The SIEV X-Factor

Jul 7, 2007 | Australian Values, Border Security, Corruption, Democracy, Freedom of Speech, Immigration, Legal, Media Values, OzPol Values, Values

The SIEV X-Factor

“A Certain Maritime Incident”

 

Richard Fidler interviewed  Tony Kevin on ABC’s Conversation Hour  last week.
Tony Kevin is an activist who was one of the driving forces behind the campaign to uncover, and especially to tell, the truth about the sinking of the SIEV X in which approximately 353 children, women and men drowned.

He was a highly commended and respected Ambassador, including to Russia, and to Cambodia in the 90s. He has written a book, Walking the Camino, about the experience of travelling the pilgrim route from Andalusia to the north of Spain.

However, his reputation as a diplomat was no defence against the vitriol which was spat at him when he dared question the government’s morality and border protection policies.

“   I guess I identified very closely with the human rights of refugees and Australia’s obligations… I was denounced in the parliament as a person of no credibility; I was abused by three senators in a senate committee…”

But Tony Kevin said some things that really struck a chord with us.

“  In a democracy every citizen is responsible for the conduct of their government and if their government behaves in unethical or even criminal ways every citizen has a responsibility within their capacity to challenge that and that’s why I was one of the forty-three former diplomats and former senior military personnel who signed the statement condemning the Australian involvement in the war in Iraq, which I believe was a criminal activity. And I guess you’ve just got to basically, sometimes, stand up and be counted. That’s the entry ticket we pay for continuing to enjoy a democracy.

And he says something about the illusion in which we all, journalists and pundits included, live and take for granted – that while most of us are decent and reasonably honest and fair-minded we assume politics and politicians are also.

Many of us have assumed that what has been going on in Australian politics has been business as usual with a right-wing twist. We have been in denial, in our complacency, that what has been going on in the past eleven and a half years has in fact been a shift to the extremist right and the debauching of basic Australian political and civil service standards. Surely there could not have been such a shift, not in our country.

Tony Kevin saw it clearly.

“  What I’ve tried to do myself is to challenge the idea that the last eleven years have been years of normality. I don’t believe they have. I believe they’ve been years of moral dysfunction in Australia and to the extent that I can continue to convey that, without blaming people, without pointing fingers at people, I plan to continue to do that.

In fact, in a speech at the Manning Clark House Weekend of Ideas in April, Kevin spoke about the fragility and transparency of our illusion about our system and our way of life.

“  Confronting the SIEV X cover-up forced me to look down into the abyss that lies beneath our “presumption of regularity” – the phrase is Jack Waterford’s – a presumption that we rely on in our daily lives in society.

I understand now that my exposure to this abyss was a full grief trauma…Walking through Manuka, seeing people enjoying themselves in restaurants, I wanted to scream — “Wake up to the horrors of what our government is doing to defenceless people in our names! How can you still pretend that we live in a normal decent country”? It is hard to look into that abyss for a long time without damage, without succumbing to depression or self-destructive rage.

In this speech he also described what happened to him as a result of his outspoken dissent and activism.

“  These are the refugee dissent suppression strategies I encountered:

 

1. Put out claimed facts that are actually untrue, relying on the public’s presumption that governments normally do not lie to the public, except in grave national security emergencies.

2. Force truth-seekers into the roles of advocates or activists. Blur debates about the facts in specific cases of abuse of human rights, by trying to move the debate into unresolvable discussions about values.

3. Drive wedges to weaken the solidarity of dissent. Use frightener words to marginalize and discredit passionate or influential dissenters, words like “extremist”, “fanatic”, “conspiracy theorist”, “Howard-hater”, “disloyal”, “un-Australian”.

4. Workplace or NGO-funding sanctions. Implied threats against those in government or government-funded employment, or threats to cut off funding to NGOs that support refugee activism.

5. Guilt trips. Accuse dissenters of prolonging victims’ distress through holding out false hopes, or of undermining national security. Play games with dissenters’ minds, aimed at undermining their belief in the justice of their causes. Seek to make them feel more isolated.

6. Never give credit to dissenters when they succeed. Always pretend that any decisions to soften the system were not taken under pressure.

 

On point 1, the SIEV X public history is full of examples of false and shifting stories put out by government:

 

On where the boat sank: First, that it sank in Indonesian waters. Later, that “we don’t know where it sank”. Then, an admission that it sank in international waters. But then, a later reversion to “we don’t know where it sank”.

 

On what we knew about the voyage. First, that we knew nothing till we saw the TV news of the sinking. Then, that we knew the boat was coming, but we did not know when or from where. We cannot tell you what we knew, because it’s intelligence; or, because it is the subject of an ongoing investigation. Or a variant from Mick Keelty: that you will just have to take our word for it that we did not know about the boat until it was too late to save the passengers. Because it’s “operational”, we cannot offer proof of this claim.

 

Were we expecting the boat? Yes, we were expecting the boat at Christmas Island on 21 October and that is why we sent a distress message to Indonesian Search and Rescue when it failed to arrive on time. But later – no, we did not put out a distress call to the ADF or to all shipping, because we then assumed that the boat had never left or it had turned back.

 

Did we ever look for the boat? No, we didn’t. Yes, we did – and here to prove are the RAAF surveillance maps and records of boat sightings, plastered all over the front page of the Weekend Australian on 29 June 2002, when media concern about SIEV X was at its peak But later – Yes, we did fly over the area, but only as part of routine RAAF surveillance patrols, because our aircrews were never tasked to look for a missing boat. And the flight charts and sightings data we tabled in the Senate and that the Senate accepted as fact were really just approximate flight paths. No, you cannot see our aircrew flight reports or know the names of the crews, because that’s all classified information. And according to the Defence Minister in 2005, the evidence the ADF gave in 2002 — despite all the conclusively forensic analysis by Marg Hutton of its many inconsistencies — was the whole truth.

 

Do we know the names of the dead? Initially, as reported — the UNHCR is preparing and collating lists of the dead and survivors. Later from the AFP — there are no such lists. Later — there are some lists but it is unlikely they will ever be made public.

And so on and on. One phoney smokescreen was put up after another until a frustrated and jaded media abandoned the story, having found no way to distinguish between truth and lies.

You can read Kevin’s testimony to the Senate Inquiry into “A Certain Maritime Incident” at the SIEV X site.

Fidler asked Kevin whether his SIEV X research and advocacy since 2002 had been worth it.

“  Yes. I think my work achieved useful results going beyond SIEV X. It helped more people to see the truth behind the now discredited myth that John Howard is just another Australian politician trying to do his job more or less decently. Australians know the real Howard now. I think my SIEV X research and advocacy helped to expose the ugly truth about this man.

Quite so.

 

 

WTF

Jun 25, 2007 | Australian Values, Citizenship, Democracy, Freedom of Speech, Lifestyle & Life, OzPol Values, Values

WTF

What do we want? Freedom!

 

When do we want it? When it’s ok with the police!
Mr Howard, to his cheer squad at the Sydney Institute:

“   Freedoms and rights, especially for women and children, are little more than cruel fictions without the rule of law and some semblance of social order enforced by legitimate authority”

What does this mean? Read it again.

Freedoms and rights rely on enforcement by legitimate authority? If they are enforced how can they be freedoms? How can they be rights?

As we have said before somewhere, any “freedom” or “right” which is in the gift of another and bestowed at their whim is neither truly a freedom nor a right but a favour dispensed as a reward for obedience to the rulers who own us.

Our freedom is our birthright and it is not in the gift of anyone, least of all an anally-retentive Little Lord Fauntleroy, a jumped up squirt like Howard.

Dis-Honoris Causa

Jun 16, 2007 | Cultural Values, Democracy, Freedom of Speech, Legal, Media Values, Terrorism, USPol, Values, War

Dis-Honoris Causa

 

In all its splendor and majesty

In September 2006 the US right pushed the country “a step toward totalitarianism” when the Republican Senate majority passed a bill which essentially stripped the US Constitution of the protection of habeas corpus, one of the foundational guarantees against executive injustice and abuse of power which has been an essential part the British legal tradition for hundreds and hundreds of years.

As Chicago Tribune columnist Garrison Keillor said at the time:

“  Last week, we suspended human rights in America, and what goes around comes around. Ixnay habeas corpus.

The U.S. Senate, in all its splendor and majesty, decided that an “enemy combatant” is any non-citizen whom the president says is an enemy combatant, including your Korean greengrocer or your Swedish grandmother or your Czech au pair, and can be arrested and held for as long as authorities wish without any right of appeal to a court of law to examine the matter.

[…]

The Senate also decided it’s up to the president to decide whether it’s OK to make these enemies stand naked in cold rooms for a couple of days in blinding light and be beaten by interrogators….[T]hey have no right to see the evidence against them, and there is no appeal.

[…]

None of the men and women who voted for this bill has any right to speak in public about the rule of law anymore, or to take a high moral view of the Third Reich, or to wax poetic about the American Ideal. Mark their names. Any institution of higher learning that grants honorary degrees to these people forfeits its honor.

[…]

To paraphrase Sir Walter Scott: ‘Mark their names and mark them well. For them, no minstrel raptures swell. High though their titles, proud their name, boundless their wealth as wish can claim, these wretched figures shall go down to the vile dust from whence they sprung, unwept, unhonored and unsung.’

 

Three Republican senators made a show of opposing the bill and after they’d collected all the praise they could get, they quickly folded. Why be a hero when you can be fairly sure that the court will dispose of this piece of garbage.

 

If, however, the court does not, then our country has taken a step toward totalitarianism. If the government can round up someone and never be required to explain why, then it’s no longer the United States as you and I always understood it. Our enemies have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. They have made us become like them.”

There were 65 Senators who voted in favour of the stripping of habeas corpus.

Three of them are now Republican Presidential candidates (none are Democrat candidates).

They were Brownback, Hagel and McCain. None of them now, as Keillor says, “has any right to speak in public about the rule of law anymore, or to take a high moral view of the Third Reich, or to wax poetic about the American Ideal.”

Indeed, such “wretched figures” surely agree with the American military that the question of whether the Guantánamo prisoners – whose Military Tribunal cases were recently dismissed – were “Enemy Combatants” or “Illegal Enemy Combatants” is mere semantics. Of course. It is merely the law, and — as we know from the way that John Yoo, Alberto Gonzalez, Andrew Card, George Bush and Dick Cheney (not to mention McCain, Brownback and Hagel) view the law in general — when it gets in the way of their own agenda the rule of law and basic democratic principles are of small importance and the law itself (even though passed by the same vile and obsequious Senate) merely a minor hindrance when it comes to the Machtergreifung ¹.

But the law is not nothing, and the difference between an “illegal” and an ordinary “enemy combatant” is neither trivial nor semantic, as “rmj” clearly explains at Adventus [and also here].

(These are the people and the sort of people, by the way, whom John Howard’s government – especially Billy Bunter Downer, Darth Ruddock and the man who has lost any idea of morality or democratic principles, Michael Joseph Keelty – uses as its moral, legal and ethical benchmarks.)

Garrison Keillor went on to say, “Any institution of higher learning that grants honorary degrees to these people forfeits its honor.”

So, speaking of universities granting honorary degrees to dishonourable people…

One-time Acting-Attorney-General James Comey “testified before both the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, and the House Judiciary subcommittee on Commercial and Administrative Law on the U.S. Attorney dismissal scandal…In early January 2006, the New York Times…reported that Comey, who was Acting Attorney General during the March 2004 surgical hospitalization of John Ashcroft, refused to “certify” the legality of central aspects of the NSA program at that time…After Comey’s refusal, the newspaper reported, Andrew H. Card Jr., White House Chief of Staff, and Alberto R. Gonzales, then White House counsel and now Attorney General, made an emergency visit to the George Washington University Hospital, to attempt to win approval directly from Ashcroft for the program”.

(Ashcroft refused. See Comey’s description here).

Nevertheless, about three weeks ago, “Andy” Card got his reward from – to its eternal shame and disgrace – the University of Massachusetts. But not without the almost universal condemnation of students and faculty in perhaps the most astonishing display of opposition and dissent ever, certainly recently, in a formal academic ritual.

[See the video above]

 

 

¹ “Machtergreifung is a German word meaning “seizure of power”. It is normally used specifically to refer to the Nazi takeover of power in Weimar Germany on January 30, 1933.

The term Machtergreifung was first coined by the Nazis themselves in order to portray their accession to power as an active seizure”

A Troll! A Real Troll!

May 31, 2007 | Australian Values, Citizenship, Cultural Values, Democracy, Media Values, Values

A Troll! A Real Troll!

C 

Values Australia is proud to welcome its very own new pet Troll!

 

Our new Troll is very sophisticated.
It can even fill out a Contact form!

Here is its latest message:

you are
a dickhead

You are a fucking gronk
go home
outrageous
lefty

[Not surprisingly our Troll also indicates it is a Ford fancier.]

We do wish to correct our troll on a teeny tiny detail in the nicest possible way (so as not to alarm it – we would be very sad if it went away).

We are, you see, very much at home already.
Values Australia has “still called Australia home” for many many more decades than Trollie.

We stole this country first, you know, and don’t you forget it.

If our widdle trollie-wollie is upset with, or does not understand, democracy, free speech, robust debate, or even (apparently) rational thought, then perhaps it might, sadly, be best if it did, itself, slink away to a more appropriate habitat such as, um….one of our favorites….say, Zimbabwe, Burma, China, Sudan, Russia, or Iraq, all of which more suit the belligerent, authoritarian temperament.

But really, please stay. You are funny.

[UPDATE: It just occurred to Values Australia that our new pet troll might be someone senior from the Department of Immigration and Citizenship! What do you think?]

 

$20 A Barrel!

May 13, 2007 | Australian Values, Democracy, Economic Values, Media Values, OzPol Values, USPol, Values, War

$20 A Barrel!

 

The Murdoch interview with Max Walsh

 

The way we were

On Wednesday, February 12, 2003, Max Walsh conducted an exclusive interview with Rupert Murdoch.

“   Max Walsh: Let’s start with Iraq and the war because that looks like being one of those inflection points in history, with the world, financial markets and the business environment all being affected by what happens. How do you see events unfolding at this stage?

Some “inflection point”!

How about “Catastrophuck”?

Two smug, self-congratulatory bulls of the financial world, oblivious to the impending and utterly predictable suffering of millions of Iraqis discussing the carnage as if it was as moving as a financial chart.

Let us imagine for a moment that America owns the world by default and that it is theirs to give or take away parts of it as they see fit, because this is the only way you could understand Murdoch’s answer, that

“   Oh, I believe Bush is right, certainly. Well, we can’t back down now, where you hand over the whole of the Middle East to Saddam…

But why does he really think Bush was acting “morally”?

“   The greatest thing to come of this to the world economy, if you could put it that way, would be $US20 a barrel for oil. That’s bigger than any tax cut in any country.

Damn! if only Costello had thought of somewhere to invade, before the budget. He could have given an even bigger insult bribe to the Australian people! Maybe Howard is thinking of invading Zimbabwe before the election! The way he’s been talking about Mugabe is if anything more strident than his condemnation of Saddam, even to the point of invoking the Nazis.

Sadly, Murdoch was slightly off in his calculations.

 

In fact, if you look closely at the graph above you can just discern that the price of oil did not go “DOWN” but edged slightly in the direction of “UP”. With a bullet.

The price of oil when he spoke was around $25 a barrel.

The price of oil now is about $66 a barrel.
And Murdoch’s 2003 crystal ball reading for Bush’s Iraqi “cakewalk”?

“   I’m not close enough to know what they really are planning. They’d certainly want to establish a democratic regime as soon as possible and they’d want to get out as soon as they can.

Double damn! Wrong again!

Let Them Eat Yellowcake

May 9, 2007 | Democracy, OzPol Values, USPol, Values, War

Let Them Eat Yellowcake

Carlo Bonini          

STATE OF THE UNION 2003:

” Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of Uranium from Africa.”
Or not …

 

Well, as Bill Moyers reminds us, it wasn’t true. It was all a forgery, perpetrated in Rome. And Carlo Bonini, the Italian journalist who blew the story, co-author of Collusion — the story about the junk intelligence that led us all to war — is interviewed on Bill’s latest show.

The video and transcript are available here.

Here are some excerpts:

“   MOYERS: Collusion, by Italian journalists Carlo Bonini and Giuseppe D’Avanzo, takes you to the streets of Rome where the fake documents were cooked up by a motley band of conspirators whose scheme revolved around SISMI, the Italian equivalent of the CIA.

 

[….]

 

BONINI: You put a piece of raw intelligence in the circuit of the intelligence – allied intelligence agencies. And what happens is in the morning what is false in the morning turns into true facts at night. This information is given to the US intelligence. In the meantime, the same information is given to the British intelligence. The US intelligence checks the informations with the British intelligence. And the British intelligence says, “Yeah, we have the same information.” The point is that the two intelligence agencies, they don’t have to share their sources. So nor the Americans nor the Brits are going to say from whom they got the informations. But they got a confirmation…

 

Then they talk to the Italians. And the Italians say, “Oh, you had a confirmation from the British?” Rome talks to London, “Hey, you got a confirmation from Washington?” So the same piece of junk obtained in 48 hours, two different confirmations. It’s a mirror game. I can say briefly when US intelligence received the informations from the Italians, they – I mean, the CIA urged the DGSE – the French intelligence, the French CIA – to check the informations because Niger is a former French colony. There’s no better intelligence agency than the French one to double check a story like this. They worked hard on the information, and they came back saying, “There is nothing. This intelligence you received is simply junk intelligence. There is no evidence of such a deal between the Niger government and the Iraqi government.”

 

[….]

 

And the lesson is journalism matters. In wartime your enemy is the lies, is the propaganda. No matter if it’s the propaganda of your enemies, or if it’s the propaganda of your government. I mean, propaganda never gets good to the people, to the army, to anybody. And, if you want, and the lesson is this one: we have to protect the public opinion, and in last instance, the democracy from propaganda.”

So the Americans had it from both the French and from Joseph C. Wilson, the American diplomat who went to Niger to investigate the claim and found nothing. (Wilson was punished for telling the inconvenient truth by the leaking of the identity of his wife, Valerie Plame, an active CIA operative.)

And where was the American press? Where was the Australian press? Well, basically jostling each other for the honour of holding the dicks of their respective Presidents and Prime Ministers. Can it really be true that the only journalists interested in holding propaganda up to scrutiny are Italian?