Axis of Cleansing
A guest post by former blogger Paul Watson. He sent it to me early Friday morning, but I was in transit all day so didn’t get a chance to post it until now.
A segment on Wednesday’s SBS Dateline program seems to have so far escaped the attentions of both mainstream media and the blog-world, despite it being the biggest news story of the year, IMO.
Curiously, the next day’s Age has a story that touches on an aspect of the matters discussed in the SBS program, while adding nothing new. But surely the Age should have re-written the story at 9 pm Wednesday night, to incorporate the goldmine of additional information that the Dateline segment offered (if you doubt me, read the transcript and compare).
An explanation here could be laziness on the Age’s part — either in it being too close to deadline to be bothered (although not physically impossible: 9/11 happened at 10.46 pm AEST, and was all over the next morning’s papers) and/or in not having a preview tape, or at the very least prior notice of the nature of the SBS program’s content.
More likely, though, is that the Age was simply afraid to do a proper story on the matter. That is, it knew that the SBS program was going to have some explosive and important content, and decided therefore to stay well away from it. Its story manqué on the same matter was therefore a coincidence, and nothing more.
Less charitable still is the possibility that the diluted, rather inconsequential story that did run in the next day’s Age was deliberately held over to act as a decoy to, and media mute-button on the SBS program. While such an act defies ordinary journalistic explanation, it is all rather naked, if scarily so, when seen as a gesture of Big Media sycophancy to Big Government.
To pinpoint the Age’s journalistic omissions, or worse, compare the opinions of Dr David Neal, from the Victorian Bar Society (hey, that’s a local phone call, the Age!) as quoted on SBS, to those of ACT Law Society executive director Larry King, quoted in the Age.
Plainly, they both can’t be right — and David Neal was speaking obiter dicta, as it were — yet for the Age to report the ACT Law Society’s (predictable) compliance in the matter as if it were an authoritative and uncontroversial ruling is plain callow.
That is mostly all I have to say. Read the transcript for yourselves, and of course, watch out for the program’s repeat, if there’s going to be one.
Finally, although I don’t think that it really matters for my argument, I pre-emptively note that I am on the record for saying that Andrew Wilkie is a boomer tool. I still hold this opinion, BTW. In case it’s not clear why, look at Wilkie’s main bee-in-bonnet: the lies told about WMDs in the lead-up to the Iraq war. Well, derr!
The Iraq War’s fall-out is no longer about WMDs, nor breathless revelations about their non-existence from the likes of Andrew Wilkie. Nor is it now about the promise of cheap oil (hah!). Indeed, the very point is that Iraq started as, and remains a non-traditional war – one bereft of secrets (and so consequently of meaningful “intelligence” and “lies” also).
That the West has long been losing the Iraq War is an open secret. Ironically, as Wednesday’s Dateline showed, the forces of government suppression have moved on from the merely futile — “scapegoating” more-than-willing fall-guy Andrew Wilkie — to the dangerously futile: scapegoating anyone, however large or small, who dares mouth the open secret. History shows that being on the losing side of a protracted war is invariably when domestic scapegoating — far away from the front — reaches fever pitch.
And if Thursday’s (23/6) Age is any guide, don’t look to the mainstream Western media for leadership on this one. The media’s game is also transparent, if rarely uttered aloud: by watching the losing West lash out (both domestically and in Iraq) — and standing by and saying nothing — one becomes a “winner”.
Further reading
Paul Kalina, Truth falls, The Age, 16 June 2005. A preview by a TV reporter of an otherwise ho-hum companion documentary, broadcast 23/6, to the SBS Dateline segment.
Deborah Snow, Big Brother sends in the hit squads to clean up national security threat, SMH, 18 September 2004. The sole contemporaneous mainstream media account of the 74 computer “cleansing�? raids in September 2004. Lack of subsequent/broader media attention can be attributed to the fact, made clear on the recent SBS segment, that mere reportage, by anyone, of the fact of the raids can constitute a (jailable) threat to national security.
The general point is well made – there has been a great lack of fuss about this.
At first sight, the Age and SMH do have an answer to your specific issue about the coverage of the Dateline program. They have covered it before, in the week of June 16th, as you indicated.
The point is, though, that this coverage has not really been mainstreamed by the Fairfax press, and of course the Murdochistas have not published one single teeny word, if Google is to be believed. So the media sidebar writers like Kalimna keep on stirring the pot, but the main mob at the desk near teacher just ignore it.
Given that they would probably like to run with the journalist as martyr line, I do think they are making a judgement about what the readers want. I don’t like the implications of that at all.
Andrew Wilkie as a boomer tool? What?
David,
The main thing that last year’s SMH story lacked was including the salient fact any reportage of the fact of the raids can constitute a (jailable) threat to national security. More than a mere detail, methinks. (The other main aspect covered by SBS Dateline, but not by last year’s SMH – breach of client confidentiality by Black Inc’s Canberra lawyer – was yet to unravel. However, surely the SMH should have since followed this up.)
Otherwise, I disagree that the Age covered the SBS Dateline story in the week prior. It *did* run a Green Guide preview to the companion documentary (by Carmel Travers) – but this doco, in turn, was far from ground-breaking.
Which brings me on to “boomer tools�. Andrew Wilkie’s major faults, IMO, are two-fold. First was his decision to become a martyr in a situation in which martyrdom was neither required nor even helpful. Yes, the WMDs were a crock – but Blind Freddie was just an authoritative source here as Andrew Wilkie.
Secondly, running for the Greens in Bennelong was an even cheaper and stupider publicity stunt. And I say this as a Greens voter – the Greens Iraq policy *should* have been quite straightforward, viz opposing the Iraq War because it perpetuated Western (esp. US and Australian) oil-piggery. Instead, the Greens/Wilkie’s stated main reason for opposing the Iraq War, viz the existence or not of WMDs, simply led them into a sterile hall of mirrors.
The same criticism can be levelled at Carmel Travers’ doco, with its twin foci on Andrew Wilkie and WMDs. If there is/was indeed a security service fatwa on Andrew Wilkie, it is entirely (i) misguided and (ii) self-inflicted (in the sense a “Big Brotherâ€? housemate can hardly later claim that they didn’t volunteer to be depicted as a vacuous boor).
The SBS Dateline segment was vastly superior to Carmel Travers’ doco because it didn’t run as a celebrity fatwa/victim story. Instead, it portrayed a “thinwa� archipelago – of dozens of ordinary people and journalists being caught up in nightmarish security net.
All agreed, though the boomer argument is a bit thin.
The aspect of the entire issue which told me it was ‘Australian Security’s finest hour’ is this:
“….Black Inc publisher Morry Schwartz said . . . “The process got into the hands of a mindless bureaucracy to the degree that when they’d finished doing it, and this is what I found almost amusing, they sent us a customer satisfaction form,”
PW
- I appreciate you drawing attention to these really important whistleblower issues, but your wonderful discussion of the topic is really undermined by your subjective description of a very brave [former] public servant, and if you felt compelled to be subjective in your descriptions of him – was that really the most imaginative you could be, when he has eyebrows like Beaker?
I am not sure that you have taken into consideration the odds that were against this man and if he had have discussed his claims in any other way he would definitely have ended up as the main meal for the Federal AG, or worse.
I have to disagree with your description of Wilkie, who has been accurately depicted by the valour of his actions, and has spent his life in honourable service to his country, but I’m glad you took the time to address this issue and you did it well.
Cheers, Liz.