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sinking stinking aussie media......

Why did no Australian media outlet tell us the easily discovered truth about the compromising of the integrity of the Australian submarine decision process revealed by US journalists last week?

On October 18th the Washington Post published a closely documented article by Craig Whitlock and Nate Jones titled “Former U.S. Navy Leaders Profited From Overlapping Interests On Sub Deal”.

 

BY Richard Tanter

 

In unarguable detail Whitlock and Jones laid out the role played by a veritable squadron of retired US admirals and former senior US defence officials in the Australian decision to acquire nuclear-powered submarines.

The opening paragraphs of the Washington Post article make clear the extent to which the Australian submarine procurement decision has been hopelessly compromised and indeed corrupted:

“Two retired U.S. admirals and three former U.S. Navy civilian leaders are playing critical but secretive roles as paid advisers to the government of Australia during its negotiations to acquire top-secret nuclear submarine technology from the United States and Britain.

“The Americans are among a group of former U.S. Navy officials whom the Australian government has hired as high-dollar consultants to help transform its fleet of ships and submarines, receiving contracts worth as much as $800,000 a person, documents show.

“All told, six retired U.S. admirals have worked for the Australian government since 2015, including one who served for two years as Australia’s deputy secretary of defense. In addition, a former U.S. secretary of the Navy has been a paid adviser to three successive Australian prime ministers.

“A Washington Post investigation found that the former U.S. Navy officials have benefited financially from a tangle of overlapping interests in their work for a longtime ally of the United States. Some of the retired admirals have worked for the Australian government while simultaneously consulting for U.S. shipbuilders and the U.S. Navy, including on classified programs.”

Former Defence official Mike Scrafton responded by calling for an urgent public review, saying:

“On the evidence it appears that the nuclear powered submarine decision process was heavily influenced by a clique of former US Navy Admirals with potential conflicts of interest, and who were generously paid by the Australian government. What confidence can Australians have in the soundness of this opaque, overpriced, strategically unjustifiable, and massively underspecified project?”

Scrafton’s excoriating and incisive assessment missed one important aspect of the explosive Washington Post story.

Why was this extraordinarily important story about the compromising of Australian sovereignty and the integrity of Defence procurement discovered by two American journalists and published in a US newspaper?

The documentation of the Washington Post article is complex and detailed, but almost wholly based on documents obtained under the US Freedom of Information Act.

The journalists’ work must have been assiduous over a long period, and would have required funding and editorial support from Post management.

But on the face of it, it was a straightforward, albeit brilliant, use of FOIA materials.

Nothing would have stopped our correspondents in Canberra doing the same thing.

Non-US citizens can use the US FOIA, and distance from Washington is no barrier.

Moreover, as Whitlock and Jones indicate, much of the story was lying about the Canberra landscape in plain sight.

Why then did no defence correspondents for the Australian media majors beat the Post to the story? Or have a go at even a small part of it?

The various parts of the News Corp Australia, the sometime Fairfax-now Nine Entertainment, and Seven West Media commercial media companies, as well as the ABC News division, all have dedicated “defence correspondents”, all filing frequently.

Most in reality do little more than rehashing media releases from the bloated Defence and ADF media units and their better-funded military industry corporate suppliers.

It is a long time since any Australian media major has had a proper and well-supported defence or national security correspondent. It is over a decade since the then Fairfax group laid off the best national security journalist of his generation, Philip Dorling.

The failure of our national media to reach even minimal standards of scrutiny of our massive defence spending programs and the lobbying networks of retired politicians, officials and ADF senior officers on the books and boards of multinational arms companies is effectively another case of state capture.

Other Australian instances have been well documented by studies such as the Australian Democracy Network’s Confronting State Capture, and Michelle Fahy and her colleagues in the Undue Influence group.

With well documented and carefully argued studies, both groups have demonstrated the vulnerability of Australian democracy and sovereignty to undue, illegitimate, and unacknowledged influences – especially in defence.

The Washington Post documentation of the compromising of the Australian submarine procurement program is a devastating example of Australian state capture by foreign influences – state and corporate – in the case of Australia’s planned largest-ever defence spend.

But the Australian media are missing in inaction.

 

 

READ MORE:

https://johnmenadue.com/captive-media-what-does-the-submarine-scandal-tell-us-about-our-defence-correspondents/

 

 

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war decisioning.....

 

by 

 

When it comes to the powers vested in politicians to send Australians into foreign conflicts, the major parties stand by the cliche: if it ain’t broke don’t fix it. But the system is broken, as war reform advocates have told Zacharias Szumer.

For advocates of war powers reform, Labor’s recently announced Inquiry into International Armed Conflict Decision Making hasn’t got off to a promising start. The defence minister and defence subcommittee deputy chair have already come out against parliamentary approval for overseas military deployments, the desired reform that advocates are seeking.

The Minister of Defence, Richard Marles, has said he is “firmly of the view” that the current system is “appropriate and should not be disturbed”. In a letter referring the Inquiry into International Armed Conflict Decision Making to the Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade, Marles said the current arrangements “enable the duly elected government of the day to act expeditiously on matters of utmost national importance in the interests of the safety and security of our nation and its people.”

Greens senator Jordon Steele-John, the party’s spokesperson for foreign affairs, peace and nuclear disarmament, told MWM that “Marles’ comments reflect a Labor Party that is self-conflicted. We see Richard Marles endorsing the current system, meanwhile many members of the Labor caucus are pushing for an inquiry.”

Labor MPs Julian Hill and Josh Wilson put forward the resolution at the last ALP conference that got the inquiry added to the party’s policy platform. The defence subcommittee, which is handling the inquiry, is chaired by Hill and also includes Wilson. However, the subcommittee doesn’t feature anyone from the Greens, who have long championed requiring parliamentary approval before overseas deployment of troops.

Liberal MP Andrew Wallace, the deputy chair of the defence subcommittee, recently told the Guardian that he was “surprised that the Labor Party is even contemplating” a change to a system that had “stood us in good stead for many many years.”

“The executive has got to be given the power to govern the country and particularly in relation to national security issues. I don’t care whether it’s Labor or Liberal – they can’t be hamstrung by the parliament,” he added.

Steele-John said that it was “sad to see Andrew Wallace and the Liberals so adamantly opposed to an inquiry on this matter, but transparency, investigating and making decisions based on that investigation are not the attributes of the party that thought invading Iraq was a good idea.”

Greens senator David Shoebridge, the party’s spokesperson for defence and veterans’ affairs, echoed Steele-John’s sentiments. “This is a disturbingly accurate insight into the attitude of the Coalition and many in Labor – they don’t want parliamentary democracy to get in the way of their ‘parties of government’ club. Imagine letting government be ‘hamstrung by parliament’,” the senator tweeted earlier in October.

“Seeing a democratically elected politician so readily reject oversight by parliament on “national security” issues should worry us all. Democracy is not optional in times of crisis or when the drumbeats of war start,” Shoebridge added.

Steele-John also questioned Marles and Wallace coming out against reform so soon after the inquiry was announced. “I hope to see all political parties and MPs approach this committee in good faith,” he said. “The ability for all MPs and parties to scrutinise the decision of ADF deployment will add a level of transparency and accountability designed to avoid repeating the catastrophic mistakes the executive government has made in the last 20 years,” he said.

Beyond the halls of parliament

Peter Hayes, a former RAAF group captain and Vietnam War veteran, told MWM that he was “disappointed” by Marles’ statement, which he said “seemed to pressure the Inquiry rather than to await with an open mind its conclusions and recommendations.”

“The inquiry could have accepted submissions from the Defence Department and others without any need for Minister Marles to make his personal views public,” said Hayes, who has also previously served as Director of Information Warfare at Australia’s Air Command Headquarters.

Hayes also took issue with Wallace’s argument that the current system had “stood us in good stead for many many years”, saying that the system had “failed utterly” when former prime minister John Howard “alone decided and authorised ADF lethal force elements to be joined with the US-led coalition invasion of Iraq … preceding the public announcement on March 18, 2003, only to be followed by the bombing of Iraq in the early hours of the following morning.”

“Howard’s decision has since been revealed to have been based on false and misleading intelligence. History has also revealed serious defects in the decision to commit Australian forces to war in Vietnam, to Afghanistan, to Syria not to mention other secret clandestine intelligence collection operations in the post-WW2 period,” Hayes added.

Former diplomat Bruce Haigh echoed Hayes’ criticisms of Wallace, telling MWM that “It’s a dangerous statement from someone who’s the deputy chair of that subcommittee”. According to Haigh, Wallace’s claim simply “doesn’t stand up against the facts.”  

“The involvement in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan didn’t go before the parliament,” Haigh said. “There were huge protests against the war in Iraq and they turned out badly for Australia. Had they been properly debated within the Australian parliament, we may not have gone, or the way we deployed our forces may have been different … That puts a lie to anything Wallace says.” 

Haigh was posted to South Africa in the late 1970s, where he initiated Australian embassy contact with members of the South African anti-apartheid movement, including dissident Steve Biko, who died in police custody. He later took diplomatic postings to Saudi Arabia, Indonesia and Pakistan, and was deputy high commissioner at the Australian high commission in Colombo.

“Our democracy demands that we should behave as a democracy,” Haigh said. “The issues relating to going into Vietnam, into Iraq and into Afghanistan were all debatable, none of them were top secret, none of them required us to display a level of reticence in order not to alert the so-called enemy. They were all matters which should have received the same amount of debate that they received in the universities at the time.”

University of New South Wales Professor Clinton Fernandes took aim at Wallace’s “good stead” statement from a different perspective.

“The real aim of our defence policy is not to defend Australia independently but to show relevance to the United States,” said Fernandes, who served in the Australian Army Intelligence Corps before becoming an academic. “Our current arrangements are designed with the real aim in mind, and they’ve stood us in very good stead in that sense.”

However, if the aim is to minimise threats against Australia or its citizens, Fernandes does not believe the system has kept us in “good stead”:

In Afghanistan, the real objective was to show Australia’s relevance to the United States. We stayed because of US domestic politics rather than the military situation on the ground. After the Taliban’s comeback in 2008, the Obama administration did not want to be attacked in domestic elections for being unable to defeat the Taliban. And we can see the results – in 2001, Islamic terrorists were based in Kabul, Kandahar, Jalalabad and a few pockets of rural Afghanistan. Twenty years later, the Taliban is back in power, and US wars – enabled by the intelligence facility at Pine Gap – have resulted in a massive expansion of terrorist activity across the globe.

Fernandes’ book Island Off the Coast of Asia contains a proposal for a new system under which the Australian parliament would have greater control over military deployments. He will reportedly be making a submission to the inquiry based on this proposal.

Public submissions to the inquiry are open until November 18.

 

READ MORE:

https://michaelwest.com.au/flaps-up-and-blinkers-on-politicians-happy-with-the-unknown-unknowns-of-fighting-war/

 

 

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