Vice President Dick Cheney visits Australia

US vice-president Dick Cheney, about to visit Sydney, is not welcome.

Cheney is visiting Australia to meet with the Howard government in
Canberra, and will address a meeting of supporters in Sydney on
February 23 at 9.30am at the Shangri-La Hotel in the Rocks.

Cheney’s visit comes at a time when the Bush government faces
increasing isolation — internationally and domestically — for its war
and occupation of Iraq. The routing of the Republicans in last year’s
mid-term elections, and Bush’s recent announcement to deploy more than
20,000 extra troops to Iraq has increased that isolation.

Cheney, a former CEO of Halliburton, one of the key corporations to
profit from the US war and occupation of Iraq, still receives handsome
kick-backs from the war profiteering corporation.

Cheney represents the most corrupt and brutal aspects of the Bush
administration. In the US, his approval rating has plunged to just 16%.
Cheney has been outspoken in advocating torture in US prison camps like
Guantanamo Bay. He has argued for US government endorsement of
practices such as “water boarding”, which involves almost drowning the
prisoner, outlawed during the Vietnam war.

Australia is one of the few US allies left in the “coalition of the
willing” countries that signed on to the Iraq war in 2003. Since then,
many countries have pulled their troops out of Iraq, or are making
plans to. Britain and Australia are exceptions.

The continued incarceration of David Hicks in Guantanamo Bay
underlines the Australian government’s support for the US-led war
drive. PM John Howard has approved Hicks’s trial in the sham military
commission in which evidence obtained under torture is accepted.

Cheney’s visit is an opportunity for the anti-war movement to
increase the pressure on Howard to bring Hicks home and withdraw the
troops from Iraq.

While Australia’s contingent is small — some 1400 troops — it is
nevertheless politically significant and reinforces the Australia-US
alliance, which has always been an alliance between war criminals.

The ALP has called for the troops to leave Iraq. The NSW Labor
Premier Morris Iemma should use Cheney’s visit to forcefully reiterate
this position.

Socialist Alliance is helping organise a “welcome” for Cheney in
Sydney and Canberra. It’s a crime that while David Hicks has been
illegally incarcerated in Guantanamo Bay for five years, this war
criminal, with the blood of 650,000 Iraqis on his hands, walks free.

Until we break the Australia-US war alliance, the world’s peoples
will be vulnerable to the dangerous whims of the warmongers such as
Cheney, Bush and Howard.