Posts by Simon Grigg
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@AlexiMostrous live tweeting with the judges permission from the Assange courtroom.
And the Guardian has crashed I guess from the live blog hits.
If this is just a hearing, one wonders if the US have any idea what a trial would be like.
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Hard News: The Wellington Cables, in reply to Joe Wylie,
Kopassus
The really nice guys - a steam of horrendous civil rights abuses including the mass rape -murder of Chinese-Indonesian women in 1998 and all sorts of nasty shit in West Papua as I type. They have immunity from civil law in Indonesia and are almost a state within a state.
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.
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Hard News: The Wellington Cables, in reply to Kyle Matthews,
I don't think that's it works - by definition foreign aid has to go overseas surely.
a huge part of the US aid budget actually goes Israel and Egypt (around 20% I think) and is political in nature. It still gets included.
@islander:
was not quite a lot "aid" given to training etc. members of the Indonesian Armed Forces back in the 1960s/70/80s?
Perhaps - I don't know. In the late 1960s Suharto, at the same time he was slaughtering a million of his countrymen was being welcomed into the grand alliance we were part of and fed aid so it is possible.
Before that we were kinda at war with Indonesia as allies of Malaysia, although my dad tells that they used to fly through Jakarta on the way north to Singapore and it was de-facto ignored that our Canberra bombers were dropping bombs on their guys in Borneo.
Suharto was seen as a good guy by the Western alliance throughout the 1970s and 1980s despite East Timor and the Australian, US and British were very much arming him.
It's a huge black mark on the west - the guy was a monster.
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Hard News: The Wellington Cables, in reply to Tim Hannah,
And, I can't find the link now although I had it a month or three back, something over 50% of all US aid expenditure goes in in-country (as in in-USA) bureaucracy and logistics.
None of which defends our own record, especially when put next to our neighbour. We are a very wealthy country as the massive expenditure on infrastructure and things like a ball game makes evident and yet having seen the large roading projects, IT infrastructure (both extensive and not, I understand, included in their aid percentage as they arrive through other budgets) and school construction projects with the tag "Australia" on them in the poorer parts of SEA, I've yet to see one that carries a kiwi logo.
This is our 'hood and yet we are almost invisible
Each year 11 Indonesians are selected to receive scholarships for post-graduate study at New Zealand universities.
11...
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Hard News: The Wellington Cables, in reply to Don Christie,
I don't buy the "US does nothing good in this world"
I don't think that was what I said, which was that I have trouble thinking of one positive that has come US Foreign Policy in the past 15 years. As a general statement I think that is true. It's been a litany of blood, bullying and missteps.
I guess I confused the issue by mentioning one aid instance (Aceh) as an aside but even then, as with much of the aid, there have been political strings attached. Aceh's aid came with an increased CIA and 'terror' related presence in Indonesia. I've met CIA people in Indonesia who were there under the auspices of USAID which shook me at the time although I guess it shouldn't have.
And that's the thing with large amounts of this aid, it does come with the sorts of conditions - political conditions - that taints the goodwill more than a little. It's rarely unconditionally generous.
It's put more than half a billion into Haiti in the past two years.
And large parts of the ongoing disaster, aside from the from the natural, that Haiti has been over the last 100 years is a result of American policy in the regions south of its borders. Hell, in Haiti they reinstituted slavery there in the early 1930s and every coup since has had US involvement through to this century. It, as Cuba was until 1959 and Central America still is, was stripped and trashed to enrich US interests. They really should be the ones with their hands in their pockets there.
On a private, personal, level however I think the US is a massive force for good worldwide - where its government may not be generous on a % of GDP level and ties too much aid to political manoeuvring, the level of generosity shown by the population as a whole is enormous and mostly unconditional.
In this part of the world the real champions are the Japanese though - and the Australians - the amount of work quietly done by both on a state and a private level is just extraordinary.
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Hard News: The Wellington Cables, in reply to Kyle Matthews,
The venn diagram which puts everything "US" completely inside "Evil" annoys the hell out of me.
I was going to mention GWB's African AIDS program however that was tied to evangelic Christian ideals in practice which caused a great deal of pain, but I do have a problem thinking of one positive that's come from US Foreign Policy in the last 15 or so years (and much of what came before - the Ford / Suharto East Timor talks are just leaking out in Indonesia at the mo' thanks to Wikileaks and it's ugly stuff). It's been a horrorshow with much blood and anguish.
They did build half a road in Sumatra after the tsunami.
To be honest, most Americans I know would likely agree although I know they're unusual in large parts of their homeland.
I'm frankly terrified the US is going to prod a war with China up where I live. It's a common fear, not unfounded I think.
Good tunes, movies, writers and software but....
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Hard News: The Wellington Cables, in reply to TracyMac,
it's their champions making the connection up out of whole cloth, I do think it's pretty moot.
Actually I don't think it's moot at all. I completely agree with you Tracy when you say:
I'd just like to add a +1 to the comments regarding the slut-shaming these women have experienced
but one comment five months back when Assange talks of a possible smear campaign does not directly tie the man to the more offensive statements and ugly blog posts of the past month or so. And even less does it tie him to the charges made here that he's claiming the two are CIA stooges or anything close.
In the months since, I guess under advice, he's made almost no statement beyond a repeated claim to innocence. He can't be held to task for the words of others any more, as I explained to a couple of apologetic American friends tonight, than they can be unfairly held to task for their government's words over this.
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Hard News: The Wellington Cables, in reply to Neil Morrison,
there's plenty of links to similar statements.
Neil, that quote above really doesn't come within a zillion kilometres of what you've claimed earlier. I've tried really hard to find these 'plenty of links to similar statements' and haven't been able to. Perhaps you can help?
The statement that 'the Pentagon plans to use dirty tricks to spoil things for [WikiLeaks]' is a fairly obvious one and I'd argue you'd have to have been living under a pile of granite for the past few decades to assume that wouldn't be the case. Whether that means he thinks the women are CIA stooges is another whole thing. I can find no evidence that he's saying that anywhere. Happy to be proved wrong.
We know you think he's a creep. I've yet to meet the guy so I'm not going to make that judgement either way.
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Hard News: The Wellington Cables, in reply to Russell Brown,
Although I'd rather they hadn't run that half-assed Jemima Khan column ..
It kinda balanced out the equally half baked John Bolton one from a few days earlier.
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Hard News: The Wellington Cables, in reply to giovanni tiso,
Can you remind me when it was that Assange suggested the two women were acting on behalf of the CIA?
And I've found denials of a CIA link from at least two of his lawyers.
The third, as far as I can can see, talks of a 'honeytrap' without such CIA specifics which seem to have been added by others after the fact.