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.

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.

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?