Constitutional Law, International, Media, Politics

Australian Government Raids ABC Headquarters After War Crimes Story

We have been discussing how the free press is under attack in both the United States and Europe. Like free speech, Western nations appear to have lost patience with free press protections. The latest example is an outrageous raid on a leading media organization in Australia. On the heels of the Assange case and other attacks on media protections, the raid on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation raises a chilling prospect that the free press could soon go the way of free speech in the West.

ABC ran an important story two years ago that alleged that Australian soldiers killed unarmed civilians and children in Afghanistan. It relied on hundreds of pages of secret military files that suggested Australian soldiers had killed unarmed civilians and children in Afghanistan.

This week, the federal police raided the ABC’s Sydney headquarters with a warrant naming a news director and the two reporters on the story. They gained access to almost 10,000 documents in a direct assault on press freedom. The police simply cited a 1914 law forbidding the release of secret government information and said that it considered such use of classified information to be an “extremely serious matter with the potential to undermine Australia’s national security.”

So is the eradication of a free press. Indeed, the free press is far more essential to preserving liberty than the classification of such documents.

Notably, July 2017 airing of “The Afghan Files,” also revealed alleged war crimes that caused the public to call for the investigation of the government.

The government intends now to be committed to guarantee that it does not happen again. Not the killings mind you . . . the disclosure of such killings.

58 thoughts on “Australian Government Raids ABC Headquarters After War Crimes Story”

  1. Global Nazi’s on the move. Remove speech, remove guns, all that’s left is authoritarians and slaves.

  3. Free Speech Issue In United States

    MAJOR NEWS SOURCES NOW REFERENCE TRUMP’S ‘LIES’

    This will not come as a revelation to people who have closely followed President Trump’s public statements and Twitter feed and have long doubted his veracity. It is, instead, a late-dawning recognition by mainstream news organizations, which until fairly recently shied away from branding the president’s many questionable utterances as outright lies.

    Nowadays, many in the news media are no longer bothering to grant Trump the benefit of the doubt. In routine news and feature stories, Trump’s dishonesty carries no fig leaf. It is described baldly.

    A recent sampling:

    ● CNN: “The Mueller report: A catalog of 77 Trump team lies and falsehoods.”

    ● Minneapolis Star Tribune: “President Trump lies to troops about pay raise.”

    ● Financial Times: “The real reason Donald Trump lies.”

    ● Los Angeles Times: “Mueller report exposes all the president’s liars.”

    ● Chicago Tribune: “Why are Trump’s lies not ruinous to him? Because truth can be in the eye of the beholder.”

    ● The New Yorker: “It’s True: Trump Is Lying More, and He’s Doing It on Purpose.”

    ● Foreign Policy: “Does It Matter That Trump Is a Liar?”

    As recently as last summer, a debate still raged within newsrooms: Could a presidential statement, no matter how blatantly false, be deemed a “lie” since, by definition, the word implies awareness of falsity and intent to deceive? How can journalists know what’s in Trump’s mind, even when he repeatedly says transparently untrue things, such as “the wall is under construction right now” on the southern border with Mexico, or that the United States pays “a disproportionate share” of the cost of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)?

    Edited from: “Lies? The News Media Is Starting To Describe Trump’s ‘Falsehoods’ That Way”

    This evening’s WASHINGTON POST

    2. This is different from modern presidents and representatives, how? It’s funny, no, sickening watching partisan shills, doing their best to divide the country, all for perceived conquest.

    3. If I were part of the Chinese Communist Politburo or whatever. I would advance a covert black program at the Bank of China to print a few billions yuan every so often and develop ownership of all the US legacy Mass media which can be bought in open markets.

      That’s on top of the the non-covert accumulations being made by various sovereign wealth funds

      using the massive leverage that would make possible from time to time, I would direct editorial attacks on adversaries of China, and elevate friends of China

      Gee, I wonder, have they done so already?

      https://dailycaller.com/2019/06/05/joe-biden-media-hunter-china-ukraine/

    1. Anonymous,

      This is the correct link! Thank you so much for getting that posted. It just wouldn’t for me. I really appreciate that you found that (and the others as well!)

    2. Thanks for trying to post it, Jill, and for letting us know about it. It’s an important interview.

      Here’s the text of the tweet:

      @abcnews

      “I’ve never seen an assault on the media as savage as this… I’ve never seen a warrant this comprehensive & I’d say scary… The chilling message is not so much for the journalists, but it’s also for the public,” head of ABC Investigations @TheLyonsDen tells @PatsKarvelas #auspol

      https://twitter.com/abcnews/status/1136160260819783680

      (Eventually, everyone will come to understand what’s happening, but it may be too late.)

  5. So this story was written in 2017. Another raided journalist wrote her story in 2018. Yet another apparently (but needs to be confirmed) was also from a different year. What is enabling them to suddenly go after these journalists at this time? Julian Assange for one. New laws criminalizing revelation of govt. crimes is in there as well.

  6. Even stranger, this post removed what I wrote. I had written ABC Australia. To find the video go to @cassandrafairbanks, scroll down to a tweet by Jaraparrila and it is linked there.

  7. What does the message: “invalid security token” mean? I cannot post a video from Australia because I keep getting this message.

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