National Security

Next month will mark a decade since the 2002 Bali bombings where 202 people were murdered.

Eighty-eight of those killed were Australians. We are all too familiar with the tragic story – a bomb in a backpack, detonated inside a nightclub, forcing locals and holidaymakers to flee – where they were met by another, much larger bomb hidden inside a small van.

And the counter-terrorism raids that occurred in Victoria on Wednesday are another reminder that we must be ever-vigilant to the risks of a terror attack, even ten years after Bali.

Continue reading "Ten years after Bali, we must remain alert, not alarmed" »

Eleven years yesterday since the murder of thousands of innocents in New York and Washington. Eleven years and 36 days since President Bush received a disturbing daily intelligence memo entitled: “BIN LADEN DETERMINED TO STRIKE IN U.S.”.

The world has known about that memo’s contents since August 2004, when the Bush Administration declassified the document for the 9/11 commission.

Yesterday, though, there were further revelations (and accusations) that the Bush White House’s treatment of the Al Qaeda threat before 9/11 was grossly negligent in an opinion piece in a major American newspaper.

Author and journalist Kurt Eichenwald wrote in The New York Times:

Continue reading "Alarming new evidence of Dubya terror negligence" »

Until Siimon Reynolds came along when I was 11 years old and scared the living daylights out of everyone with his Grim Reaper AIDS advertisements, the biggest abstract bogey man I remember was nuclear war.

Those Russians, they had the bomb, and they were possibly going to use it. It didn’t help matters that in 1986 Chernobyl fulfilled the nuclear nightmare, conflating two separate issues into one terrifying specter.

It’s probably a good indication of how little I had to worry about being a child in the 80s in rural Australia that I remember “the bomb” being on my mind every now and again.

Continue reading "Remember being scared of nuclear war?" »

The plummeting sales of newspapers worldwide have brought about an epidemic of soul-searching about the future of journalism: do people still want straight reporting in the age of blogs?  Is there room any longer for large reporting organisations like newspapers and network TV News? Above all, who’s going to pay?

Whatever the answers to those questions, it’s a good time to be reminded of what journalism can be at its best, and the Washington Post has produced exactly such a reminder. If you read nothing else this week, bookmark this site. 

Over two years, two Washington Post reporters have been assembling an investigative series into what they call Top Secret America, and the results are fascinating.

Continue reading "Quality journalism exposes the counter-terror industry" »

A cynic might query the timing of the announcement - as a devastating tsunami hits the Pacific, news sneaks out that Prime Minister Kevin Rudd is spending $35 million on a White House-style “situation room” or war room.

It will certainly come in handy when New Zealand finally declares war on us. And if you’re going to devote yourself to a life of sacrifice in public office, it seems only fair that you get your own room with big maps and lots of pins in it, so you can chart the performance of the ADF along the eastern front running from Dubbo to Orbost as our boys repel the Kiwi invaders.

But maybe it’s just a huge waste of money. It’s certainly a lot of money. Seventy times more than the $500k John Howard wanted to spend on expanding meeting space in the PMO, which he was hounded over in estimates by John Faulkner and Robert Ray. 

Continue reading "Oh what a lovely war room, Prime Minister" »

Has anyone else noticed there was something missing from the reaction to last week’s failed terrorism plot to stage a Last Stand at Holsworthy?

I pricked up my ears and sniffed the air but try as I might I could no longer detect a dog whistle, that barely audible call to channel justified fear into something altogether more ugly.

In a sign that the Howard era is finally over, both the Prime Minister and the besieged Opposition Leader exhibited a fundamental decency in playing the men and not the race.

Continue reading "Down boy - no more whistling to tune of terror" »

One of the most disturbing things about this morning’s counter-terrorism raids in Melbourne is the profile of the suspects, who were allegedly planning a Mumbai-style machine-gun attack on Australian Army barracks.

They were, The Australian reports, construction workers and taxi drivers of Somali and Lebanese descent, living in suburban Melbourne.

Combine this with the admission of Anglo-Australian terrorist Shane Kent that he was part of a terrorist organisation and it’s clear terrorists don’t look like anything in particular and could be living in your street.

Continue reading "Race profiles a blunted tool in fight against enemy within" »