There is SO much about Wikileaks at the moment that it’s truly hard to keep up. The following is a select selection of some of the more revealing revelations, related stories and controversies. Laurie Oakes in Sydney’s Daily Telegraph: Julia Gillard couldn’t help herself. She had to join the chorus of American hard-liners calling for…
Showing all posts tagged Australia
Assange reminds us who the real hero is
Fascinating Guardian organised online chat yesterday with Julian Assange: Fwoggie I’ll start the ball rolling with a question. You’re an Australian passport holder – would you want return to your own country or is this now out of the question due to potentially being arrested on arrival for releasing cables relating to Australian diplomats and…
Australia is in Afghanistan to support this?
Oh what a glorious war: Britain’s four-year military stewardship of the troubled Helmand province has been scorned by President Hamid Karzai, top Afghan officials and the US commander of Nato troops, according to secret US diplomatic cables. The dispatches expose a devastating contempt for the British failure to impose security and connect with ordinary Afghans.…
Where’s the media guts over Wikileaks?
My following article appears on ABC Unleashed today: The rolling revelations of the WikiLeaks US embassy cables will continue for months but equally interesting is the reaction of the global media. Many in the British media establishment, not given advance look at the documents, fumed against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and repeated government spin that…
Sarkozy, like Gillard, Cameron et al, long to look into the eyes of US President
Just what the world needs; another Western leader desperate to be loved by America: President Nicolas Sarkozy is an unusually solid French friend of America. He is also a “mercurial” man operating in “a zone of monarch-like impunity” surrounded by advisers often too fearful to give honest counsel, according to leaked cables from the United…
We support Assange because we know the agenda of his enemies
A global battle looms and it’s clear what side we need to be on: The WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, is tonight facing growing legal problems around the world, with the US announcing that it was investigating whether he had violated its espionage laws. Assange’s details were also added to Interpol’s worldwide wanted list. Dated 30…
Can we trust the press to be totally honest over Wikileaks (hint: no)
I wish this interview was more comforting. The idea of a Murdoch editor talking about resisting potential Australian government requests not to publish certain Wikileaks cables requires a suspension of disbelief, not least because he argues about not challenging anything that “could imperil the lives of Australian soldiers, men and women serving overseas in a…
Canberra just desperate to do America’s bidding, anywhere anytime
Australia is little more than a reliable lackey, keen to follow Washington into every futile war and action they launch: Australia is described as a “rock solid” but uninfluential US ally in secret US government documents made public by the controversial whistle-blowing website, WikiLeaks. A small number of the 250,000 cables have been released, leaving…
The old fashioned idea of backing public assets and keeping them
The corporate love affair with privatisation shows no sign of slowing down. But what if the economics are less than convincing? Nicholas Gruen writes in Inside Story that governments should more closely examine what they’re backing and why public ownership of key assets needs to be seriously considered. It’s not socialism, you know: Rather than…
Real reporters in war aren’t looking to paint troops in a lovely, glowing light
General Leahy heads the National Security Institute at the University of Canberra and has a rather curious view of the media: General Leahy says the Defence Force sees some journalists as ignorant sensationalists with no interest in good news stories, and divides them into two camps: those it can trust and those to be shunned.…