----- Original Message -----
From:Geoff Seidner
Sent: Friday, February 13, 2004 1:10 PM
Subject: Phillip Adams believes in the JFK Conspiracy!
In his lamentable, typically boring anti American article ''War cries an insult to our intelligence'' [The Australian, 11/02] Phillip Adams actually blames Americans for ''....failing to protect president John F Kennedy from those who wanted him dead''
How sad that Phillip has forgotten the number of anti - conspiracy articles he has penned over the years. Of course they may have been better days: I find it incongruous that he thus supports the classical modern - day conspiracy, not even contemplating that some people recall his better days!
By the way, Phillip; you seek to ads gravitas to your scribbling by mocking the war against terror by reference to the Harold Holt conspiracy: note that it was a Japanese submarine, not Chinese!
Geoff Seidner
13 Alston Grove East St Kida 3183 ..... 03 9525 9299
Letter to Editor
The Australian Feb. 13 2004
I've got what Phillip Adams wants (Opinion, 11/2), a bullshit detector. It lights up like a Christmas tree everytime I read one of his columns.
Tony Cooke
Morisset, NSW
Tony Cooke
Morisset, NSW
 War cries an insult to our intelligence 11feb04 IN this era of technological triumphalism and digital dazzlements, you would think someone would have come up with a BSD. A bullshit detector. With circuitry installed in your TV, computer or mobile phone ready to buzz or blink when someone tries to lay it on with a trowel. The old joke that asks: "How can you tell when a politician's lying?" is answered by: "When his lips move." Yet too many people remain oblivious to political lying. In many cases such credulity is wilful, a deliberate choice. How else could this ongoing BS about weapons of mass destruction remain an issue? Those fortunate enough to have a natural aptitude for BS detection were trying to warn the world what was going on throughout the preamble to the war in Iraq. When the only people on earth who believed, or pretended to believe that George W.Bush, Tony Blair and John Howard were telling the truth were to be found among the gullible and the culpable in the US, the UK and Australia. The great fraud that went on for month after month, wherein our PM echoed the nonsense being pumped out in Washington and London, failed to convince a majority of Australians while being rejected and ridiculed by nations and populations around the world. The thuggery that went on at the UN, the revelations of former weapons inspector Scott Ritter and the blundering attacks on Hans Blix were clear evidence of Bush's and Blair's determination to bulldoze their countries into an unnecessary conflict. The BS was laid on so thick that you didn't need a detector. It was clear that Howard didn't believe what he was saying and hardly cared if we didn't believe him either. Remember Howard's twaddle about no final decision having been made about our involvement? Australia's media was all but buried in Uluru-sized dollops of BS in an ongoing piece of political and media theatrics that was even less convincing, less plausible, than the silliest cosmetic ads. While Baghdad's Baathists would be stunned by the scale of Washington's war, many of us were more shocked and awed by the scale of its BS. It wasn't the WMDs we were worrying about but the WBS. The powerful weapons of bullshit. It's not an issue of the reliability of US Intelligence. When has it ever been reliable? Intelligence (sic) failed to notice that North Korea was about to invade the South. It was responsible for such glorious stuff-ups as the Bay of Pigs and, subsequently, failed to protect president John F. Kennedy from those who wanted him dead. Having grotesquely exaggerated the military might of the Soviet Union throughout the cold war, intelligence failed to predict communism's collapse. Then there was the small problem of its failure to protect the US from September 11. BUT all this low IQ intelligence is nothing compared with the unintelligence, the idiocy, of what passes for political leadership. It was the scale of the exaggerations, the out-and-out fabrications, the bare-faced fraudulence of the whole preamble to the war in Iraq, that critics found profoundly offensive. One might have forgiven Bush and Co if, for a moment, they had believed what they were saying. If they had simply been misinformed. Or mistaken. But it was all chicanery and charades, sexing up any intelligence that could be conjured by Washington while ignoring any contradictory information or advice. Critics were vilified, having their patriotism questioned. It became treasonable to protest. We've witnessed an ugly war waged by ugly people against, yes, an ugly despot. And the WMD were just one of the lies used to justify it. Never forget the vacuous allegation (more unintelligent intelligence) that the invasion was an essential part of the war against terror because Iraq was in league with al-Qa'ida. Of course it was. Just as Harold Holt was plucked off Cheviot Beach by a Chinese submarine. Intelligence? Washington would have been better off relying on the revelations in owls' entrails or the horoscopes in women's magazines. |