The Ugly Side

If John Howard were really a decent and honest man with a genuine commitment to Democracy, wouldn't you expect him to immediately and loudly speak out against these death threats bineg made in his name:

Former intelligence analyst Andrew Wilkie, who was the Greens candidate for Bennelong in 2004, said today there were strong similarities between his campaign experiences and reports of the intimidation of former ABC presenter McKew.

Four men holding torches were discovered underneath Ms McKew's car, parked outside her North Shore home, on Thursday night.

The incident followed a number of death threats against the journalist since she announced she would take on Mr Howard in Bennelong.

Mr Wilkie has said he received a number detailed letters in 2004 outlining what would be done to him if he continued his political campaign.

"I received a number of death threats, some so alarming I also had to go to police as Maxine McKew seems to have done," Mr Wilkie said. "It looks and sounds like the exact thing I faced."

Mr Wilkie said the threatening letters stopped after the election, in which he secured a small swing against Mr Howard, but abusive phone calls continued for many months until he changed his telephone number.

The former spy said he didn't go public about the intimidation at the time for fear of appearing to have sour grapes about his political defeat.

"I didn't want to sound at the time like these people were cheating by intimidating me so I kept it to myself and just lived with it," Mr Wilkie said.

"Now I see it being done to someone else I feel I have a responsibility to let people know there's a pattern here," said Mr Wilkie.

As for the men under the car, you don't explain that one away as over-zealous loval supporters. In such a situation, the men were either placing a bomb (fortunately NOT in this case) or installing a listening bug and a GPS positioning device to track the car's location.

The local police are on the case. Will they subpoena ASIO agents? I don't think so.