Posts by giovanni tiso
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Hard News: The Wellington Cables, in reply to chris,
The reduction of a complex set of interacting historical/ cultural phenomena to a singular simplified common genesis.
I am speechless.
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Hard News: The Wellington Cables, in reply to Russell Brown,
It was my impression that people were thinking that way, I thought it was unfair to the journalists concerned, and I said so.
It was a useful point to make, and I've appreciated the backgrounder. I was just questioning how days later we were still focussing on the Fulbright programme being a good thing as if anybody outside of I/S had ever said otherwise.
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Hard News: The Wellington Cables, in reply to Neil Morrison,
Any reference for Holbrooke being part of the Phoenix Program?
It came up a lot in the last couple of days, but no reference at hand. Wikipedia suggests that he was enlisted to work under Komer (who was the brain of the PP) in a committee that operated separately from the National Security Committee.
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Our location can also be an advantage: we work while Europe and the US sleep, which means we can deliver first thing their morning. This is a plus in a number of time-sensitive situations.
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I think I'm not just making it up.
You're reassuring me that this does actually go back in the main to something I/S wrote. It's neither how Hager presented it nor the media spun it, nor the terms in which it was discussed here. One could be excused from the way you were presenting it to think that it was the way a substantial number of people, if not one whole side of the debate, looked at the information.
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If you want to defend Carter's record in Indonesia, I suggest you do it based on facts. Same goes for Obama. It seems that you're quite happy to take politicians at their rhetoric - sorry, it won't cut it.
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Hard News: The Wellington Cables, in reply to Neil Morrison,
The Indonesian invasion was in 1975, Holbrooke joined Jimmy Carter's administration in 1977.
At which point he proceeded to ensure that the US congressmen that were trying to raise issues about the occupation be silenced. He's also the Richard Holbrooke who cut his teeth in the Phoenix Program and who worked on the Pentagon Papers. Lovely bloke by all accounts.
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Hard News: The Wellington Cables, in reply to Neil Morrison,
Richard Holbrooke is one of many examples of how the US has been a force for good.
I find it very reassuring that Obama has such people handling foreign policy.
You do realise he was the principal person responsible for making sure that the US congress turn a blind eye to the massacres in East Timor, yes?
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Hard News: The Wellington Cables, in reply to Kracklite,
To insinuate that those who took Fulbright scholarships and the like were willingly cogniscant of the moral corruption of the US
Who suggested that? I'm asking unrhetorically here. Was it something that I/S said? Because all of a sudden Russell started trotting out names of past Fulbrights and I kind of missed the connection with the WikiLeaks cables.
I would expect a Fulbright to be aware of who's funding their research, just as I'd like them to be aware of what their research might be used for ('o look, I've mounted a sensor on this robot which now can move around the campus freely and evade all kinds of obstacles. I see nothing sinister in that at all, look at it go!') and what kind of work their wider universities are engaging in. Incredibly in my research (and yes, I'm an Eng-Lit major) it is possible to get funding from the US Defence Department, they're quite happy to listen. And even if I couldn't see the military applications, maybe they could. But then I also like to think I was quite aware of the funding I was getting here, from the New Zealand government, and why I was getting it and what that meant.
Giovanni does cut rather a profile indeed.
It was lovely to meet you.
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Hard News: The Wellington Cables, in reply to Simon Grigg,
These, just to be clear, are the guys that even Bush wanted nothing to do with but Obama has lifted sanctions on and is training and arming.
That can't be, because with Obama in charge things have changed and we don't need WikiLeaks and we'll have peace in our time.