[LINK] Vale Gough Whitlam

[JanW]

Wow. If you get a chance, look at The Drum from yesterday on iView. Tho Peter Carey's new book is about this, the panel poo-pooed it as impossible conspiracy theory. I may rethink and buy Carey's book after all, given the analysis below. "Amnesia" is the title.

Jan

At 09:28 AM 24/10/2014, jore wrote:

>      The forgotten coup - how America and Britain crushed the
>      government of their 'ally', Australia
>
>http://johnpilger.com/articles/the-forgotten-coup-how-america-and-britain-crushed-the-government-of-their-ally-australia
>
>
>        23 October 2014
>
>/John Pilger/
>
>
>Across the political and media elite in Australia, a silence has
>descended on the memory of the great, reforming prime minister Gough
>Whitlam, who has died. His achievements are recognised, if grudgingly,
>his mistakes noted in false sorrow. But a critical reason for his
>extraordinary political demise will, they hope, be buried with him.
>
>Australia briefly became an independent state during the Whitlam years,
>1972-75. An American commentator wrote that no country had "reversed its
>posture in international affairs so totally without going through a
>domestic revolution". Whitlam ended his nation's colonial servility. He
>abolished Royal patronage, moved Australia towards the Non-Aligned
>Movement, supported "zones of peace" and opposed nuclear weapons testing.
>
>Although not regarded as on the left of the Labor Party, Whitlam was a
>maverick social democrat of principle, pride and propriety. He believed
>that a foreign power should not control his country's resources and
>dictate its economic and foreign policies. He proposed to "buy back the
>farm". In drafting the first Aboriginal lands rights legislation, his
>government raised the ghost of the greatest land grab in human history,
>Britain's colonisation of Australia, and the question of who owned the
>island-continent's vast natural wealth.
>
>Latin Americans will recognise the audacity and danger of this "breaking
>free" in a country whose establishment was welded to great, external
>power. Australians had served every British imperial adventure since the
>Boxer rebellion was crushed in China. In the 1960s, Australia pleaded to
>join the US in its invasion of Vietnam, then provided "black teams" to
>be run by the CIA. US diplomatic cables published last year by WikiLeaks
>disclose the names of leading figures in both main parties, including a
>future prime minister and foreign minister, as Washington's informants
>during the Whitlam years.
>
>Whitlam knew the risk he was taking. The day after his election, he
>ordered that his staff should not be "vetted or harassed" by the
>Australian security organisation, ASIO - then, as now, tied to
>Anglo-American intelligence. When his ministers publicly condemned the
>US bombing of Vietnam as "corrupt and barbaric", a CIA station officer
>in Saigon said: "We were told the Australians might as well be regarded
>as North Vietnamese collaborators."
>
>Whitlam demanded to know if and why the CIA was running a spy base at
>Pine Gap near Alice Springs, a giant vacuum cleaner which, as Edward
>Snowden revealed recently, allows the US to spy on everyone. "Try to
>screw us or bounce us," the prime minister warned the US ambassador,
>"[and Pine Gap] will become a matter of contention".
>
>Victor Marchetti, the CIA officer who had helped set up Pine Gap, later
>told me, "This threat to close Pine Gap caused apoplexy in the White
>House... a kind of Chile [coup] was set in motion."
>
>Pine Gap's top-secret messages were de-coded by a CIA contractor, TRW.
>One of the de-coders was Christopher Boyce, a young man troubled by the
>"deception and betrayal of an ally". Boyce revealed that the CIA had
>infiltrated the Australian political and trade union elite and referred
>to the Governor-General of Australia, Sir John Kerr, as "our man Kerr".
>
>Kerr was not only the Queen's man, he had long-standing ties to
>Anglo-American intelligence. He was an enthusiastic member of the
>Australian Association for Cultural Freedom, described by Jonathan
>Kwitny of the Wall Street Journal in his book, 'The Crimes of Patriots',
>as, "an elite, invitation-only group... exposed in Congress as being
>founded, funded and generally run by the CIA". The CIA "paid for Kerr's
>travel, built his prestige... Kerr continued to go to the CIA for money".
>
>When Whitlam was re-elected for a second term, in 1974, the White House
>sent Marshall Green to Canberra as ambassador. Green was an imperious,
>sinister figure who worked in the shadows of America's "deep state".
>Known as the "coupmaster", he had played a central role in the 1965 coup
>against President Sukarno in Indonesia - which cost up to a million
>lives. One of his first speeches in Australia was to the Australian
>Institute of Directors - described by an alarmed member of the audience
>as "an incitement to the country's business leaders to rise against the
>government".
>
>The Americans and British worked together. In 1975, Whitlam discovered
>that Britain's MI6 was operating against his government. "The Brits were
>actually decoding secret messages coming into my foreign affairs
>office," he said later. One of his ministers, Clyde Cameron, told me,
>"We knew MI6 was bugging Cabinet meetings for the Americans." In the
>1980s, senior CIA officers revealed that the "Whitlam problem" had been
>discussed "with urgency" by the CIA's director, William Colby, and the
>head of MI6, Sir Maurice Oldfield. A deputy director of the CIA said:
>"Kerr did what he was told to do."
>
>On 10 November, 1975, Whitlam was shown a top secret telex message
>sourced to Theodore Shackley, the notorious head of the CIA's East Asia
>Division, who had helped run the coup against Salvador Allende in Chile
>two years earlier.
>
>Shackley's message was read to Whitlam. It said that the prime minister
>of Australia was a security risk in his own country. The day before,
>Kerr had visited the headquarters of the Defence Signals Directorate,
>Australia's NSA where he was briefed on the "security crisis".
>
>On 11 November - the day Whitlam was to inform Parliament about the
>secret CIA presence in Australia - he was summoned by Kerr. Invoking
>archaic vice-regal "reserve powers", Kerr sacked the democratically
>elected prime minister. The "Whitlam problem" was solved, and Australian
>politics never recovered, nor the nation its true independence.
>
>_______________________________________________
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