With Hiroshima Day this Sunday, 6 August, (and Nagasaki Day on 9 August) plus the cinema release of Oppenheimer, there’s no better time to highlight Australia’s longest running show about nuclear issues – Radio Active.
Canberra’s oldest community radio station, 2XXFM 98.3, airs the program every Sunday morning and, sadly, nuclear issues are just as topical now as they were when the show started in 1976.
According to the Doomsday Clock, which was created by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (founded in 1945 by Albert Einstein and University of Chicago scientists who helped develop the first atomic weapons), it is 90 seconds to midnight.
The Doomsday Clock is set every year and has become a universally recognised indicator of the world’s vulnerability to global catastrophe caused by man-made technologies.
This ticking clock feeds the longevity of Radio-Active. Canberra’s 2XXFM is one of 20 community radio stations broadcasting the show around Australia for the past 47 years.
The show is produced at Melbourne’s community radio station 3CR by producer Michaela Stubbs.
“All of the show’s presenters are activists, which is probably why the show has gone on for so long because we have quite a big movement that is multi-generational and we’re really passionate about the issues,” Michaela says. “My mum was part of the peace and nuclear disarmament movement in the ‘80s so I had an awareness of Hiroshima Day.”
Michael has a vast archive of tapes to draw from and recently aired a show about “Down Winders”, people affected by the Trinity nuclear test site in New Mexico, USA, the site of the first detonation of a nuclear weapon.
“That was such an important story,” Michaela says. “They are the voices that don’t get heard.”
There are also old cassettes of protests such as Australia’s Jabiluka blockades in the ‘70s against the Jabiluka uranium mine in the Northern Territory.
Michaela recently interviewed an Indigenous woman whose family was affected by the British Government atomic tests at Emu Field, South Australia. This occurred 70 years ago this October and her family is still seeking reparations.
“We have always had a strong focus on amplifying the voices of people who are directly impacted by nuclear development,” Michaela says.
Australia’s longest running show on nuclear issues also focuses on peace and sustainability. Radio-Active is broadcast on Canberra community radio 2XXFM 98.3 every Sunday, 7.30am-8am.
The right’s nuclear stupidity is enough to make us cough up Phlegm Orville ( Bernard Keane and Crikey )
President Macron has reversed France’s original plan to reduce its nuclear energy from 70% to 50%, indeed as part of a nuclear renaissance, France will build six new large reactors and shortly commence testing on a nuclear power plant in Phlegm Orville, which is set to open early next year.
Er, what? Phlegm Orville in France? Sounds like a haute cuisine serving of mucus. Presumably the IPA scribe misheard when Dutton referred to Flamanville Nuclear Power Plant (thank God he didn’t refer to Finland’s Olkiluoto). Or perhaps they couldn’t believe Dutton was seriously invoking Flamanville as an advertisement for the wisdom of nuclear power.
Crikey first mentioned the new reactor being built at Flamanville in 2009, when it was due to open in 2013 and was already one-third over budget. By 2016 it was 200% over budget and scheduled to start in 2018. By 2018, the builder EDF discovered serious construction problems that delayed the start until 2020, and blew the budget out again. In 2020, the French government labelled Flamanville a “mess”. Early in 2022, when it was going to open at the end of the year, there was another delay and the budget rose to €12.7 billion (A$21.3 billion). At the end of last year, there was another delay into 2024 and the budget went over €13 billion.
So, all up, a decade overdue, and a final cost triple the initial estimate — if it starts next year. And it’s what Dutton thinks is an advertisement for nuclear power. Perhaps he should have mentioned Olkiluoto instead. It finally commenced in April this year… 14 years overdue.
Such criticisms, however, are now airily dismissed by nuclear power advocates. The future is small modular reactors (SMRs), which take much less time to build and are far cheaper — even if there are none actually operating outside Russia or China yet. “A single SMR can power some 300,000 homes. A microreactor could power a regional hospital, a factory, a mining site or a military base,” Dutton told the IPA.
At the same time as Dutton is spruiking SMRs, the Financial Review is as well. It’s run a three-part series on plans in Canada, Japan and the United Kingdom for SMRs (as one AFR reader acerbically noted, the keyword is “plans”).
The AFR also editorialised about the glories of SMRs. Conveniently absent, however, was the fact that even the new wonder technology needs massive taxpayer subsidies. The SMR that gets advocates most excited is the small prototype that US firm NuScale received regulatory approval to build in Idaho earlier this year — celebrated as a major milestone for the technology. Except it won’t commence operation until 2030 at the earliest and has already received US$1.4 billion in subsidies. That hasn’t stopped the proposed facility’s cost per MW-hour already increasing by more than 50% — three times the current cost of large-scale nuclear power in the US.
Why has the cost gone up for this SMR? Because, erm… cough cough… there’s been a massive blowout in the construction cost: 75%, to more than US$9 billion. Sure, it’s not a Phlegm Orville 300% blowout, but it is only a small reactor. And who will insure SMRs? In the United States, the government provides that insurance, with nuclear power plant owners paying hundreds of millions of dollars a year in premiums, further adding to the cost.
Another issue not mentioned by either the AFR or Dutton — both of whom like to whine about too much government spending — is what to do with the waste produced by SMRs. See, while they may be small, SMRs produce much more waste per unit of energy produced — and waste with higher radioactivity levels — than normal reactors. Good luck finding somewhere to store that for 10,000 years. You can bet no company will be doing that — it will fall to taxpayers, yet again.
So, apart from taking a long time to build, blowing out costs, requiring a massive infrastructure solution in terms of waste disposal and requiring colossal taxpayer support, the SMRs championed by Dutton and the AFR are completely different to traditional nuclear power.
What’s driving all this? Why does the right think SMRs are the solution? The delays that are typical of nuclear power, and which would be typical of SMRs as well, aren’t the problem — they’re the point. Switching focus to nuclear power and away from renewables and storage would delay decarbonisation and give fossil fuel industries extra years — indeed, extra decades — to keep operating while a nuclear “solution” was prepared. Like carbon capture, like gas, it’s another scam used by fossil fuel interests to try to delay meaningful climate action.
The mainstream media has once more tried to generate alarm about the presence of two relatively innocuous Chinese electronic spy ships in international waters during the latest biennial Talisman Sabre military exercise spread across the Australian mainland and offshore oceans. It involves 30,000 troops from 13 countries. Although the Indian prime minister Narendra Modi had publicly assured his Australian counterpart Anthony Albanese that his country would attend, India did not turn up.
The unnamed enemy is China. A London based journalist reported from Townsville that the latest exercise was occurring against a “changing security landscape in which China grows evermore belligerent”. Apparently, he didn’t see any need to give evidence for this dubious claim. The defence minister, Richard Marles said Talisman Sabre provided an opportunity to practice “high-end” warfare. Just how participants such as PNG, Tonga and Fiji can do this is not clear. In a war, their role would be to let the US operate from their territory.
During the last exercise, the ABC’s national television news each night ran a video of the spy ships across the top of the screen. It hasn’t gone that far this time, but has given extensive coverage to the spy ships without explaining what harm they might be doing.
The participants don’t seem alarmed. During the last exercise, an ABC journalist asked an American soldier on an amphibious ship if he was worried about the presence of Chinese spy ships. He replied, “No, we do it to them and they do it to us”. An Australian military spokesman said this time that it had taken the appropriate precautions to ensure the spy ships don’t cause any harm. A core reason is that all signals traffic is encrypted. The reality is that the US and its allies conduct electronic intelligence gathering on a much greater scale than China can. The Pine Gap satellite ground station in central Australia, for example, generates billions of pieces of intelligence every day. This did not stop the ABC defence correspondent Andrew Green commenting on the activities of one Chinese spy ship, “If knowledge is power, China has just become more powerful”.
The RAAF’s P8A Poseidon electronic spy planes pose an aggressive threat to China by dropping sonar buoys in the South China Sea where its submarines are based on Hainan island close to the mainland. The small buoys contain an underwater microphone to pick up the sounds from submarines and relay the data to the spy planes conducting surveillance for potential military use.
Australia’s behaviour in the South China Sea is the same as if Chinese planes dropped sonar buoys outside the Fremantle base for Australian and US submarines. But the Chinese planes don’t do this. …………………………………………………………………………………
Certainly, Australian media would consider it provocative if China developed a long-range air capability and dropped sonar buoys off the submarine base at Fremantle. Albanese portrays the co-operation between the US and Australia to conduct potentially aggressive military activities in the South China Sea as part of the struggle between autocracies and democracy. Unfortunately, the draconian nature of some of Australia’s national security laws, deprive Australia of the right to call itself a liberal democracy.
Similar problems arise with Albanese’s iron grip on the Labor party’s federal conference in Brisbane on August 17-19. Although he describes Labor as a democratic party, he has effectively banned any parliamentarians attending the conference from supporting motions in favour of scrapping the AUKUS pact or the acquisition of nuclear submarines. Albanese has also banned any parliamentarian from supporting the existing conference policy of making it a priority to recognise of Palestine as a state. https://johnmenadue.com/australian-medias-alarm-over-chinese-spy-ship-highlights-stark-double-standard/
‘Hugely significant’: Australia to manufacture and export missiles to US’ (SMH)
‘Australia to manufacture and export missiles to US and others’ (9 News)
‘US to help Australia develop guided missiles by 2025’ (Aljazeera)
Above are just a few of the rapturous headlines in the print media. Then the joyous Australian TV and radio media – orgasmic delight at Australia’s new subservience to USA militarism.
BUT – by today – 204 comments on thed Sydney Morning Herald’s delighted article by Matthew Knott. July 28, 2023. Yes quite a few comments rejoicing in the prospect of the missiles industry . BUT the overwhelming majority of commentators were disgusted. Below are some of the comments.
Australia will be the front line in a US war with China
And make Australia a target for attacks un-necessarily ? Australia should NOT be drawn into any activity that is war-like in nature. We are a peaceful country that should not be militarily engaged in other nations issues. Sure we can have a voice BUT NOT ACT MILITARILY .. If the Americans want to stick their nose in other nation’s affairs, so be it .. Don’t drag us in militarily !!!
We voted Labor and they are throwing any semblance of autonomy we had away.Terrible idea !We can’t make Under Pants, Socks, Kettles, Washing Machines, Dustpans.
The Syrian war and Ukraine wars have generated 10 million refugees who have fled into the rest of Europe. The South China Sea has 200 million people living within 10 km of the coastline. Australians were easily convinced to turn back the boats and create a cruel offshore detention program all for the expediency of the LNP’s re election. The obsession with contributing to the US led arms race and the insistence of provoking a war over Taiwan will inevitably lead to our shiny new missiles and military arsenal being used as an expediency to turn back the thousands of boats
Just how (and why) are we finding the capacity to make death ? More military lunacy.
We can’t make Under Pants, Socks, Kettles, Washing Machines, Dustpans.
Just how (and why) are we finding the capacity to make death ?
We can’t make Under Pants, Socks, Kettles, Washing Machines, Dustpans.
Just how (and why) are we finding the capacity to make death ?As Fraser said, we should have got out of Anzus at the end of the Cold War. Seems now we’re more captured by the US’s foreign policy agenda than ever before.
For Labor it’s clearly about the domestic optics. They want to be seen as the tough guy on military and defence matters, so long that being the Coalition’s political play.
Because of Morrison, and no Choice. We ended up with ALBO the United States Cheerleader.
Albo will NOT provide leadership and he will not provide intellectual input in the following areas; •‘Made a public call for building an autonomous Australia in a persistent attempt to shake off Australia’s shackles and prove that it is not the vassal of The United States. •that Australia should be one pole of multipolarity with its own independent position to serve its own interests, and cannot be a vassal of other forces, •When dealing with its relations with the US, it is hoped that Australia can truly safeguard its own core interests and get rid of the shackles the US has placed on it in the fields of economy, trade, ideology and even security, Finally he has no idea on how to make Australia a world class manufacturing hub as declared in his election policy speech.
I’d much rather see Australia manufacturing things like solar panels and wind turbines and exporting them to the rest of the world to help tackle the growing threat of global climate change. Instead we focus on weapons and the machinery of war. Strange priorities from a Labor government…..disappointing really!
Big cheers for this ‘Hugely significant’!!! We finally became like North Korea, soon we will be able to replace New Year celebrations with real deadly missiles.
With the added bonus for politicians: whenever they make a mess they just fire missiles to distract the electorates … and at the same time it would be ‘Hugely Great’. The Rednecks and war mongers will be cheering all the way … it’s win win… well done Albo
We are being conned. Can we go back to making cars. At least they were useful. Missiles are for war. Unless we agree to annilate all Mankind we are walking down the wrong path. In a car you can go somewhere.
And so the violence industry marches on. By setting such an example is it little wonder there is so much killing & maiming in the world today?
So now new funding just extending the Morrison/Dutton Missile manufacturing policy announced in 2021?
Will it be like the F18 program all over again – assembling kits from the US? How much will the taxpayer subsidise the program?
So we’ve been sold out to the military industrial complex and will become fully integrated into the US War machine as the US makes its last ditch attempt to maintain its global hegemony and it control over the pacific region. We are being marched into WWIII by the crazy neo cons in the USA and we are too blind to see it, chanting USA, USA, USA as we are led like lambs to the slaughter.
Unbelievable.
How are we a ‘peaceful country’ – name a war we HAVEN’T been involved in! We’re sycophants, hiding under the US’s skirt.
After being a gigantic quarry for so many years, our new major export industry will be providing weapons of war.
This is shameful. Surely we have the intelligence and foresight to do better than this.
Unbelievable.
After being a gigantic quarry for so many years, our new major export industry will be providing weapons of war.
This is shameful. Surely we have the intelligence and foresight to do better than this.
This is a step up from days of Lithgow Small-Arms .303s and these days, our Bushmasters. We’ll just be making them here to another nation’s specs & IP, all for the promise of jobs.
Blinken & Bush: “We have no greater friend, no greater partner, no greater ally than Australia. A charm offensive that Albanese must take heed.
We import foods & goods from our neighbours for survival only for them to be killed by our missiles. How gross!
While the US and Australia are incessantly focusing on arms and the military in the Pacific, China’s hospital ship, the Peace Ark is in Tonga and will depart Nuku’alofa on 4 August 2023. It will also visit Kiribati, Vanuatu, Solomons Islands and Timor-Leste during its mission. The ‘Peace Ark’, on her third goodwill visit to Tonga on a humanitarian medical mission from 28 July to 4 August 2023. So which country is doing more for the people in the Pacific?
American owned, designed, parts supplied. We are just like a 3rd world country assembling stuff, all profits going offshore with no tax paid. What a waste………… And paying for the privilege
And another target added to the growing number of American bases.
..and what about all the bs about becoming self-sustaining after the pandemic when we saw how reliant we are on imports? Or this is suddenly irrelevant? They need a Royal Commission into the capabilities of Australia when another and worse pandemic hits. Oh, I can write the summary now “We will be stuffed – starvation, no drugs, no products”. But yes, focus on warheads. Made with Australian metal I hope? Stick some kangaroo prints on it so when it is dug out of children we can be proud.
Yes, “assembled ‘Down Under’ from imported components subject to our strict specifications so you can rest assured that when you get hit by a genuine ‘Aussie’ missile it’s gonna hurt”…………….. Exactly! How gullible we are to trust the Americans? It’s unbelievable!
Now imagine if an LNP government announced we were making killing things for Uncle Sam. You’d never hear the end of it. Oh the hypocrisy.
Nice not, when we have industry again it is all about weapons and destruction.
What have we become? So we are not making products that will make our life easier and more comfortable? We are not making tools and machines to facilitate our normal daily activities? We are no building metro lines to reduce commute times? We are not making electric vehicles to reduce carbon emissions? Yet we are going to making missiles for wars that will kill human beings. What a weird sense of priority we’ve got ???
Lloyd Austin moved from the board of Raytheon to Secretary of Defence. Is it any wonder we are now getting sucked into arms manufacturing a cycle of endless wars, which is a bona fide policy of the US. We need to be much more discerning than “all the way with Uncle Sam” this is a very poor sign of our priorities, and the “jobs and growth” mantra has been taken from the liberal playbook to justify this stupid and dangerous choice.
So the plan is to continue a longstanding trend to make us even more financially and militarily dependent on foreigners right?
“Sydneysiders are aghast at the level of gun violence breaking out. On to happier news, Australia is going to create its very own missile manufacturing plants”.RESPECT8
We’re being used again, it won’t be to our advantage everything the US does is for theirs. We are their lapdog. The anti-China brigade in Canberra is pushing hard to get Labor to think China wants to go to war & so we have to be closely allied with the US.
NO it is the USA that always wants to go to war – look how many we’ve followed them into and look at China, only min-wars or skirmishes on their borders, never ever far afield.
I think this idea stinks.
ALP – American Lapdog Party
What is hugely significant is Albo’s lost his marbles.
No way. To restore our manufacturing capacity, I’d rather prefer we start making electric vehicles and solar panels, not missiles.
We’re becoming completely dependant upon the American military machine. AUKUS are about all our government seems to care about anymore. Meanwhile… over 1 million young people are living in poverty and koalas are going extinct. It’s all about priorities and it’s 100% obvious what and who our leaders are working for and it ain’t the people or the country. With friends like Labor, who needs Liberals?
Who cares what Simon Birmingham thinks, or says.
He represents a government that made defence decisions that were more photo-op than substance; cancelled the SEA1000 project that put us squarely into the ship-building “Valley of Death” that the COALition hyperventilated over; failed abysmally in both defence and foreign policy, all the while telling us what absolute standouts they were in government.
It was the COALition that left us with this mess called AUKUS.
I can’t see us receiving nuclear-powered submarines, despite the efforts to push through with AUKUS. At some point, the taxpayers of Australia will simply say “enough!” The options being offered are far too expensive.
“US defence contracting giants Lockheed Martin and Raytheon have been selected by the government as preferred partners for its guided weapons and explosive ordnance enterprise“. The Hawkei is made by Prime contractors including Thales Australia (French) Boeing (US) Plasan (Israel). The Virginia submarines are designed and built by US General Dynamics Electric Boat (EB) and Huntington Ingalls Industries. Virtually all military equipment purchased or being built in Australia by foreign, usually US companies. Australia is feeding overseas military complexes, not developing anything new.
A gigantic error from the government here. The only priorities here are for shareholders of Raytheon and Lockheed Martin. The US are always looking for the next endless war. History repeating itself over and over. We will be used as pawns between the US and China.
Carried away by the logic of one-upmanship that they impose on the world of politics, the media are co-producing Western countries’ progressive entry into the war against Russia. Everything about the way they treat the conflict suggests that such a confrontation is inevitable. This battle of opinion, which began a year ago, is now being waged on three fronts at once. First, the beatification of Zelensky,
Western journalists are all but unanimous that negotiating with Russia would equal forgiving it its aggression. Nothing short of a crushing victory for Ukraine is conscionable. The risk of escalation is rarely mentioned.
Le Monde Diplomatiqe by Serge Halimi & Pierre Rimbert, Translated by George Miller March 2023
After speeches by British prime minister Rishi Sunak and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky at a joint press conference on 8 February at a military base in southwest England, it was time for questions. BBC Ukraine correspondent Natalia Goncharova greeted Zelensky with, ‘I would really like to hug you, but I’m not allowed.’ Ignoring his security service, Zelensky got down from the podium and embraced her to general applause. Then Goncharova asked Sunak, ‘You know that Ukrainian soldiers are dying every day. Don’t you think that that decision about warplanes is taking too long?’ In 2003, during the invasion of Iraq, the embedding of journalists with the US military had caused some in the profession to wince; 20 years on, in the Ukraine war, it’s become a journalism of the all-out embrace.
In France, too, the code of conduct set out by Hubert Beuve-Méry, founder of the daily Le Monde (and this publication), counselling ‘contact and distance’, has been set aside. At least when it comes to Volodymyr Zelensky: ‘In real life, he’s nice, quite cool, often funny and not at all grudging with his time,’ said Isabelle Lasserre, Le Figaro’s diplomatic correspondent and darling of the media, France Inter and news channel LCI in particular, since she adopted an uncompromising stance on Ukraine. ‘He has an incredible leadership style, a very intense charisma. He gets straight to the point, he always speaks with conviction,’ she told C politique on France 5 (12 February 2023).
Eulogies, hugs, gushing questions: the Western press’s veneration of this president in khaki fatigues suggests media in thrall to political leaders. But that impression is misleading. Since Donald Trump’s election in 2016, and particularly since Russia’s aggression in Ukraine, ‘journalism’ in the United States and also in Europe has increasingly behaved like an autonomous political force with its own ideological agenda.
Unlike traditional political parties, the media are simultaneously bringing to life and feeding rival tendencies that form two branches of the market for news: one on the hard right (Fox News, The Sun, CNews etc), the other liberal (the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, the Guardian, Le Monde etc). With these two audiences, both of which demand their own partisan reading of events, ‘journalism’ is careful not to alienate the faithful by ever making them doubt the bewitching story it serves up.
Media in combat mode have polarised the US around fictitious issues (‘Trump is the Kremlin’s puppet’, ‘Joe Biden’s election victory was rigged’). Since the invasion of Ukraine, they have involved the West in a war against Russia by suppressing any public debate on the risks of military escalation.
This undertaking has been aided by instincts inherited from the cold war: (much-replayed) archive footage of American schoolchildren learning how to protect themselves from a Soviet nuclear attack; a long-standing obsession with communist subversion in the US; and recurrent paranoia about the ‘enemy within’.
It was conceivable, though, that the demise of the Soviet Union and the election of a president who enjoyed strong support in the West, and was almost servile towards it — Boris Yeltsin — would call for more cordial relations between the two former protagonists in a confrontation that had become futile. The Russian people longed for this just as much as their leaders: in the early 1990s, when former Soviet citizens were asked about their favourite international partner, 74% of them picked the US (1).
To ensure US hegemony
This enthusiasm was not mutual. US politicians and media treated Russia as a defeated country, whose role was to not only bend to the rules of then-triumphant neoliberal capitalism, but also to remain strategically weak so that no hostile power could ever again threaten US hegemony. In 1992, only a few weeks after the end of the Soviet Union, the leaked draft Defense Planning Guidance (DPG), better known as the Wolfowitz Doctrine, a Pentagon document that the press published immediately, already had Russia in its sights. It stated that Washington would henceforth need to ‘refocus on precluding the emergence of any future global competitor’. The power of American ‘conviction’ would be all the more compelling because the Pentagon promised to back it up with a military capable of ‘preclud[ing] hostile competitors from challenging our critical interests’ (2). However, ‘the master of the Kremlin’ was then Boris Yeltsin, not Vladimir Putin.
But that barely mattered, because with rare exceptions — notably Saudi Arabia and Israel — the US and its media were almost equally inflexible towards and dismissive of their puppets (Yeltsin), their ‘allies’ (European states) and their enemies (China, Russia, Iran). The idea in the Wolfowitz Doctrine that the international order is ultimately guaranteed by the United States and that the US must be in a position to ‘act independently, as necessary’ when international support is ‘sluggish or inadequate’ was the consensus in the State Department, Washington think tanks and newsrooms. This imperial prism explains the unquestioning acceptance with which all American wars, including the most illegal ones, have been greeted by Fox News and the New York Times.
Journalists have gone back to basics. In the Ukraine war, Chinese, Indian, Latin American, Arab or African viewpoints don’t count?
So Russians gradually became disenchanted with the West…………and NATO’s ongoing expansion, together with the experience of privatisation, finally convinced the Russian public that the US intended, if not to ‘humiliate’ Russia, then at least to subordinate it. ……….
In the US, the construction of the Russian enemy had proceeded in parallel as disagreements and tensions between the two former superpowers grew. ………………………………………….
‘Trump, Putin’s lackey’
Much inanity flowed from this belief. And the European media picked up most of it…………………………………………………….
The US mainstream media’s war on Trump illustrated the transformation of the news business into a political force………………………………………………….
……..journalist Jeff Gerth, who spent three decades on the New York Times, recently published a rolling investigation of the media’s Russiagate coverage in the respected Columbia Journalism Review (5). This mountain of fake news, whose main purveyors were the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN and MSNBC, asserted that, without collusion between Trump and Putin, Clinton would have been sitting in the Oval Office. Unfortunately for them, after two years of investigation, special prosecutor Robert Mueller, a darling of the Democrats, burst this bubble and disproved any collusion (6). The Washington Post even had to correct several of its scoops and take down the most grotesque fabrications from its website.
The Columbia Journalism Review’s investigation can be read like a textbook of journalistic errors: elision of information that doesn’t corroborate a reporter’s thesis, a competitive race for scoops at the expense of rigour, passing off as ‘Russian disinformation’ stories that are true but embarrassing to the Democrats, the misleading presentation of statistics, misuse of anonymous sources (a thousandfold during the Trump era) vaguely described as ‘administration officials’ or ‘intelligence officials’.
Misleading use of statistics
Even when the agencies corrected or denied the information they had published, the press, acting as an autonomous political force, went on to make doctored ‘revelations’ to keep up the pressure on the White House. ……………………………………………….
As if to confirm this damning indictment of the press, the media outlets involved greeted Gerth’s investigation with stony silence, no doubt confident that their readers would rather have their convictions reaffirmed than be disabused. The result, Gerth explained, is that a profession that is highly influential in public life faces no penalty when it goes wrong……………………………….
Russiagate had turned questions about a ‘Russian threat’ into a domestic political weapon; the media emerged from it discredited. But the war in Ukraine saved them in a sense. It enabled them to recycle their obsession, this time based on real aggression and in a more favourable political context, since both US parties agree that their country should be arming Ukraine against Russia for as long as it takes.
The cult of ‘Western values’
A similar consensus exists in Europe. The 1999 Kosovo war had already seen Germany’s Greens commit themselves wholeheartedly to NATO; even today, the most fervent support for Kyiv is found among the liberal left and environmentalist groups that were once tempted by pacifism. . For these educated sections of society, defending Ukraine is a secular religion: journalists, high priests of the cult of ‘Western values’, preach the salvation of progressive souls at last mobilised against Moscow’s imperialism. Putin’s nationalist diatribes and reactionary traditionalism encourage this militancy, as does the presence of a Democrat in the White House.
The almost total absence of dissenting voices within the ‘progressive’ universe is also partly explained by the price exacted for straying from the bellicose line that is asserted with almost imperceptible shades of difference by LCI and France 2, Médiapart and Paris Match, L’Opinion and Politis, RTL and France Inter. Any reservation expressed about the general mobilisation for Ukraine sparks controversy or scandal,………………………………………………………………
This question gives rise to others. Why do the hosts of this morning show have guests who are almost unanimously in favour of increasing military aid to Kyiv: François Hollande, Bernard Guetta, Isabelle Lasserre, Pierre Servent etc? Why is it that from 8pm on LCI, under the leadership of Darius Rochebin (an admirer of Bernard-Henri Lévy), ‘debates’ on Ukraine assemble panels of Atlanticist journalists (a rotating cast of Pierre Servent, Isabelle Lasserre and Nicolas Tenzer), former NATO researchers (Samantha de Bendern), an exiled ‘former KGB agent’ and Ukrainian activists? Why do magazine covers look like leaflets distributed in Kyiv (‘Ukraine must win’, ran the headline in L’Express on 16 February 2023)? Why do reporters make do so often with simply illustrating a story devised in newsrooms in Paris and why, finally, do editorials only add a patina of respectability to this crusading tone?
It is as if everyone had agreed there is only one possible foreign policy, the policy being pursued by Ursula von der Leyen and the US State Department, and summed up by the German foreign minister on 25 January: ‘We’re waging a war against Russia’. The absence of pluralism is all the more noticeable because any leftwing opponents stay silent or invisible (8). …………….. journalists have gone back to basics. In the Ukraine war, Chinese, Indian, Latin American, Arab or African viewpoints don’t count
Carried away by the logic of one-upmanship that they impose on the world of politics, the media are co-producing Western countries’ progressive entry into the war against Russia. Everything about the way they treat the conflict suggests that such a confrontation is inevitable. This battle of opinion, which began a year ago, is now being waged on three fronts at once. First, the beatification of Zelensky, who has become the most famous influencer on the planet, to the extent that no book fair, film festival or American football match can claim success without his blessing via video link.
……………………………………………………………..The fear of offending Kyiv sometimes borders on self-censorship: when the New York Times ran a story online initially headlined ‘Ukraine corruption scandal stokes longstanding aid concerns in US’ (27 January 2023), it was immediately amended to read: ‘US officials overseeing aid say Ukrainian leaders are tackling corruption.’
The West’s sanctions campaign
The second front is the campaign to destroy Russia economically and militarily through sanctions and stepping up arms deliveries to Ukraine in the form of artillery, missiles, tanks and fighter planes. Not content with brushing aside the debate on the dangers of such a military escalation, the media equate any idea of negotiation with giving Moscow a full pardon (shades of Munich, 1938). As for economic retaliation, they are reluctant to admit their relative failure;…………………………………………………………..
The third front, which is probably most effective because least visible, is the avoidance of any historical perspective on the conflict and unfolding events. When France Inter’s geopolitics commentator Pierre Haski, who is also the president of Reporters Without Borders, rightly accused the Russians of ‘hitting cities and infrastructure’ (14 February 2023), he failed to point out that this is precisely what NATO did during the war in Kosovo. ………………………………………
The idea that other people might compare Russian imperialism to that of the US — wars without a UN mandate in Kosovo and Iraq, Washington’s denunciation of several disarmament agreements with Moscow, embargoes and boycotts against Cuba and Iran, extra-judicial executions by drone, the persecution of Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning — is unwelcome in most newsrooms. As a result, these Western decisions are erased from memory or treated as exceptions, not part of a pattern.
………………………………………………. But the biased presentation of history does not just impoverish Westerners’ ability to judge the ongoing war. It also renders less comprehensible the reaction of other peoples who are aware of facts that their media are willing to tell them. For Arabs, Africans or Latin Americans, the assertion that Ukraine is ‘fighting for our values’ (11) can only reawaken memories of the Iraq war. At the time when the US was preparing to invade that country on a false prospectus, it received the support of eight European leaders — from the Czech Republic, Spain, Portugal, Italy, the UK, Hungary, Poland and Denmark — in the form of a joint letter published in the Wall Street Journal on 30 January 2003. It began, ‘The real bond between the United States and Europe is the values we share: democracy, individual freedom, human rights and the Rule of Law.’ The result: a country destroyed and hundreds of thousands of lives lost.
Does this mean that beyond Ukraine, other acts of aggression, massive destruction, violations of people’s right to self-determination have not aroused the same indignation, the same batteries of sanctions, the same abundance of military assistance to the besieged country? Silence in the ranks! https://mondediplo.com/2023/03/08media
“……………………………….. the nuclear threat is still very much at the top of our collective mind.
The Sydney Theatre Company is staging the very first stage adaptation of Shute’s novel “On the Beach”. And Oppenheimer, one of 2023’s two most-hyped films, tells the story of the man referred to as “the father of the atomic bomb”.
‘Australia’s most important novel’
Journalist Gideon Haigh calls On the Beach “arguably Australia’s most important novel — important in the sense of confronting a mass international audience with the defining issue of the age”.
British-born Shute emigrated in 1950 to Australia, where he lived outside Melbourne. As well as writing novels, he worked as an aeronautical engineer.
The title of On the Beach — which started life as a four-part story called The Last Days on Earth — ostensibly referred to a Royal Navy expression for reassignment. (Shute spent time in the Royal Naval Reserve during World War II.) However, as readers of Eliot’s poetry will know, the phrase also appears late in The Hollow Men:
In this last of meeting places We grope together And avoid speech Gathered on this beach of the tumid river.
As in Eliot’s poem, the characters that cluster together in the pages of Shute’s novel, set in and around Melbourne between 1962 and 1963, tend on occasion to avoid speech…………………………
The reason why the guests at Peter’s party are so keen to avoid serious talk is both simple and depressing. They are trying very hard to forget that they are all going to be dead from radiation poisoning in a matter of months.
Shute brings the reader up to speed after the dinner party wraps up. A massive nuclear war has devastated the entire northern hemisphere, wiping out all forms of life there. And the radioactive fallout generated during the conflict is now creeping — slowly but surely — into the southern hemisphere.
Shute makes it clear there is absolutely nothing anyone can do about this. In tonally dispassionate prose, he reveals that vast swathes of Australia have already been rendered uninhabitable due to radiation poisoning. The only thing the characters who remain can do is wait.
…………………………………………………………………………… This is the way Shute’s novel of nuclear extinction ends: not with a bang but with a whimper. Released at the height of the Cold War, On the Beach struck a chord with millions of concerned readers.
………………………………………………………………………Shute’s didactic inclinations are evident towards the end of the novel. “Peter,” the character Mary asks, “why did this all this happen to us?” Even at this late stage, Mary, whose radiation-racked body is spasming uncontrollably, wants to know whether things might have panned out differently. Her husband’s reply is revealing:
“I don’t know … Some kinds of silliness you just can’t stop,” he said. “I mean, if a couple of hundred million people all decide that their national honour requires them to drop cobalt bombs upon their neighbour, well, there’s not much that you or I can do about it. The only possible hope would have been to educate them out of their silliness.”
………………………..While the science in the novel was somewhat flawed, Shute’s cautionary tale undoubtedly spoke to the collective zeitgeist.
………………………………………………..
Shute’s vision of humanity’s self-inflicted destruction is eerily resonant in our time of climate emergency. The nuclear threat remains, too, in our perilous historical moment of democratic backsliding and failing nuclear states.
It seems increasingly likely the world as we know it is coming to an end — if it hasn’t already. The question remains: will it be with a bang or a whimper?
The mainstream media continues to beat the drums of war while voices of truth and reason are being silenced, writes Dr William Briggs.
JOHN PILGER, in highlighting the manipulation of our media, called on people to ‘speak up’.
The drive to war and the demonisation of China have seen many people speak up and speak out. That same manipulated media has muffled those voices and pushed dissent to the margins. Journals and websites like this one are increasingly becoming almost samizdat publications. The mainstream media has played an important role, not only in silencing dissident voices but in convincing the public that there is little effective opposition.
A glance at the anti-AUKUS website shows that over 1,000 individuals and more than 200 organisations have thus far lent their support for a rational and sane response to the rising threat of war with China and obscene military spending.
There are many important voices among the signatories but their voices are not regularly heard in our media. Their words do not appear in the major daily newspapers, regardless of how well-credentialed they might be. Our former Prime Minister, Paul Keating, has effectively been relegated to the sidelines for voicing a position that does not fit with the official line.
And, while the collective wisdom of so many is ignored, the war-mongers of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) are given free rein.
‘In so many ways, the product of ASPI is critically important, not only in informing the Australian public, but those of us in government who seek to play a role in this space.’
Marles states that the Australian public must be informed. He recognises this to be ‘critically important’ but there is an unhealthy degree of censorship that is impossible to ignore. The information that the public is allowed to see, hear and read is the information that is filtered. There is a strong sense of creeping authoritarianism in all of this………………………………………..
The intellectuals, essayists, poets and novelists that might speak up and speak out remain, either silent or silenced by the mainstream media. It is not that they are not there. It is not that many thousands of ordinary people do not share the view that things are terribly wrong. The media has played and is playing a bad role. It is media in name only. It has abandoned any semblance of independence. It is so hard to speak out if you are kept captive; if ideas are filtered and disinformation passes for truth.
Pilger rightly calls on those with a conscience to speak out. What needs to be remembered is that the marketplace for ideas has shrunk……………………..Truth has become the property of those who control the media.
Pilger has been sidelined. Film-maker David Bradbury, twice nominated for an Academy Award, is now touring his latest documentary, The Road to War, screening it wherever an audience can be found. Even so, its circulation and therefore its audience remains limited.
American vengefulness would see WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange die in prison. Successive Australian governments have behaved equally badly, but the USA calls the shots. Assange’s crime? To report the truth. The truth, however, is not what Richard Marles is thinking of when he talks of the ‘critical importance’ of informing the public.
…………………………John Pilger’s call, for us all to speak up, has never had more urgency. The decades since the end of WWII and the proclamation of the U.S.-inspired rules-based order have seen millions die in American-led wars.
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.
“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.
It gave US Secretary of State Antony Blinken an opportunity to do the usual cartwheel. “Far too many governments use repression to silence free expression, including through reprisals against journalists for simply doing their jobs,” goes his May 3 press statement. “We again call on Russian authorities to immediately release Wall Street reporter Gershkovich and all other journalists held for exercising freedom of expression.” What, then, of the Australian publisher and founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange?
Selected days for commemoration serve one fundamental purpose. Centrally, they acknowledge the forgotten or neglected, while proposing to do nothing about it. It’s the priest’s confession, the chance for absolution before the next round of soiling.
These occasions are often money-making exercises for canny businesses: the days put aside to remember mothers and fathers, for instance. But there is no money to be made in saving writers, publishers, whistleblowers, and journalists from the avenging police state.
World Press Freedom Day, having limped on for three decades, is particularly fraught in this regard. It remains particularly loathsome, not least for giving politicians an opportunity to leave flimsy offerings at its shrine. These often come from the powerful, the very same figures responsible for demeaning and attacking those brave scribblers who do, every so often, show how the game is played.
Every year, we see reactions often uneven, and almost always hypocritical. The treatment of US journalist Evan Gershkovich is the stellar example for 2023. Here was the caged victim-hero scribbler, held in the remorseless clutches of the Russian Bear.
It gave US Secretary of State Antony Blinken an opportunity to do the usual cartwheel. “Far too many governments use repression to silence free expression, including through reprisals against journalists for simply doing their jobs,” goes his May 3 press statement. “We again call on Russian authorities to immediately release Wall Street reporter Gershkovich and all other journalists held for exercising freedom of expression.” What, then, of the Australian publisher and founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange?
With unintended, bleak irony, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) also thought it fitting to rope in the Secretary at a World Press Freedom Day event organised in conjunction with the Washington Post. Talking to his interlocutor, the Post’s David Ignatius, Blinken spoke of efforts to “fight back and push back around the world to help journalists, who – in one way or another, are facing intimidation, coercion, persecution, prosecution, surveillance.” This seemed grimly comical, given that the United States, through its agencies, has engaged in intimidation, coercion, persecution, prosecution and surveillance against Assange, whose scalp they continue to seek with salivating expectation.
In the course of the event, Ignatius and Blinken encountered Code Pink activists Medea Benjamin and Tinghe Barry. Both were keen to test the Secretary’s lofty assessments about Washington’s stance on free expression and journalistic practice. “Excuse me, we can’t use this day without calling for the freedom of Julian Assange,” exclaimed Benjamin, storming the stage where the two men were engaged in bland conversation. A bemused Ignatius duly approved of Benjamin’s eviction by three burly minders, seeing it all as part of “free expression”.
Barry’s own assessment of the whole show summed matters up. “Two hours and not one word about journalist Shireen Abu-Akleh, who was murdered by Israeli occupation forces in Palestine, not one word about Julian Assange.”
Others from the US State Department were also found wanting. A department press briefing from Vedant Patel, principal deputy spokesperson, opened with comments about World Press Freedom Day. He echoed the belief in “the importance of a free press. It’s a – we believe a bedrock of democracy.”
Then came a question from Matt Lee of Associated Press: Did the State Department regard Assange “as a journalist who is – who should be covered by the ideas embodied in World Press Freedom Day?”
Patel’s response did not deviate from the views of his superiors. “The State Department thinks that Mr Assange has been charged with serious criminal conduct in the United States, in connection with his alleged role in one of the largest compromises of classified information in our nation’s history.”
With dutiful adherence to a narrative worn and extensively disproved in Assange’s extradition trial proceedings, Patel spoke of actions that “risked serious harm to US national security to the benefit of our adversaries” (there was none) and subjected “human sources to grave and imminent risk of serious physical harm and arbitrary detention” (no evidence has ever been adduced by the Department of Justice on this point)…………………………………………………………….. more https://theaimn.com/hypocritical-commemorations-world-press-freedom-day/
Wednesday was World Press Freedom Day, and it saw US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, and Deputy State Department Spokesman Vedant Patel confronted about the glaring hypocrisy of the Biden administration’s persecution of Julian Assange for the crime of good journalism.
During an appearance at a World Press Freedom event hosted by The Washington Post’s David Ignatius on Wednesday morning, Blinken was confronted by Code Pink activists Medea Benjamin and Tighe Barry demanding justice for Assange before being swiftly dragged off stage.
“Excuse us, we can’t use this day without calling for the freedom of Julian Assange,” said Benjamin, holding a sign saying “FREE JULIAN ASSANGE”.
The two were immediately rushed by many security staffers, and the audio from the stage was temporarily cut.
“Stop the extradition request of Julian Assange,” Benjamin can be heard saying.
“Two hours and not one word about journalist Shireen Abu-Akleh, who was murdered by the Israeli occupation forces in Palestine, not one word about Julian Assange,” said Barry.
“We’re here to celebrate freedom of expression, and we just experienced it,” said Ignatius without a trace of irony once the dissent had been silenced. He then returned to the subject of how bad and awful the Russian government is for imprisoning American journalist Evan Gershkovich.
Then during a White House press briefing on Wednesday afternoon, Karine Jean-Pierre was asked a question by CBS News’ Steven Portnoy that was so inconvenient the press secretary flat-out said she wouldn’t answer it.
“Advocates on Twitter today have been talking a great deal about how the United States has engaged in hypocrisy by talking about how Evan Gershkovich is held in Russia on espionage charges but the United States has Espionage Act charges pending against Julian Assange. Can you respond to that criticism?” asked Portnoy.
“What is the criticism?” asked Jean-Pierre.
“Well, the criticism is that — the argument is that Julian Assange is a journalist who engaged in the publication of government documents,” Portnoy replied. “The United States is accusing him of a crime under the Espionage Act, and that, therefore, the United States is losing the moral high ground when it comes to the question of whether a reporter engages in espionage as a function of his work. So can you respond to that?”
“Look, I’m not going to speak to Julian Assange and that case from here,” said Jean-Pierre.
And then she didn’t. She just dismissed Portnoy’s question without explanation, then babbled for a while about things Biden has said that are supportive of press freedoms, then again said “I’m not going to weigh in on comments about Julian Assange.”
This type of “I’m not answering that, screw you” dodge is a rare move for a White House press secretary. They don’t normally just come right out and say they refuse to answer the highly relevant and easily answerable question a reporter just asked; typically when the question is too inconvenient they’ll either word-salad a bewildering non-response, say the answer is the jurisdiction of another department, or say they’ll get back to them when they have more information. It’s not the norm for them to just wave away the question without even pretending to provide a reason for doing so.
But really, what choice did she have? As Wall Street Journal White House correspondent Sabrina Siddiqi recently acknowledged on MSNBC, the job of the White House press secretary is not to tell the truth, but to “stay on message and control the narrative.” There is nothing about the Assange case that is on-message with the White House narrative; just the other day Biden said at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner that “journalism is not a crime,” yet his persecution of Assange is deliberately designed to criminalize journalism.
There’s simply no way to reconcile the US government’s story about itself with its efforts to normalize the extradition and persecution of journalists around the world under the Espionage Act. If your job is to make the White House look good, the only way to respond to questions of US hypocrisy regarding the Assange case is not to respond at all.
Later in the press conference, Jean-Pierre responded to another reporter’s questions about press freedoms in China with an assurance that the Biden administration will “hold accountable the autocrats and their enablers who continue to repress a free, independent media.”
Also on Wednesday afternoon, AP’s Matt Lee cited the aforementioned Code Pink protest earlier that day to question Deputy State Department Spokesman Vedant Patel about Assange, and was met with a similar amount of evasiveness.
“So then can I ask you, as was raised perhaps a bit abruptly at the very beginning of his comments this morning, whether or not the State Department regards Julian Assange as a journalist who would be covered by the ideas embodied in World Press Freedom Day?” asked Lee.
“The State Department thinks that Mr. Assange has been charged with serious criminal conduct in the United States, in connection with his alleged role in one of the largest compromises of classified information in our nation’s history,” Patel replied. “His actions risked serious harm to US national security to the benefit of our adversaries. It put named human sources to grave and imminent risk and risk of serious physical harm and arbitrary detention. So, it does not matter how we categorize any person, but this is – we view this as a – as something he’s been charged with serious criminal conduct.”
“Well, but it does matter actually, and that’s my question. Do you believe that he is a journalist or not?” asked Lee.
“Our view on Mr. Assange is that he’s been charged with serious criminal conduct in the United States,” said Patel………………………………………………..
Okay. So, basically, the bottom line is that you don’t have an answer. You won’t say whether you think he is a journalist or not,” Lee replied.
Again, Patel was left with no safe answers to Lee’s questions, because of course Assange is indisputably a journalist. Publishing information and reporting that is in the public interest is precisely the thing that journalism is; that’s why Assange has won so many awards for journalism. Trying to contend that Assange is not a journalist is an unwinnable argument.
Later in that same press conference Patel was challenged on his claim that Assange damaged US national security by journalist Sam Husseini.
“You refer to WikiLeaks allegedly damaging US national security,” said Husseini. “People might remember that WikiLeaks came to prominence because they released the Collateral Murder video. And what that showed was US military mowing down Reuters reporters – workers in Iraq. Reuters repeatedly asked the US Government to disclose such information about those killings, and the US government repeatedly refused to do so. Only then did we know what happened, that the US helicopter gunship mowed down these Reuters workers, through the Collateral Murder video? Are you saying that disclosure of such criminality by the US government impinges US national security?”
“I’m not going to parse or get into specifics,” Patel said, before again repeating his line that Assange stands accused of serious crimes in a way that harmed US national security.
Journalist Max Blumenthal tweeted about Patel’s remarks, “According to this State Dept flack, Julian Assange’s jailing is justified because he ‘harmed US national security.’ But Assange is not an American citizen. By this logic, the US can kidnap and indefinitely detain any foreign journalist who offends the US national security state.”
It is good that activists and journalists have been doing so much to highlight the US empire’s hypocrisy as it crows self-righteously about its love of press freedoms while persecuting the world’s most famous journalist for doing great journalism. Highlighting this hypocrisy shows that the US empire does not in fact care about press freedoms at all, save only to the extent that it can pretend to care about them to wag its finger at governments it doesn’t like.
https://europeanjournalists.org/blog/2023/04/27/free-julian-assange-member-of-our-organisations/ Our Italian FNSI affiliates were visited today in Rome by Julian Assange‘s wife, Stella Morris. The Italian journalists’ union, at the initiative of its Campania branch, presented Julian Assange with an FNSI membership card. The European Federation of Journalists (EFJ) passed on the initiative to its affiliates in Europe: 18 of them decided to follow the Italian example and grant Julian Assange membership (or honorary membership) of their organisations. The EFJ and its affiliates once again call on the UK authorities to release Julian Assange.
Here is the joint appeal delivered to Stella Morris in Rome this morning:
We, the undersigned European unions and associations of journalists, join the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) in calling on the US government to drop all charges against Julian Assange and allow him to return home to his wife and children.
We are gravely concerned about the impact of Assange’s continued detention on media freedom and the rights of all journalists globally. We urge European governments to actively work to secure Julian Assange’s release.
To show our solidarity, we declare Julian Assange a full member, an honorary member or a free member of our organisations.
Signed:
Maja Sever, EFJ President and TUCJ President, Croatia
Fabrizio Cappella, SUGC-FNSI Secretary, Italy
Satik Seyranyan, UJA President, Armenia
Borka Rudić, BHJA General Secretary, Bosnia & Herzegovina
Hrvoje Zovko, HND President, Croatia
Emmanuel Poupard, SNJ First General Secretary, France
Emmanuel Vire, General secretary SNJ-CGT, France
Tina Groll, dju in ver.di President, Germany
Maria Antoniadou, JUADN President, Greece
Laszlo M. Lengyel, HPU Executive President, Hungary
‘Hand-wringers’ under attack as Navy chief and Nine round on AUKUS doubters
Australia’s chief of Navy believes AUKUS is one of the country’s greatest nation-building projects. And Nine papers were happy to give him a rooftop to shout from.
The Nine mastheads have continued their full-throated backing of all things AUKUS, allotting prime weekend front-page space to Australia’s chief of Navy Mark Hammond, who — blow me down — laid out why the nation must get behind the Navy’s submarine project.
In a tour de force of military reasoning, the 37-year Australian Defence Force veteran also picked up some of the talking points advanced by the political class to defend the $368 billion decision sprung on the nation just a few weeks ago.
Hammond lamented that AUKUS was not being hailed as one of the great nation-building projects, such as the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric scheme. ……………. (registered readers only)
After a certain point criticizing the hypocrisy and contradictions of the US-centralized empire starts to feel too easy, like shooting fish in a barrel. But hell let’s do it anyway; the barrel’s right here, and I really hate these particular fish.
Russian security services have formally filed espionage charges against Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, who has been detained in Russia since his arrest last month. Gershkovich reportedly denies the spying allegations and says he was engaged in journalistic activity in Russia.
This news came out at the same time as a joint statement was published by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell condemning Gershkovich’s detention as a violation of press freedoms.
“Let there be no mistake: journalism is not a crime,” the senators write. “We demand the baseless, fabricated charges against Mr. Gershkovich be dropped and he be immediately released and reiterate our condemnation of the Russian government’s continued attempts to intimidate, repress, and punish independent journalists and civil society voices.”
The use of the phrase “journalism is not a crime” is an interesting choice since the most common individual case you’ll hear it used in reference to is surely that of Julian Assange, who has been locked in a maximum security prison for four years while the US government works to extradite him for the crime of good journalism. Every pro-Assange demonstration I’ve ever been to has featured signs with some variation of the phrase “journalism is not a crime,” and any Assange supporter will be intimately familiar with that refrain.
So as an Assange supporter it sounds a bit odd to hear that slogan rolled out by two DC swamp monsters who have both enthusiastically supported the persecution of the world’s most famous journalist.
“He has done enormous damage to our country and I think he needs to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. And if that becomes a problem, we need to change the law,” McConnell said of Assange after WikiLeaks published thousands of diplomatic cables in 2010.
“Neither WikiLeaks, nor its original source for these materials, should be spared in any way from the fullest prosecution possible under the law,” Schumer said in 2010.
“Now that Julian Assange has been arrested, I hope he will soon be held to account for his meddling in our elections on behalf of Putin and the Russian government,” Schumer tweeted when Assange was dragged from the Ecuadorian embassy in London almost exactly four years ago. (Assange has not been charged with anything related to Russia or the 2016 election, and allegations of collusion with Russia remain completely unsubstantiated to this day.)
These are two of the most powerful elected officials in the world, puffing and posing as brave defenders of press freedoms after having actively facilitated their government’s attempts to destroy those very press freedoms. Their government is working to extradite and imprison Assange under the Espionage Act for engaging in what experts say is standard journalistic activity, which will allow them to set a legal precedent in which any journalist anywhere in the world can be extradited and prosecuted for exposing US war crimes like Assange did.
There is no greater threat posed to world press freedoms than the one the US is presenting with its persecution of Julian Assange, a persecution which has been fervently endorsed by Schumer and McConnell and all the other Washington swamp creatures who are melodramatically rending their garments about Evan Gershkovich today.
Which is of course ridiculous. You don’t get to say “journalism is not a crime” while literally working to criminalize journalism. Those positions are mutually exclusive. Pick one.
It’s worthwhile to point out the hypocrisy of US empire managers, not because hypocrisy in and of itself is some uniquely grave evil but because it shows that these people do not stand for what they pretend to stand for. The US empire does not care about press freedoms, it cares about power and domination, and the noises it makes in support of journalism are only ever made as a cynical ploy with which to bludgeon disobedient foreign governments on the world stage.
Assange exposed many inconvenient facts about the US empire in his work with WikiLeaks, but none have been so inconvenient as what he’s exposed by forcing them to come after him and reveal their true face in their brazen persecution of the world’s greatest journalist.
The uniformly negative reaction of the national press gallery to former PM Paul Keating’s views on Australia’s security raises questions not just of its intellectual adequacy but of whether the media has been captured by and is knowingly serving the United States at Australia’s expense.
How might one distinguish commentary which knowingly favours US objectives which increase risk and cost for Australia from incompetence having the same result? Perhaps case studies of commentators’ past writings could reveal patterns to help readers judge.
Let’s take a prominent journalist. Peter Hartcher, political and international editor for the Sydney Morning Herald, is richly experienced. A long-standing opinion writer at the national level who has spent years in the US. One assumes such a figure would inform Australians authentically and perceptively of developments in the United States which affect Australia as a major security partner, from an Australian perspective. Not only should we expect insightful knowledge to reside in such a figure but that this be evident in published work.
Undoubtedly, since the signing of the ANZUS treaty in 1951 the decisive shift affecting our security relationship has been the influence on US foreign policy of “neo-conservativism”.
Spawned in Chicago academia and arriving in Washington following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, “neocons” contrived the unfounded invasion of Iraq in 2003. Their ethos prevails to this day. In a nutshell, the neocon ethos espouses pre-emptive action to prevent any nation becoming a challenge to US hegemony, by identifying potential rivals early and countering with force as necessary. Anything goes, including truth. That allies should bear the burden for US dominance is axiomatic.
It is in this context that China has been declared by the US to be the principal threat to its global domination. Based on the neocon algorithm, China is deemed to be the priority political and economic competitor, to be diminished to insignificance, employing military force as necessary.
The neocon policy mindset in America is profoundly different from that which Australia experienced in San Francisco seventy years ago when negotiating ANZUS. One would expect a half-competent Australian international editor to pick up on that shift. And embed this new reality in writing on US/China security matters. To thus shape the tone of the issues and conclusions. Assessing Hartcher’s writing for even a hint of this quality goes to the competence of the correspondent. Readers can judge whether such an attribute resides in Hartcher’s commentary. Which says nothing necessarily of motive, however.
Closer to home and more recently, Australia’s security architecture has been destroyed by America pursuing domination of China. The destruction has passed unnoticed, without debate. Here media incompetence generally is so sustained and glaring that questions of motive automatically arise.
Who would know that the ANZUS treaty has been buried in practice? Whilst it failed to offer Australia a binding security guarantee it did support us in valuable ways to build our own self- reliant defence, using our own money for our own priorities. Now that self-reliance is done. America has insinuated its forces onto Australian territory and into our defence resources and our foreign and defence policy – for its own objectives against China.
How? The takeover was formalised through a document known as the Force Posture Agreement, compliments of former US Secretary of State John Kerry visiting us in 2014. Embraced by the Abbot government and fertilised by every government since. Therein, Australia agrees to provide the real estate and support for American military operations against China, under American control and command, at America’s pleasure. It is expandable, again at America’s pleasure, without limits.
Hereby, Australia has taken on acutely elevated geostrategic risk – with no end in sight, willingly. Australia is now on a strategic risk escalator controlled by Washington. Yet our media presents Beijing as the protagonist.
Worse, as with ANZUS, America has not provided any guarantee of armed response when Australia is attacked. The Australian government is now subsidising the US to attack China from our sovereign territory whenever the US chooses, with no insurance.
Overturning of Australia’s security superstructure should have been serious grist to a foreign correspondent’s mill. Yet Hartcher has not even scratched that surface in commentary. Really, could mere incompetence explain this void, not just in Hartcher’s coverage but across the entire fourth estate? Ignorance is an unlikely explanator given Hatcher’s deep, relevant background. Clearly it is to America’s benefit that Australians remain uninformed of the hazards being imposed, and our extra costs, with our governments’ encouragement.
Australians are forced to entertain purposeful manipulation of their right to know, to America’s advantage.
All the while, some earnest Australians have been working for change so that Parliament has the say on Australia going to war. What good is that when America has free rein to wage war from Australia whenever it suits Washington? American operations mounted from here against China will automatically render us at war in China’s eyes. What any Australian parliament or government might say would be of no practical consequence to a China under attack from B52 bombers based at Tindal.
Then there was Hartcher’s “red alert” series on war with China, recently run by the Herald. That paper’s editorial advised readers that “fighting with China could come as early as 2026”. A professional editor would have demanded authoritative evidence. It’s easy enough to come by, publicly. The US Secretary of Defence intelligence report to Congress for 2022 advises that China’s military plan is to be able to restrain US forces on its periphery by 2027. That is, China is focussed on dealing with American military pressure on its sea and air surrounds. And Australian forces are involved now in that pressure on China. So the fact is that China is trying to deal with attack on its territory by forces which include Australia’s. That destroys the foundation of Hartcher’s “red alert” construct.
In short, Hartcher has a habit of misleading Australians on their security, and the enormous risk being dumped on Australia by our friend America. Not by China. Both by commission and omission this commentator’s work exhibits a pattern of serving US interests while denying Australian readers. Whether this is purposeful servitude to American interests at Australian’s expense is for readers to decide.
More surely, from one who surely knows, Henry Kissinger once said: “To be an enemy of the United States is dangerous, but to be a friend is fatal”. No Australian government has had the ticker to look for other ground.
As international tensions rise to a new level, with the Ukraine war passing its first anniversary and the Albanese Government set to announce its commitment of hundreds of billions of dollars to new weaponry, nuclear propelled subs, stealth bombers etc, The Road to War brings into sharp focus why it is not in Australia’s best interests to be dragged into an American-led war with China.
The Road to War is directed by one of Australia’s most respected political documentary filmmakers, David Bradbury. Bradbury has more than four decades of journalistic and filmmaking experience behind him having covered many of the world’s trouble spots since the end of the Vietnam war — SE Asia, Iraq, East Timor, revolutions and civil war in Central and South America, India, China, Nepal and West Papua.
“I was driven to make this film because of the urgency of the situation. I fear we will be sucked into a nuclear war with China and/or Russia from which we will never recover, were some of us to survive the first salvo of nuclear warheads,” says the twice Oscar-nominated filmmaker.
“We must put a hard brake on Australia joining in the current arms race as the international situation deteriorates. We owe it to our children and future generations of Australians who already face the gravest existential danger of their young lives from Climate Change,” says Bradbury.
There is general concern among the defence analysts Bradbury interviews in the film that Australia is being set up to be the US proxy in its coming war with China. And that neither the Labor nor LNP governments have learnt anything from being dragged into America’s wars of folly since World War II — Korea, Vietnam, two disastrous wars in Iraq and America’s failed 20 year war in Afghanistan which ripped that country apart, only to see the Taliban warlords return the country and its female population to feudal times.
“Basing US B52 and Stealth bombers in Australia is all part of preparing Australia to be the protagonist on behalf of the United States in a war against China. If the US can’t get Taiwan to be the proxy or its patsy, it will be Australia,” says former Australian ambassador to China and Iran, John Lander.
Military analyst, Dr Richard Tanter, fears the US military’s spy base at Pine Gap near Alice Springs, will be the first target of any direct confrontation between the US and Russia or China.
“The US military base at Pine Gap is critical to the US military’s global strategy, especially nuclear missile threats in the region. The generals in Moscow and Beijing would have it as a top priority on their nuclear Hit List,” says Dr Tanter whose 40 years of ground-breaking research on Pine Gap with colleague, Dr Des Ball, has provided us with the clearest insight to the unique role Pine Gap plays for the US. Everything from programming US drone attacks to detecting the first critical seconds of nuclear ICBM’s lifting off from their deep underground silos in China or Russia, to directing crippling nuclear retaliation on its enemy. “Should Russia or China want to send a signal to Washington that it means business and ‘don’t push us any further’, a one-off nuclear strike on Pine Gap would do that very effectively, without triggering retaliation from the US since it doesn’t take out a US mainland installation or city,” says Dr Tanter.
“It’s horrible to talk about part of Australia in these terms but one has to be a realist with what comes to us by aligning ourselves with the US,” Tanter says.
“Studies show in the event of even a very limited nuclear exchange between any of the nuclear powers, up to two billion people would starve to death from nuclear winter,” says Dr Sue Wareham of the Medical Association for the Prevention of War.
“The Australian Government, Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, and Minister for Defence, Richard Marles, have a serious responsibility to look after all Australians. Not just those living in cities. Were Pine Gap to be hit with even one nuclear missile, Health Minister Mark Butler would be hard pressed to find any volunteer nurses and doctors willing to risk their lives to help survivors in Alice Springs, Darwin and surrounding communities from even one nuclear missile hitting this critical US target,” says Dr Wareham.
Further information or interviews with David Bradbury: david@frontlinefilms.com.au
Media enquiries: Sandi Keane: 0427 260 319 keanesandi@gmail.com, Twitter: @jarrapin
Antinuclear 