Turning war lies on their head

The Australian Alert Service is the weekly publication of the Australian Citizens Party.

It will keep you updated on strategic events both in Australia, and worldwide, as well as the organising activities of the Citizens Party.

To subscribe to the Australian Alert Service, it's easy, and it's secure.

Lead Editorial

14 June 2023
Vol. 25 No. 24

London, 15 February 2003: One woman among the million-or-so people protesting a looming war in Iraq against non-existent Weapons of Mass Destruction, felt the weight of the decision to go to war more acutely than most. Katharine Gun, an analyst at Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), two weeks earlier had deliberately leaked communications from the USA which called on its allies to monitor calls and emails to determine how member nations may vote on the upcoming UN Security Council resolution for war, with a view to “either blackmailing them, or bribing them, or threatening them”, in Gun’s words.

A month later, just before the Iraq invasion commenced, illegally—as later acknowledged by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan—the Observer newspaper published Gun’s leak on its front page. Gun quickly confessed to being the leaker, opening a gruelling chapter of her life, where she was harassed, charged under the Official Secrets Act 1989, and psychologically tortured in a trial that was unduly dragged out to make an example of her. (Read the details here.)

Despite having admitted her crime, Gun pleaded not guilty to the charge. Her legal defence argued that as it was an illegal war, Gun was acting out of loyalty to her country by acting to prevent its involvement. This stopped the prosecution in its tracks, eventually forcing it to drop the case for fear of drawing attention to British Attorney General Peter Goldsmith’s original determination that the war was indeed illegal. Goldsmith had only changed his position after travelling to the USA to meet with members of the Bush Administration who were gunning for war. To prove Gun wrong, the prosecution would have had to dredge up embarrassing and potentially incriminating evidence against the government. Her plea—which was based not on a crafty legal strategy but her desire for truth—had them cornered.

Twenty years later, on Friday 9 June 2023, another whistle blower against Iraq war crimes, Julian Assange, saw a British judge reject his appeal against extradition to the USA. Assange’s final appeal is now being submitted. Like Gun, Assange’s mission was to use truth to bring about peace; his oftrepeated slogan being “If wars can be started by lies, peace can be started by truth.”

While the machinations of the war machine need continual exposure, it is by exposing the broader game plan that the Anglo-American war party can now be stopped in its tracks. The City of London-Wall Street centred financial empire is in the advanced stages of collapse, and a more fair and just alternative financial and economic architecture is emerging. This is driving the Anglo-Americans’ reckless geopolitical provocations, using Ukraine and Taiwan, and potentially many more nations including Australia, as pawns in that game.

But success will require pre-empting the war game-plan by pulling off an orderly reorganisation of the collapsing financial order by agreement among nations, a cause to which Australia must be recruited. The dying Anglo-American system is already surrounded by a growing “global majority” of the world’s people, whose leaders are arranging the elements of a replacement framework that will be fair both for them, and for the people of opposing nations. Support for this framework, both economic and strategic, is coalescing around the growing BRICS-plus group, initiated by Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, which is due to meet in August.

Such a plan can work if it is built upon proposals that all parties can not only agree upon, but desperately need in a time of crisis. As the financial bubble disintegrates, bringing a much bigger crisis than 2008, formerly opposing parties will look at such solutions very differently. This is the approach the Citizens Party is applying in Australia. Our program is based on policies that have universal traction, among all citizens, of every description, because they are the solutions necessary to survive the crisis.

In this issue:

• Chalmers is phasing out cheques based on Anna Bligh’s lies
• Scandal tainting Brittany Higgins compensation highlights Labor’s betrayal of Sterling First victims
• AUKUS, Australia and China
• Bust up ‘junior imperialist’ alliance to disrupt war plans
• Does the shift in influence in Southeast Asia betoken something more global?
• Brits push ‘economic NATO’ to isolate China
• ACP campaigns march forward: Stop war and start nation-building!
• The woman who blew up state secrets to stop a war
• ALMANAC: Return to the high-water mark of banking (Part I)

Click here to find out how to subscribe. For freely available AAS articles, click here.

Click here for the archive of previous issues of the Australian Alert Service