Election Wire is an online youth portal covering the Australian election campaign (here’s their recent report about detention centres). Journalist Austin G. Mackell yesterday interviewed me about the issues in the country, including foreign affairs, the Greens, the web filter, Wikileaks and the Middle East:
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Israel emerges in the Wikleaks documents
I’ve been wondering if Israel appears at all in the recent Wikileaks information dump. A new search tool provides the answer; only briefly though protests did occur in Afghanistan against Israel’s onslaught in Gaza in January 2009.
Australia kindly provides weapons to Taliban
Helping the “enemy”, one fruitless war at a time: Australian weapons and equipment have repeatedly been discovered among Taliban stockpiles, raising fears that Afghan troops trained by Diggers have been pilfering military supplies. Documents released by the WikiLeaks website show that in the past six years International Security Assistance Force troops have uncovered Australian mortar…
Killing Julian Assange is a legitimate response to his leaks?
The level of depravity surrounding the Wikileaks saga continues, causing arguably sane people to call for extreme, if not criminal, action: Did my [Washington Post] colleague, Marc Thiessen, just call for a drone strike in Iceland? Thiessen is obviously incensed by WikiLeaks‘s dissemination of tens of thousands of pages of government documents relating to the…
Today’s Pentagon Papers may have similar effect
Frank Rich in the New York Times inserts some sense into the Wikileaks debate and argues that the significance lies in confirming people’s views on a failed war (just like Vietnam). Last week the left and right reached a rare consensus. The war logs are no Pentagon Papers. They are historic documents describing events largely…
Endangering “informants” in Afghanistan is a murky affair
Wikileaks founder Julian Assange talks to Fox News (!) about the Afghan war logs and provides some context to the release of classified documents and the ways in which “informants” often work: A bigger problem, according to Assange, was a project the government called the “kill or capture list”– a list of suspected terrorists that…
Knowing that Afghanistan is a failure
Simon Jenkins writes in the Guardian that the Wikileaks war logs are significant. But will the media war cheer-leaders be listening? Is it the death of war? In Vietnam the horror of fighting was brought to TV screens in real time. Such was the reaction that American citizens withdrew their consent. In the 1980s computers…
Did Australia cover-up Afghan deaths?
The Australian Wikileaks connection: Classified US Defence Department documents leaked to the WikiLeaks website this week suggest the Australian Defence Force covered up the killing of an Afghan policeman by Australian troops. Buried among the 90,000 intelligence documents is a log entry about the killing of an Afghan man by an Australian mentoring and reconstruction…
Pentagon says that stories about Pentagon aren’t true
Never trust a “Pentagon official”. Journalists should know better than trusting such anonymous sources. But of course they don’t. Hence this story: An ongoing Pentagon review of the massive flood of secret documents made public by the WikiLeaks website has so far found no evidence that the disclosure harmed U.S. national security or endangered American…
The West dances with the Pakistani devil
This is what happens when the world’s only super-power, with client state support (hello Australia) engage in a war with no end with partners who loathe your presence: Former Pakistani spy agency chief Lt. Gen. Hamid Gul denied that he has any links to al Qaeda or Taliban insurgents and said he is willing to…