freedom – the modern individual has plenty of that. It is about a culture that is quite uncertain about what it believes, that has cocooned itself in excessive comfort, and that has retreated into the illusion that some sort of package tour through life might be fulfilling. More has come down with the Twin Towers in New York than concrete and steel – and 3000 lives.

Peter Mares

The chances of dying in a terrorist attack are miniscule. In Australia, there is probably a greater risk of being killed by an unleashed pit bull terrier in a city park. This is not to diminish the tragedy of September 11 or to trivialise the terrible loss of life, but to indicate that the terrorist’s insidious purpose is not just to maim and kill. It is to terrorise – to instil fear in our hearts and minds.

Counter-terrorism strategies target the physical risk, seeking to deter future attacks through improved intelligence, greater police powers and heightened awareness. But these measures do not address the psychological threat of terrorism. If anything, they exaggerate it. The price of eternal vigilance is to be constantly afraid.

Australia, after September 11, became a more frightened country, and this has implications well beyond the mental well-being of each of us as individuals. Fear breeds mistrust, particularly of foreigners. (The anniversary of September 11 coincides with the anniversary of the Tampa affair and the birth of the ‘Pacific solution’.) Fear makes us defensive and risk-averse. In foreign policy terms, the safest course appears to lie on the well-worn track of the past. We hold fast to our alliance with the USA, and pledge our support for an attack on Iraq.

Perhaps the real challenge of September 11 is to transcend our fear; to refuse to succumb to terrorists’ psychological weaponry; to reassert the centrality of trust and hope as guiding principles in the human struggle to build a better world; to dare to be idealistic. I am not advocating an ‘all you need is love’ approach to foreign policy, but it is important to remember that the view from the bunker is never very good.

Consider the figure of the refugee. As Arthur C. Helton writes in his recent book The Price of Indifference (OUP), refugees ‘provide important insights into the modern dilemmas of statecraft’, not least because their very presence reflects past ‘failures in governance and international relations’. Human displacement sows seeds of instability that can blossom into ugly flowers. (Look at Israel and the Palestinian territories.) Before following George W. Bush to Baghdad, we should contemplate the figure of the refugee and think carefully about the possible consequences of our actions.

There may be no simple trajectory from injustice to terrorism. It has been pointed out often enough that Osama bin Laden comes from a family of billionaires. But this does not invalidate the view that, unless injustice is overcome, the ‘war on terror’ will be never-ending. Churchill and Roosevelt recognised this. In the Atlantic Charter of August 1941, they declared that ‘the final destruction of the Nazi tyranny’ must be followed by a peace ‘which will afford assurance that all the men in all the lands may live out their lives in freedom from fear and want’. No such vision accompanies today’s talk of war. Yet without a just peace, military victory will be short-lived.

Susan Hawthorne

The USA PATRIOT Act (2002) is an acronym for ‘Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism’. It gives powers to the US Federal government’s agents to seize the assets of any organisation or individual aiding and abetting ‘terrorist activities’. Foreign individuals can be arrested, detained indefinitely, deported and subjected to a military tribunal. They can also be shot. All of this can be done without reference to the usual appeals processes of courts and juries.

September 11 has become the impetus for new draconian legislation in the USA and in Australia. As Diane Bell points out in her essay in September 11, 2001: Feminist Perspectives, for any Australian or other foreigner living in the USA at present, the USA PATRIOT Act (2002) is being used to criminalise dissent. ‘This is war and the politics of free speech have moved to the right. If one is a citizen the threat is being called unpatriotic. If one is a non-citizen one can be tried before a military tribunal and shot.’ In Australia, the ASIO legislation due to be debated in late August will allow the Australian government to detain people without charge for up to seven days; and it takes away the right to silence. This legislation can be applied very broadly and could have an impact on political activists of all kinds, including feminists, unionists, anti-globalisation activists, eco-activists and the like.

This is political opportunism of the worst sort. It brings to the fore questions of who is a terrorist. These are not paltry questions that affect just a few. When a terrorist is defined by the powerful as anybody of a different nationality or political persuasion, the freedoms of citizens are severely threatened.

As a feminist, I have long been critical of the masculinism of the military and of its close partner, corporate globalisation. Over the last twelve months, I have become even more wary of this nexus of powerful forces, which I believe has become far too strong, which is having long-term effects on the level of poverty in the world and on the destruction of global biodiversity, and which is reinforcing political and business opportunism.

The political colour of the world has changed in the last twelve months. The Howard government’s policies on refugees, its refusal to be party to the convention against torture, its gung-ho willingness to follow George W. Bush into almost any theatre of war — these are all part of the same political strategy that emphasises security and sacrifices social justice.

The political system needs to be challenged by new ideas that take the lives of the most marginal seriously. I suggest a new political force coming from what I call the diversity matrix, which includes feminists and lesbian feminists, indigenous peoples, the poor, refugees and migrants, disability activists and anyone concerned with the long-term well-being of the planet.

Tony Coady

The terrible events of September 11 did not ‘change the world’, as many proclaimed at the time, but they created a new sense of vulnerability in the USA and, to a much lesser degree, in other industrialised nations. Americans now suffer pained feelings of bewilderment and grievance at the hostility of much of the rest of the world. Their government has reacted by attempting to impose its will by military force even more widely than ever before. The dubious doctrine of ‘pre-emptive war’ has been revived, even for planning attacks on nations that have no ideological connection with the attacks of September 11.

Of course, the world’s only ‘hyperpower’, like so many conventional empires of the past, has long made a practice of projecting violence around the world in pursuit of ‘régime change’ or ‘régime stabilisation’. The names of Iran, Guatemala, Chile, Cuba and Nicaragua begin a list I don’t have space to finish. The new militarism is merely an acceleration of older tendencies, but it shows a failure to understand what, in part, gave rise to the terrorist attacks on the home soil.

A spell in Washington DC a few years ago, as a generously funded Senior Fellow at the United States Institute of Peace, confirmed my earlier impressions that Washington was the seat of quasi-imperial power and knew it. At numerous seminars, briefings and lectures, US government officials debated or declared what ‘we’ would do to solve this, that and the other crisis abroad. A Sri Lankan scholar could stand it no longer and burst out, ‘We! Who is this “we”? I only know it does not include me and my countrymen.’ The American speakers were puzzled and politely confused – surely the free world was trailing along behind them.

This widespread resentment of US power, and the arrogance with which it is often used, needs to be understood as part of the background to the inexcusable attacks of September 11. It also partly explains the elated reactions to these attacks in many parts of the Arab world, and highlights the ambiguities of the ‘war against terrorism’. But the current US leadership remains intent on unilateral military solutions to complex political problems, thereby fanning the anti- Americanism that is part of the problem. Contrary to George W. Bush’s belief that ‘they hate us because we’re so good’, the hate and mistrust directed against America is mostly generated by the perception that its foreign policies are powerful, misguided and destructive.

Of course, there are other factors, a primary one being a revulsion against modernity shared by Islamic militant fundamentalists and the romantic wings of various Western protest movements.

Contrary to the fanatics’ belief, there are many things to admire in American civilisation, especially its diversity, its intellectual energy, its many generous and altruistic impulses. But its stance in the world too often fails to reflect these virtues. The terrorist attacks have given carte blanche to a reactionary US administration headed by a compromised president who confuses bombastic rhetoric with political sagacity. He is supported (or driven) by a number of Cabinet officials whose backgrounds encourage the propagation of policies imbued with messianic political (and sometimes religious) fundamentalism that ironically mirrors a similar drive in their enemies.

Rather than responding to the challenge by forced régime change, the USA and the rest of us need to address the huge imbalances of power and wealth that disfigure the world community and fan the flames of hatred and terror. Militant Islamic fundamentalism is no answer for the grievances of the powerless and persecuted, but it will continue to be attractive while the USA and its allies remain insensitive to what is legitimate in those grievances.

Richard Neville

Events since September 11 have revealed:

• That naked, tooth-and-claw fundamentalism remains a brain disease and the enemy of freedom. This applies to the Old Testament White House and Zionist land-stealers, as well as to militant Islam.
• That hawks in the West outnumber the doves by at least ten to one, except in Washington and Canberra, where the doves are virtually extinct. If you think Colin Powell is a dove, you’re hallucinating.
• That US foreign policy is openly manipulated for the benefit of a group of oil-sodden, multi-millionaire arms dealers who will fight for their feather beds at any cost, including the well-being of the earth, and the lives of wedding guests in Afghanistan.
• That for such an élite, globalisation is a code word for cheap labour and hungry markets rather than a unifying approach to international problems such as tyranny, global warming and torture.
• That there is one law for America and a boot up the ass for everyone else.
• That the Federal Coalition, unlike Australian army chiefs, learned nothing from its complicity in the war against Vietnam and is now preparing to shed blood in Iraq.
• That the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Alexander Downer, believes anyone who questions this policy is a fool and an appeaser.
• That the credo of ‘my country right or wrong’, especially as fanned by media hacks, makes it unnecessary for politicians to be fussy about global justice.
• That freedom of the press is a peacetime privilege, not an inalienable right.
• That the web has come of age.
• That, shortly after the September strikes, there came to light a second series of attacks, both here and in the USA, upon thousands of innocent citizens, which perhaps can be classed as acts of ethical terror. It wasn’t landmark towers that crashed to the ground, but landmark companies, starting with Enron, wiping out the savings and livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of employees and shareholders, creating misery and bleak futures. Why? Megalomania, greed and social irresponsibility. Scores of those at the helm of the terror wars are linked to companies that have fleeced the public and/or pillaged the developing world.
• That George Bush was able to describe Ariel Sharon as a ‘man of peace’ without him or any newsreader throwing up.
• That Sharon and Arafat will share the same circle of hell.
• That as far as the USA is concerned, the Geneva Convention is of no more worth than Enron’s official statement of ethics.
• That the Bush administration believes that environmental laws do not apply to vast tracts of oceans under US control, paving the way for toxic dumping, oil rigs and military manoeuvres.
• That America intends to forcibly board any vessel on the high seas it regards as ‘suspicious’.
• That, in the last calendar year, US weapons manufacturers entered into new agreements worth US$12.1 billion and delivered US$9.7 billion worth of arms, basically cornering the market in weapons of death.
• That, in the twenty-first century, a pre-emptive strike is now considered a civilised option, if delivered by the West.
• That, one year on, the US cluster bombs scattered in the Afghan sands are still killing and maiming children.
• That each week, factories set up in eastern Afghanistan are producing hundreds of kilos of heroin.
• That those nations who join the World Court without pledging to protect from its jurisdiction those Americans serving on its soil are likely to lose all US military aid. • That Britain and the USA have assumed the power to detain suspects for as long as they like, without putting them on trial, or even charging them, contrary to obligations dating as far back as the Magna Carta (1215).
• That to hasten the extraction of information, enemy suspects can be secretly transferred to friendly police states in order to be tortured.
• That, instead of working to ‘save civilisation’, as shock-jock John Laws and Prime Minister Howard jointly boasted this country would aim to do on the morning of September 12, both Australia and the USA have retreated from civilisation.