News Corp raid is a False Flag, the real target the ABC Why? Look at the history of Murdoch's tactics to get what he wants. He's thrown journalists under the bus before to save himself and move forward. He's done an Alan Bond. He's seduced politicians with promises to aid and abet his and his fellow traveller's interests in order to achieve an ultimate goal and in Australia it's always been the ultimate prize the destruction of the ABC and the control of mass news and influence in Australia along with his friends in the IPA that dates back to his father before him. (ODT)
Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton says there are good reasons some government agency information is secret, after federal police raided two media outlets.
Why was National security compromised by these two reports? How did we get here?
It's the least demanding, most invincible justification in our public life. And that's possibly why the federal police used it – without elaboration – to defend its raid on News Corp's Annika Smethurst. Smethurst had published a story revealing a plan for the Australian Signals Directorate to spy on Australian citizens directly by hacking into critical infrastructure without a warrant.
The story was strongly denied at the time. Now it is the basis of a raid. We're simply not told how it compromises our national security to learn of such things. The same might be said of the ABC story that triggered the other raid, which revealed how Australian special forces in Afghanistan allegedly killed civilians and covered it up.
News Corp was having none of it, attacking the raid as a "dangerous act of intimidation" that expressed "the willingness of governments to undermine the Australian public's right to know". And given that these stories were more than a year old, and that the raids were timed in the immediate aftermath of an election when the price of any scandal is likely to be minimised, that might be true. But it's bound to ring hollow because it implies that sometimes police use their powers for political ends, rather than legitimate policing ones. And that's an idea we've been trained to reject instinctively.
The unfounded suspicion we've come to increasingly believe
According to last year's Essential survey, the federal police is now the most trusted institution in the country. More than the High Court, the Reserve Bank, or importantly, those institutions raided this week. State police come in second.
44 years later, after six years of calamitous Tory incompetence and nastiness and following their campaign of lies and misinformation, there is no way I will accept this current claque as legitimate, and I will not be nice to those who do.
“She already told me that she doesn’t have to be nice, so why do I? Because my mother raised me, right? That’s why wolves always win. Because the rest of us mind our manners and get devoured for our efforts.”
― Sheryl J. Anderson, Killer Cocktail
To reflect Ms Anderson’s sentiments – fuck you, Fauxmo; and the donkeys you rode in on!
For six years the L/NP dodged scrutiny with its “look, it’s Labor” dissembling and obfuscation – taking their behaviour as an Opposition into Government. A complacent and compliant media went along for the ride giving a free pass to a declining economy, corporate crime, a degraded environment and social disharmony.
The ABC was cowed into submission by constant attacks, becoming a timorous shadow of the once honourable organisation that held governments to account.
And in a truly ironic case of misplaced schadenfreude, a journalist from the L/NP propaganda machine Newscorpse was raided by the Australian Federal Police Farce – the Gestapo of Spud’s private legion of spooks and door-breakers. The indignation of News’ L/NP groupies provided a level of grim lampoonery.
The goon squad trading as the AFP has all of the credibility of the Keystone Cops. A bought and paid for apparatus of the Lib surveillance state they somehow managed to lose the paperwork when “investigating” Michaelia CCar crash on the AWU raids tip-off. In raiding the ABC and a News journalists, they are complying with standard practice – hounding sources of information that embarrass the conservative Government, intimidating potential whistle-blowers and keeping the L/NP free from scrutiny.
Dutton, ex-copper from Queensland, is resurrecting the Bjelke-Petersen-era police state cheered on by the Party nutters who’ve slipped through the crazy filter. Bullies are cowards and this platoon of poltroons is scared of accountability. Their incompetence and failures and their lack of courage is supplemented by their conviction that they have a right to rule and no obligation to serve.
A compliant and complicit mainstream media has gotten a loud wake-up call. Will they respond or will they hit the snooze button? Will a complacent public shrug this off? I’m betting they will and I will not be polite in calling out those of that kind of my acquaintance, and in less than courteous terms. This is a government for gormless dullards, the tremulous, the authoritarians, the weak of mind and dull of eye, the indifferent and the stupid.
It’s not my government. Fuck that!
Hunter’s reprehensible verbal nonsense and Trump’s potential pardons reflect a military chauvinism that infuses the American vernacular in the 21st century. The dangerous doctrine of American exceptionalism applies, apparently, to this country’s so-called exceptional right to commit war crimes with impunity. Thinking back to My Lai, though, it seems that whitewashing, excusing and apologizing for criminal military behavior is as American as apple pie. Hunter and Trump just say as much out loud.
Australia is rushing blindly to adopt everything American particularly the control of information and the narrative of history and the accompanying of facts the only support it. (ODT)
