Review by John Bursill

Paper Link: Why Australia's Presence in Afghanistan is Untenable - By Lawyer James O'Neill

US President Barack Obama, 1 December 2009 “I am convinced that our security is at stake in Afghanistan and Pakistan. This is the epicenter of the violent extremism practiced by al Qaeda. It is from here that we were attacked on 9/11.......It is important to recall why America and our allies were compelled to fight a war in Afghanistan in the first place. We did not ask for this fight. On September 11 2001, 19 men hijacked four airplanes and used them to murder nearly 3000 people.”

From the essays Introduction "This article will suggest that the official rationale for the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan is false. It involves a rewriting and/or ignoring of history on the part of the participants. It shows the same cavalier disregard for international law that was apparent in Iraq. It accepts without question the validity of the two premises argued by Obama in the above quote. Perhaps most disturbingly it persistently fails to address the reality of the present policies and their likely true intention."

Lawyer James O'Neill

In this outstanding historical analogy of the Afghan situation author and Lawyer Australian James O'Neill presents a story that the Australian and worlds population have been denied. O'Neill in this cutting and well documented essay makes a mockery of our current state of democracy in Australia; where neither the media, or the politicians of the major parties have attempted to even debate the legality of the US lead invaision and occupation of Afghanistan.