From 25th June – the most recent Australian nuclear news.
(See last week’s at https://antinuclear.net/2024/06/24/keep-up-to-date-on-australias-media-quagmire-on-nuclear-power/)
Climate. Nuclear more costly and could ‘sound the death knell’ for Australia’s decarbonisation efforts, report says. Incoming climate change tsar Matt Kean pours cold water on nuclear push.
Economics. Coalition’s taxpayer-funded nuclear con a road to ruin. Power prices will rise under Dutton’s incomplete nuclear energy ‘plan’.
Energy. Does the nuclear ‘plan’ add up? Australia’s carbon emissions under the Coalition’s proposal.
Opposition to nuclear. Unanimous trade union opposition to Dutton’s nuclear plans.
Politics. Dutton’s Nuclear ‘Thuggery’ Will Heat Up Debate And Energy Prices, But It Won’t Cool The Climate. Peter Dutton’s nuclear power plans are an ironic backflip to nationalisation for the Liberal Party. ‘Long held denialism’: Paul Keating launches stinging attack on Coalition’s nuclear power push. “Jam tomorrow:” Dutton’s confused nuclear plan won’t keep the lights o ACT ‘vulnerable’ to being forced into nuclear under Coalition: Barr. The cloud of coal has long hung over the Latrobe Valley. Now nuclear power is dividing it. ‘No one serious takes their plan seriously’: PM on nuclear power.
Politics International. Peter Dutton’s nuclear strategy relies on Trump winning the USA election, and tearing up global climate politics.
Public Opinion. Resolve Political Monitor: New poll reveals what Aussie voters think of Peter Dutton’s nuclear power plans. Labor gains in Newspoll as Australians narrowly oppose the Coalition’s nuclear energy plan.
Renewable. Nuclear option ‘not enough’ to avoid rush for more wind and solar. Economic Regulation Authority chair says nuclear ‘can’t work’ with renewables.
Secrets and lies. The Coalition says the rest of the G20 is powering ahead with nuclear – it’s just not true
Spinbuster. The Coalition’s nuclear fantasy serves short-term political objectives – and its fossil fuel backers Hidden costs? Cheaper energy? ‘Farcical’ locations? Debunking the hype around nuclear. Dutton Nuclear is just a scam | Scam of the Week https://www.youtube.com/embed/vVwkt9gX2DM?si=kv39UZ4-WYmyur9P Peter Dutton says nuclear power plants “burn energy.” No they don’t.
Technology. The Coalition says its nuclear plants will run for 100 years. What does the international experience tell us?
Wastes. What happens to nuclear waste under Peter Dutton’s Coalition plan to build seven nuclear power reactors? Nuclear energy creates the most dangerous form of radioactive waste. Where does Peter Dutton plan to put it?.
Assange’s Return to Australia: The Resentment of the Hacks
Sharp eyes will be trained on Assange in Australia, ……… He is in the bosom of the Five Eyes Alliance, permanently threatened by the prospect of recall and renewed interest by Washington. And there are dozens of journalists, indifferent to the dangers the entire effort against the publisher augurs for their own craft, wishing that to be the case.
Dr Binoy Kampmark 1 July 24 https://theaimn.com/author/binoy-kampmark/
Julian Assange of WikiLeaks fame is now back in the country of his birth, having endured conditions of captivity ranging from cramped digs in London’s Ecuadorian embassy to the maximum-security facilities of Belmarsh Prison. His return to Australia after striking a plea deal with the US Department of Justice sees him in a state with some of the most onerous secrecy provisions of any in the Western world.
As of January 2023, according to the Attorney-General’s Department, the Australian Commonwealth had 11 general secrecy offences in Part 5.6 of the Criminal Code, 542 specific secrecy offences across 178 Commonwealth laws and 296 non-disclosure duties spanning 107 Commonwealth laws criminalising unauthorised disclosure of information by current and former employees of the Commonwealth.
In November 2023, the Albanese Government agreed to 11 recommendations advanced by the final report of the review of secrecy provisions. While aspiring to thin back the excessive overgrowth of secrecy, old habits die hard. Suggested protections regarding press freedom and individuals providing information to Royal Commissions will hardly instil confidence.
With that background, it is unsurprising that Assange’s return, while delighting his family, supporters and free press advocates, has stirred the seething resentment of the national security establishment, Fourth Estate crawlers, and any number of journalistic sellouts. Damn it all, such attitudes seem to say: he transformed journalism, stole away our self-censorship, exposed readers to the original classified text, and let the public decide for itself how to react to disclosures revealing the abuse of power. Minimal editorialising; maximum textual interpretation through the eyes of the universal citizenry, a terrifying prospect for those in government.
Given that the Australian press establishment is distastefully comfortable with politicians – the national broadcaster, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, for instance, has a central reporting bureau in Canberra’s Parliament House – Assange’s return has brought much agitation. The Canberra press corps earn their crust in a perversely symbiotic, and often uncritical relationship, with the political establishment that furnishes them with rationed morsels of information. The last thing they want is an active Assange scuppering such a neat understanding, a radical transparency warrior keenly upsetting conventions of hypocrisy long respected.
Let’s wade through the venom. Press gallery scribbler Phillip Coorey of the Australian Financial Review proved provincially ignorant, his mind ill-temperedly confused about WikiLeaks. “I have never been able to make up my mind about Assange.” Given that his profession benefits from leaks, whistleblowing and the exposure of abuses, one wonders what he is doing in it. Assange has, after all, been convicted under the US Espionage Act of 1917 for engaging in that very activity, a matter that should give Coorey pause for outrage.
For the veteran journalist, another parallel was more appropriate, something rather distant from any notions of public interest journalism that had effectively been criminalised by the US Republic. “The release of Julian Assange has closer parallels to that of David Hicks 17 years ago, who like Assange, was deemed to have broken American law while not in that country, and which eventually involved a US president cutting a favour for an Australian prime minister.”
The case of Hicks remains a ghastly reminder of Australian diplomatic and legal cowardice. Coorey is only right to assume that both cases feature tormented flights of fancy by the US imperium keen on breaking a few skulls in their quest to make the world safe for Washington. The military commissions, of which Hicks was a victim, were created during the madly named Global War on Terror pursuant to presidential military order. Intended to try non-US citizens suspected of terrorism held at the Guantánamo Bay detention facility, they were farcical exercises of executive power, a fact pointed out by the US Supreme Court in 2006. It took Congressional authorisation via the Military Commissions Actin 2009 to spare them.
Coorey’s colleague and international editor of The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, Peter Hartcher, was similarly uninterested in what Assange exposed, babbling (paywalled) about the publisher’s return as the moment “Assangeism came into plain view”. He had no stomach for “the cult” which seemed to have infected Canberra’s cold weather. He also wondered whether Assange could constructively “use his global celebrity status to campaign for public interest journalism and human rights.” To do so – and here, teacher’s pet of the political establishment, beater of the war drum for the United States – Assange would have to “fundamentally” alter “his ways to advance the cause”.
All this was a prelude for Hartcher to take the hatchet to the journalistic exploits of a man more decorated with journalism awards that many in the Canberra gallery combined. The claim that he is “a journalist is hotly contested by actual journalists.” Despite the US government conceding that the disclosures by WikiLeaks had not resulted in harm to US sources, “there were many other victims of Assange’s project.” The returned publisher was only in Australia “on probation”, a signal reminder that the media establishment will be attempting to badger him into treacherous conformity.
Even this language was too mild for another Australian hack, Michael Ware, who had previously worked for Time Magazine and CNN. With pathological inventiveness, he thought Assange “a traitor in the sense that, during a time of war, when we had American, British and Australian troops in the field, under fire, Julian Assange published troves of unredacted documents.” Never mind truth to power; in Ware’s world, veracity is subordinate to it, even in an illegal war. What he calls “methods” and “methodology” cannot be exposed.
Such gutter journalism has its necessary cognate in gutter politics. All regard information was threatening unless appropriately handled, its more potent effects for change stilled. Leader of the opposition in the Senate, Simon Birmingham (paywalled), found it “completely unnecessary and totally inappropriate for Julian Assange to be greeted like some homecoming hero by the Australian Prime Minister.”Chorusing with hacks Coorey, Hartcher and Ware, Birmingham bleated about the publication by Assange of half a million documents “without having read them, curated them, checked to see if there was anything that could be damaging or risking the lives of others there.” Keep the distortions flying, Senator.
Dennis Richardson, former domestic intelligence chief and revolving door specialist (public servant becomes private profiteer with ease in Canberra), similarly found it inexplicable that the PM contacted Assange with a note of congratulation, or even showed any public interest in his release from a system that was killing him. “I can think of no other reason why a prime minister would ring Assange on his return to Australia except for purposes relating to politics,” moaned Richardson to the Guardian Australia.
For Richardson, Assange had been legitimately convicted, even if it was achieved via that most notorious of mechanisms, the plea deal. The inconvenient aside that Assange had been spied upon by CIA sponsored operatives, considered a possible object of abduction, rendition or assassination never clouds his uncluttered mind.
Sharp eyes will be trained on Assange in Australia, however long he wishes to say. He is in the bosom of the Five Eyes Alliance, permanently threatened by the prospect of recall and renewed interest by Washington. And there are dozens of journalists, indifferent to the dangers the entire effort against the publisher augurs for their own craft, wishing that to be the case.
Unanimous trade union opposition to Dutton’s nuclear plans
Jim Green, 1 July 24
Here’s a list of unions that endorsed a 2019 statement opposing nuclear power in Australia:
Australian Council of Trade Unions, Tasmanian Unions, Unions ACT, Unions WA, Unions SA, Unions NT, Victorian Trades Hall Council, Australian Education Union, Australian Manufacturing Workers Union, Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation, Australian Services Union, Communication Workers Union, Electrical Trades Union, Independent Education Union (Vic – Tas), Maritime Union of Australia, National Union of Workers, United Voice, and the United Firefighters Union.
And the AWU and MEU are opposing Dutton’s nuclear plans (see below)… the only two unions previously supporting nuclear power.
Seems there is now 100% trade union opposition to nuclear power in Australia?
Undermining the frequent claim from Dutton and Ted O’Brien that ‘high energy IQ’ workers at coal plants will support nuclear power.
Two Labor-aligned unions accused of ‘backflipping’ on their ‘long held’ support for nuclear energy after Coalition policy announcement
Two Labor-aligned unions have been slammed for “backflipping” on their “long held” support for nuclear energy after they attacked the opposition’s nuclear policy despite recently calling on state and federal governments to back nuclear.
Two Labor-aligned unions accused of ‘backflipping’ on their ‘long held’ support for nuclear energy after Coalition policy announcement
Two Labor-aligned unions have been slammed for “backflipping” on their “long held” support for nuclear energy after they attacked the opposition’s nuclear policy despite recently calling on state and federal governments to back nuclear.
Sky News, 1 July 24, , 2024
Two Labor-aligned unions have been accused of “backflipping” on their “long-held” support for nuclear energy, after they attacked the Coalition’s proposal to build nuclear plants on the sites of aging coal plants.
Both the Australian Workers Union and the Mining and Energy Union (formerly the CFMEU’s mining and energy division) have long records of supporting nuclear energy, with the head of the AWU lobbying the government to lift the ban on nuclear as recently as December last year.
Despite this, both the AWU and MEU condemned the Coalition’s nuclear policy after the opposition revealed the seven sites where it is proposing to build nuclear reactors to replace aging coal-fired power plants……..
While neither the AWU or MEU reacted to the policy with images of toxic wastelands, both unions were quick to attack the policy.
The AWU hit out at the Coalition’s plans in a social media message posted just hours after the announcement, describing it as a “half-baked fantasy” that will “slam the brakes on our energy transition and put our industries in peril”.
“The Coalition must give up its nuclear dreaming and back the Future Gas Strategy,” AWU national secretary Paul Farrow was quoted as saying in the post.
In follow up posts the powerful union – which is aligned with Labor’s right faction – followed up with posts stating that this mean “investing now in firmed renewables backed up with gas.”
“It doesn’t mean sitting on our hands for decades to pay more for nuclear if and when it finally arrives,” the AWU post said.
“This proposal has no interest in solving real challenges faced by industry and workers today. Energy is not a political football: it’s our livelihoods. We deserve so much better.”………………………………….
The MEU also attacked the Coalition’s nuclear policy, despite years of advocating for nuclear as a solution to impending job losses from the closure of coal-fired power plants.
In a media release put out on June 19, the MEU described it as a “distraction” that would fail to provide jobs for workers in coal-fired plants before they shut down.
“Now is not the time for distractions. We need to be acting to deliver an orderly transition that focuses on jobs, economic activity in affected regions and positive social outcomes for affected workers while we still have the chance,” MEU General Secretary Grahame Kelly said.
Australia’s Liberal-National Party really communist – wants a NATIONALISED NUCLEAR industry!
What more can I say? I am astounded. The Liberal party – champion of free enterprise – long opponent of our taxes being used to support wasteful public projects like health, education, welfare, environment, – now makes a dramatic exception to its private enterprise philosophy.
They want a fully tax-payer built and run nuclear power industry.
I mean – I’m not here arguing that nuclear power is dirty, unhealthy, or will be too late to combat climate change, or any of those nasty, Lefty allegations. Good heavens, I’m not a communist!
But I’m wondering if Peter Dutton, esteemed Leader of this Opposition Party IS in fact a communist? He wants to set up a nuclear power industry in Australia, and has designated several sites each to host several nuclear reactors – I think Large Nuclear Reactors – but I’m not sure on this. He does want little ones, too.
What other explanation?
In my paranoia, one explanation comes to mind.
Little Australia – population under 27 million, is not well informed on nuclear issues. Many of those 27 million get their information from Murdoch media, and from Trumpian-type posts on social media. Last year, guided by the Atlas Network, those outlets just pushed a simplistic promotion – and quite miraculously changed public opinion on Aboriginal rights.
Could they do it again – converting the Australian public to wanting to have their taxes pay for the nuclear industry?
And if the nuclear lobby and its close mates the mining giants can pull this off in Australia – why not in more of the Western world?
Is Australia the nuclear lobby’s guinea pig, with Peter Dutton its glorious and well-funded hero?
Julian Assange: Free at last, but guilty of practicing journalism
Pepe Escobar, Strategic Culture Foundation, Wed, 26 Jun 2024, https://www.sott.net/article/492585-Julian-Assange-Free-at-last-but-guilty-of-practicing-journalism
The United States Government (USG) – under the “rules-based international order” – has de facto ruled that Julian Assange is guilty of practicing journalism.
Edward Snowden had already noted that “when exposing a crime is treated as committing a crime, you are being ruled by criminals.”
Criminals such as Mike “We Lie, We Cheat, We Steal” Pompeo, former Trump Secretary of State, who had planned to kidnap and kill Julian when he was head of the CIA.
The indomitable Jennifer Robinson and Julian’s U.S. lawyer Barry Pollack sum it all up: the United States has “pursued journalism as a crime”.
Julian was forced to suffer an unspeakably vicious Via Crucis because he dared to expose USG war crimes; the inner workings of the U.S. military in their rolling thunder War Of Terror (italics mine) in Afghanistan and Iraq; and – Holy of Holies – he dared to release emails showing the Democratic National Committee (DNC) colluded with the notorious warmongering Harpy Hillary Clinton.
Julian was subjected to relentless psychological torture, and nearly crucified for publishing facts that should always remain invisible to public opinion. That’s what top-notch journalism is all about.
The whole drama teaches the whole planet everything one needs to know about the absolute control of the Hegemon over pathetic UK and EU.
And that bring us to the kabuki that may – and the operative word is “may” – be closing the case. Title of the twisted morality play: ‘Plead Guilty or Die in Jail’.
The final twist in the plot line of the morality play runs like this: the combo behind the cadaver in the White House realized that torturing an Australian journalist and publisher in a maximum security U.S. prison in an electoral year was not exactly good for business.
At the same time the British establishment was begging to be excluded from the plot – as its “justice” system was forced by the Hegemon to keep an innocent man and family father hostage for 5 years, in abysmal conditions, in the name of protecting a basket of Anglo-American intel secrets.
In the end, the British establishment quietly applied all the pressure it could muster to run towards the exit – in full knowledge of what the Americans were planning for Julian.
Life in prison was “fair and reasonable”
Cue to the kabuki this Wednesday in Saipan, the largest of the Northern Mariana Islands, unincorporated Pacific land administered by the Hegemon.
Free at last – maybe, but with conditionalities that remain quite murky.
Julian was ordered by this U.S. Court in the Pacific to instruct WikiLeaks to destroy information as a condition of the deal.
Julian had to tell U.S. judge Ramona Manglona that he was not bribed or coerced to plead guilty to the crucial charge of “conspiring to unlawfully obtain and disseminate classified information relating to the national defense of the United States”.
Well, his lawyers told him he had to follow the ‘Plead Guilty or Die in Jail’ script. Otherwise, no deal.
Judge Manglona – in an astonishing brush aside of those 5 years of psychological torture – said, “it appears that your 62 months in prison was fair and reasonable and proportionate.”
So now the – oh, so benign and “fair” – USG will take the necessary steps to immediately erase remaining charges against Julian in the notoriously harsh Eastern District of Virginia.
Julian was always adamant: he stressed over and over again that he would never plead guilty to an espionage charge. He didn’t; he pleaded guilty to a hazy felony/conspiracy charge; was given time served; was set free; and that’s a wrap.
Or is it?
Australia is a Hegemon vassal state, intel included, and with less than zero capability to protect its civilian population.
Moving from the UK to Australia may not be exactly an upgrade – even with freedom included. A real upgrade would be a move to a True Sovereign. Like Russia. Yet Julian will need U.S. authorization to travel and leave Australia.Moscow inevitably will be a sanctioned, off-limits destination.
There’s hardly any question Julian will be back at the helm of WikiLeaks. Whistleblowers may be even lining up as we speak to tell their stories – supported by official documents.
Yet the stark, ominous message remains fully imprinted in the collective unconscious: the ruthless, all-powerful U.S. Intel Apparatus will go no holds barred and take no prisoners to punish anyone, anywhere, who dares to expose imperial crimes. A new global epic starts now: The Fight against Criminalized Journalism.
LABOR AGAINST WAR says nuclear power and nuclear submarines and their wastes should have no part in Australia.
Labor Against War, Marcus Strom , 20 June 2024
ALP Government must be consistent on nuclear energy
Grassroots anti-AUKUS campaign, Labor Against War, joins with the ALP Government in
condemning Liberal leader Peter Dutton’s desperate attempt to reignite the climate wars by
announcing plans for seven nuclear reactors on land sites in Australia.
Nuclear energy should play no part in Australia’s energy mix. Dutton’s distraction is about
extending Australia’s reliance on, and production of, fossil fuels and delaying the urgently
needed transition to renewals. It is not a serious attempt to reduce carbon emissions.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has said the policy is a “nuclear fantasy”. We agree. Energy Minister Chris Bowen has said the plans are “too slow, too expensive and too risky for Australia. It’s not a plan, it’s a scam.”
LAW National Convenor Marcus Strom said: “Chris Bowen is spot on, but this assessment equally applies to AUKUS: a dangerous and expensive scam introduced by Scott Morrison. “By continuing with the Morrison nuclear submarine plan, the Albanese Government has unfortunately opened the door to Dutton’s nuclear energy fantasy.
“If nuclear energy is too risky on terra firma, it can’t be safe for our oceans. And AUKUS brings with it the added risk of weapons-grade nuclear waste, nuclear proliferation and a US war with China that is against the interests of the Australian people. “The Government must be consistent: we need to reject nuclear energy on land and at sea.”
Dutton’s reactors will produce nuclear waste for which there is no safe plan for storage. This is the same for the weapons-grade waste that the AUKUS submarines will produce. “And like Dutton’s reactor fantasy, it is still very much up in the air if the AUKUS nuclear submarines will ever arrive,” Mr Strom said.
“The US is way behind its own nuclear submarine manufacturing timetable and by January Donald Trump, a convicted felon, could be back in the White House calling the shots. “In criticising Dutton’s fantasy, the Prime Minister needs to cast out the nuclear beam in his own eye.” Marcus Strom
How the media facilitates Dutton’s nuclear lies
The fault is the media’s also. It entertains the nonsense, repeats it until it is real. It pretends there is debate where there is none. It leans too heavily on conflict. It mistakes credulity for balance.
It is in these false equivalences that Peter Dutton finds his purpose. Here, on these glib plains, he is reinvented as a politician. His lone policy announcement is given the status once reserved for an alternative government.
In journalism, the answer to any question in a headline is almost always no. The hope is that a reader might settle for maybe. The question mark itself bends over in embarrassment.
Last week, the ABC used its leading news podcast to ask: “Could nuclear power really lead to cheaper bills?” Similar questions have been asked across the media. The answer is no, but the headline has already done its work. It has already lent credibility to a fantasy.
According to the latest Lowy polling, two thirds of Australians now support the use of nuclear power. As many as 27 per cent support it strongly. A decade ago the opposite was true: 62 per cent did not want nuclear as part of the energy mix.
The difference is not science. It is mischief. The case for nuclear has not grown stronger. The cost argument has not been won. Uranium has become no safer or less finite. All that has changed is the desperateness of the Coalition and the fecklessness of the press.
Peter Dutton cannot name the experts who advised on his policy. This is most likely because they do not exist. Imaginary reactors are the preserve of imaginary scientists. The policy is not costed and relies on developments that are presently illegal.
Findings from the Australian Energy Market Operator, published this week, make clear that the power grid would fail before even the most optimistic projections of when these reactors might be operational. They are not a solution. They are a distraction.
Cost is another lie. The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation notes that nuclear power is twice as expensive to produce as renewables. These figures don’t allow for blowouts in construction and time, which are almost inevitable. If everything went right, the answer would still be wrong.
Dutton knows all this. So does the media that asks fallaciously if nuclear power could lead to cheaper bills. They have conspired to solve a problem that exists now with a solution that is never coming.
There is little enough being debated that this is taking up all the space. It is interrupting the inevitable shift to renewables. That is its sole intention.
Once again investment is being slowed. Once again the obvious is being treated as uncertain. This is played out as if it were a game, but it is not: the world is being pushed closer to catastrophe.
No wonder the question marks cower in their headlines, ashamed of their role in this whole sordid scam.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on June 29, 2024 as “The nuclear question mark”.
Nuclear option ‘not enough’ to avoid rush for more wind and solar
SMH, By Nick Toscano, June 29, 2024
A massive expansion of renewable energy will still be key to driving Australia’s transition away from coal and reaching net-zero emissions by 2050, new modelling shows, even if the Coalition wins the next election and implements a plan to deploy nuclear reactors across the country.
Opposition Leader Peter Dutton rekindled Australia’s climate wars this month, vowing to abandon the government’s target for renewable energy to account for 82 per cent of the grid by 2030, and instead pushing to build seven nuclear generators to achieve the longer-term ambition of reaching net-zero emissions by 2050.
However, modelling from research group Bloomberg New Energy Finance raises questions about how beneficial it would be for Australia to adopt nuclear energy at a time when it faces an imminent wave of more coal-fired power station closures and significant power demand growth driven by electrification and decarbonisation.
Assuming the Coalition’s seven proposed nuclear reactors add 7 gigawatts of nuclear power capacity by 2050, the rollout would reduce the necessary build-out of solar farms by only up to 7 per cent and wind farms by 12 per cent, the analysis found.
Even doubling that to 14 gigawatts, nuclear was found to have a limited role in avoiding the need to hasten the shift to large-scale renewables and to build far more power lines to connect them to the grid and major cities, it said…………………………………………………………………….
n its 25-year road map released this week, AEMO says Australia’s best and lowest-cost pathway through the transition is to build a grid dominated by renewable energy, firmed by grid-scale batteries and backed up by gas-powered generators.
AEMO did not assess the costs of nuclear energy because nuclear energy is banned under federal law. But it said nuclear “is one of the most expensive ways to generate electricity” and it said building the plants “would be too slow to replace retiring coal-fired generation”.
Energy Minister Chris Bowen said the BloombergNEF report was “another example of experts confirming nuclear was too slow, too expensive and too risky for Australia”. https://www.smh.com.au/business/the-economy/nuclear-option-not-enough-to-avoid-rush-for-more-wind-and-solar-20240628-p5jpjk.html
Julian Assange is finally free, but no thanks to the media
The establishment media acted as a willing tool in the demonising narrative the US and British governments carefully crafted against Assange.
The smears might not have stuck so well had they been thrown only by the rightwing tabloids. But life was breathed into these claims from their endless repetition by journalists supposedly on the other side of the aisle, particularly at the Guardian.
In this case, it was Assange. But the same media machine was rolled out against former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, another thorn in the establishment’s side. And as with Assange, the Guardian and the BBC were the two outlets that were most useful in making the smears stick.
JONATHAN COOK, 26 JUNE 2024 DeClassified UK
It was the media, led by the Guardian, that kept Assange behind bars. Their villainy will soon be erased because they write the script about what’s going on in the world.
“………………………………………………………………….Everything Assange had warned the US wanted to do to him was proved correct over the next five years, [from 2017] as he languished in Belmarsh entirely cut off from the outside world.
No one in our political or media class appeared to notice, or could afford to admit, that events were playing out exactly as the founder of Wikileaks had for so many years predicted they would – and for which he was, at the time, so roundly ridiculed.
Nor was that same political-media class prepared to factor in other vital context showing that the US was not trying to enforce some kind of legal process, but that the extradition case against Assange was entirely about wreaking vengeance – and making an example of the Wikileaks founder to deter others from following him in shedding light on US state crimes.
That included revelations that, true to form, the CIA, which was exposed as a rogue foreign intelligence agency in 250,000 embassy cables published by Wikileaks in 2010, had variously plotted to assassinate him or kidnap him off the streets of London.
Other evidence came to light that the CIA had been carrying out extensive spying operations on the embassy, recording Assange’s every move, including his meetings with his doctors and lawyers.
That fact alone should have seen the US case thrown out by the British courts. But the UK judiciary was looking over its shoulder, towards Washington, far more than it was abiding by its own statute books.
Media no watchdog
Western governments, politicians, the judiciary, and the media all failed Assange. Or rather, they did what they are actually there to do: keep the rabble – that is, you and me – from knowing what they are really up to.
Their job is to build narratives suggesting that they know best, that we must trust them, that their crimes, such as those they are supporting right now in Gaza, are actually not what they look like, but are, in fact, efforts in very difficult circumstances to uphold the moral order, to protect civilisation.
For this reason, there is a special need to identify the critical role played by the media in keeping Assange locked up for so long.
The truth is, with a properly adversarial media playing the role it declares for itself, as a watchdog on power, Assange could never have been disappeared for so long. He would have been freed years ago. It was the media that kept him behind bars.
The establishment media acted as a willing tool in the demonising narrative the US and British governments carefully crafted against Assange.
Even now, as he is reunited with his family, the BBC and others are peddling the same long-discredited lies.
Those include the constantly repeated claim by journalists that he faced “rape charges” in Sweden that were supposedly dropped. Here is the BBC making this error once again in its reporting this week.
In fact, Assange never faced more than a “preliminary investigation”, one the Swedish prosecutors repeatedly dropped for lack of evidence. The investigation, we now know, was revived and sustained for so long not because of Sweden but chiefly because the UK’s Crown Prosecution Service, then led by Sir Keir Starmer (now the leader of the Labour party), insisted on it dragging on.
Starmer made repeated trips to Washington during this period, when the US was trying to find a pretext to lock Assange away for political crimes, not sexual ones. But as happened so often in the Assange case, all the records of those meetings were destroyed by the British authorities.
The media’s other favourite deception – still being promoted – is the claim that Wikileaks’ releases put US informants in danger.
That is utter nonsense, as any journalist who has spent even a cursory amount of time studying the background to the case knows.
More than a decade ago, the Pentagon set up a review to identify any US agents killed or harmed as a result of the leaks. They did so precisely to help soften up public opinion against Assange.
And yet a team of 120 counter-intelligence officers could not find a single such case, as the head of the team, Brigadier-General Robert Carr, conceded in court in 2013.
Despite having a newsroom stuffed with hundreds of correspondents, including those claiming to specialise in defence, security and disinformation, the BBC still cannot get this basic fact about the case right.
That’s not an accident. It’s what happens when journalists allow themselves to be spoon-fed information from those they are supposedly watching over. That is what happens when journalists and intelligence officials live in a permanent, incestuous relationship.
Character assassination
But it is not just these glaring reporting failures that kept Assange confined to his small cell in Belmarsh. It was that the entire media acted in concert in his character assassination, making it not only acceptable but respectable to hate him.
It was impossible to post on social media about the Assange case without dozens of interlocutors popping up to tell you how deeply unpleasant he was, how much of a narcissist, how he had abused his cat or smeared his walls in the embassy with faeces. None of these individuals, of course, had ever met him.
It also never occurred to such people that, even were all of this true, it would still not have excused stripping Assange of his basic legal rights, as all too clearly happened. And even more so, it could not possibly justify eroding the public-interest duty of journalists to expose state crimes.
What was ultimately at stake in the protracted extradition hearings was the US government’s determination to equate investigative national-security journalism with “espionage”. Whether Assange was a narcissist had precisely no bearing on that matter.
Why were so many people persuaded Assange’s supposed character flaws were crucially important to the case? Because the establishment media – our supposed arbiters of truth – were agreed on the matter.
The smears might not have stuck so well had they been thrown only by the rightwing tabloids. But life was breathed into these claims from their endless repetition by journalists supposedly on the other side of the aisle, particularly at the Guardian.
Liberals and left-wingers were exposed to a steady flow of articles and tweets belittling Assange and his desperate, lonely struggle against the world’s sole superpower for the right not to be locked away for the rest of his life for doing journalism.
The Guardian – which had benefited by initially allying with Wikileaks in publishing its revelations – showed him precisely zero solidarity when the US establishment came knocking, determined to destroy the Wikileaks platform, and its founder, for making those revelations possible.
For the record, so we do not forget how Assange was kept confined for so long, these are a few examples of how the Guardian made him – and not the law-breaking US security state – the villain.
Marina Hyde in the Guardian in February 2016 – four years into his captivity in the embassy – casually dismissed as “gullible” the concerns of a United Nations panel of world-renowned legal experts that Assange was being “arbitrarily detained” because Washington had refused to issue guarantees that it would not seek his extradition for political crimes.
Long-time BBC legal affairs correspondent Joshua Rozenberg was given space in the Guardian on the same day to get it so wrong in claiming Assange was simply “hiding away” in the embassy, under no threat of extradition (Note: Though his analytic grasp of the case has proven feeble, the BBC allowed him to opine further this week on the Assange case).
Two years later, the Guardian was still peddling the same line that, despite the UK spending many millions ringing the embassy with police officers to prevent Assange from “fleeing justice”, it was only “pride” that kept him detained in the embassy.
Or how about this one from Hadley Freeman, published by the Guardian in 2019, just as Assange was being disappeared for the next five years into the nearest Britain has to a gulag, on the “intense happiness” she presumed the embassy’s cleaning staff must be feeling.
Anyone who didn’t understand quite how personally hostile so many Guardian writers were to Assange needs to examine their tweets, where they felt freer to take the gloves off. Hyde described him as “possibly even the biggest arsehole in Knightsbridge” while Suzanne Moore said he was “the most massive turd.”
The constant demeaning of Assange and the sneering at his plight was not confined to the Guardian’s opinion pages. The paper even colluded in a false report – presumably supplied by the intelligence services, but easily disproved – designed to antagonise the paper’s readers by smearing him as a stooge of Donald Trump and the Russians.
This notorious news hoax – falsely claiming that in 2018 Assange repeatedly met with a Trump aide and “unnamed Russians”, unrecorded by any of the dozens of CCTV cameras surveilling ever approach to the embassy – is still on the Guardian’s website.
This campaign of demonisation smoothed the path to Assange being dragged by British police out of the embassy in early 2019.
It also, helpfully, kept the Guardian out of the spotlight. For it was errors made by the newspaper, not Assange, that led to the supposed “crime” at the heart of the US extradition case – that Wikileaks had hurriedly released a cache of files unredacted – as I have explained in detail before.
Too little too late
The establishment media that collaborated with Assange 14 years ago in publishing the revelations of US and UK state crimes only began to tentatively change its tune in late 2022 – more than a decade too late.
That was when five of his former media partners issued a joint letter to the Biden administration saying that it should “end its prosecution of Julian Assange for publishing secrets”.
But even as he was released this week, the BBC was still continuing the drip-drip of character assassination. A proper BBC headline, were it not simply a stenographer for the British government, might read: “Tony Blair: Multi-millionaire or war criminal?”
For while the establishment media has busily fixed our gaze on the supposed character flaws of Assange, it has kept our attention away from the true villains, those who committed the crimes he exposed: Blair, George W Bush, Dick Cheney and many more.
We need to recognise a pattern here. When the facts cannot be disputed, the establishment has to shoot the messenger.
In this case, it was Assange. But the same media machine was rolled out against former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, another thorn in the establishment’s side. And as with Assange, the Guardian and the BBC were the two outlets that were most useful in making the smears stick.
Sadly, to secure his freedom, Assange was compelled to make a deal pleading guilty to one of the charges levelled against him under the Espionage Act.
Highlighting the enduring bad faith of the Guardian, the same paper that so readily ridiculed Assange’s years of detention to avoid being locked away in a US super-max jail, ran an article this week, as Assange was released, stressing the “dangerous precedent” for journalism set by his plea deal.
Washington’s treatment of Assange was always designed to send a chilling message to investigative journalists that, while it is fine to expose the crimes of Official Enemies, the same standards must never be applied to the US empire itself.
How is it possible that the Guardian is learning that only now, after failing to grasp that lesson earlier, when it mattered, during Assange’s long years of political persecution?
The even sadder truth is that the media’s villainous role in keeping Assange locked up will soon be erased from the record. That is because the media are the ones writing the script we tell ourselves about what is going on in the world.
They will quickly paint themselves as saints, not sinners, in this episode. And, without more Assanges to open our eyes, we will most likely believe them. https://www.declassifieduk.org/julian-assange-freedom-this-time-no-thanks-to-the-media/
The Assange case – a win for journalism? Sort of.
Sort of – because his guilty plea leaves all journalists at risk. Because this freedom at last for Julian Assange means that the U.S. government can now claim that they’ve secured a conviction against a journalist under the Espionage Act. Assange’s impending legal case appealing against extradition did not take place – then what happens if another non-USA journalist reveals U.S. military atrocities?
The mainstream media can be relied on to snidely smear Julian Assange from now on.
However, 17 federal charges against Assange were dropped. He pled guilty to a felony charge of conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defence information. It could have been a lot worse. And Julian Assange, after all these years, now gets the opportunity for a decent life in Australia. with his family.
We’ve been here before. A courageous Australian journalist – a man of integrity reveals the horrors of American military atrocities. Wilfred Burchett was the first journalist to expose the truth about the devastating after-effects of the atom bomb -going to Hiroshima and defying the USA military’s ban on journalists going to Hiroshima.
The USA made sure that Burchett was smeared as a traitor, and the Australian government comfortably complied with that view – conservative Prime Minister Robert Menzies banned Burchett, and his children, from Australia – a ban that lasted 17 years.
A different case was that of Christopher Boyce, an American, who with a friend in 1977 was sentenced to 40 years in prison, mostly solitary confinement , for acquiring classified U.S. documents and selling them to Russia. Boyce claimed that the CIA was planning to remove Australia’s Prime Minister Whitlam from office, because Whitlam opposed the huge USA secret military base Pine Gap, in central Australia. Boyce seemed to care about Australia’s loss of sovereignty to the USA military. However, unlike Burchett and Assange – Boyce went on to a colourful career in a prison escape and bank robberies. Finally released from prison in 2002, Boyce settled down, but will never speak about his revelations of CIA intrigue in the 1970s.
Well, the USA government didn’t agree to Assange’s plea deal out of the goodness of their hearts. In this tense election year for the U.S. Democratic administration – Assange’s cruel incarceration in the U.K. Belmore prison was becoming an embarrassment. And what if Assange were to win his legal appeal against extradition to he USA? A damaging precedent?
And, above all – there was the unified pressure, from Assange’s wife, his family, his legal team, and thousands of people in the UK, Europe, USA, and Australia. The Australian government was no help, early on – but Australian politicians, and dignitaries like Kevin Rudd, gradually came on board. The whole thing was becoming awkward for the USA and the UK governments.
To some extent, this legal plea deal from an innocent journalist has been a success – for people power.
TODAY. The persecution of Wilfred Burchett and Julian Assange
Julian Assange’s “crime” was, in 2010, to expose military abuses committed by the USA .
Assange is not a USA citizen – he’s Australian. Yet his own national government is apparently abandoning him to the cruel vindictive revenge of a foreign government – the USA.
But hey – this is nothing new! While the world remembers the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it conveniently forgets that other Australian journalist, Wilfred Burchett, who,in 1945 revealed the horrors of that bombing.
In the 1930s, Burchett took many personal risks to help rescue Jews from Hitler’s Germany.
In August 1945, in defiance of the US army’s ban on journalists, he made his way to the devastated Japanese city of Hiroshima . He was the first journalist to expose the truth about the devastating after-effects of the atom bomb.The US military had wanted to keep radioactive contamination an official secret, concealing the death and suffering it caused for hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians.
US officials accused Burchett of being under the sway of Japanese propaganda.[Burchett lost his press accreditation and he was ordered to leave Japan. His camera, containing photos of Hiroshima, was confiscated while he was documenting persistent illness at a Tokyo hospital. The film was sent to Washington and classified secret .
For daring to out these and later, many other important truths, Burchett was marked by Western intelligence services.
Burchett dedicated the rest of his life to exposing the lies told by Western governments.
Australian conservatives branded him a traitor and communist. the Australian Robert Menzies government illegally refused to replace his passport. He was barred from re-entering Australia, despite his citizenship. His children were also denied Australian passports. The Australian national security department, which became ASIO in 1949, opened a file on the whole Burchett family in the 1940s.
the Australian government investigated the possibility of charging Burchett with treason. ASIO agents were despatched to Japan and Korea to collect evidence, but their investigations uncovered little. Burchett was subjected to government-backed smear campaigns and barred from Australia.
In 1969, Australian authorities refused Burchett entry to attend his father’s funeral. Only in 1972 — after 17 years of exile — was Burchett finally given an Australian passport by the incoming Whitlam government.
I guess that Australia will never again be allowed by the USA to have a government like that of Gough Whltlam. Liberal or Labor, the Australian government is determined to toe the USA line – which is to persecute any journalist who tells the truth about USA war atrocities.
Newly identified tipping point for ice sheets could mean greater sea level rise
Small increase in temperature of intruding water could lead to very big increase in loss of ice, scientists say
A newly identified tipping point for the loss of ice sheets in Antarctica and elsewhere could mean future sea level rise is significantly higher than current projections.
A new study has examined how warming seawater intrudes between coastal ice sheets and the ground they rest on. The warm water melts cavities in the ice, allowing more water to flow in, expanding the cavities further in a feedback loop. This water then lubricates the collapse of ice into the ocean, pushing up sea levels.
The researchers used computer models to show that a “very small increase” in the temperature of the intruding water could lead to a “very big increase” in the loss of ice – ie, tipping point behaviour.
It is unknown how close the tipping point is, or whether it has even been crossed already. But the researchers said it could be triggered by temperature rises of just tenths of a degree, and very likely by the rises expected in the coming decades.
Sea level rise is the greatest long-term impact of the climate crisis and is set to redraw the world map in coming centuries. It has the potential to put scores of major cities, from New York City to Shanghai, below sea level and to affect billions of people.
The study addresses a key question of why current models underestimate the sea level seen in earlier periods between ice ages. Scientists think some ice sheet melting processes must not be yet included in the models.
“[Seawater intrusion] could basically be the missing piece,” said Dr Alexander Bradley of the British Antarctic Survey, who led the research. “We don’t really have many other good ideas. And there’s a lot of evidence that when you do include it, the amount of sea level rise the models predict could be much, much higher.”
Previous research has shown that seawater intrusion could double the rate of ice loss from some Antarctic ice shelves. There is also real-world evidence that seawater intrusion is causing melting today, including satellite data that shows drops in the height of ice sheets near grounding zones.
“With every tenth of a degree of ocean warming, we get closer and closer to passing this tipping point, and each tenth of a degree is linked to the amount of climate change that takes place,” Bradley said. “So we need very dramatic action to restrict the amount of warming that takes place and prevent this tipping point from being passed.”
The most important action is to cut the burning of fossil fuels to net zero by 2050.
Bradley said: “Now we want to put [seawater intrusion] into ice sheet models and see whether that two-times sea level rise plays out when you analyse the whole of Antarctica.”
Scientists warned in 2022 that the climate crisis had driven the world to the brink of multiple “disastrous” tipping points, including the collapse of Greenland’s ice cap and the collapse of a key current in the north Atlantic, disrupting rains upon which billions of people depend for food.
Research in 2023 found that accelerated ice melting in west Antarctica was inevitable for the rest of the century, no matter how much carbon emissions are cut, with “dire” implications for sea levels.
The new research, published in the journal Nature Geoscience, found that some Antarctic ice sheets were more vulnerable to seawater intrusion than others. The Pine Island glacier, currently Antarctica’s largest contributor to sea level rise, is especially vulnerable, as the base of the glacier slopes down inland, meaning gravity helps the seawater penetrate. The large Larsen ice sheet is similarly at risk.
The so-called “Doomsday” glacier, Thwaites, was found to be among the least vulnerable to seawater intrusion. This is because the ice is flowing into the sea so fast already that any cavities in the ice melted by seawater intrusion are quickly filled with new ice.
Dr Tiago Segabinazzi Dotto, of the UK’s National Oceanography Centre, welcomed the new analysis of the ocean-ice feedback loop under ice sheets.
“The researchers’ simplified model is useful for showing this feedback, but a more realistic model is highly needed to evaluate both positive and negative feedbacks,” he said. “An enhancement of observations at the grounding zone is also essential to better understand the key processes associated with the instability of ice shelves.”
Julian Assange is free, but curly legal questions about his case remain
National Tribune, 26 Jun 2024, Holly Cullen, Adjunct Professor in Law, The University of Western Australia
Today Julian Assange walked out of the Federal Court Building in Saipan, North Marianas Islands, a free man. He pleaded guilty to one count of breaching the US Espionage Act.
With the court accepting his 62 months already spent in Belmarsh Prison as a sufficient sentence, he has no more case to answer, and no more sentence to serve.
However, this case leaves behind it a trail of unanswered legal questions and unresolved controversies. In particular, there are questions of fundamental human rights that can only now be addressed in future cases, if ever.
Can freedom of speech concerns stop extradition?
Once Assange had formally pleaded guilty, the US government’s lawyers announced they would immediately withdraw the request to extradite Assange from the UK.
That means the appeal that would have been heard later this year will not go ahead.
To recap, in May the UK High Court gave Assange the right to appeal the UK Home Secretary’s order for his extradition. This was granted on two grounds, both related to free speech.
The first ground of appeal accepted by the court was that extradition would be incompatible with Assange’s right to freedom of expression, as guaranteed in the European Convention on Human Rights.
The second ground, related to the first, is that he would be discriminated against on the basis of his nationality because he could, as a non-citizen of the US, be unable to rely on First Amendment freedom of speech rights.
But as this appeal is no longer proceeding, the issue of whether a threat to the accused’s freedom of expression can stop extradition will therefore not be argued or decided. The European Court of Human Rights and other human rights bodies have never addressed this point. It’s unlikely to arise again soon.
An espionage precedent?
Also on freedom of expression, the relationship between the US Espionage Act and the First Amendment of the US Constitution remains an open question.
In today’s pleadings, Assange and the US government took different views on whether the exercise of freedom of expression should constitute an exception to the offences under the Espionage Act. Nonetheless, Assange accepted that no existing US case law established such an exception.
This leads to the question of whether today’s guilty plea establishes a precedent for prosecuting journalists for espionage.
In the strict legal meaning of precedent in common law, which refers to a binding judicial interpretation, it does not.
The judge made no determination on whether Assange or the US government was legally correct. However, the US government can now point to this case as an example of securing a conviction against a journalist under the Espionage Act.
The question of how much a non-national of the US can rely on the First Amendment likewise continues to be on the table. This issue would also have been addressed in the extradition appeal, as a question of whether Assange would be discriminated against on the basis of his nationality.
Detention or confinement?
Finally, today’s hearing revived the question of whether the time Assange spent in the Ecuadorian embassy between 2012 and 2019 counts as detention.
As the judge moved to determine whether the sentence of “time served” was a sufficient penalty for his offence, the US government insisted the judge could only consider the 62 months in Belmarsh……………………………………………………
Today, the main story is that Assange no longer faces prosecution for espionage and is now free to return to his family. However, some of the legal issues emerging from this case remain tantalisingly unresolved. https://www.nationaltribune.com.au/julian-assange-is-free-but-curly-legal-questions-about-his-case-remain/
julian assange news.
Julian Assange Is Finally Free, But Let’s Not Forget the War Crimes He Exposed. Julian Assange: Free at last, but guilty of practicing journalism. Julian Assange is finally free, but no thanks to the media. Assange’s Release: Exposing the Craven Media Stable. Glenn Greenwald: Enduring Media Lies And Myths About Julian Assange Debunked – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mk4cyAtplpQ Assange’s Return to Australia: The Resentment of the Hacks. Julian Assange is free, but curly legal questions about his case remain.
The Suspect Body Count: The Death Toll in Gaza is Much Higher Than We’re Being Told
Seymour Hersh Substack Thu, 27 Jun 2024 https://www.sott.net/article/492600-The-Suspect-Body-Count-The-Death-Toll-in-Gaza-is-Much-Higher-Than-We-re-Being-Told
The number of slain Palestinians in Gaza, including those believed to be Hamas cadres, has gone through a series of public recalibrations in recent weeks, as Israel’s reshuffled war cabinet has struggled to minimize international rage at the slaughter there. The reduced body count was little more than a sideshow because the Israeli offensive is continuing in Gaza with no signs of the ceasefire that the Biden administration has been desperately seeking.
Hamas triggered the war last October 7 with a surprise attack — there is so far no official explanation for Israel’s security failure that day — that killed 1,139 Israelis and injured 3,400 more. Some 250 soldiers and civilians were taken hostage.
Comment: There is plenty of evidence to strongly suggest that Israel allowed the incursion on Oct. 7th to happen and that parties unknown carried out most of the killing. This strategy fits with Israel’s decades-long goal of creating the right ‘conditions’ to justify implementing a final solution to their ‘Palestinian problem’.
The expected Israeli response began within days, with the bombing of the Gaza Strip. Some Israeli ground operations inside Gaza began on October 13, and two weeks later the expected full-scale offensive began. The war still rages, with one estimate concluding that by the beginning of April 70,000 tons of explosives had been dropped on targets throughout the 25-mile long Gaza, more tonnage than was dropped by Germany on London and by America and the United Kingdom on Dresden and Hamburg in World War II, combined.
The Gaza Health Ministry, which is under Hamas control, estimated as of Tuesday that the death toll from the Israeli attacks stood at 37,718, with more than 86,000 Gazans wounded. Last month the Israeli government issued a much lower estimate of the casualties, stating that its planes and troops had killed 14,000 “terrorists” — Hamas fighters — and no more than 16,000 civilians.
The Biden administration, on the eve of the first presidential debate, has said nothing about the new numbers, but there are many senior analysts in the international human rights and social science community who consider these numbers to be hokum: a vast underestimate of the damage that has been done to a terrorized civilian population living in makeshift tents and shelters amid disease and malnutrition, with a lack of sanitation, medical care, and medicines as well as increasing desperation and fatigue.
In days of telephone and email exchanges with public health and statistical experts in America I found a general belief that the civilian death toll in Gaza, both from the bombings and their aftermath, had to be significantly higher than reported, but none of the scientists and statisticians — appropriately — was willing to say so in print because of a lack of access to accurate data. I also asked one well-informed American official what he thought the actual civilian death count in Gaza might be and he answered, without pause: “We just don’t know.”
One public health expert acknowledged: “No clear and definite body count is possible, given the continuing Israeli bombing.” He added, caustically, “How many bombs does it take to kill a human being?”
Gaza was an ideal target for an air attack, he said. “No functioning fire department. No fire trucks. No water. No place to escape. No hospitals. No electricity. People living in tents and bodies stacked up all over . . . being eaten by stray dogs.
“What the fuck is wrong with the international medical community?” he asked. “Who are we kidding? Without a ceasefire, a million people are going to starve. This is not a debating point. How can you count something when the system is biting its own tail.” He was referring to the fact that the health system in Gaza — its hospitals and service agencies — “is being targeted and shattered” by Israeli aircraft and those responsible for the counting of the dead and injured “are themselves dead.”
The expert added that the lack of better casualty statistics is not only the fault of Israel. “Hamas has a vested interest in consistently minimizing the number of civilians killed “because of a lack of planning over the years when it was in charge of Gaza.” He was referring to ordinary Gazan citizens’ lack of access to Hamas’s vast underground tunnel complex that could have served as a bomb shelter for all. In Gaza during the Israeli bombing raids, “Is Hamas going to say that Israel” was able to kill all in Gaza “because we started a war without being able to fully protect our people?” His point was that Hamas has every reason, as does Israel, to minimize the extent of innocent civilians who have become collateral damage in the ongoing war.
Comment: Hamas did not start this most recent round of mass slaughter by Israel on Oct 7th. Hamas has never provided Israel with the justification it always sought to massacre Gazans wholesale. On Oct. 7th, Israel provided itself with that justification.
A prominent American public health official who spoke to me acknowledged that he was also concerned about the numbers of unreported dead in Gaza. In a crisis, he said, “we can start with a name-by-name count, but pretty soon the numbers of killed and missing exceed the capacity of any such approach, especially when the counters are being killed and the records [are] at risk.” He said that various postwar academic studies of mortality during the siege of Mosul — when a US-led coalition fought a door-to-door fight in 2017 against the Islamic State in Iraq, killing as many 11,000 civilians — “showed the large loss of life from the use of high-velocity weapons in urban areas. So we should expect similar in Gaza.”
Other data suggest that the published death figures are seriously misleading. Save the Children, an international child protection agency, issued a report this month estimating that as many as 21,000 children in Gaza are “trapped beneath rubble, detained, buried in unmarked graves, or lost from their families.” Other children, the agency said, “have been forcibly disappeared, including an unknown number detained and forcibly transferred out of Gaza” with their whereabouts unknown to the families “amidst reports of ill-treatment and torture.”
Comment: As if the mass slaughter and starvation of Palestinians in Gaza is not enough, it is highly likely that a large number of Palestinian children have been abducted by Zionist state forces, likely to be tortured and killed or otherwise used for the depraved pleasures of some of the people that inhabit that “shitty little country”.
Jeremy Stoner, the charity’s regional director for the Middle East, said: “Gaza has become a graveyard for children, with thousands of others missing, their fates unknown. . . . We desperately need a ceasefire to find and support the missing children who have survived, and to prevent more families from being destroyed.”
Warnings about the inevitability of far more deaths among the ordinary citizens of Gaza have been around since last winter. In December, Devi Sridhar, the chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh, wrote in the Guardian that the Gaza war was “the deadliest conflict for children in recent years” with as many as 160 children being killed daily. The surviving children do not have “the basic needs that any human, especially babies and children, need to stay healthy and alive. . . . Unless something changes, the world faces the prospect of almost a quarter of Gaza’s 2 million population — close to half a million human beings — dying within a year.
“It’s a crude estimate,” Sridhar wrote, “but one that is data-driven, using the terrifying real numbers of death in previous and comparable conflicts.”
The New York Times and the Washington Post reported Wednesday that a new study endorsed by the United Nations found that as many as half a million Gaza residents are facing imminent starvation because of “a lack of food.” The study also said that more than one half of the surviving residents of Gaza “had to exchange their clothes for money and one-third resorted to picking up trash to sell.”)
One of the most avid early critics of the official statistics published by the Gaza Health Ministry and accepted by most in the American media, has been Ralph Nader. On March 5, he wrote a column in the Capitol Hill Citizen, a monthly newspaper he founded, about what he called “the undercount” of Palestinian casualties in Gaza. He quoted Martin Griffiths, the United Nations under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs: “Life is draining out of Gaza at terrifying speed.”
In my years as a journalist, I have often found an oddball story that says more with each retelling. Something like that happened in February when Al Jazeera ran an interview with a 64-year-old Gazan undertaker named Saadi Hassan Sulieman Baraka, whose nickname is Abu Jawad. He complained of working almost constantly since the Israeli invasion of Gaza began.
“I’ve buried about ten times more people during this war than I did across my entire 27 years as an undertaker,” he said. “The least was 30 people and the most was 800. Since October 7, I’ve buried more than 17,000 people.” He especially remembered the day he buried the 800 dead. “We collected them in pieces; their bodies so riddled with holes it was like Israeli snipers used them for target practice; Others were crushed like . . . like a boiled potato, and many had huge facial burns.
“We couldn’t really tell one person’s body from the other, but we did our best. We made one big deep grave, probably 10 meters (30 feet) deep and buried them together.”
It could be propaganda — of course, it could. But Abu Jawad made no mention of anyone from the Gaza Health Ministry coming to collect the names of the dead. He made no mention of any government official being involved in the process at all.
1 This month
of the week – Disrupting War & Militarism in Oceania. Active solidarity. Radical practice.
Antinuclear 