What were they thinking??

What a bizarre little third of a page ad in The Age on Tuesday morning (well, okay, I slept in and it was early afternoon, but you get my drift). Australia's nuttiest right-wingers, the Citizens Electoral Council (CEC) had roped in several dozen reputable people to co-sign a protest to the Federal government's Anti-Terrorism Bill 2004, arguing the civil liberties line. There is some merit to the argument made, since the Anti-Terrorism Bill is essentially an ambit claim by the government that is awaiting some watering down in the Senate. But why-oh-why would decent people put their names to a CEC document?? According to one of them, General Peter Gration in The Age on Wednesday:

General Gration said he was concerned on hearing allegations against the CEC. "It is all very disturbing to me," he said.


In other words, Do'h.

A visit to the CEC website, can be quite instructive. Recent media releases include:

New Release To Hit Cheney Hard - The following statement was written by U.S. Democratic Party Presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche, on the occasion of the release of the third version of his "Children of Satan" pamphlets. LaRouche has used these pamphlets to spearhead the fight in the U.S. against the Dick Cheney-led neo-conservatives who have hijacked the American Presidency, by exposing their Straussian agenda of deliberate lies (Children of Satan I) and their "Beast-Man" pedigree, which foreshadowed the current torture scandal out of Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, and Camp X-Ray at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba (Children of Satan II).


Why piss off Satanists? They're likely to swing toward LlaR/CEC, surely.

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