The United Nations Charter requires the USA to protect human rights in Afghanistan

The treaty clearly asserts the primacy of United Nations Charter rights and obligations over the provisions of the treaty, including Article 5, which Australia has invoked to support the USA.

Human rights obligations incumbent on members of the UN include the obligation to protect civilian populations in the conduct of armed conflict, and extend to protection from the use of nuclear, chemical or biological weapons, and from indiscriminate destruction or mass terror.

The obligations are inconsistent with any "acceptable" level of civilian casualties from weapons, both as applicable norms of International Law, and legal duties incumbent under the UN Charter.

In gaining UN membership, states freely covenant to abide a legal assertion of inalienable human rights in all people to live in a world free from a use of weapons of mass terror, or indiscriminate destruction , and other nuclear, chemical or biological weapons, by powers capable of so acting.

In so being against the Charter, the use of such arms is unacceptable and all members of the UN , including Australia and the US, are bound to uphold our basic human rights, and thereby work to maintain a legal responsibility in the UN for the maintenance of international peace and security.

By dint of the basic human rights of all peoples, Australian moral and practical support to the US under Article 5 of the ANZUS treaty must be withdrawn should war on terrorism in the theatre of military action as declared by the US, begin to exact civilian casualties, by a use of such arms.

Accordingly, the recent call of Opposition foreign affairs spokesperson, Laurie Bereton, for a new scrutiny of security is truly overdue. Likewise is his realisation that old freedoms may be restricted in reaction against "the worst single act of evil terrorism perpetrated in our life times".

To our loss, Laurie Bereton hasn't gone far enough with human rights, while the zealous global media has gone way too far over the top, with each having missed putting core questions shaping who we are to be in this millennium: ie, Whose freedoms are to be restricted; and how, and why?

Freedom of the press to publish unrestricted propaganda, from any quarter, with a real propensity to incite racial, ethnic or sectarian hatred, is a prime candidate among a few western democracy's hard won democratic freedoms to be put on the line for hard questioning, and to go if necessary for the future of any human rights, the attainment of justice against terror or a prospect of peace.

The press has a role to lead by example and must make needed hard choices itself, by giving up divisive "infoganda". It can no longer peddle clearly slanted diatribe which is unacceptable to human rights and the attainment of a victory against terrorism. The press must abandon the new diversionary option that in western democracies there are inessential personal freedoms we all enjoy as individuals, and which we may ill afford to keep as luxuries in the face of this barbarity.

Syndicated news reports, whose principal merit lies in denying universal human rights by openly demonising Palestinian people, top the list of grave threats to human rights, security and peace. Such propaganda are two sets of syndicated press photographs of cheering Palestinian children.

The first was published under the emboldened headline: "They celebrate while everyone else mourns" (The Adelaide Advertiser, Thursday 13/09/01). The same newspaper replicated the technique two days later with a different group of Palestinian children (15/9/01- Weekend - p.8). Each publication was accompanied by a scant story line omitting to say how these children, let alone children, comprehended the enormity of the excess and why it was known they understood.