THE GROUND HAD SHIFTED FROM UNDER THEIR FEET
Childers, Queensland
The old responses were still in place.
The enemy was not a foreigner. Not a terrorist. The enemy was a journalist.
The media. Lock 'em out. Shut them up. Target. Discredit. Control or destroy.
The Media Age has been dawning since the middle of 20th Century. It’s a tribute to the ability of the Defence Department and the Australian Defence Force to fight old wars that that so much effort is still concentrated on the traditional foe, The Press or News Media. The fear of hacks reaches towards phobia. Not to worry, Defence. The hack world is unravelling at warp speed. I’ve had fun previously with ‘Defence Instructions (General) on Public Comment and Dissemination of Information by Defence Members’, replacing the word ‘media’ with nouns like monsters and trolls and goblins.The monster mashup of the DI(G) highlighted the sense of fear that drove the Defence message to its people: keep the goblins away. Be on guard against monsters that feed on inaccuracy and misrepresentation. Disclosure is dangerous. Uncoordinated messages will be punished.
The DI(G) obsesses that any Defence information made public ‘must be coordinated, agreed and authorised.’ Striking that, there’s not much emphasis on the speedy deployment of maximum truth firepower to occupy the Information high ground and triumph in the Media Age battle. Instead of communication, the core Defence message is about coordination and control. These are the tactics for old battles not the new frontiers that have already arrived. Graeme Dobell. The Strategist. 16 May, 2016.
As Dobell, who is on their payroll, warned officialdom long ago, the war was lost.
You needed to change tact.
Years ago.
There was no use attempting to destroy all dissent.
Threatening to jail everyone who disagreed with your official version of events. That Australia was involved in noble war efforts. That we were a peaceful, prosperous, cooperative, successful multicultural nation.
The truth lay elsewhere, and was clear for all to see.
You may have wrested control of the ABC.
You may have media mogul Rupert Murdoch in your pocket, or more likely, he has you in his.
You may have planted informants and agents throughout the media world.
You may, in all too many ways, succeeded in dumbing down the population, creating conformity and compliance.
It was all to no good, a waste of time, effort and money.
The world was streaming past you on every edge.
The secretive wars of recent years, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, expensive wars about which Australians knew virtually nothing, were easily exposed for what they were, craven exercises in pleasing a so-called ally, the US, whose disastrous military adventures Australia had been following in lockstep even before the catastrophe of Vietnam.
Australia has committed war crimes in Iraq as the second-largest contributor to the US-led coalition fighting Islamic State, according to an Amnesty International report.
While Iraq and the United States have claimed victory over IS in Mosul, thousands of bodies still lie in the pulverised ruins.
Almost one million people have fled. The Iraqi Army has lost up to 40 per cent of its attack force. Estimates of the number of civilians killed range over 13,000. The exact number will never be known.
Amnesty International spokesperson Diana Sayed told The New Daily the 225kg bombs dropped into the crowded streets of Mosul had a shock radius of 230 metres and resulted in needless casualties.
“Pro-government forces, including Australia, failed to take feasible precautions to protect civilians during the battle for west Mosul – through launching barrages of indiscriminate, disproportionate and otherwise unlawful attacks, and failing to provide adequate warnings prior to bombardments. The realities of living under the Islamic State often meant people were trapped and unable to leave their homes,” she said.
“Australia and its allies in Iraq should publicly acknowledge the massive loss of lives during the Mosul operation.”
The report, titled ‘At Any Cost: The Civilian Catastrophe in West Mosul, Iraq’, said Iraqi and US forces did not meet humanitarian law requirements.
“Iraqi government and US-led coalition forces failed to adequately adapt their tactics to these challenges – as required by international humanitarian law – with disastrous consequences for civilians. Pro-government forces relied heavily upon explosive weapons with wide area effects. These weapons wreaked havoc in densely populated west Mosul, where large groups of civilians were trapped.”
If military planners were unaware of the likely civilian toll, it quickly became evident. John Stapleton, Amnesty accuses Australia of war crimes, The New Daily, 12 July, 2017.
There was no use trying to control the flow of all information.
The impacts of every bomb you drop in the immoral wars to which you have so eagerly signed up means that images of screaming women and dying children are streamed live to the internet, ensuring you have lost the propaganda war before your warplanes have even returned to base.
Every journalist you try to silence with your rafts of draconian anti-free speech legislation makes them noisier.
Every journalist you place under surveillance, a barely legal form of sustained harassment and abuse now being used against multiple targets across the country, from patriotic anti-multicultural groups frightened of the Islamisation of the country, through to the violent Antifa-like activists of the left, to virtually everyone in the Muslim world who drew breath and pledged their allegiance to Allah, before country, before family, before themselves, all of them were being targeted and harassed.
The military mind thrashed in a kind of superheated despair at the noncompliance of the population.
Messy intent, deeply divided, disconnected and dismissive, equipped with ever more radically free forms of expression in an ever evolving internet space, with revolution brewing as the government became more and more authoritarian at every level, from excessive levels of policing at the curb to insane levels of internecine bureaucratic spying in the upper echelons, things were heating up.
A new offence of ‘communicating’ classified information about national security will carry a jail term of up to 20 years.
‘Dealing’ with national security classified information? Up to 10 years’ jail.
But according to Australia’s top constitutional, free speech and human rights lawyer Professor George Williams, the new offences and penalties amount to “overkill”, as they are coming on top of 67 anti-terror provisions the Australian parliament has passed since September 11, 2001.
“There’s no parallel in the US for this, even after 9/11. And no parallel even in Israel”, Professor Williams told The New Daily.
This week a unity ticket of 14 media organisations – AAP, HT&E, Bauer Media, Fairfax Media, MEAA, FreeTV, ASTRA, Commercial Radio, CBAA, News Corp, ABC, SBS, NewsMediaWorks and The West Australian – all told Canberra’s joint committee on intelligence and security that the Turnbull government’s proposed new secrecy Bill was draconian: “The proposed legislation criminalises all steps of news reporting, from gathering and researching of information to publication/communication, and applies criminal risk to journalists, other editorial staff and support staff who know of the information that is now an offence to ‘deal’ with, hold and communicate.”
Criminalising journalism to keep us safe from traitors, spies and terrorists
The media organisations want the bill amended to include a public interest and news reporting defence covering all provisions on secrecy and espionage.
“This is the only way to ensure public interest reporting can continue and Australians are informed of what is going on in their country.”
So broad are the bill’s provisions that the Inspector General of ASIO and the Commonwealth Ombudsman have warned that their officials could be caught by even ‘dealing’ with complaints involving national security classified information.
The parliamentary committee was holding public hearings into the Foreign Interference Bill as the ABC coincidentally exposed the cabinet- in-secret contents of a discarded and locked filing cabinet sold for a few dollars at a Canberra secondhand shop.
The point was immediately made that although the documents were not leaked as an act of subversion by a traitor, the journalists and producers communicating and ‘dealing’ with the security classified material would face jail if the legislation were to be enacted in its current form.
Prof Williams, co-author of A Charter of Rights for Australia, told The New Daily a research audit of statutes had revealed 67 anti-terror laws since 2001 and 350 provisions since Federation in 1901 which were arguably anti-democratic or counter to civil, political or human rights.
Quentin Dempster, The New Daily, 2 February, 2018.
This government would do anything they could to target and destroy not just the journalists on whom they had declared war, but the free flow of information. Any information they did not themselves generate; having long abandoned any pretense at representing and defending the people, rather than preying on them.
The Australian government had spent vast amounts of time, effort and money in controlling the public square.
They vetted, controlled or manipulated much of the information and personnel coming out of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, the ABC, with its ever expanding reach.
One could switch from a 24 hour news channel to a local station to a rock station to classic, talkback, rarefied intellectual, all of it government funded. And all of it biased.
The Deep State was deeply left. And as one of their primary instruments of propaganda, the ABC was deeply left.
The Murdoch press, that fantasy of low rent free enterprise, wore its bias on its front covers, owning 70% of the newspaper audience.
The government's own experts had been warning them for years that the ground had moved beneath thier feet.
As the corporal navigates the terrain of the three block war, he or she will find a Digital Citizen standing on every corner. That Citizen will have the capacity to bear witness, to record, to broadcast, to report, to proclaim—to speak truth to power at the touch of button.
The corporal will have the gun but the Digital Citizen will have media clout.
For Defence, as much as for any other arm of government, the techniques that once worked with The Press/Media will not suffice. The central purpose of Exclude or Engage is to control and coordinate to serve power.
Power, though, is dispersing because the Media Age makes it so.
The Media Age is about communication more than control. The creations of communication can overthrow control and subvert secrecy at the touch of a key.
Operational secrecy? Media guidelines? Sorry, sir, it’s already up and out there—Twittered and videoed and Facebooked and blogged and Instagrammed and Youtubed…and…and…and… Graeme Dobell, Defence Confronts the Media Age, The Strategist, 16 May, 2016.
THE BIGGER STORY:
Four teenage migrants were in critical condition after being shot and more than a dozen others were injured, some seriously, during clashes in the northern French port of Calais between Afghans and Africans, local authorities said.
Some 22 people were hospitalised Thursday, according to an official total, including four Eritreans aged between 16 and 18 who needed surgery, local prosecutors said. Another wounded migrant was taken to the nearby city of Lille because of his “very serious state of health,” the local prefect’s office said.
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“We have reached an escalation of violence that has become unbearable for both those from Calais and migrants,” said interior minister Gerard Collomb during a visit to one of the sites of the clashes. “This is a level of violence never seen before.”
Two police officers were also injured during the clashes.
A nearly two-hour fight broke out on the southern outskirts of Calais among about 100 Eritreans and some 30 Afghans who had been queueing for food handouts. It started when an Afghan fired shots.
A second fight then broke out at an industrial site around three miles (5km), with more than a hundred Eritreans armed with iron rods and sticks fighting about 20 Afghans, prosecutors said.
“Police intervened to protect the Afghan migrants faced with 150 to 200 Eritrean migrants,” the local prefecture said, adding that security reinforcements were being deployed in the area.
Further violence broke out late afternoon in an industrial area of Calais.
To see Australia’s $2 billion intelligence community, come for a stroll around Canberra’s parliamentary triangle. The expansion of bureaucratic empires is always expressed in concrete and marble, so there’s much to observe.
Your tour guide is the spirit of a judge, Robert Marsden Hope. The foundations of the intelligence community rest on Hope’s vision and his Canberra labours—from 1974 to 1985—among the spooks and spies and analysts and prime ministers.
The 2017 Independent Intelligence Review repeats the mantra that Hope’s ideas remain at the heart of the Australian intelligence community (a term Hope created). This series of interviews with one of the 2017 reviewers will start with the enduring Hope bequest.
Because Canberra’s purpose is the lives of Australians, the walk starts in front of a memorial—simple but detailed, mute yet telling—in a parliamentary garden opposite the House of Representatives’ entrance. The memorial bears the names of 91 Australians (citizens and residents) who died in the terrorist bombings in Bali in October 2002. For Australia, Bali and 9/11 are the attacks that announced the modern age of terrorism; Canberra’s response was to boost the bureaucracies and build