Kevin Rudd - The Murdoch media’s China coronavirus conspiracy has one aim: get Trump re-elected

By Dilip -
In liberal democracies, the integrity, impartiality and professionalism of intelligence agencies matters. That’s why it is essential that intelligence agencies remain aloof, not only from the political debates of the day, but also from the policy decisions that individual governments may take. The intelligence community’s core task is to provide brutally realistic analysis on the threat environments we face so that governments can then make the best-informed policy decisions possible to preserve our common security.

 The failures of the intelligence community before the Iraq war, the gullibility of much of the western media, as well as the cynical manipulation of both by the political class of the day, provide us with a stark reminder of what can go radically wrong. On 8 September 2002 the New York Times published one of this century’s most consequential news articles. The front-page story, supplied by the Bush administration, claimed that Saddam Hussein had stepped up his quest for weapons of mass destruction by acquiring key components for a nuclear weapon. In the UK, the Blair government’s “dodgy dossier” compounded the error. John Howard did the same in Australia. 

The problem was that it just wasn’t true. These were over-egged stories designed to soften the public up for what would become a disastrous war....
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2020/may/08/murdoch-media-china-coronavirus-conspiracy-trump-kevin-rudd

see also
Is Donald Trump the Second 9/11? Or Is He the Third? By Tom Engelhardt
Chauncey DeVega: Trump is mentally ill but our real sickness runs much deeper
Victor Jara murder: ex-military officers sentenced in Chile for 1973 death
Andrew Bacevich: High Crimes and Misdemeanors of the Fading American Century
Lucian Truscott: Trump wants to end the forever wars - except the one about oil and money
William Astore: The U.S. Military’s Lost Wars // Chris Hedges: The American Empire Will Collapse Within a Decade, Two at Most
SUBMARINE STATE
Dismantling democracy? Virus used as excuse to quell dissent...
Sam Kriss: 'Neoliberalism' isn't a left-wing insult but a monstrous system of inequality
Noam Chomsky: Internationalism or Extinction (Universalizing Resistance)
Book review: Thomas Piketty's Capital and Ideology
Can Capitalism and Democracy Coexist?
George Monbiot: ‘Try to stop me’ – the mantra of our leaders who are now ruling with impunity
Tom Dispatch - William Astore, From Deterrence to Doomsday? // C. Wright Mills on The Structure of Power in American Society (1958) // The Week the World Almost Ended by Nate Jones and J. Peter Scoblic

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