Australian Prime Minister Albanese refuses to meet with Assange’s wife
Oscar Grenfell@Oscar_Grenfell, 22 May 2023, WSWS,
Asked by independent MP Andrew Wilkie why he would not meet with Mrs Assange, Albanese brushed aside the question, declaring: “Who I meet with is determined by the priorities that my office has.”
Over the past month, Albanese has met with a multitude of business tycoons. He attended the wedding of right-wing radio shock jock Kyle Sandilands, alongside a convicted drug dealer and reputed crime boss. Most recently, Albanese fawned over US President Joe Biden in Tokyo on the weekend. Biden is overseeing the attempt to extradite Assange from Britain, and imprison him for 175 years for exposing American war crimes.
Albanese proclaimed in parliament, he was not interested in meeting Assange’s wife, which he said would be akin to a “demonstration” and “grandstanding.” Albanese sought to dress up the refusal by reiterating vague comments that “enough is enough” in relation to the Assange case, and he cannot see that anything is served by the WikiLeaks founder’s continued incarceration.
While Albanese claims he has made this position clear to the US administration, there is no evidence of that, including in extensive correspondence obtained under freedom of information requests between various American and Australian government bodies. Labor continues to give carte blanche to the very administration seeking Assange’s destruction.
The obvious question is: if Albanese won’t even meet with Assange’s wife, a basic act of respect and courtesy that he has extended to thousands of others over the course of his year in office, why would anyone think the prime minister is waging a fight for the imprisoned Australian journalist’s freedom behind closed doors?
As part of her visit to Australia, Stella Assange yesterday addressed the National Press Club in Canberra.
The speech was a powerful plea for Assange’s freedom, an exposure of the draconian conditions under which he is detained in Britain’s maximum-security Belmarsh Prison and a clear outline of the fundamental issues of democratic rights at stake in the attempted prosecution of her husband.
Stella noted a groundswell of support for Assange. She stated: “I would like to thank the overwhelming dedication of the Australian people, who have brought about a sea change in awareness and solidarity for Julian’s plight. This unity in support for my husband is a source of enormous encouragement for our family. It nurtures Julian’s ability to continue on.”
She added: “The reality is that to regain his freedom, Julian needs the support of his home country. This is a political case, and it needs a political solution.”
In discussing her presence in Australia, and also what she speaks about with her husband, Stella stressed Assange’s connection to Australia. He had been raised in the country, and had shared his extensive memories, from surfing in Byron Bay, to beekeeping in Melbourne’s Dandenong Ranges and riding a horse in the New South Wales Northern Rivers.
“That’s how I imagine Julian when he is free,” she said………………………..
Stella outlined the draconian security procedures required for her and her two children to visit their father. They had to pass innumerable checkpoints, searches and scans for their visits. The children had only ever seen their father in the inhospitable prison visiting room. For the elder of the two, now six years old, “Prisons feature in his dreams and his nightmares.”
Turning to the case, Stella stated: “A 175 year sentence is a living death sentence. A prospect so desperate that the English court found that it would drive him to take his own life, rather than live forever in hell. We must do everything we can to ensure that Julian never, ever, sets foot in a US prison. Extradition in this case is a matter of life and death.”
She explained: “For most people, Julian is a symbol. A symbol of staggering injustice, because he is in prison on trumped up charges for exposing the crimes of others. A symbol because he faces a bewildering 175 year sentence for publishing the truth. A symbol of a sophisticated form of state violence dressed up in complexity and indirection that not even Franz Kafka could have imagined.
“For the press and the public, Julian’s case is the most brutal attack on press freedom that the Western world has seen in the last 70 years. A foreign government is using the political offences in its statute books to indict a foreign national abroad, because of what he or she published in a different country.
“Accurate, damning publications exposing their war crimes. If sovereignty is to mean anything, if jurisdiction is a proper legal and political reality, the case against Julian cannot be understood as anything other than an absurdity.”
Despite the dire threat to press freedom, the address was largely subjected to a media boycott. Only a handful of nationally-recognised journalists attended. Several prominent publications sent junior staff, fresh out of university, armed only with arrogance and obnoxious questions based on the slanders that have been used to attack Assange.
The shameful display underscored the fact that broad sections of the official media function as nothing more than state propagandists. While they are cheering on each new step in Australia’s integration into the US preparations for war with China, this corrupted layer is hostile to a genuine journalist who exposed war crimes………………………………………. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/05/23/gavm-m23.html?fbclid=IwAR180uIICBGtiZ8Fb3gyk6bwi2YScNh7OxnAQDK0979TWB0XNzNFuUBpSso
60 Minutes Australia Keeps Churning Out War-With-China Propaganda
Australians are particularly vulnerable to propaganda because Australia has the most concentrated media ownership in the western world, dominated by a powerful duopoly of Nine Entertainment (who airs 60 Minutes) and the Murdoch-owned News Corp. This vulnerability is being fully exploited as the time comes for the western empire to beat the war drums against China.
CAITLIN JOHNSTONE, MAY 25, 2023 https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/60-minutes-australia-keeps-churning?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=82124&post_id=123620142&isFreemail=true&utm_medium=email
60 Minutes Australia has been playing a leading role in saturating Australian airwaves with consent-manufacturing messaging in support of militarising to participate in a US war against China. A segment they ran a year ago is titled “Prepare for Armageddon: China’s warning to the world,” and features an image of Xi Jinping overlaid with war planes and explosions and captioned “POKING THE PANDA”. Another from a year ago is titled “War with China: Are we closer than we think?” Another from ten months ago is titled “China’s new target in the battle to control the Pacific.” Another from six months ago is titled “Inside the battle for Taiwan and China’s looming war threat.” Another from two months ago is titled “Is the Navy ready? How the U.S. is preparing amid a naval buildup in China.”
All of these segments have millions of views on YouTube alone. Now this past weekend 60 Minutes Australia has aired back-to-back segments titled “The real Top Gun: US military in heated stand-off with China” and “Five countries secretly sharing intelligence say China is the No.1 threat,” both of which are as jaw-droppingly propagandistic as anything I’ve ever seen.
“It might sound like twisted logic, but military forces everywhere argue that the greater the firepower they possess, the greater the chance of maintaining peace,” opens 60 Minutes Australia’s Amelia Adams. “In other words, massive weaponry is the best deterrent to war. Right now the theory is being tested like never before, and much of it is happening in Australia’s backyard, the Indo-Pacific region. The United States wants the world, and more particularly China, to know of its increasing presence there, and to do that it’s putting on a spectacular show.”
What follows is 19 minutes of overproduced footage displaying this “massive weaponry” while Adams oohs and ahhs and gives slobberingly sycophantic interviews to US military officials.
“There’s something utterly mesmerising about the F-35 jet,” Adams moans. “The sound, the heat, and the power put this supersonic stealth fighter in a league of its own.”
“Colonel these are some very impressive machines you’re in charge of!” she gushes to an officer on an aircraft carrier.
“Yes ma’am,” the colonel replies.
Jesus lady, do your orgasming off camera.
Contrast this glowing ecstatic revelry with Adams’ open hostility later in the segment toward a Chinese think tanker named Henry Wang, claiming that he was trying to “rewrite history” for dismissing panic about a Chinese military buildup by pointing out (100 percent correctly) that China is spending a lower percentage of its GDP on its military than western nations.
“Every command, every maneuver, is being fine-tuned on this vast blue stage, where China has proven to be a bad actor, playing a long game of intimidating Pacific nations,” Adams proclaims over helicopter footage of US war ships. “But the US and its allies aren’t having it, bolstering their defenses — and it’s an impressive display.”
I defy you to find me footage more brazenly propagandistic than this, from any point in history. This is supposed to be a news show, run by people who purport to be journalists, yet they’re engaging in propaganda that looks like it came from a Sacha Baron Cohen spoof of a third world dictatorship.
As I never tire of pointing out, the claim that the US has been militarily encircling its number one geopolitical rival defensively is the single dumbest thing the empire asks us to believe these days. The US is surrounding China with war machinery in ways that it would consider an outrageously aggressive provocation if the same thing were done in its neck of the woods, which means the US is plainly the aggressor in this standoff, and China is plainly reacting defensively to those aggressions.
While the first segment unquestioningly regurgitates Pentagon narratives and gives supportive interviews to military officials, the second segment unquestioningly regurgitates talking points from the western intelligence cartel and gives supportive interviews to Five Eyes spooks.
“Showing off deadly weaponry in massive war games is a tactic China and the United States both use to try to avoid full-on combat,” says 60 Minutes Australia’s Nick McKenzie in introduction. “But the truth is the two countries, as well as other nations including Australia, are already battling it out in an invisible war. There are no frontline soldiers but there are significant skirmishes. Until now these conflicts have been kept quiet, but key members of a secretive alliance of top cops from Australia, the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and New Zealand are about to change that.”
“Their group is called the Five Eyes, and tonight they want you to know what they see,” says McKenzie, which is the same as saying “We’re telling you what the Five Eyes intelligence agencies told us to tell you.”
McKenzie literally just assembles a bunch of Five Eyes officials to tell Australians that China is bad and dangerous, and then disguises the western intelligence cartel advancing its own information interests as a real news story.
“There is one threat that alarms our partners more than any other,” McKenzie says over dramatic music, asking “Which state actor is the key threat to democracy in Australia and amongst the Five Eyes partners?” and presenting a montage of western intelligence operatives answering (you guessed it) China.
“The Americans describe a growing menace on our doorstep flowing from China’s increasing influence in the region,” McKenzie says, before asking an American official, “Do you see the Chinese state preying on Pacific island nations?”
“I believe so, yes,” the official responds.
Western journalism, ladies and gents.
Australians are particularly vulnerable to propaganda because Australia has the most concentrated media ownership in the western world, dominated by a powerful duopoly of Nine Entertainment (who airs 60 Minutes) and the Murdoch-owned News Corp. This vulnerability is being fully exploited as the time comes for the western empire to beat the war drums against China.
We keep being hammered by this narrative that “massive weaponry is the best deterrent to war,” when all facts in evidence say the exact opposite is true. It was the military encroachment against Russia and the conversion of Ukraine into a NATO military asset which provoked Putin to invade Ukraine, and all the militarization against China that we are seeing is only inflaming tensions and making war more likely.
And, I mean, of course it is; even a casual glance at the Cuban Missile Crisis reveals that powerful nations don’t take kindly to having menacing forces placed near their borders. So much of the propaganda indoctrination we’re subjected to in the 2020s revolves around convincing people to believe that Russia and China should react completely differently than the way the US would react if foreign proxy forces were being amassed along its borders.
So yes, Amelia Adams, claiming that aggression and militarism is the best path toward peace is absolutely “twisted logic”. It is as twisted as it gets. Because it is false. This is obvious to anyone who hasn’t yet been successfully indoctrinated into this omnicidal belief system.
We need to do everything we can to fight against this indoctrination now, because if we wait until the war actually starts it will likely be too late to resist.
America’s Wars and the US Debt Crisis
To surmount the debt crisis, America needs to stop feeding the Military-Industrial Complex, the most powerful lobby in Washington.
JEFFREY D. SACHS, May 20, 2023, Common Dreams https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/military-spending-debt-crisis
In the year 2000, the U.S. government debt was $3.5 trillion, equal to 35% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). By 2022, the debt was $24 trillion, equal to 95% of GDP. The U.S. debt is soaring, hence America’s current debt crisis. Yet both Republicans and Democrats are missing the solution: stopping America’s wars of choice and slashing military outlays.
Suppose the government’s debt had remained at a modest 35% of GDP, as in 2000. Today’s debt would be $9 trillion, as opposed to $24 trillion. Why did the U.S. government incur the excess $15 trillion in debt?
The single biggest answer is the U.S. government’s addiction to war and military spending. According to the Watson Institute at Brown University, the cost of U.S. wars from fiscal year 2001 to fiscal year 2022 amounted to a whopping $8 trillion, more than half of the extra $15 trillion in debt. The other $7 trillion arose roughly equally from budget deficits caused by the 2008 financial crisis and the Covid-19 pandemic
Facing down the military-industrial lobby is the vital first step to putting America’s fiscal house in order
To surmount the debt crisis, America needs to stop feeding the Military-Industrial Complex (MIC), the most powerful lobby in Washington. As President Dwight D. Eisenhower famously warned on January 17, 1961, “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.” Since 2000, the MIC led the U.S. into disastrous wars of choice in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, and now Ukraine.
The Military-Industrial Complex long ago adopted a winning political strategy by ensuring that the military budget reaches into every Congressional district. The Congressional Research Service recently reminded Congress that, “Defense spending touches every Member of Congress’s district through pay and benefits for military servicemembers and retirees, economic and environmental impact of installations, and procurement of weapons systems and parts from local industry, among other activities.” Only a brave member of Congress would vote against the military-industry lobby, yet bravery is certainly no hallmark of Congress.
America’s annual military spending is now around $900 billion, roughly 40% of the world’s total, and greater than the next 10 countries combined. U.S. military spending in 2022 was triple that of China. According to Congressional Budget Office, the military outlays for 2024-2033 will be a staggering $10.3 trillion on current baseline. A quarter or more of that could be avoided by ending America’s wars of choice, closing down many of America’s 800 or so military bases around the world, and negotiating new arms control agreements with China and Russia.
Yet instead of peace through diplomacy, and fiscal responsibility, the MIC regularly scares the American people with a comic-book style depictions of villains whom the U.S. must stop at all costs. The post-2000 list has included Afghanistan’s Taliban, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, Libya’s Moammar Qaddafi, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, and recently, China’s Xi Jinping. War, we are repeatedly told, is necessary for America’s survival.
A peace-oriented foreign policy would be opposed strenuously by the military-industrial lobby but not by the public. Significant public pluralities already want less, not more, U.S. involvement in other countries’ affairs, and less, not more, US troop deployments overseas. Regarding Ukraine, Americans overwhelmingly want a “minor role” (52%) rather than a “major role” (26%) in the conflict between Russia and Ukraine. This is why neither Biden nor any recent president has dared to ask Congress for any tax increase to pay for America’s wars. The public’s response would be a resounding “No!”
While America’s wars of choice have been awful for America, they have been far greater disasters for countries that America purports to be saving. As Henry Kissinger famously quipped, “To be an enemy of the United States can be dangerous, but to be a friend is fatal.” Afghanistan was America’s cause from 2001 to 2021, until the U.S. left it broken, bankrupt, and hungry. Ukraine is now in America’s embrace, with the same likely results: ongoing war, death, and destruction.
The military budget could be cut prudently and deeply if the U.S. replaced its wars of choice and arms races with real diplomacy and arms agreements. If presidents and members of congress had only heeded the warnings of top American diplomats such as William Burns, the U.S. Ambassador to Russia in 2008, and now CIA Director, the U.S. would have protected Ukraine’s security through diplomacy, agreeing with Russia that the U.S. would not expand NATO into Ukraine if Russia also kept its military out of Ukraine. Yet relentless NATO expansion is a favorite cause of the MIC; new NATO members are major customers of U.S. armaments.
The U.S. has also unilaterally abandoned key arms control agreements. In 2002, the U.S. unilaterally walked out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. And rather than promote nuclear disarmament—as the U.S. and other nuclear powers are required to do under Article VI the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty—the Military-Industrial Complex has sold Congress on plans to spend more than $600 billion by 2030 to “modernize” the U.S. nuclear arsenal.
Now the MIC is talking up the prospect of war with China over Taiwan. The drumbeats of war with China are stoking the military budget, yet war with China is easily avoidable if the U.S. adheres to the One-China policy that properly underpins U.S.-China relations. Such a war should be unthinkable. More than bankrupting the U.S., it could end the world.
Military spending is not the only budget challenge. Aging and rising healthcare costs add to the fiscal woes. According to the Congressional Budget Office, debt will reach 185 percent of GDP by 2052 if current policies remain unchanged. Healthcare costs should be capped while taxes on the rich should be raised. Yet facing down the military-industrial lobby is the vital first step to putting America’s fiscal house in order, needed to save the U.S., and possibly the world, from America’s perverse lobby-driven politics.
Seymour Hersh: The Ukraine Refugee Question
Ukraine’s neighbors push for Zelensky to pursue peace as millions of displaced people flow into Europe. By Seymour Hersh / Substack https://scheerpost.com/2023/05/19/seymour-hersh-the-ukraine-refugee-question/
Last Saturday the Washington Post published an exposé of classified American intelligence documents showing that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, working behind the back of the Biden White House, pushed hard earlier this year for an expanded series of missile attacks inside Russia. The documents were part of a large cache of classified materials posted online by an Air Force enlisted man now in custody. A senior official of the Biden administration, asked by the Post for comment on the newly revealed intelligence, said that Zelensky has never violated his pledge never to use American weapons to strike inside Russia. In the view of the White House, Zelensky can do no wrong.
Zelensky’s desire to take the war to Russia may not be clear to the president and senior foreign policy aides in the White House, but it is to those in the American intelligence community who have found it difficult to get their intelligence and their assessments a hearing in the Oval Office. Meanwhile, the slaughter in the city of Bakhmut continues. It is similar in idiocy, if not in numbers, to the slaughter in Verdun and the Somme during World War I. The men in charge of today’s war—in Moscow, Kiev, and Washington—have shown no interest even in temporary ceasefire talks that could serve as a prelude to something permanent. The talk now is only about the possibilities of a late spring or summer offensive by either party.
But something else is cooking, as some in the American intelligence community know and have reported in secret, at the instigation of government officials at various levels in Poland, Hungary, Lithuania, Estonia, Czechoslovakia, and Latvia. These countries are all allies of Ukraine and declared enemies of Vladimir Putin.
This group is led by Poland, whose leadership no longer fears the Russian army because its performance in Ukraine has left the glow of its success at Stalingrad during the Second World War in tatters. It has been quietly urging Zelensky to find a way to end the war—even by resigning himself, if necessary—and to allow the process of rebuilding his nation to get under way. Zelensky is not budging, according to intercepts and other data known inside the Central Intelligence Agency, but he is beginning to lose the private support of his neighbors.
One of the driving forces for the quiet European talks with Zelensky has been the more than five million Ukrainians fleeing from the war who have crossed the country’s borders and have registered with its neighbors under an EU agreement for temporary protection that includes residency rights, access to the labor market, housing, social welfare assistance, and medical care. An assessment published by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees reports that the estimate excludes roughly 3 million Ukrainian refugees who escaped from the war zone without a visa into any of the 27 European nations that have abolished border control between each other under the Schengen agreement. Ukraine, though not in the EU, now enjoys all the benefits of the Schengen pact. A few nations, exhausted by the 15-month war, have reintroduced some forms of border control, but the regional refugee crisis will not be resolved until there is a formal peace agreement.
The UNHRC reports that free travel from Ukraine into the Baltic states and EU states in Western Europe “makes it particularly difficult to determine exactly how many Ukrainians have reached the EU in the last few months, and where they are now.” The report says the “vast majority” of the Ukrainian refugees are women and children, and one third of them are under the age of eighteen. Seventy-three per cent of the refugees of working age are women, many with children.
A February analysis of the European refugee issue by the Council on Foreign Relations found that “tens of billions of dollars” in humanitarian aid were poured into Ukraine’s neighbors during the war’s first year. “As the conflict enters its second year with no end in sight,” the report says, “experts worry that host countries are growing fatigued.”
Weeks ago I learned that the American intelligence community was aware that some officials in Western Europe and the Baltic states want the war between Ukraine and Russia to end. These officials have concluded that it is time for Zelensky to “come around” and seek a settlement. A knowledgeable American official told me that some in the leadership in Hungary and Poland were among those working together to get Ukraine involved in serious talks with Moscow. “Hungary is a big player in this and so are Poland and Germany, and they are working to get Zelensky to come around,” the American official said. The European leaders have made it clear that “Zelensky can keep what he’s got”—a villa in Italy and interests in offshore bank accounts—“if he works up a peace deal even if he’s got to be paid off, if it’s the only way to get a deal.”
So far, the official said, Zelensky has rejected such advice and ignored offers of large sums of money to ease his retreat to an estate he owns in Italy. There is no support in the Biden Administration for any settlement that involves Zelensky’s departure, and the leadership in France and England “are too beholden” to Biden to contemplate such a scenario. There is a reality that some elements in the American intelligence community can’t ignore, the official said, even if the White House is ignoring it: “Ukraine is running out of money and it is known that the next four or months are critical. And Eastern Europeans are talking about a deal.” The issue for them, the official told me, “is how to get the United States to stop supporting Zelensky,” The White House support goes beyond the needs of the war: “We are paying all of the retirement funds—the 401k’s—for Ukraine.”
And Zelensky wants more, the official said. “Zelensky is telling us that if you want to win the war you’ve got to give me more money and more stuff. He tells us, ‘I’ve got to pay off the generals.’ He’s telling us”—if he is forced out of office—“he’s going to the highest bidder. He’d rather go to Italy than stay and possibly get killed by his own people.”
“All of this talk is being reported and is now flying around inside the American intelligence community, but, as usual,” the official said, “it’s not clear to the intelligence community what the president and his foreign policy aides in the White House know of the reality” of the European discussion about finding a way to end the war. “We are still training Ukrainians how to fly our F-16s that will be shot down by Russia as soon as they get into the war zone. The mainstream press is dedicated to Biden and the war and Biden is still talking about the Great Satan in Moscow while the Russian economy is doing great. Putin can stay where he is”—in power—“despite his failure to wipe Ukraine off the map as an independent state. And he thought he would win the war with just one airborne division”—a sardonic reference to Russia’s failed effort in the first days of the war to seize a vital airport by parachuting in an attack force.
“Europe’s problem,” the official said, in terms of getting a quick settlement to the war, “is that the White House wants Zelensky to survive while there are others”—in Russia and in some European capitals—“who say Zelensky has got to go, no matter what,”
It’s not clear that this understanding has gotten to the Oval Office. I have been told that some of the better intelligence about the war does not reach the president, through no fault of those who prepare the often contrary assessments. Biden is said to rely on briefings and other materials prepared by Avril Haines, director of National Intelligence, since the Biden Administration came into office. She has spent much of her career working for Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, whose ties to Biden and agreement with him on matters pertaining to Russia and China go back decades.
The one saving grace for some in the community, I have been told, has been CIA Director William Burns. Burns was ambassador to Russia and deputy secretary of State and is seen as someone “who has come around” in opposition to some of the White House’s foreign policy follies. “He doesn’t want to be a rat on a sinking ship,” the official told me.
On the other hand, I have been told, it’s not clear to those in the CIA who prepare the President’s Daily Brief that Joe Biden is a regular reader of their intelligence summary. The document is usually three pages. Decades ago I was told—by someone who begged me not to write about it at the time—that Ronald Reagan rarely read the PDB until Colin Powell, then in the White House, began reading it to a video recorder. The tape would then be played for the president. It’s unclear who, if anyone, might take the initiative as Biden’s Colin Powell.
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Antinuclear 