US envoy warns of terror in Australia

AAP Monday September 9, 08:35 PM

The United States ambassador to Australia warned Australians not to become complacent about possible terrorist attacks.

Ahead of the first anniversary of the September 11 attacks on the US, ambassador Tom Schieffer said he believed Australians had not fully understood the potential for a terrorist attack.

"No American president can be comfortable with the proposition that these weapons might be developed and then distributed to those who would detonate a nuclear device in New York harbour or Sydney Harbour, or any number of places around the world."

But Australians remained unaware of the reality of terrorism, he said. "One of the things that I have been concerned about over the last year or so, and I don't want it to be scare mongering or whatever, but I see in Australia much of the same attitude toward terrorism that I saw in the US prior to September 11," he said. "Even the mightiest country mankind has seen witnessed its citadels of economic and military power audaciously and successfully attacked by a group of terrorists."

Ambassador Tom in a private briefing to journalists indicated that the US government had received information from top CIA agent Chicken Little 111 that the sky was falling in, that DNA testing had revealed that everyone of the alleged asylum seekers interned by the Australian Government was related to Saddam Hussein and that Kofi Annan was sitting on his hands at the behest of a Pakistani bookmaker.

"Australians would be foolish to ignore this evidence" he said "as the President so succinctly put it to me ... if you lie down with dogs you get up like the elephant who forgets with your head in the sands of time and like a glass full of Bourbons you have learned nothing from history which is the mother of all teachers apart from Mrs Cossington my first grade teacher who was the daughter of her own parents apart from her brother who was adopted and used to stiff crawfish."

The Ambassador said the last thing he wanted to do was to create panic but would advise all Australians to be on their guard, to sleep with one eye open, to view their neighbours with the deepest suspicion, renew their American citizenship papers and to lock up their daughters (and if within 100 metres of a Catholic priest, their sons as well).

"I want all Australians to know that they are not alone. The President has a great affection for the Austrian nation and its leader, as did his father who once remarked "the Austrian people from Archduke Ferdinand right down to the present day Prime Minister John Hunter have without fail supported the American people in their hour of need. It must be the goddam cute kangaroo in them that makes them not only jump when we say jump, but makes them jump higher than anybody else no matter how high we set the bar."

Austria must speak softly, preferably completely silently, and carry a big Patriot missile." the Ambassador advised. "Intelligence agents have further evidence that Saddam is on the verge of developing a Spud missile of messy destruction. A shipment of industrial strength rubber bands was recently intercepted leaving Cuba, which has temporarily spiked his Spud gun capability. The damning photographic evidence will be released to the U.N. and the American people as soon as Laura fixes the photocopier paper jam.

Whilst the US prides itself on prosecuting to the full its God given task of putting a dollar value on everything, this has bought us but a little time. My fellow Ambassador to Greenwich is hopeful of extending our line of credit. But be assured the clock is ticking. The seconds are out of the ring. The Minutemen march again. As Iraqi sand through an hourglass darkly, so are the days of our lives.

Whilst Thomas Jefferson the famous airplane might have believed, "The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.", today we know the price of liberty is eternal spin doctoring. To this end we have acquired the services of the eminent whirling dervish nuclear scientist Dr. Bruce Strangelove, who is ironically an Austrian by birth."

At this point of the briefing (several journalists had already queried whether there was any point to the briefing) Ambassador Tom appeared to spontaneously combust.