By Gabriel HONRADA

Australia has announced plans to accelerate its missile procurement program years ahead of schedule due to perceived threats from China. According to a statement made by Australian Defense Minister Peter Dutton on Tuesday (April 5), the accelerated program will cost US$2.6 billion and increase Australia’s deterrent capabilities.

Under the revised timeline, Australia’s F/A-18F Super Hornet jets will be armed with improved US-made missiles by 2024, three years earlier than planned. The missiles would likely be the AGM-158B JASSM-ER, a stealthy cruise missile with a range of 900 kilometers.

Australia’s Anzac-class frigates and Hobart-class frigates will be equipped with Norwegian-made Kongsberg Naval Strike Missiles by 2024, five years earlier than scheduled, and would effectively double the warships’ strike range.

This comes as a follow-on to the Australian government’s promise last year to invest US$761 million to build guided missiles in the country.

Australia, the US and UK have also announced that they will be working together to develop hypersonic missiles. According to a statement released this month, the three countries will commence trilateral cooperation on hypersonics, counter-hypersonics and electronic warfare capabilities, as well as expand information-sharing and deepen cooperation on defense innovation.

This development comes after Australia-based firm Hypersonix presented its 3D-printed hydrogen-powered hypersonic scramjet engine to US officials last month, and entered into a partnership with US-based firm Kratos to launch the DART AE, a multi-mission, hypersonic vehicle powered by a hydrogen-fueled scramjet engine. Hypersonix says that the DART AE is designed to a reusable space launch platform that emits no CO2 for clean spaceflight.

This spate of hypersonic and other missile developments have no doubt been triggered by Australia’s growing concern over China’s creeping presence near its territories and perceived sphere of influence.

The announcements also mark a certain reversal of policy in Canberra, which came under pressure during the previous Donald Trump administration in 2019 to position US ground-based missiles in Darwin in northern Australia, a proposal that was refused at the time.

Then-US secretary of state Mike Pompeo said at the time a request to base American missiles in Australia would take into account the “mutual benefit” to both countries. Local Australian reports at the time noted that if the US deployed missiles with a range of 5,500 kilometers at Darwin, southern China would be comfortably within range.

The US proposal, which was declined at the time despite moves to boost America’s military presence at Darwin, was made before Australia-China diplomatic and economic relations went into a tailspin over Canberra’s call for an independent inquiry into the origins of Covid-19, an investigation Beijing sees as anathema.

Last month the Solomon Islands announced that it has “initialed” elements of a proposed security deal with China, to be signed at a later date, that would potentially give China temporary stationing rights for its naval vessels and allowance for a Chinese police presence. The deal is still undergoing revision and awaiting the signatures of both countries’ foreign ministers.

The China-Solomon Islands pact was leaked last month by opponents of the deal, and verified as authentic by the Australian government. While still in draft form that cites the need for restoring social order to send in Chinese forces, a Chinese base in the Solomon Islands would immediately undermine Australia and New Zealand’s security.

A Chinese naval presence in the Solomons could cut off Australia and New Zealand from critical sea lines of communication from the US, forcing both countries to rely on their own defense capabilities. The Solomon Islands’ strategic location made it a key battleground during World War II.

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison stated that “there are others who may seek to pretend to influence and may seek to get some sort of hold in the region,” and New Zealand raised concerns over the militarization of the Pacific.

The Solomon Islands is a point of increasing geopolitical tension between the US and China in the Pacific. Last year, protests erupted in the capital Honiara over allegations that Solomon Islands Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare was accused of using money from a national development fund that comes from China.

Other factors leading to last year’s protests in the Solomon Islands were unequal distribution of resources, the lack of economic support, poor government services, corruption, and a controversial decision in 2019 to drop diplomatic relations with Taiwan in favor of China.

In February the US announced plans to reopen its embassy in the Solomon Islands, which has been closed since 1993, in a bid to counter China’s growing presence.

In 2019, China attempted to lease Tulagi in the Solomon Islands, which has a natural deep-water harbor suitable for a naval base. However, the Solomon Islands government later vetoed China’s attempt to lease Tulagi, saying that the provincial government did not have the authority for such negotiations.

asiatimes.com

In the western world’s mad rush to ramp up censorship and dangerous cold war escalations against Russia over its invasion of Ukraine, the Australian government has done what it always does and raised the bar of authoritarianism a click above everyone else in the room.

“The Australian Government is sanctioning 10 people of strategic interest to Russia for their role in encouraging hostility towards Ukraine and promoting pro-Kremlin propaganda to legitimise Russia’s invasion,” reads a new statement from Australian Foreign Minister Marise Payne. “This includes driving and disseminating false narratives about the ‘de-Nazification’ of Ukraine, making erroneous allegations of genocide against ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine, and promoting the recognition of the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic and Luhansk People’s Republic as independent.”

A report by the Australian Associated Press and the Daily Mail says that the men targeted with these new sanctions are “journalists, authors or Putin’s press officers.” This move follows earlier waves of sanctions directed at Russian government, military and financial institutions, as well as economic sanctions on the Luhansk and Donetsk regions in Ukraine.

Today Australia imposed new sanctions on key military figures, the Russian Armed Forces & those responsible for driving and disseminating Russian propaganda. This follows last week’s listing of key banks, to prevent finance for Putin’s unjustified war.
https://t.co/pB2E9kqGOv

— Marise Payne (@MarisePayne) March 8, 2022

Obviously a government in a purportedly “free” country sanctioning anyone for sharing any ideas anywhere on earth is outrageous, no matter how stupid or fictional they might be. Anyone on earth should be free to say that Ukraine is ruled by reptilian space wizards orchestrating a global conspiracy to steal the earth’s ivermectin if they want to without being sanctioned by the Australian government.

But the fact that the ideas cited by the Foreign Minister — de-Nazification, genocide of ethnic Russians, and independence for the DPR and LPR — are fairly common opinions that can be argued using facts and evidence makes this move a lot more disturbing.

I personally don’t find it truthful to claim that the invasion of Ukraine has anything to do with “de-Nazification” myself; that just sounds like the sort of thing you say to make a bloody invasion look noble, and Ukraine’s neo-Nazi issues would surely have been a non-issue for Putin if Kyiv was aligned with Moscow rather than Washington. But even NBC News is reporting that “Ukraine has a genuine Nazi problem” that cannot simply be ignored, and a recent report by The Grayzone details how intimately neo-Nazi militias are intertwined with the nation’s power structure. So this isn’t some preposterous conspiracy theory; it arises from known facts that people do need to talk about.

The claim of genocide in the Donbas may not be a consensus reality that has been firmly established via official channels, but neither is the claim of genocide in China’s Xinjiang province, yet we saw that assertion waved around as absolute fact by the entire western political/media class in the lead-up to the Beijing Olympics. It’s just a simple fact that 14,000 people have died in the fighting against Donbas separatists since a US-backed coup toppled Ukraine’s government in 2014, and that most of those deaths have been on the side of the ethnic Russian separatists. Whether or not this technically constitutes genocide has not been established, but it’s a debate that is both valid and worthwhile.

According to UN figures, from 2018 to 2021, 81.4% of civilian casualties in the Donbas war came in rebel-held territory. 16.3% were in Ukrainian gov’t-controlled territory.

This is one key reality of the war that US media doesn’t report. Too inconvenient. https://t.co/Pjf7fg30af pic.twitter.com/KSMHwdaR6K

— Aaron Maté (@aaronjmate) February 23, 2022

The most egregious citation on Payne’s list is “promoting the recognition of the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic and Luhansk People’s Republic as independent.” The idea that rebel-held regions in eastern Ukraine should be recognized as independent republics is pure political opinion; the Australian government has no more legitimacy in labeling it “propaganda” than they would on people’s opinions about the morality of abortion. Yet it’s being cited as a justification for targeted sanctions.

This comes after Australian television providers SBS and Foxtel dropped RT in the frenetic push to expand censorship throughout the western world, a move Payne explicitly praised in the aforementioned statement with an acknowledgement that the Australian government is working with online platforms to censor unauthorized content.

“The Australian Government continues to work with digital platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Google to take action to suspend the dissemination of content generated by Russian state media within Australia. SBS and Foxtel have already announced the suspension of Russia Today and NTV broadcasting,” the statement says.

This is getting so, so ugly so very, very fast. Just the other day a young Australian-Russian man was ejected from the audience of the popular television show Q+A simply for expressing his support for Putin’s war, something we’ve never seen happen in any of the controversies about the insane American military invasions that this country has gotten itself involved in over the years.

Stan Grant kicks an Australian-Russian man out of #QandA for questioning the media’s pro-Ukraine/anti-Russia coverage. pic.twitter.com/tKylsWVeCK

— Caldron Pool (@CaldronPool) March 3, 2022

Whether you agree with these opinions or not, you’d have to be blind not to see the dangers of speech getting stomped out which doesn’t align with the authorized opinions of the government and the globe-spanning empire of which it is a member state. It is not valid to simply label dissenting ideas “propaganda to legitimise Russia’s invasion” and then shut them down; in a free society we’re meant to debate ideas and explain our positions to convince others that they are correct.

An ostensibly free and democratic nation labeling basic political opinions and ideas about points of geopolitical contention “pro-Kremlin propaganda” and implementing punitive sanctions in response has implications that are uncomfortable to think about. As an Australian who frequently disagrees with Canberra about unaligned foreign governments including Moscow, I am frankly feeling a bit nervous that I might myself be designated a person “of strategic interest to Russia” and penalized in some way for “disseminating false narratives”.

Securing more and more control over the ideas and information that people share with each other is an objective of unparalleled importance of the oligarchic empire loosely centralized around the United States. It is an intrinsically valuable goal; anywhere control of speech can be expanded is strategically useful for that expansion in and of itself, independent of the excuses made to justify it. Hopefully we all collectively find a way to unplug each other from the imperial narrative matrix before they can secure total control.

caityjohnstone.medium.com

The scheduling of the QUAD ministerial meeting in Canberra on February 9 right in the middle of the Ukraine crisis and cascading U.S.-Russia tensions served to highlight that China remains Washington’s top foreign policy priority.

Possibly, Washington also gave a nuanced message that it has the capability to simultaneously tackle China and Russia. Washington probably hoped that such messaging would resonate in the Asia-Pacific region, which largely refuses to take sides between the U.S. and China.

Conceivably, the U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken set out for Canberra with a plan to persuade the QUAD to get on board its “dual containment” strategy. The QUAD ministerial was held just five days after the joint China-Russia statement issued in Beijing on February 4 heralding a new era in the world order. When China and Russia support and supplement each other, it is a game changer. Simply put, they pose a strategic defiance of the so-called “rules-based order” that QUAD notionally upholds.

Whether Blinken tried to insert “Russian aggression” into the agenda of the Canberra ministerial is a moot point. In all probability, he tried. Blinken’s deputy, Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Daniel J. Kritenbrink and the Australian Foreign Minister Marise Payne who hosted the ministerial disclosed to the media beforehand that the grouping would discuss the “challenges” that China and Russia posed.

Blinken reportedly exhorted the QUAD partners to stand up for a rules-based system threatened by “Chinese aggression” and warned that a Russian invasion of Ukraine could happen any time now. The Japanese Foreign Minister Yoshimasa Hayashi told Blinken that Tokyo “shared grave concerns” over Russian military buildup while Payne went several steps ahead to say that the “Russian military build-up on Ukraine’s border has deeply concerned Australia and our allies and partners.”

Interestingly, India’s External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar refused to be drawn into the topic of Russia. Curiously, Jaishankar also openly disagreed with the U.S.’ policy to sanction Myanmar, saying that as a neighbouring country, Delhi needs a working relationship with the military leadership in Nay Pyi Taw over security issues.

The Americans used to regard Jaishankar as something of a godfather to the QUAD in the good old times. But India, like most countries, is increasingly unsure about the consistency and dependability of U.S. policies and strategies. Above all, between now and the 2024 parliamentary elections, the government will be preoccupied with the post-pandemic recovery of the economy. Biden’s America First policy has nothing to offer India on that front. There is realisation that India’s tensions with China must be kept under check. Washington, on the contrary, thrives on — and even fuels — India China tensions.

All the same, the Biden Administration’s Indo-Pacific Strategy document, which was released by the White House last week (coinciding with the QUAD ministerial), says effusively that “We (U.S.) recognise that India is a like-minded partner and leader in South Asia and the Indian Ocean, active in and connected to Southeast Asia, a driving force of the QUAD and other regional fora, and an engine for regional growth and development.” The Americans know that such a characterisation of India as a larger than life friend and ally would annoy Beijing. But it is a sound investment, given the Biden Administration’s stated plans to “strengthen the QUAD as a premier regional grouping and ensure it delivers on issues that matter to the Indo-Pacific.”

In the final analysis, the joint statement issued after the Canberra ministerial steered clear of the topic of Ukraine and/or Russia. The Australian media reports attributed this entirely to India’s reservations. At the joint press conference after the ministerial too, Jaishankar brusquely shrugged off a question on the topic, while his Australian counterpart Payne and Blinken gleefully condemned “Russian aggression”.

Suffice to say, the QUAD is a queer entity, as each of its four members has own expectations out of the grouping. The Indian officials saw the Canberra meeting as an opportunity to “review ongoing QUAD cooperation and build on the positive and constructive agenda… to address contemporary challenges such as the COVID pandemic, supply chains, critical technologies (and) climate change.” During the past year or two, signs began appearing that India hoped to “depoliticise” its QUAD membership, lest its optics as an anti-China clique needlessly antagonised Beijing and might only complicate the ongoing bilateral efforts to resolve the border tensions. But all the same, India continues to look for opportunities behind the closed door to push back China. It is a difficult manoeuvring since India is also loathe to subserving as a geopolitical tool for the U.S. against China.

Basically, the QUAD is yet to prove itself to be a capable mechanism that can yield concrete results in countering China’s deep and extensive ties all across the Indo-Pacific region. All hopes are now pinned on the unveiling of the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF) that U.S. President Joe Biden announced last October during the East Asia Summit. Biden indicated that the IPEF is expected to define shared objectives around trade facilitation, standards for the digital economy and technology, supply chain resiliency, decarbonisation and clean energy, infrastructure, worker standards, and other areas of common interest.

Basically, the hype notwithstanding, IPEF seems to be another geopolitical tool for the U.S. to energise the Indo-Pacific Strategy in the economic field focused on China’s exclusion from supply chains, access to high technology, infrastructure development, digital trade, etc. It is driven more by the unease over America’s glaring absence from any major regional trade agreements and the angst over China’s expanding influence in the region rather than offering a new platform to stimulate economic growth. The regional countries are unlikely to feel enthused.

The joint statement issued at Canberra lacks substance. But that doesn’t mean the QUAD’s time is up. Paradoxically, all four partners cannot do without the QUAD format. It provides an umbrella to huddle together behind closed doors and give vent to their grouse against China in hushed tone — a safety valve for pent-up frustrations. The attempts to create a “QUAD Plus” with the induction of countries like South Korea and Vietnam have failed.

The latest spin is that QUAD isn’t about “standing against anyone in particular,” as Blinken stated in an interview in Canberra. “It is about standing up for a rules-based order, making sure that we uphold those rules and principles if they’re being challenged,” he claimed. There is an apparent unwillingness to single out China by name while discussing the QUAD’s goals. This is intriguing. Thus, the Canberra meeting of QUAD ministers ended up discussing a range of issues, from coronavirus vaccine to maritime and cyber security to countering disinformation, climate change and so on. But it did not mention China.

For sure, the QUAD is running against time and tide. On the same day of the QUAD ministerial, reports appeared that the European Union and China are set to hold a virtual summit on 1st April in a high-stakes diplomatic effort to bring to the centre stage their partnership and economic competition for more attention, relegating to the back burner the U.S.-induced “systemic rivalry” with China. Both Chinese President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Keqiang will join the meeting.

Chile’s dictatorship operated over 1,200 detention and torture centres, yet Cuartel Simon Bolivar was its best kept secret until Jorgelino Vergara Bravo, a former errand boy for the National Intelligence Directorate (DINA) chief Manuel Contreras, revealed its existence as “the place where  no one got out alive.” Vergara, known as El Mocito, gave testimony which placed the feared Lautaro Brigade as commanding operations at the site, notably extermination and disappearance of dictator Augusto Pinochet’s political opponents.

Among the agents named by Vergara was Adriana Rivas, a former secretary to Contreras who also worked at Cuartel Simon Bolivar. Vergara’s testimony places her as an agent directly participating in torture. “Generally, when Adriana Rivas participated in the torture of the detainees, she beat them with sticks, she kicked them, punched them and also applied an electric current to the political prisoners,” Vergara stated.

In an interview with the Australian news outlet SBS in 2013, Rivas praised the dictatorship and normalized its torture methods, but denied being involved in the proceedings. Torture was necessary, she declared, to “break people.” Her stint with DINA, she said, opened her to new glamorous experiences and meeting influential people.

Rivas had managed to abscond from Chilean justice. She was arrested in 2006 and fled to Argentina while out on bail, after which she escaped to Australia in 2010 where she worked as a nanny in Sydney. As relatives of the disappeared ramped up their quest for justice in Chile, Chileans in Australia also clamoured for Rivas’s extradition, to face justice for her role in the detention, torture and killing of seven political prisoners of the dictatorship: Victor Diaz, Hector Veliz, Fernando Navarro, Reinalda Pereira, Lincoyan Berios, Horacio Cepeda and Fernando Ortiz.

In 2014, Chile requested Rivas’s extradition from Australia. Five years later, Australia was still dragging its feet over whether Rivas was extraditable to face justice for crimes of humanity. Rivas was arrested in 2019 and denied bail.

Rivas is the notoriously outstanding example of how Australia offered safe haven to torturers and victims alike. The narrative, at least for Rivas, is about to change with the latest rejected appeal by the New South Wales Federal Court, which has ruled the former torturer extraditable to Chile.

The former DINA agent has claimed she had no idea of what happened at Cuartel Simon Bolivar. In the latest appeal, her lawyer Frank Santisi argued that since DINA was set up by the dictatorship, it did not constitute an unlawful organization at the time it operated, and that there was no testimony that placed Rivas at Cuartel Simon Bolivar. Vergara’s testimony, however, is adamant on her presence and role at the torture and extermination centre.

Santisi also mentioned Pinochet’s Amnesty Law, which sought impunity for all agents involved in crimes against humanity. However, many DINA agents have been convicted in Chile, including Contreras himself and other prominent torturers. Santisi also argued there was political motivation in Rivas’s extradition. However, the political motivation existed from the crimes against humanity committed against Pinochet’s opponents, and which Rivas is said to have participated in.

Little recourse is now left for Rivas. Her final resort could be an appeal to Australia’s High Court if she can persuade the court that there are “special reasons for it to be heard.”

Australia will find it difficult to keep itself out of the spotlight as regards Chile. It is highly unlikely that there was no prior knowledge of Rivas’s presence in Australia and of who she was. Additionally, the ongoing refusal to declassify documents relating to Australia’s role aiding the CIA in Chile remains a point of contention. With Rivas one step closer to facing the Chilean courts, pressure should be ramped up for further disclosure on Australia’s duplicitous role, and how it might be contributing towards the oblivion and impunity enacted by Pinochet.

By Kit KLARENBERG

Was the government of Australia aware of the US Central Intelligence Agency plot to assassinate Julian Assange, an Australian citizen and journalist arrested and now imprisoned under unrelentingly bleak, harsh conditions in the UK?

Why have the country’s elected leaders refused to publicly advocate for one of its citizens, who has been held on dubious charges and subjected to torture by a foreign power, according to UN Special Rapporteur on Torture Nils Melzer? What does Canberra know about Julian’s fate and when did it know it?

The Grayzone has obtained documents revealing that the Australian government has since day one been well-aware of Julian’s cruel treatment inside London’s maximum security Belmarsh Prison, and has done little to nothing about it. It has, in fact, turned a cold shoulder to the jailed journalist despite hearing his testimony of conditions “so bad that his mind was shutting down.”

Not only has Canberra failed to effectively challenge the US and UK governments overseeing Assange’s imprisonment and prosecution; as these documents expose in stark detail, it appears to have colluded with them in the flagrant violation of an Australian citizen’s human rights, while doing its best to obscure the reality of his situation from the public.

On knowledge of CIA plot against Assange, Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs issues snide non-denial denial

In the wake of Yahoo News’ startling September revelations of CIA plans to surveil, kidnap, and even kill WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, which confirmed and built upon a May 2020 exposé by The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal, officials in the NATO-oriented ‘Five Eyes’ global spying network struggled to get their stories straight.

William Evanina, Washington’s top counterintelligence officer until his retirement in early 2021, told Yahoo the Five Eyes alliance was “critical” to Langley’s dastardly plot, and “we were very confident” that Julian’s potential escape from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London could be prevented, by hook or by crook.

When asked whether the US had ever briefed or consulted the government of Julian’s native Australia on the operation, however, Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) dodged the question. For his part, Malcolm Turnbull, the Australian Prime Minister at the time of these deadly deliberations, claimed, “the first I heard about this was in today’s media.”

It is certainly possible that elected officials in Canberra were kept in the dark about the CIA’s proposals. Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam was unaware of the very existence of Five Eyes until 1973, 17 years after his country became a signatory to the network’s underpinning UKUSA agreement, following police raids on the offices of domestic spying agency the Australian Security Intelligence Organization, due to its withholding of information from the government.

Whether or not Turnbull was aware of the operation, DFAT’s response when a member of Julian’s family contacted the Department demanding Australian Foreign Minister Marise Payne ask the Biden administration to drop the charges against him, and seeking comment on the Yahoo article, was disturbingly flippant.

“Just because it’s written in a newspaper doesn’t mean it’s true…the CIA has been accused of a lot of things, including faking the Moon landing,” a DFAT official quipped in a classic non-denial denial.

These crude remarks were recorded in a letter sent to Payne by John Shipton, Julian’s father. The missive is just one of many documents provided exclusively to Grayzone by Kellie Tranter, Julian’s legal authority in Australia.

For years, Tranter has filed freedom of information requests with the Australian government in a campaign to uncover its true position on Julian, and to what extent its intimate alliance with Washington has limited its ability or willingness to push for his freedom.

The documents acquired by Tranter expose Canberra as anything but an advocate for Assange, the Australian citizen. Instead, throughout Julian’s time in the Ecuadorian Embassy, and imprisonment at Her Majesty’s Pleasure in Belmarsh high security prison – “Britain’s Gitmo” – the Australian government has been determinedly committed to seeing, hearing, and speaking no evil in his regard, despite possessing clear evidence of his dramatically waning physical and mental health, and the torturous conditions of his confinement.

Assange informs Canberra of US violations of his rights: ‘This action was illegal’

The records of a brief visit by Australian consulate officers to Belmarsh on May 17th 2019, one month after Assange’s dramatic expulsion from the Embassy, are especially illustrative of Canberra’s attitude. Over the course of that meeting, Assange spoke in detail about prison conditions and his 23-hour-a-day solitary confinement.

“He remains in his cell most of the day, with 40 minutes allocated each day for ‘associations’,” the Australian consular officials noted. “He is allowed outside for 30 minutes each day, although he said at times this does not happen,” for reasons unstated. Unable to eat at all “for a long period,” he was now ingesting “small amounts”, collecting meals from the kitchen and returning to his cell.

Permitted just two personal visits each month, plus legal consultations, Assange mentioned his recent meeting with Nils Melzer and two medical experts specialized in examining potential victims of torture and other ill-treatment, and that he had so far been unable to speak to his family.

The WikiLeaks co-founder eschewed work programs “which would afford him the opportunity to get out of his cell more often,” according to the diplomats, on the grounds that he refused to engage in “slave labour” and needed time to prepare his legal case. Prisoners in British jails earn an average of $13 per week for hard, thankless toil on behalf of big business, which in turn profits immensely from their rank exploitation.

While mercifully prescribed antibiotics and codeine by prison doctors for an infected root canal, which can be life-threatening in the event the infection spreads, Assange was still waiting on reading glasses and had yet to see an optometrist. The jailed journalist went on to describe how one senior officer “has it in for me,” showing his visitors a charge sheet indicating that a search of his cell uncovered a razor blade, and he’d failed to tidy it after an inspection.

A third infraction of any sort “would result in exercise privileges being withdrawn,” the document states. Possibly fearing reprisal, Assange asked that officials not raise these matters with prison authorities. Evidently, what might typically be considered an unambiguous indication of suicidal intentions was instead logged as a simple disciplinary matter.

Adding to his psychological toll, Assange reported that he had undergone blood tests, and been advised he was HIV-positive, a shocking diagnosis. However, subsequent examinations confirmed the test result to be a false positive, forcing Assange to wonder if the misdiagnosis was a mere error, or “something else.” It could well have been a grotesquely sick mind game, perhaps alluding to the bogus sexual assault allegations he had faced in Sweden, and intended to drive him toward madness.

Assange also presented the Australian consular officials with a recently-published UK Home Office deportation notice, informing him then-Secretary of State Sajid Javid had determined under the 1971 UK Immigration Act that his presence in the UK “was not conducive to the public interest, and he would be removed from the UK without delay,” with no chance of appealing the decision.

“Mr. Assange expressed concern about surviving the current process and fears he would die if taken to the US. He claimed the US was going through his possessions that had remained at the Ecuadorian Embassy. He said that this action was illegal,” the officers wrote. “He stated that his possessions included two valuable artworks he planned to sell to raise funds for his legal defence, the manuscripts of two books, and legal papers. He expressed concern his legal material would be used against him by the US.”

Assange was correct that sensitive documents were stolen by US authorities. Immediately following his arrest, his attorney Gareth Peirce contacted the Ecuadorian Embassy regarding this privileged material, demanding it be handed over as a matter of urgency. When at last his property was collected, all legal papers were missing save for two volumes of Supreme Court files “and a number of pages of loose correspondence,” making his extradition defense an even greater challenge than it already was.

Over the course of Julian’s initial extradition hearings in early 2020, assistant US attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia Gordon Kromberg implausibly pledged a “taint team” would excise material from these files so it would not be used in any resultant trial. Similarly feeble “assurances” of this ilk were offered during the recent appeal proceedings.

Conversely, there has so far been no unconvincing public guarantee against the abuse of any information illicitly obtained by UC Global, a CIA contractor, from its extensive surveillance of the Embassy. The Spanish private security firm went as far as bugging the building’s female bathroom, where the WikiLeaks founder conducted discussions with his lawyers, away from prying ears and eyes – or so he hoped.

Despite his situation, Julian somehow retained a vague shred of optimism about the future in discussions with consular officials, suggesting that the result of Australia’s federal election, which was held the very next day, “may present a window for a new government to do something supportive for his case,” asking that Marise Payne be briefed on developments.

As it was, Scott Morrison’s Liberal National Coalition retained its grip on power – and no alarm was publicly raised about anything learned over the course of the consular visit. Indeed, remaining tight-lipped on Julian’s suffering, no matter how horrendous, was to be a matter of dedicated policy.

Australia’s DFAT denies any role in “progressively severe abuse” of Assange

On May 30th that year, WikiLeaks’ made the shock announcement that Julian had been moved to Belmarsh’s medical ward, expressing “grave concerns” about the state of his health. Almost immediately, DFAT’s Global Watch Office fired off an internal email drawing attention to the post.

The following day, ​​UN Special Rapporteur on Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment Nils Melzer proclaimed “the collective persecution of Julian Assange must end here and now!” The international legal veteran added that, “in 20 years of work with victims of war, violence and political persecution,” he had “never seen a group of democratic states ganging up to deliberately isolate, demonize and abuse a single individual for such a long time and with so little regard for human dignity and the rule of law.”

Next, Melzer fulminated against a “relentless and unrestrained campaign of public mobbing, intimidation and defamation” by the US, UK, Sweden and Ecuador, which had subjected him to “persistent, progressively severe abuse ranging from systematic judicial persecution and arbitrary confinement in the Ecuadorian embassy, to his oppressive isolation, harassment and surveillance inside the embassy.”

In response, Australia’s DFAT issued a statement rejecting any suggestion Canberra was “complicit in psychological torture or has shown a lack of consular support” in Assange’s regard, claiming to be “a staunch defender of human rights and strong advocate for humane treatment in the course of judicial processes,” and expressing confidence that he was “being treated appropriately.”

Due to “privacy considerations” allegedly extended to all consular clients, the Department declined to divulge any further details related to his physical or mental state.

It added that the Australian High Commission in London “previously raised any health concerns identified with Belmarsh prison authorities and these have been addressed,” with further inquiries made following Julian’s move to the health ward.

The documents provided to The Grayzone indicate Canberra did indeed make repeated enquiries to Belmarsh by phone and mail in the wake of Wikileaks’ announcement, all of which went unanswered for six straight days. So why did Australia’s High Commissioner not intervene, and demand immediate clarity on an issue of literal life-and-death urgency?

Whatever the reason for the Australian government’s foot-dragging, a consular file dated August 8th that year records how Shipton wrote to advise that Julian had been readmitted to Belmarsh’s sick bay, and a lawyer was drafting a letter to Marise Payne, requesting DFAT “use its diplomatic sources to seek an independent medical assessment (ie outside the prison).”

Then, 11 days later, Shipton mentioned that Julian’s brother, Gabriel, had recently visited the prison and was distressed by Assange’s “deteriorating condition,” leading him to write letters to both Australian Governor General David Hurley and Morrison raising his fears.

On October 21st, Assange appeared in court for a pre-trial hearing in his extradition case. As was widely reported in the mainstream media, he appeared frail and discombobulated, struggling to recall his own name and date of birth when asked by the judge. When the presiding justice enquired whether he even knew what was happening, Assange responded, “not exactly,” indicating conditions in Belmarsh left him unable to “think properly.”

“I don’t understand how this is equitable,” the imprisoned journalist stated. “I can’t research anything, I can’t access any of my writing. It’s very difficult where I am.”

Assange’s attorney, Mark Summers, argued that his initial extradition hearing, scheduled for February 2020, should be delayed by three months due to the complexity of the case – “the evidence…would test the limits of most lawyers,” he said, and discussed the immense difficulty of communicating with his client in the jail, given he lacked access to a computer.

The judge denied the request. As a result, Julian would be deprived of “the most basic of access to the bare minimum needs for proper representation” until just weeks prior to the hearing.

Assange attorney warns Australia’s DFAT of “impending crisis”

Three days later, Assange attorney Gareth Peirce wrote to the High Commission, asserting that if consular representatives had attended court, “they will have undoubtedly noted what was clear for everyone present in court to observe” – that his client was “in shockingly poor condition…struggling not only to cope but to articulate what he wishes to articulate.”

Unbelievably, a DFAT report on the proceedings unearthed by Tranter made no mention whatsoever of Julian’s disheveled appearance, or his clearly frayed mental state.

Peirce went on to argue that under the circumstances, it was unsurprising Julian had not authorized prison officials to provide the Australian government with information regarding his medical treatment, which had been “been grossly and unlawfully compromised over some time, including, disturbingly, even whilst he has been in Belmarsh prison, false information on at least one occasion having been provided to the press by very obviously internal sources.”

“We hope that what we are able to say…will be accepted by you as having been based on close observation, including by independent professional clinicians..Every professional warning provided to the prison, including by at least one independent doctor called in by Belmarsh, has been ignored,” she wrote. “We would be pleased to meet with you at any stage if by intervention in what is now an impending crisis [emphasis added], you can contribute to its amelioration and avoidance.”

And so it was that consular officials visited Belmarsh November 1st. In their exchange, Assange criticized false statements made to the media by DFAT which suggested he had rejected offers of their support.

Next, he revealed that a prison doctor was “concerned” about his condition. In fact, Assange said his psychological state was “so bad that his mind was shutting down,” almost permanent isolation making it impossible for him “to think or to prepare his defence.”

He did not even have a pen with which to write, was unable to do any research, could not receive documents during legal visits, and all his mail was read by prison officials before it was given to him.

The next month, Professor Michael Kopelman, emeritus professor of neuropsychiatry at King’s College London, prepared a report on Julian’s psychiatric state based on meetings throughout his first six months in Belmarsh, conversations with his parents, friends, colleagues and Stella Morris, his partner and mother of his two children.

As was revealed in Judge Vanessa Baraitser’s January ruling on the US extradition request, Kopelman diagnosed Julian with a severe recurrent depressive disorder, which was occasionally accompanied by psychotic features such as hallucinations, and frequent suicidal thoughts.

His symptoms furthermore included loss of sleep and weight, impaired concentration, a persistent feeling of being on the verge of tears, and state of acute agitation in which he paced his cell until exhausted, punching his head or banging it against the wall.

Assange commented to Kopelman that he believed his life was not worth living, he thought about suicide “hundreds of times a day,” and had a “constant desire” to self-harm or commit suicide, describing plans to kill himself that the professor considered “highly plausible.”

Calls to The Samaritans, a UK charity helpline providing emotional support to those in emotional distress, struggling to cope, or at risk of suicide, were “virtually” a nightly occurrence, and on occasions when he had not been able to reach them, Assange had slashed his thigh and abdomen to distract from his sense of isolation.

Kopelman concluded that, if Assange was held in solitary confinement in the US for a prolonged period, his mental health would “deteriorate substantially resulting in persistently severe clinical depression and the severe exacerbation of his anxiety disorder, PTSD and suicidal ideas,” not least because various “protective factors” available to him in the UK would be absent Stateside.

“For example, he speaks to his partner by telephone nearly every day and, before lockdown, was visited by her and his children, various friends, his father, and other relatives…[Kopelman] considered there to be an abundance of known risk factors indicating a very high risk of suicide,” Baraitser recorded. “He stated, ‘I am as confident as a psychiatrist ever can be that, if extradition to the US were to become imminent, Mr. Assange will find a way of suiciding.’”

The professor’s reports were fundamental to the extradition order’s rejection – a surprising outcome, given Baraitser previously approved extradition in 96% of cases upon which she has ruled.

Nonetheless, she accepted every other argument and charge put forward by the Department of Justice, in effect criminalizing a great many entirely legitimate journalistic activities, and setting the chilling precedent that citizens of any country can be extradited to the US for alleged breaches of its national laws, therefore implying Washington’s legal jurisdiction is global in scale.

Files on Australia’s DFAT discussions with US Secretary of State redacted in full

In response to the ruling, Australia’s Shadow Attorney General Mark Dreyfus issued a forceful statement, declaring the opposition Labor party believed “this has dragged on for long enough,” particularly given Julian’s “ill-health,” and demanding the Morrison administration “do what it can to draw a line under this matter and encourage the US government to bring this matter to a close.”

Conversely, DFAT published a characteristically laconic, soulless note, stating merely that Australia was “not a party to the case and will continue to respect the ongoing legal process,” and rehashing previous false claims that Julian had rejected multiple offers of consular assistance.

Canberra was simply silent when in June, the Icelandic publication Stundin revealed in detail how a “superseding indictment” levelled against Assange in September 2020, which charged that he and others at WikiLeaks “recruited and agreed with hackers to commit computer intrusions,” was based largely on the admittedly false testimony of fraudster, diagnosed sociopath and convicted pedophile Siggi Thordarson, who had previously embezzled vast sums from WikiLeaks and been recruited by the FBI to undermine its founder from within.

There is good reason to believe the Australian government knew the indictment was coming. In July that year, Foreign Minister Payne met with CIA director Mike Pompeo at an Australia–US Ministerial Consultations convention, “the principal forum for bilateral consultations” between the country and the US.

Tranter submitted freedom of information requests for details of that rendezvous, but the documents she received in return were fully redacted. As were files released to her relating to the Foreign Minister’s summit with Secretary of State Antony Blinken in May 2021.

It was almost certain that Assange was a subject of these meetings. DFAT claims Payne “raised the situation” when she met Blinken again in September, and the minister herself alleges she specifically discussed Australia’s “expectations” regarding Assange’s treatment with UK Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab when he visited Canberra in February 2020. Tranter requested records related to this meeting too, but was told none existed.

Upon Julian’s arrest, Prime Minister Morrison alleged he would receive “the same treatment that any other Australian would get.”

“When Australians travel overseas and then find themselves in difficulties with the law, they face the judicial systems of those countries,” Morrison said. “It doesn’t matter what particular crime it is that they’re alleged to have committed, that’s the way the system works.”

However, an internal email dated April 5th 2019 secured by Tranter from the Australian Attorney General’s office was shot through with contempt for the Wikileaks co-founder. The note asserted, “FYI – Assange might be evicted. Not sure if his lawyers will make any (not very convincing) [emphasis added] arguments about Australia’s responsibilities to him but thought it was worth flagging.”

As usual, Australian officials said nothing in public about Assange’s imminent abduction.

Assange’s treatment, and the total lack of outrage over his incarceration, prison conditions, blatant procedural abuses engaged in by Washington in their relentless pursuit of him, and CIA plans to kidnap and/or murder the WikiLeaks founder, diverges starkly from Australia’s approach to Kylie Moore-Gilbert, an Australian-British academic jailed in Iran for 10 years on questionable charges of espionage in September 2018.

Behind the scenes, Australian diplomats struggled for almost two years to secure her release, eventually brokering a prisoner swap, under which she was traded for three Iranian inmates in Thailand – two of whom were convicted in connection with a 2012 bombing plot in Bangkok. In a statement, Foreign Minister Payne expressed relief that Moore-Gilbert was finally free as a result of “professional and determined work,” noting Canberra had “consistently rejected” the grounds on which she was detained.

Meanwhile, the Australian government has consistently reinforced Washington’s position on Assange. In fact, officials have on occasion gone even further than their US counterparts in publicly condemning him and his actions.

In December 2010, then-Prime Minister Julia Gillard declared WikiLeaks’ release of US diplomatic cables meant Assange was “guilty of illegality,” and that Federal Police were investigating, to offer “advice about potential criminal conduct of the individual involved.” To be fair to Canberra though, elected representatives there may effectively have no choice in the matter.

According to investigative journalist Duncan Campbell, each Five Eyes member theoretically has the right to veto a request for signals intelligence collected on an individual, group or organization collected by another. However, Campbells explained, “when you’re a junior ally like Australia or New Zealand, you never refuse,” even in situations when there are concerns about what ostensible allies may do with that sensitive information.

The documents obtained by Tranter and provided to The Grayzone provide an unobstructed view of the Australian junior ally’s betrayal of one of its citizens to the imperial power that has hunted him for years. As Julian Assange’s rights were violated at every turn, Canberra appears to have been complicit.

thegrayzone.com

60 Minutes Australia has churned out yet another fearmongering war propaganda piece on China, this one so ham-fisted in its call to beef up military spending that it goes so far as to run a brazen advertisement for an actual Australian weapons manufacturer disguised as news reporting.

This round of psychological conformity-making features Australian former major general Jim “The Butcher of Fallujah” Molan saying that in three to ten years a war will be fought against China over Taiwan and that Australians are going to have to fight in that war to prevent a future Chinese invasion of the land down under. He argues Australia will need to greatly increase its military spending in order to accomplish this, because it can’t be certain the United States will protect it from Chinese aggression.

“Australia is monstrously vulnerable at the moment; we have this naive faith that American military power is infinite, and it’s not,” says Molan, who is a contributor to government/arms industry-funded think tanks Lowy Institute and Australian Strategic Policy Institute.

Extremely normal day in Aussie media pic.twitter.com/XSXpCRF0Co

— Carl Zha (@CarlZha) November 15, 2021

“The next war is not going to be 10 or 20 years away. It’s going to be in the next three to 10 years.”

Former major general @JimMolan fears the nuclear submarines Australia will acquire through the AUKUS pact will come far too late to protect us. #60Mins pic.twitter.com/B490dpIKiW

— 60 Minutes Australia (@60Mins) November 14, 2021

Decrying what he calls “panda huggers” (meaning people who aren’t China hawks), Molan claims that “the Chinese Communist Party’s aim is to be dominant in this region and perhaps dominant in the world.” Asked when war might break out, he claims “Given the power that they have in their military they could act any time from now on, and that’s what frightens me more than anything.”

“The next war is not going to be ten or twenty years away, it’s going to be in the next three to ten years,” Molan asserts. “My estimate is that in a serious fight the Australian Defense Force only has enough missiles for days. This is not going to be resolved in days. And of course we’re not big enough. We should expand the defense force significantly… We should fund defense now based on our assessment of the national security strategy which is based on the war that we want to win.”

“In short do you think Australia needs to prepare for war tomorrow?” the interviewer asks Molan.

“Absolutely,” he replies.

Molan makes the ridiculous argument that if Australia does not to commit to defending Taiwan from the mainland then it won’t be long before they can expect a Chinese invasion at home, as though there’s any line that could be drawn between the resolution to a decades-old Chinese civil war and China deciding to invade a random continent full of white foreigners thousands of miles away.

“Suppose we said okay Taiwan you’re on your own up there and the Chinese snapped it up, and the Chinese started looking around the world and they might snap up other liberal democracies like Australia,” Molan argues. “And we might then turn to America and say America well could you give us a bit of a hand here? And the Americans might say what we said to Taiwan. Where do you draw the line? This situation that is developing now is an existential threat to Australia as a liberal democracy.”

It’s early days yet, but increasingly, cheap autonomous drones are being viewed as a key to modern warfare – particularly for nations like Australia. #60Mins pic.twitter.com/bX72zEbvTn

— 60 Minutes Australia (@60Mins) November 14, 2021

Incredibly, the 60 Minutes segment then plunges into several minutes of blatant advertising for Australian defense technology company Defendtex which manufactures weaponized drones designed to be used in clusters, saying such systems could handily be used to defeat China militarily in a cost-effective manner.

The segment also promotes bare-faced lies which have become commonplace in anti-China propaganda, repeating the false claim that Chinese fighter planes have been “breaching Taiwanese airspace” and repeating a mistranslation of comments by Xi Jinping which it used in a previous anti-China segment made to sound more aggressive than they actually were.

This segment follows a cartoonishly hysterical fear porn piece on China put out by the same program this past September which featured Australian Strategic Policy Institute ghouls insisting that Australians must be prepared to fight and die in defense of Taiwan and that a Chinese invasion of Australia is a very real threat. That 60 Minutes segment was preceded by an equally crazy one in May which branded New Zealand “New Xi-Land” for refusing to perfectly align with US dictates on one small foreign policy issue.

Brian Berletic & Carl Zha and I got together for a late call last night and we did a screening/reaction video on 60 Minuites Australia’s new war with China special. Here is an excerpt.

Full video here: https://t.co/qb9lDWZmun pic.twitter.com/A97CLWYfoZ

— Daniel Dumbrill (@DanielDumbrill) September 25, 2021

To be perfectly clear, there is no evidence of any kind that China will ever have any interest in an unprovoked attack on Australia, much less an invasion, and attempts to tie that imaginary nonsense threat to Beijing’s interest in an island right off its coast which calls itself the Republic of China are absurd.

As we’ve discussed previously, anyone who’d support entering into a war against China over Taiwan is a crazy idiot. In the unfortunate event that tensions between Beijing and Taipei cannot be resolved peacefully in the future there is no justification whatsoever for the US and its allies to enter into a world war between nuclear powers to determine who governs Taiwan. The cost-to-benefit ratio in a conflict which would easily kill tens of millions and could lead to the deaths of billions if it goes nuclear makes such a war very, very, very far from being worth entering into, especially since there’s no actual evidence that Beijing has any interest in attacking nations it doesn’t see as Chinese territory.

There’s so much propaganda going toward generating China hysteria in westerners generally and Australians in particular, and it’s been depressingly successful toward that end. Watching these mass-scale psyops take control of people’s minds one after another has been like watching a zombie outbreak in real time; people’s critical thinking faculties just fall out their ears and then all of a sudden they’re all about cranking up military spending and sending other people’s kids off to die defending US interests in some island.

Please don’t become a zombie. Keep your brain. Stay conscious.

caityjohnstone.medium.com

The U.S. has declassified thousands of documents relating to its involvement in the ousting of Chile’s socialist President Salvador Allende and the installing of dictator Augusto Pinochet. Australia, on the other hand, continues to guard its classified documents on the pretext of security, drawing a discrepancy between its purported democratic principles and obstructing the public’s right to knowledge. As a country which welcomed Chileans fleeing the horrors of Pinochet’s brutal dictatorship, as well as harbouring Chilean agents – the most notable case being that of Adriana Rivas – Australia’s political and moral obligation should not be played down.

This month, the Australian Administrative Appeals Tribunal ruled that releasing documents relating to the Australian Secret Intelligence Service’s (ASIS) role in Chile would damage Commonwealth relations. “Protecting our ability to keep secrets – and being seen to do that – may require us to continue suppressing documents containing what may appear to be benign or uncontroversial information about events that occurred long ago,” the ruling partly stated.

In September this year, heavily redacted documents were declassified which confirmed ASIS working with the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), following petitions signed by a former Australian intelligence officer, Clinton Fernandes, calling upon the government to clarify its role in Cambodia, Indonesia and Chile.

Fernandes had described Australia’s foreign policy complicity with the U.S. as “a profoundly undemocratic, unfriendly act.” Allende, after all, was democratically elected. U.S. interference to bring about the right-wing dictatorship was a strategy to impede other countries from following Chile’s example in democratic revolutionary socialism.

In 1971, ASIS was tasked to open a radio station in Santiago by the CIA through which spy operations were conducted. Australia’s involvement ceased when the newly-elected Labour Prime Minister Gough Whitlam ordered the closing down of operations, fearing that any public disclosure would make things difficult in terms of explaining ASIS’s presence. At the same time, Australia was also concerned that its decision would be interpreted as anti-American.

Australia’s decision is baffling, considering the amount of declassification which the U.S., as the main instigator of violence in Latin America, has undertaken. The Australian Administrative Appeals Tribunal did not make its proceedings public, thus Fernandes and his lawyer could not counter-argue the decision.

To state there not a sufficient passage of time has passed since Australia’s involvement in the coup stands in contrast with how Chile has proceeded since the democratic transition, where the rewriting of a new constitution spells the possibility of a thorough reckoning with the dictatorship legacy. While the Chilean military still holds on to its files and upholds its secret pact which National Intelligence Directorate (DINA) agents are bound to, thus refusing to collaborate with the courts for justice when it comes to locating the disappeared, for example, the Chilean government has been coerced to respond to the people’s call for change, thus ushering in an era where Pinochet’s legacy can be challenged and toppled.

There exists speculation that the Australian government would request permission from the CIA to reveal its role, based upon an agreement between the CIA and ASIS. In the early 90s, Chileans in Australia requested the expulsion of DINA agents living in Australia but were told that the government did not have permission from the CIA to heed the request.

Almost 50 years have passed since Pinochet took power, so what exactly is Australia afraid of? The petition was not calling for a revelation of names, but rather the actions which would shed light on Australia’s role in Chile at the behest of the CIA. Considering the exiled Chileans living in Australia, refusing declassification is a political infringement on their right to memory.

By Antony LOEWENSTEIN, Peter CRONAU

Australia’s independence from Britain has been contested ground since the nation’s birth in 1901 — the first real test being Australia’s decision to send troops to Europe for Britain’s war with Germany in 1914.

Two bitterly fought referenda to allow military conscription were narrowly defeated — Australia’s contribution to the Great War was to remain a voluntary one.

Move forward to 2021 and the relationship is no less controversial. U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson and U.S. President Joe Biden announced a new Indo-Pacific military alliance with Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison in September and awkwardly titled it AUKUS (which as one nave noted, sounds better than USUKA).

In announcing AUKUS, the three leaders loftily claimed to be “guided by our enduring ideals and shared commitment to the international rules-based order.”

The U.K. in July signaled its re-emergence as a Pacific Ocean force when it announced the aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth would lead a fleet of U.K. navy ships to join with the U.S. Navy in leading a flotilla of warships including Australian and Japanese vessels through the South China Sea.

The Australian Defence Department would neither confirm nor deny the precise nature of the maritime exercise. However, on this occasion the fleet kept a wary distance from Chinese-claimed territory.

The U.S. may brandish the world’s most powerful military but it is turning towards its traditional friends as it readies for confrontation, and perhaps conflict, with the rising economic and military powerhouse of China.

The AUKUS treaty saw Australia spectacularly dump its $90 billion contract with France to build Australia’s new submarine fleet, instead announcing a deal to buy U.S. and U.K. technology and build nuclear-powered submarines in Australia.

Although not nuclear armed (yet), the first of the new nuclear submarines will not be ready until as late as 2040. Other elements of the treaty, however, will come into play much sooner. Australia will spend $30 billion on new weaponry, including a suite of long-range missiles for its navy and air force, as well as land-based precision strike missiles, largely sourced or developed in conjunction with the U.K. and U.S.

Britain’s resurgent interest in the Pacific region as a part of its “increased international activism” was announced in March with Johnson stating the strategy will “tilt to the Indo-Pacific, increasingly the geopolitical centre of the world.”

Together with the U.S. “pivot to Asia” outlined by U.S. President Barack Obama in 2011, Australia is becoming a focus of a rapid military build-up.

Australia is in a precarious position as the “tilt” and “pivot” of these major powers’ international activism plays out on the strategic balance in the Indo-Pacific. Australia is hoping it is more than a mere “suitable piece of real estate” adrift in the South Pacific.

The world may have got some insight into the true closeness of the new AUKUS relationship when in a September press conference Boris Johnson referred to Scott Morrison as “prime minister Morris” and Biden forgot his name entirely, referring to him instead as “uh, that fella down under.”

Joint Work on New Weapons

In the 1950s and 60s Britain convinced Canberra to allow it to test its prototype nuclear bombs in South Australia. With a nuclear ascendant U.S., Britain was racing to keep a seat at the nuclear table. Australia on the other hand was hoping that helping Britain would ensure them a “nuclear guarantee”.

Described as safe, the bombs’ fallout from the Maralinga and Emu Field tests contaminated livestock and humans, and fallout carried by winds was detected as far away as Sydney, Brisbane and Adelaide.

British disinterest saw a Royal Commission in 1985 that led to Australia embarrassing the U.K. into helping fund an attempted clean-up of the sites, with works ending in 2000.

As well as nuclear weapons testing, the Australian desert lands of the Anangu indigenous peoples have for 60 years also hosted other weapons development projects, rocket firings and missile tests at the RAAF Woomera Range Complex, near Maralinga.

It was only in 1994 that the Anangu received compensation for injury and damages of the nuclear testing.

Both Britain and the U.S. are now working on new generation nuclear-capable hypersonic missile projects in Australia — Britain’s BAE Systems has Project Javelin and the U.S. is developing SCIFiRE with arms manufacturers Raytheon, Boeing and Lockheed Martin.

The RAAF Woomera Range has been the site of BAE Systems development work on its Taranis supersonic stealth bomber drone, though the project has stalled, and on the Mantis, a long-endurance drone.

Airbus is also using Australia in developing the Zephyr solar-powered high-altitude long-endurance pseudo-satellite surveillance drone, designed to supply live vision of combat for up to 40 hours from 20 kms high.

It’s been undergoing test flights in the calm air above Wyndham in Western Australia but has suffered several crashes. The U.K. Ministry of Defence is one of the main customers, if not the only customer, for the Zephyr.

While Australia awaits its own fleet of 12 armed Reaper drones, Britain has been making use of RAAF drone pilots embedded with the RAF conducting missions over Iraq and Syria, piloted from the RAF base at Waddington in Lincolnshire.

Australian pilots began training on Reaper drones in 2015 in the U.S. and flew operational missions for the USAF in its war over Iraq and Syria.

Pine Gap

However, it is the top secret Pine Gap satellite surveillance base — officially titled “Joint Defence Facility Pine Gap” (JDFPG, but known generally to the 800 staff as “the base”) – that is Australia’s greatest contribution to the Five Eyes alliance that also includes Canada and New Zealand.

Located near Alice Springs, it’s a base for the C.I.A., National Security Agency and National Reconnaissance Office and collects signals and other data from an array of satellites snooping on military, commercial and private communication systems.

Mirrored with the N.S.A.’s base at  RAF Menwith Hill in North Yorkshire, it forms a global surveillance net.

Battlefield intelligence used by the U.S. in its “war on terror” has been gathered and analyzed at Pine Gap for use by the U.S. military including in potentially illegal drone strikes in the Middle East that have killed thousands of civilians.

Gough Whitlam giving a speech during the 1972 election campaign. (National Archives of Australia, CC BY 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)

Last year, research by professor Jenny Hocking revealed confidential documents from the Australian National Archive that showed the advance notice that Queen Elizabeth had of the plotting by the governor general. The documents also showed a level of encouragement from senior staff of the Palace in the dismissal of the democratically elected prime minister.Pine Gap first attracted public disquiet in 1975 when the then Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam threatened to reveal the names of C.I.A. agents involved. He was controversially dismissed by the Queen’s representative in Australia, Governor General John Kerr, on November 11, 1975.

At the time of the public and political controversy over Pine Gap, the site hosted just eight satellite dishes. Today, the base is quietly undergoing a new expansion with six new dishes being constructed, bringing the total now to 39.

The new dishes, most likely aimed at detecting missile launches, will boost the U.S.’s planning to fight a nuclear war with China.

Australia is tumbling headlong in accepting the rotational basing of U.S. Marines in Darwin — presently 2,500, soon expected to be 5,000 personnel. South of Darwin, near Katherine, the Tindal RAAF base is undergoing a major upgrade of refueling capability and armaments storage, to allow it to host an expanded range of allied military aircraft, including the U.S.’s long-range B-52 bombers.

Nuclear Proliferation

Australia prides itself on being a member of the “rules-based international order,” however it is cooperating with two nuclear weapons states that are breaching the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Britain has announced it is to increase the number of nuclear warheads it has for its Trident submarines, and together with the U.S. is developing new generation hypersonic missiles capable of delivering nuclear warheads anywhere on the globe.

Along with the U.K. and U.S., Australia is a holdout from signing or ratifying the new Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear War. This treaty would prohibit Australia from “provision of assistance to any State” conducting activities ranging from producing, possessing and stockpiling of nuclear weapons, through to possessing the threat to use nuclear weapons.

The Treaty requirements “to prevent and suppress” prohibited activity “on territory under its jurisdiction or control” would see a range of necessary limitations placed on Australia — including, most importantly, a review of the nuclear war-supporting functions of the Pine Gap satellite surveillance base.

War Crimes in Afghanistan

Australian soldiers on foot patrol in Uruzgan, Afghanistan, Aug. 16, 2008. (ISAF, John Collins, U.S. Navy)

The U.K. and Australia have played a key partnership role since the 9/11 attacks but have dealt with the fallout slightly differently. When the Brereton Report, an Australian-government led investigation into alleged war crimes by Australian special forces in Afghanistan, released its findings in November 2020 the results were devastating.

A four-year inquiry found that 39 Afghan civilians were murdered by Australian forces in 23 incidents in 2009, 2012 and 2013. The Kabul-based Australian photojournalist Andrew Quilty uncovered countless more killings by Australian soldiers that went unmentioned in the Brereton Report.

According to the Australian government, the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan may potentially hinder ongoing investigations into war crimes though the country is at its most relatively peaceful for decades. It’s hard not to conclude that Australian officials view the Taliban government as a convenient impediment to progressing with any prosecutions.

Nonetheless, the Brereton Report is one of the more comprehensive examinations of any Western army that occupied Afghanistan after October 2001. None of this is to defend the Australian government’s response to the report, which is filled with obfuscation, denial and willful blindness, but it’s still superior to many other comparable nations.

This is despite both Canada and New Zealand having uncovered hard evidence of their own forces committing abuses in Afghanistan and the U.S. escaping scrutiny after pressuring the International Criminal Court for years to only investigate the Taliban and ISIS.

U.S. President Donald Trump granted clemency to U.S. military personnel who killed Afghans. Fox News had encouraged Trump to pardon these men accused of war crimes.

The seriousness of the Brereton Report was reflected in comments by the Afghan-based Independent Human Rights Commission. Its chairperson, Shaharzad Akbar, said that the Australian investigation should push the U.K., U.S. and other occupation forces to examine their role in the death of civilians since 2001.

She particularly stressed that the U.K. “open an independent inquiry to review and investigate the allegation of unlawful killings by U.K. special forces.”

Instead, the British Ministry of Defence said that its “armed forces are held to the highest standards, and the Service Police have carried out extensive and independent investigations into alleged misconduct of U.K. forces in Afghanistan. As of today, none of the historical allegations under Operation Northmoor have led to prosecutions.”

Despite claiming that it was investigating serious allegations of war crimes in both Iraq and Afghanistan, Britain failed to find anyone senior worth prosecuting despite mountains of evidence. One soldier was jailed for stabbing a 10-year-old Afghan boy.

Nonetheless, cover-ups and lies were central to Whitehall’s response.

The murder of Afghan civilians was not deemed important enough nor the dogged pursuit by Saiffulah Yar who accused U.K. forces of killing four members of his family in Helmand Province in 2011.

There was important reporting by BBC Panorama and BBC Newsnight though overall the Western media has not covered itself in glory reporting the Afghan war, usually preferring government and military sources to Afghans.

Despite the Chilcot inquiry, with its damning assessment of how former Prime Minister Tony Blair pushed his country into war with Iraq, nobody has been seriously held to account for Britain’s failed wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The fear remains that Australia, despite the Office of the Special Investigator still investigating human rights breaches in Afghanistan, will follow London’s lead and bury or indefinitely delay any potential war crimes trials.

Elite soldier Ben Roberts-Smith is accused of killing Afghan civilians and is currently suing major Australian media reports for daring to report it. The trial has become a proxy war crimes trial while masquerading as a defamation case. It may be the only such trial in the foreseeable future.

Militarized Immigration Policy

Australia’s Manus Island regional immigration processing facility, 2012. (Flickr, DIAC, CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons)

It’s the militarized immigration policy where Canberra arguably inspires London the most. Australia’s immigration policy is known for its brutal disregard for human rights and sending refugees to remote Pacific Islands for processing. The policy has deep roots in Australia’s settler colonial history.

The so-called Pacific Solution began in 2001 and quickly received bi-partisan support in the Federal Parliament. Forcibly placing vulnerable refugees from Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Myanmar, Sri Lanka or elsewhere in overcrowded, hot and dangerous locations was a cruelly effective method of dehumanizing and silencing people, many of whom were escaping wars in countries that Australia was supposedly trying to liberate through occupation.

Despite protests from the European Union and many other liberals around the world, Australia’s refugee policy has become a model for the EU and Britain under the Conservative government.

Christmas Island Immigration Detention Centre, Dec. 7, 2008. (Flickr, DIAC, CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons)

Former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott, a right-wing climate denier, set the tone in a 2015 speech when delivering the Margaret Thatcher lecture in London by arguing that Europe should shut its borders completely. “The Australian experience proves that the only way to dissuade people seeking to come from afar is not to let them in,” he said.

The U.K. Conservatives listened and agreed. In 2020, U.K. Home Secretary Priti Patel reportedly examined the viability of constructing an asylum seeker detention facility 6,000 kilometers away from Britain, in Ascension Island or St. Helena in the South Atlantic, but eventually decided it was logistically too challenging.

Instead, in 2021 Patel announced that Britain would forcibly push back refugee boats crossing the English Channel, a carbon copy of Australia’s boat turn-back policy which the U.N. estimated in July had resulted in 800 people on 31 boats since 2013 being towed back to potential danger, sinking or death.

In some cases, Australia is credibly accused of covering up actions that led to hundreds of deaths at sea. Australia also stands accused of paying Indonesian people smugglers to keep boats out of Australian waters.

Australia and Britain share a political, ideological and military partnership that transcends partisan bickering. As journalists who have investigated this relationship for years, it’s revealing how little scrutiny is given to it by the establishment media and political elites.

declassifieduk.org

Even as scientific studies show that vaccines alone cannot extricate humanity from the Covid-19 crisis, governments are rushing headlong towards the creation of a ‘vaccinated economy’ without any consideration for the consequences. It’s time for an injection of sanity and informed democratic debate.

An astonishing thing happened this week that should have – were it not for a media industrial complex that coddles and cossets the powers that be – incited journalists to scream bloody murder around our increasingly imprisoned planet. What the world got instead was the deafening cacophony of crickets.

When a reporter asked New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern about the possibility of the Pacific island nation being fragmented into two distinct classes of citizens – the vaccinated and unvaccinated – Arden didn’t miss a beat as she responded with her trademark Cheshire grin, “That is what it is. So yep. Yep.”

After being further prodded by the deferential journalist as to why she favored apartheid, Ardern, who has already mandated vaccines for government employees or else, responded, unscientifically, that “people who have been vaccinated will want to know that they are around other vaccinated people; they’ll want to know that they’re in a safe environment.”

Under normal conditions – that is, before scientific inquiry was sent back kicking and screaming to the Dark Ages – Ardern’s outrageous remark would have been greeted by robust and vigorous debate from both the political and medical communities. After all, the vaccinated should feel absolutely at ease mingling among the unvaccinated in stuffy public places given that they are, supposedly, protected? Isn’t that the point of the vaccines, to protect the vaccinated and get us back to some semblance of ‘normal’? If not, then why the incessant push to jab every single person on the planet, and not just once, as initially promised, but multiple times? The answer, at least according to Queen Ardern, is so that everyone can feel “confident” once again among their fellow man. That makes absolutely zero sense, especially as new studies show no discernible decrease in infection rates among the vaccinated. So why hedge our bets when just the opposite seems to be happening?

On the brink of losing my job, can’t travel, can’t eat out, can’t stay in a hotel, can’t go to the gym, can’t go in any shops except supermarkets (for now), family tell me they’re not willing to see me for fear of breaking the “rules”…………

Is this “life” from now on?

— Geronimo (@NototyrannyNOW) October 26, 2021

In a recent study by Harvard researchers, published in the European Journal of Epidemiology, it was discovered that, looking at statistics around the world, “there appears to be no discernable relationship between percentage of population fully vaccinated and new COVID-19 cases…” The researchers then delivered a brutal body slam to conventional (political) thinking by revealing that “the trend line suggests a marginally positive association such that countries with higher percentage of population fully vaccinated have HIGHER (emphasis added) COVID-19 cases per 1 million people.”

That is a truly shocking discovery, and one that deserves a serious public debate now that a mandatory vaccination regime – replete with the loss of jobs and lives – is being bolted down across much of the globe. But instead of addressing the health crisis with a modicum of restraint and humility, many politicians are gleefully capitalizing on the pandemic, using it as an opportunity to accumulate ever greater political power. This disturbing trend is happening across much of the Western hemisphere where, in what must be one of the greatest coincidences of modern times, a coterie of like-minded liberal leaders hold the destiny of mankind in their very hands. This cannot be considered a good thing by any stretch of the imagination. Although these individuals may owe no special favors to the pharmaceutical industry, their collective actions – denying the unvaccinated the same inherent rights to liberty and freedom as other citizens, including the corporate variety  – do not support such a premise.

So how to explain this unprecedented power grab happening around the world? Best to examine the unmatched power of the media that promotes the message of Covid authoritarians, like Jacinda Ardern, and their unflinching devotion to a fragmented apartheid state. All in the name of health, of course.

Noam Chomsky says the “right response” to The Unvaccinated is “to insist that they be isolated” from society https://t.co/T34V7anDGI pic.twitter.com/1bBzURPeEi

— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) September 2, 2021

Political commentator Chantelle Baker told Sky News Australia that Ardern enjoys practically “full control” of the narrative in New Zealand because the government has paid “hundreds of millions” to the media. Now, in return, the citizens are stuck with compromised journalists who will “only push for promotion of Jacinda and…her ideological ideas.”

Around the globe, in another power-grabbing liberal hotspot, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau also enjoys no small amount of mainstream media support. In its 2019 budget, the federal government lavished select media outlets to the tune of $600 million in subsidies, the overwhelming bulk of the largesse going to left-leaning publications, of course.

“Trudeau’s media bailout will not save the newspaper business,” warned Derek Fildebrandt, publisher of the Western Standard, one of the last free and independent media voices in Canada. “It will put it in a complacent, comatose state on life support, fearful that if it acts against its master, that the plug could be pulled at any time.”

The power to declare pandemic rule will shift to the Premier under laws designed to replace Victoria’s State of Emergency.

Fines of up to $90,000 or two years jail await those breaking the rules, which Daniel Andrews described as a win for accountability. @msanto92 #9News pic.twitter.com/TYz1t2hUN8

— 9News Melbourne (@9NewsMelb) October 26, 2021

South of the border, in the United States of Submission, the liberal-dominated media is almost 100 percent aligned behind Joe Biden and his mandatory vaccine regime. The media whitewashing of the subject comes even as several states, including Texas, Florida and Arizona have drawn a line in the sand, allowing their citizens loopholes from which to escape the wildly draconian, ‘vaccinate-or-vacate’ your job stance.

Returning to the Pacific basin, in Australia, where new cases of Covid have decreased to a trickle, Victoria Premier Daniel Andrews is snorting heavily from the absolute power stash, attempting to ram home a bill that would empower him to pronounce, like any degenerate Caesar, any and all future pandemics and the necessary emergency provisions.

In a delightful document entitled the Roadmap – which comes off a bit like a Mad Max sequel – Andrews, who apparently moonlights as a PhD when he’s not pretending to be a leader, postulates that “there will come a time when Victorians who choose not to get vaccinated will be left behind…” as Australians begin “transitioning to a ‘vaccinated economy’ in this state, and ensure we have the right systems in place.”

Those are some truly disturbing words, and ones that few people would expect to be tossed around blithely by a western leader in the 21^st century. In fact, they fly in the face of democratic theory to the point where the question of abuse of powers cannot be discounted. I suspect this is the real reason why the ‘progressive’ radicals now working overtime in the U.S. to fracture societies around the planet are the same people who wish to eliminate Thomas Jefferson from the annals of American history, starting with stone depictions of his existence.

Jefferson, in the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence, which he authored, famously states: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Across the so-called Five Eyes alliance, comprised of the U.S., UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand, a homegrown tyranny based on a creeping medical apartheid is threatening the “life, liberty and pursuit of Happiness” worse than all of history’s former tyrants combined. Covid-19 did not create the unbearable conditions for which millions of people from Auckland to Alaska are now suffering; what created our current crisis is the reckless response to Covid-19, which increasingly appears to be based not on medical science, but rather raw political opportunism. This tragic state of affairs, justified by a disease with a better than 99 percent survival rate, cannot continue indefinitely. In fact, it needs to end immediately.

By Prabir PURKAYASTHA

The Quadrilateral group’s leaders’ meeting in the White House on Sept. 24 appears to have shifted focus away from its original framing as a security dialogue among four countries: the United States, India, Japan and Australia.

Instead, the United States seems to be moving much closer to Australia as a strategic partner and providing it with nuclear-powered submarines.

Supplying Australia with U.S. nuclear submarines that use bomb-grade uranium can violate the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) protocols. Considering that the United States wants Iran not to enrich uranium beyond 3.67 percent, this is blowing a big hole in its so-called rule-based international order — unless we all agree that the rule-based international order is essentially the United States and its allies making up all the rules.

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe had initiated the idea of the Quad in 2007 as a security dialogue. In the March 12 statement issued after the first formal meeting of the Quad countries, “security” was used in the sense of strategic security.

Before the recent meeting of the Quad, both the United States and the Indian sides denied that it was a military alliance, even though the Quad countries conduct joint naval exercises — the Malabar exercises — and have signed various military agreements. The Sept. 24 Quad joint statement focuses more on other “security” issues: health security, supply chain and cybersecurity.

Has India decided that it still needs to retain strategic autonomy even if it has serious differences with China on its northern borders and therefore stepped away from the Quad as an Asian NATO? Or has the United States itself downgraded the Quad now that Australia has joined its geostrategic game of containing China?

AUKUS

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison on video with U.S. President Joe Biden during Sept. 15 announcement of the AUKUS pact. (C-Span clip)

Before the Quad meeting in Washington, the United States and the U.K. signed an agreement with Australia to supply eight nuclear submarines — the AUKUS agreement.

Earlier, the United States had transferred nuclear submarine technology to the U.K., and it may have some subcontracting role here. Nuclear submarines, unlike diesel-powered submarines, are not meant for defensive purposes. They are for force projection far away from home. Their ability to travel large distances and remain submerged for long periods makes them effective strike weapons against other countries.

The AUKUS agreement means that Australia is canceling its earlier French contract to supply 12 diesel-powered submarines. The French are livid that they, one of NATO’s lynchpins, have been treated this way with no consultation by the United States or Australia on the cancellation.

The U.S. administration has followed it up with “discreet disclosures” to the media and U.S. think tanks that the agreement to supply nuclear submarines also includes Australia providing naval and air bases to the United States. In other words, Australia is joining the United States and the U.K. in a military alliance in the “Indo-Pacific.”

Earlier, French President Emmanuel Macron had been fully on board with the U.S. policy of containing China and participated in Freedom of Navigation exercises in the South China Sea.

France had even offered its Pacific Island colonies — and yes, France still has colonies — and its navy for the U.S. project of containing China in the Indo-Pacific.

France has two sets of island chains in the Pacific Ocean that the United Nations terms as non-self-governing territories — read colonies — giving France a vast exclusive economic zone, larger even than that of the United States.

The United States considers these islands less strategically valuable than Australia, which explains its willingness to face France’s anger. In the U.S. worldview, NATO and the Quad are both being downgraded for a new military strategy of a naval thrust against China.

Australia has very little manufacturing capacity. If the eight nuclear submarines are to be manufactured partially in Australia, the infrastructure required for manufacturing nuclear submarines and producing/handling of highly enriched uranium that the U.S. submarines use will probably require a minimum time of 20 years. That is the reason behind the talk of U.S. naval and air bases in Australia, with the United States providing the nuclear submarines and fighter-bomber aircraft either on lease, or simply locating them in Australia.

Maritime Powers

Ships from the navies of the U.S., Australia, India and Japan participate in Malabar exercises in the North Arabian Sea on Nov. 17, 2020. (U.S. Navy, Elliot Schaudt)

I have previously argued that the term Indo-Pacific may make sense to the United States, the U.K. or even Australia, which are essentially maritime nations.

The optics of three maritime powers, two of which are settler-colonial, while the other, the erstwhile largest colonial power, talking about a rule-based international order do not appeal to most of the world. Oceans are important to maritime powers, which have used naval dominance to create colonies. This was the basis of the dominance of British, French and later U.S. imperial powers. That is why they all have large aircraft carriers: they are naval powers that believe that the gunboat diplomacy through which they built their empires still works. The United States has 700-800 military bases spread worldwide; Russia has about 10; and China has only one base in Djibouti, Africa.

Behind the rhetoric about the Indo-Pacific and open seas is the U.S. play in Southeast Asia. Here, the talk of the Indo-Pacific has little resonance for most people. Its main interest is in the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), which was spearheaded by the ASEAN countries. Even with the United States and India walking out of the RCEP negotiations, the 15-member trading bloc is the largest trading bloc in the world, with nearly 30 percent of the world’s GDP and population. Two of the Quad partners — Japan and Australia — are in the RCEP.

The U.S. strategic vision is to project its maritime power against China and contest for control over even Chinese waters and economic zones. This is the 2018 U.S. Pacific strategy doctrine that it has itself put forward, which it de-classified recently.

The doctrine states that the U.S. naval strategy is to deny China sustained air and sea dominance even inside the first island chain and dominate all domains outside the first island chain. For those interested in how the U.S. views the Quad and India’s role in it, this document is a good education.

A virtual Quadrilateral group summit with Australia, India and Japan at the White House on March 12. (White House, Adam Schultz)

As India found to its cost in Lakshadweep, the U.S. definition of the freedom of navigation does not square with India’s either. For all its talk about rule-based world order, the United States has not signed the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) either.The United States wants to use the disputes that Vietnam, the Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand and Malaysia have with China over the boundaries of their respective exclusive economic zones. While some of them may look to the United States for support against China, none of these Southeast Asian countries supports the U.S. interpretation of the Freedom of Navigation, under which it carries out its Freedom of Navigation Operations, or FONOPS.

So, when India and other partners of the United States sign on to Freedom of Navigation statements of the United States, they are signing on to the U.S. understanding of the freedom of navigation, which is at variance with theirs.

The 1973 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty created two classes of countries, ones that would be allowed to use a set of technologies that could lead to bomb-grade uranium or plutonium, and others that would be denied them.

There was, however, a submarine loophole in the NPT and its complementary IAEA Safeguards for the peaceful use of atomic energy. Under the NPT, non-nuclear-weapon-state parties must place all nuclear materials under International Atomic Energy Agency safeguards, except nuclear materials for nonexplosive military purposes.

No country until now has utilized this submarine loophole to withdraw weapon-grade uranium from safeguards. If this exception is utilized by Australia, how will the United States continue to argue against Iran’s right to enrich uranium, say for nuclear submarines, which is within its right to develop under the NPT?

India was never a signatory to the NPT, and therefore is a different case from that of Australia. If Australia, a signatory, is allowed to use the submarine loophole, what prevents other countries from doing so as well?

Australia did not have to travel this route if it wanted nuclear submarines. The French submarines that they were buying were originally nuclear submarines but using low-enriched uranium. It is the retrofitting of diesel engines that has created delays in their supplies to Australia. It appears that under the current Australian leadership of Prime Minister Scott Morrison, Australia wants to flex its muscles in the neighborhood, therefore tying up with Big Brother, the United States.

For the United States, if Southeast Asia is the terrain of struggle against China, Australia is a very useful springboard. It also substantiates what has been apparent for some time now — that the Indo-Pacific is only cover for a geostrategic competition between the United States and China over Southeast Asia.

And unfortunately for the United States, East Asia and Southeast Asia have reciprocal economic interests that bring them closer to each other. And Australia, with its brutal settler-colonial past of genocide and neocolonial interventions in Southeast Asia, is not seen as a natural partner by countries there.

India under Prime Minister Narendra Modi seems to have lost the plot completely. Does it want strategic autonomy, as was its policy post-independence? Or does it want to tie itself to a waning imperial power, the United States? The first gave it respect well beyond its economic or military clout. The current path seems more and more a path toward losing its stature as an independent player.

consortiumnews.com