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betrayal is common for men with no conscience ....Bob Carr may have been Foreign Affairs Minister for only 12 months, but he started talking to United States diplomats about internal Labor politics nearly 40 years ago. Previously secret US embassy and consulate reports incorporated into a new searchable database unveiled by WikiLeaks on Monday reveal that Mr Carr was a source for US diplomats seeking information on the Whitlam government and the broader Labor movement in the mid-1970s. Then a rising star in NSW Labor, Mr Carr was quick to join in criticism of prime minister Gough Whitlam as the federal Labor Government encountered growing political and economic difficulties after the May 1974 federal election. In August 1974, the US Embassy in Canberra reported at length on what it described as "a pervasive sense of gloom and anxiety" as the Whitlam government “struggle[d] in [a] disorganised fashion to stem growing inflation”. Together with NSW Labor president John Ducker, Mr Carr candidly told the US consul-general in Sydney that "economic policy has never been Whitlam's bag" and criticised the prime minister's "tendency to delegate practically everything". A former Australian Young Labor president and then education officer with the NSW Labor Council, Mr Carr later "expressed deep concern to [the US] consul general over [the] impact of Labor disputes on the prospects of [the] Labor Government". Asked about his 1970s contacts with US diplomats, Senator Carr said on Monday: "I was in my 20s. I could have said anything." The once-confidential cables also suggest that US diplomats turned to Mr Carr as a source of background information on Labor political figures: for example Mr Carr explained that a speaker at a pro-Palestinian demonstration in 1975 – left-wing Labor parliamentarian George Petersen – was "a NSW equivalent of Victoria's [Bill] Hartley". Senator Carr has long been a very strong supporter of Australia's alliance with the United States and has a keen interest in US politics and history. In his early conversations with US officials, he appears to have followed the lead of Mr Ducker, his NSW Labor right faction mentor, who advised the US on industrial relations issues and internal Labor politics, and dismissed critics of the US alliance as being engaged in "emotional, silly expression lacking in substance and characteristic of the silly left-wing fringe of the ALP". US embassy cables leaked to WikiLeaks in 2010 revealed that another senior NSW Labor right faction leader, former Senator Mark Arbib, was a more recent "protected" US embassy source providing inside information and commentary on Labor politics. About 11,000 cables from the US embassy in Canberra and consulates in Sydney and Melbourne between 1973 and 1976 are part of a massive trove of more than 1.7 million electronic documents that were transferred to the US National Archives and Records Administration in 2006. However the records have been largely neglected by historians, owing to the absence of an effective search engine. WikiLeaks has incorporated a copy of the entire electronic archive into an easily searchable database that also includes the more than 250,000 US diplomatic cables leaked by United States Army private Bradley Manning. With more than two million documents and more than a billion words, WikiLeaks's Public Library of US diplomacy is the largest electronically searchable diplomatic archive available to historians, journalists and other researchers.
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of business and rights...
One can only wonder about the hypocrisy of Mr Gerard Henderson who rightly warns us — and our Prime Minister — about the human right abuses in China — as if Julia Gillard did not know... She knows and thank you for reminding us she knows...
Yep, doing business in the world becomes complicated by this sensitive issue. Of course Australia could not trade with itself, nor with any other country on the planet should one have strict rules about this bad behaviour.
May as well the Prime Minister entered a convent for atheists in the Swiss Alps, but the self-flagellation might not be to her taste.
Gerard, yes we know... Very commendable of you to remind us about abuses in China, but then you should also remind us of the abuses by the US and their rendering affiliated countries. And of abuses in most Arabic Muslim countries including our oily friends, under the blanket of "tradition"... As my Arab taxi driver would say, if you're a foreign Philippino woman slaving in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain or the UAE, you're rights are quite truncated... Even if you're a local woman...
Yes, the artist Wang's Archibald Prize entry is poignant... But at least some of the people are still alive, unlike the children that the US drones regularly kill in Pakistan, Afghanistan and other places — dare I mention also Marxist Yemen that the US from time helps get rid of "undesirables"...
Peace. Gus.
a spy in a tie?...
During the first week after the dismissal of the Labor Government, the army was on stand-by at their barracks in case there were mass demonstrations. However, it was the Australian Council of Trade Unions then president Bob Hawke who summoned the labour movement to be calm. US diplomatic cables also implicate the former prime minister, saying he regularly conferred with the U.S. Consulate in Melbourne during his ACTU years. It was generally believed that the Labor Attaché at the U.S. embassy in Canberra was in reality the CIA station chief (McKnight, D., “Labor and the Quiet Americans”, The Age, February 20, 2003, p15). The future Hawke Government, elected in 1984, went on to implement many pro-U.S. initiatives, and prevented public disclosure of documents relating to the Nugan Hand Bank during his term as Prime Minister, which were believed to implicate the CIA with drug trafficking and organized crime,.
This is the first time that leaked U.S. documents have confirmed what many believe to be the truth surrounding U.S. infiltration within the Australian Labor Party. The issue is likely to be very quickly dismissed in Australia by the argument that the U.S. is an ally. However, within these documents there is some proof and support that the U.S. has meddled in the affairs of the Australian union movement and political parties for many years. What is even more astounding is that some Labor politicians showed disloyalty to their party to a foreign power during the Whitlam years.
Bob Carr has been forthright in exposing past politicians as members of the Communist Party of Australia, so should take the accusations against him seriously, either stepping aside for the duration of an inquiry or resigning outright. David Combe‘s relationship with a Soviet diplomat Valery Ivanov back in 1984 led to swift action on the part of the Hawke Government at the time. In the interests of transparency and sovereignty, the Australian Federal Police and ASIO should conduct an inquiry.
Somehow I doubt this will happen.
http://www.independentaustralia.net/2013/politics/is-bob-carr-a-spy/
The next investigation is to gauge the infiltration of the Soviet Union into the ranks of the Liberal (conservative) Party... I believe. for example, Julie Bishop is a commie. It's easy to know. People like her go to extraordinary lengths to hide these secret affiliations by appearing totally the opposite — like rat bags fascists. I rest my case.