We have lost our moral compass under John Howard

Margo Kingston in the SMH:

"Last week The Sydney Morning Herald revealed that last year Australian Major George O'Kane at the US military headquarters in Baghdad helped draft a response to the first Red Cross report on abuses in Abu Ghraib prison. He reported back regularly to his superiors. The Howard Government had claimed ignorance until the pictures of the horror were released last month. As usual, John Howard did not respond by setting out the facts, but by obfuscation. Why? What do we believe in?

Even on purely practical grounds, we should have protested. The downside for the coalition of torturing ordinary Iraqis is enormous. But I bet we didn't, just like we won't ask for the videos of the interrogations of our citizens in Guantanamo Bay.

We have lost our moral compass under John Howard, and thereby aided a superpower which is dooming itself and the world to endless war. Last week, the International Institute of Strategic Studies confirmed that the war had rejuvenated al-Qaeda and swelled its ranks, now estimated to be 18,000, with 1000 now in Iraq."