On February 21, the Royal Courts of Justice hosted a second day of carnivalesque mockery regarding the appeal by lawyers representing an ill Julian Assange, whose publishing efforts are being impugned by the United States as having compromised the identities of informants while damaging national security. Extradition awaits, only being postponed by rearguard actions such as what has just been concluded at the High Court. How, then, to justify the 18 charges being levelled against the WikiLeaks founder under the US Espionage Act of 1917, an instrument not just vile but antiquated in its effort to stomp on political discussion…
Author: Dr. Binoy Kampmark
On February 20, it was clear that things were not going to be made easy for Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder who infuriated the US imperium, the national security establishment, and a stable of journalists upset that he had cut their ill-tended lawns. He was too ill to attend what may well be the final appeal against his extradition from the United Kingdom to the United States. Were he to be sent to the US, he faces a possible sentence amounting to 175 years arising from 18 venally cobbled charges, 17 spliced from that archaic horror, the Espionage Act of…
Gaza. Palestinians. Israel. Genocide. Taylor Swift? This odd cobbling of words is the extent celebrities make a mockery of serious conversation, even in such middle-brow outletsas Australia’s Radio National. Admittedly, it was breakfast, and the presenter a seasoned impressionist of journalism, but surely listeners did not have to know that Swift’s private jet had just arrived in Melbourne, making it an occasion of national significance? Ground had already been tilled, and seeds scattered, by desperate academics keen to draw gold dust from the Swift worship machine at Melbourne’s Swiftposium 2024. Seriousness was not the order of the day and papers…
The imaginative faculties of standard Australian politiciansretreat to some strange, deathly placeon certain issues. In that wasteland, theyare often unrecoverable. Like juveniles demanding instant reward, these representatives find complexity hideous, troubling, discomforting. Focus on the prospect of immediate electoral gain, the crude punch, the bruising, the hurt. That, in sum, is Canberra’s policy towards refugees. With this month’s appearance of 39 asylum seekerson some of the most remote shorelines on the planet in Western Australia, the customary wells of hysteria were again being tapped for political gain.“Here we go again,” lamented the Tasmanian Greens Senator Nick McKim. “A boat arrives…
He was sweet and well meaning, but he was old. He was hazy. His memory was poor. Doddering, confused, the self-proclaimed leader of the Free World seemed ready to check into a retirement village. That, at least, is the thick insinuation of the Special Counsel’s report on President Joe Biden’s mishandling of classified documents when vice president during the Obama administration. The findings of the Special Counsel Robert Hur were not punitive. But they were laceratingly wounding. It seemed to resemble more of a nurse’s assessment of whether you need an upgrade in aged-care treatment, a bolstering of services for…
To attribute weighty moral codes to athletes has always been a silly pastime of the judging classes and flesh admiring voyeurs. But sporting bodies, in a manner similar to the clergy, demand something called the level playing field. Fairness and fair play imply that sports people will follow various principles and rules in competition. They will, for instance, do nothing to unravel and disturb this understanding of détente between the supremely talented. We are all gifted on Olympus; may the best athlete behave in accordance with accepted practices. No need for superior sporting machinery, superior equipment, enhanced biceps, steroid-boosted bodies.…
There are few surprises regarding the final episode of Nemesis, the three-part account on how the Australian Liberal Party, in partnership with the dozy Nationals,psychotically and convulsively disembowelledthemselvesfrom the time Tony Abbott won office in 2013.Over the muddy gore and violence concluding the tenures of Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull, one plotter rose, knife bloodied and brimming with confidence: Scott Morrison. As always, he claims to have done so without a trace. That, dear readers, is the way of all advertising men. Theinconspicuous rise of Morrison heralded a bankrupt political culture, one of smeary gloss, smug grabs on complex issues, the…
Legal challenges regarding the Israel-Gaza War are starting to bulk lawyers’ briefs and courtroom proceedings. South Africa got matters underway with its December application before the International Court of Justiceaccusing Israel of genocide in its campaign against the Palestinians.While determining whether genocide has taken place, the ICJ issued an interim order warning Israel to prevent genocidal acts, preserve evidence relevant to the prosecution of any such acts, and ease the crushing restrictions on humanitarian aid. In the United States, a valiant effort was made in the US District Court for the Northern District of California to restrain the Biden administration…
Animals have, at times, been given the same dismissively nasty treatment humans love giving themselves. Be it detention, torture, trial, and execution, the unwitting creatures can be found in the oddest situations, anthropomorphised with all the characteristics of will, thought and intention.By way of ghastly example, the Norman city of Falaise hosted the execution of a pig in 1386 for having “indulged in the evil propensity of eating infants on the streets”, and sentenced to maiming in the heat and forelegs prior to hanging. A field where such a matter has, and continues to crop up, is espionage. Espionage, that…
Times were supposedly better in 2022. That is, if you were a lawmaker in the Australian state of Victoria, a busy Israeli arms manufacturer, or cash counting corporate middleman keen to make a stash along the way between the two. That view is premised on the notion that what happened on October 7,2023 in Israel was stunningly remarkable, a historical blot dripped and dribbled from nothingness, leaving the Jewish state vengeful and yearning to avenge 1200 deaths and the taking of 240 hostages. All things prior were dandy and uncontroversial. Last month, word got out that the Victorian government had…
Holding the foreign policy of a country accountable in court, notably when it comes to matters criminal, can be insuperably challenging. Judges traditionally shun making decisions on policy, even though they unofficially do so all the time. The Center for Constitutional Rights, a New York-based civil liberties group, was not to be discouraged, most notably regarding the Biden administration’s unflagging support for Israel and its war in Gaza. In a filing in the US District Court for the Northern District of California last November, the CCR, representing a number of Palestinian human rights organisations including Palestinians in Gaza and the…
The release of the Vault 7 files in the spring of 2017 in a series of 26 disclosures, detailing the hacking tools of the US Central Intelligence Agency, was one of the more impressive achievements of the WikiLeaks publishing organisation. As WikiLeaks statedat the time, the hacking component of the agency’s operations had become so sizeable it began to dwarf the operations of the National Security Agency. “The CIA had created, in effect, its ‘own NSA’ with even less accountability and without publicly answering the question as to whether such a massive budgetary spend on duplicating the capabilities of a…
It was a struggle to see how a child’s welfare was relevant in the latest, shrill debates about technology taking place on The Hill. The Senate Judiciary Committee and the leaders of social media companies were on show to thrash out matters on technology and their threats on January 31 in a hearing titled “Big Tech and the Online Child Exploitation Crisis.” The companies present: X Corp, represented by Linda Yaccarino; TikTok Inc, fronted by Shou Chew; Snap Inc, by Evan Spiegel; Meta and Mark Zuckerberg; and Jason Citron of Discord Inc. Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) got the ghoulish proceedings…
The BBC’s characteristically mild-mannerednote said it all: What is Tower 22? More to the point, what are US forces doing in Jordan?(To be more precise, a dusty scratching on the Syria-Jordan border.) These questions were posed in the aftermath of yet another drone attack against a US outpost in the Middle East, its location of dubious strategic relevance to Washington, yet seen as indispensable to its global footprint. On this occasion, the attack proved successful, killing three troops and wounding dozens. The Times of Israeloffered a workmanlike description of the site’s role: “Tower 22 is located close enough to US…
Palace coups have become a seasonal tradition in Australian politics. Between 2007 and 2018, Australia had six prime ministers, four of whom were overthrown by their own parties, the first five never being allowed to complete their first term in office.In contrast, between 1983 and 2007, the country could count on the dry, solid stability of three leaders. The change of heart led to the irresistible description of Australia being “the coup capital of the democratic world”. In the Westminster system of government, where the executive is drawn from the representative chamber, prime ministers are at the mercy of party…
During the evening of January 25, Kenneth Eugene Smith, having failed to convince the US Supreme Court to delay his execution,became yet another victim of judicial, state-sanctioned murder. A previous, failed effort, using lethal injection, had been made in 2022. On this occasion, it was the state of Alabama which sought to bloody (or gas, in this instance) its copybook at the William C. Holman Correctional Facility in Atmore. The method of execution: nitrogen hypoxia. Smith was convicted in 1989 for murdering Elizabeth Sennett, the wife of a preacher’s wife, in a murder-for-hire killing. His life, taken in turn, succumbed…
On January 26, legal experts, policy wonks, activists and the plain curious waited for the order of the International Court of Justice, sitting in The Hague. The topic was that gravest of crimes, considered most reprehensible in the canon of international law: genocide. The main participants: the accused party, the State of Israel, and the accuser, the Republic of South Africa. Filed on December 29 last year, the South African case focused on its obligations arising under the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide and those of Israel. Pretoria, in its case, wished that the…
The lessons of the South African nuclear weapons program are deep, profound and largely ignored by non-proliferation dogmatists. They show that a regime, even one subject to sanctions and exiled to the diplomatic cold room, can still show aptitude and resourcefulness in creating such murderous weapons. The white regime of Apartheid South Africa was marginalised, the globe’s notorious pariah, yet managed to chug along, developing a formidable arsenal with external aid and local resourcefulness. Where there is a pathological will, there will be a way. The South African example also shows that members of the nuclear club are an easily…
So much for that. Much had been promised by Florida Governor Ron De Santis to derail Donald Trump’s bid to return to the White House. But the attempt to wrest the Republican Party from the orange ogre’s meaty, waving hands was never convincing.In the end, DeSantis was more stumbler than balancer, a woeful mismatch before the forces he never staved off. While he made his name fluorescent bright in Florida’s politics, launching attacks on Disney, skirmishing with public health officials regarding pandemic measures, and railing against minorities (LGBTQ youth figured highly), he seemed awkward away from the swamp. On the…
On February 20, Julian Assange, the daredevil publisher of WikiLeaks, will be going into battle, yet again, with the British justice system – or what counts for it. The UK High Court will hear arguments from his team that his extradition to the United States from Britain to face 18 charges under the Espionage Act of 1917 would violate various precepts of justice. The proceedings hope to reverse the curt, impoverished decision by the remarkably misnamed Justice Jonathan Swift of the same court on June 6, 2023. At this point, the number of claims the defence team can make are…
They are unlikely to be revelatory, will shatter no myths, nor disprove any assumptions. Cabinet documents exist to merely show that a political clique – the heart of the Westminster model of government, so to speak – often contain the musings of invertebrates, spineless on most issues such as foreign policy, while operating at the behest of select interests. Hostility to originality is essential since it is threatening to the tribe; dissent is discouraged to uphold the order of collective cabinet responsibility. The recent non-story arising from the cabinet documents made available as to why Australia participated in a murderous,…
AUKUS, the trilateral pact between the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia, was a steal for all except one of the partners. Australia, given the illusion of protection even as its aggressive stance (acquiring nuclear-powered submarines, becoming a forward base for the US military) aggravated other countries; the feeling of superiority, even as it was surrendering itself to a foreign power as never before, was the loser in the bargain. Last month, Australians woke up to the sad reminder that their government’s capitulation to Washington has been so total as to render any further talk about independence an embarrassment.…
Criminal Assumptions: The Howard Cabinet and Invading Iraq When war criminals can daub canvasses in blithe safety, rake in millions of dollars in after dinner speeches and bore governments to death with their shoddy words of wisdom, the world is not so much as it should be, but merely as it is. Former US President George W. Bush, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, and tag along bore, former Australian Prime Minister John Howard, remain at large, despite their respective countries wagging fingers of disapproval at authoritarian regimes for defying the rules-based international order. Never a more fitting trio in…
Finance analysts free of moral scruple can point to Palantir with relish and note that 2023 was a fairly rewarding year for it. The company, which bills itself as a “category-leading software” builder “that empowers organizations to create and govern artificial intelligence”, launched its initial public offering in 2020. But the milky confidence curdled, as with much else with tech assets, leading to the company stock falling by as much as 87% of value. But this is the sort of language that delights the economy boffins no end, a bloodless exercise that ignores what Palantir really does. The surveillance company…
As a private citizen, the options for suing an intelligence agency are few and far between. The US Central Intelligence Agency, as with other members of the secret club, pour scorn on such efforts. To a degree, such a dismissive sentiment is understandable: Why sue an agency for its bread-and-butter task, which is surveillance? This matter has cropped up in the US courts in what has become an international affair, namely, the case of WikiLeaks founder and publisher, Julian Assange. While the US Department of Justice battles to sink its fangs into the Australian national for absurd espionage charges, various…
The failure of the United States to convince the Australian government to send one vessel to aid coalition efforts to deter Houthi disruption of international shipping in the Red Sea was a veritable storm whipped up in a teacup. The entire exercise, dressed as an international mission titled Operation Prosperity Guardian, is intended as a response to the growing tensions of the ongoing Israel-Hamas War. Washington has made no secret of the fact that it wants to keep Iran away from Israel’s predations by deterring any provocative moves from Teheran’s proxies. But Israel’s murderous war in the Gaza Strip is…
Julian Assange’s wife, Stella, is rarely one to be cryptic. “Day X is here,” she posted on the platform formerly known as Twitter. For those who have followed her remarks, her speeches, and her activism, it was sharply clear what this meant. “It may be the final chance for the UK to stop Julian’s extradition. Gather outside the court at 8.30am on both days. It’s now or never.” Between February 20 and 21 next year, the High Court will hear what WikiLeaks claims may be “the final chance for Julian Assange to prevent his extradition to the United States.” (This…
The secretive Australian government just cannot help itself. Clamouring and hectoring of other countries and their secret arrangements (who can forget the criticism of the Solomon Islands over its security pact with China for that reason?) the Albanese government is a bit too keen on keeping a lid on things regarding the withering away of Australian independence before a powerful and spoiling friend. A degree of this may be put down to basic lack of sensibility or competence. But there may also be an inadvertent confession in the works here: Australians may not be too keen on such arrangements once…
Like a bank with branches everywhere, the Catholic Church will go after its own when circumstances permit, wherever they are. In other instances, it will take the opposite tack, shielding the detractors or deviants from local scrutiny, and concealing them from the burden of accountability. Italian Cardinal Giovanni Angelo Becciu, former adviser to Pope Francis and the second ranking official in the Vatican’s Secretariat of State, could not count on the latter, though his prosecution had a pungent whiff of scapegoating to it. After some two-and-a-half years of tense church drama and institutional intrigue, a Vatican court sentenced the Pope’s…
The time has come to treat the sequence of UN Climate Change Conferences, the latest concluding in Dubai, as a series of the failed and the abysmally rotten. It shows how a worthless activity, caked (oiled?) with appropriately chosen words, can actually provide assurance that something worthwhile was done. Along the way, there are always the same beneficiaries: fossil fuel magnates and satirists. COP28, which featured 97,000 participants, including the weighty presence of 2,456 fossil fuel lobbyists, was even more of a shambles than its predecessor. Its location – in an oil rich state – was head scratching. Its chairman…
