It can take much bruising, much ridicule, and much castigation to eventually reach the plateau of wisdom. Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim, who took office in November 2022, is one such character. Like a hero anointed by the gods for grand deeds and fine achievements, he was duly attacked and maligned, accused of virtually every heinous crime in the criminal code. Sodomy and corruption featured. Two prison spells were endured.

His whole fall from grace as deputy-prime minister was all the more revealing for being instigated by his politically insatiable mentor, Mahathir bin Mohammed, Southeast Asia’s wiliest, and most ruthless politician. Eventually, that old, vengeful fox had to relent: his former protégé would have his day.

Anwar is in no mood to take sides on spats between the grumbly titans who seek their place in posterity’s sun. And why should a country like Malaysia do so? During last year’s visit to Beijing and the Boao Forum in Hainan, he secured a commitment from Chinese President Xi Jinping on foreign investment amounting to RM170.1 billion ($US35.6 billion) spanning 19 memoranda of understanding (MOU). Greater participation in Malaysia’s 5G network plan by Chinese telecommunications behemoth Huawei was assured some weeks later.

In the Financial Times, the Malaysian PM levelled the charge against the United States that Sinophobia had become a problem, a fogging fixation. Why should Malaysia, he asked, “pick a quarrel” with China, a country that had become its foremost trading partner? “Why must I be tied to one interest? I don’t buy into this strong prejudice against China, this China-phobia.”

Much of this middle-of-the-road daring was prompted by comments made by US Vice President Kamala Harris, who has been saddled with the task of padding out ties between Washington and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). Rather than being diplomatic, the Veep has been irritatingly teacherly.

Last September, during her visit to the US-ASEAN summit in Jakarta, Harris beat the drum on the issue of promoting “a region that is open, interconnected, prosperous, secure, and resilient.” Such openness was always going to be subordinate to Washington’s own interests. “We have a shared commitment to international rules and norms and our partnership on pressing national and regional issues.” An international campaign against “irresponsible behaviour in the disputed waters” would be commenced.

During her trip to the Philippines last November, Harris made the focus of concern clear to countries in the region. “We must stand up for principles such as respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity, unimpeded lawful commerce, the peaceful resolution of disputes, and the freedom of navigation and overflight in the South China Sea, and throughout the Indo-Pacific.”

The subtext for those listening was so obvious as to be scripted in bold font: Our values first; China’s a necessarily distant second. This coarse directness did not fall on deaf ears, and Anwar was particularly attentive. He had already found the views voiced by Harris at Jakarta about Malaysia’s leanings towards Beijing as “not right and grossly unfair.”

In remarks made during a joint press conference with Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese held at the current ASEAN summit, being hosted in Melbourne, Anwar expressed much irritation in being badgered by the United States and its allies on the subject of taking sides. The virus of Sinophobia had been doing the rounds, causing sniffles and rumbles. “[M]y reference to China-phobia is because the criticism levied against us for giving additional focus on China; my response is, trade investments is open and right now, China seems to be the leading investor and trade into Malaysia,” Anwar observed. Malaysians, for the most part, “do not have a problem with China.”

Labouring, even flogging the “fiercely independent” standing of Malaysia, Anwar went on to state that his country remained “an important friend of the United States and Europe and here in Australia, they should not preclude us from being friendly to one of our important neighbours, precisely China.”

Nothing typifies this better than Malaysia’s policy towards the supply and manufacturing of semiconductors. The emergence of a China Plus One Strategy, notably in the electronic supply chain, has seen companies diversify their risk through investing in alternative markets to mitigate risks. Keep China on side but do so securely. Anwar has established a task force dedicated to the subject, while also courting such entities as US chipmaker Micron Technology. Last October, the company promised an investment of US$1 billion to expand its Penang operations, in addition to the previous allocation of $US1 billion to construct and fully equip its new facility. In business, such promiscuity should be lauded.

Anwar’s concerns were solid statements of calculated principle, and inconceivable coming out of the mouth of an Australian politician. Albanese, for his part, has tried to walk the middle road when it comes to security in the Indo-Pacific, even as China remains Australia’s largest trading partner. He does so in wolf’s clothing supplied by Washington, with various garish labels such as “AUKUS” and “nuclear-powered submarines.” For decades, Australia’s association with ASEAN has been ventriloquised, the voice emanating from the White House, Pentagon or US State Department.

Canberra’s middle road remains cluttered by one big power, replete with US road signs and tolls, accompanied by hearty welcomes from the US military industrial complex and its determination to turn Australia into a forward defensive position, a garrison playing war’s waiting game. To his credit, Anwar has avoided the trap, exposing the inauthentic position of his Australian hosts with skill and undeniable charm.

The starvation regime continues unabated as Israel continues its campaign in the Gaza Strip. One of the six provisional measures ordered by the International Court Justice entailed taking “immediate and effective measures” to protect the Palestinian populace in the Gaza Strip from risk of genocide by ensuring the supply of humanitarian assistance and basic services.

In its case against Israel, South Africa argued, citing various grounds, that Israel’s purposeful denial of humanitarian aid to Palestinians could fall within the UN Genocide Convention as “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”

A month has elapsed since the ICJ order, after which Israel was meant to report back on compliance. But, as Amnesty International reports, Israel continues “to disregard its obligation as the occupying power to ensure the basic needs of Palestinians in Gaza are met.”

The organisation’s regional director for the Middle East and North Africa, Heba Morayef, gives a lashing summary of that conduct. “Not only has Israel created one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world, but it is also displaying callous indifference to the fate of Gaza’s population by creating conditions which the ICJ has said placed them at imminent risk of genocide.” Israel, Morayef continues to state, had “woefully failed to provide for Gazans’ basic needs” and had “been blocking and impeding the passage of sufficient aid into the Gaza strip, in particular to the north which is virtually inaccessible, in a clear show of contempt for the ICJ ruling and in flagrant violation of its obligation to prevent genocide.”

The humanitarian accounting on this score is grim. Since the ICJ order, the number of aid trucks entering Gaza has precipitously declined. Within three weeks, it had fallen by a third: an average of 146 a day were coming in three weeks prior; afterwards, the numbers had fallen to about 105. Prior to the October 7 assault by Hamas, approximately 500 trucks were entering the strip on a daily basis.

The criminally paltry aid to the besieged Palestinians is even too much for some Israeli protest groups which have formed with one single issue in mind: preventing any aid from being sent into Gaza. As a result, closures have taken place at Kerem Shalom due to protests and clashes with security forces.

Their support base may seem to be small and peppered by affiliates from the Israeli Religious Zionism party of Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, but an Israeli Democracy Institute poll conducted in February found that 68% of Jewish respondents opposed the transfer of humanitarian aid to the residents of Gaza. Rachel Touitou of Tzav 9, a group formed in December with that express purpose in mind, stated her reasoning as such: “You cannot expect the country to fight its enemy and feed it at the same time.”

Hardly subtle, but usefully illustrative of the attitude best reflected by the blood curdling words of Israeli Defence Minister, Yoav Gallant, who declared during the campaign that his country’s armed forces were “fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly” in depriving them of electricity, food and fuel.

In December 2023, the UN Security Council passed a resolution demanding, among other things, that the warring parties “allow and facilitate the use of all available routes to and throughout the entire Gaza Strip, including border crossings.” Direct routes were also to be prioritised. To date, Israel has refused to permit aid through other crossings.

In February, the Global Nutrition Cluster reported that “the nutrition situation of women and children in Gaza is worsening everywhere, but especially in Northern Gaza where 1 in 6 children are acutely malnourished and an estimated 3% face the most severe form of wasting and require immediate treatment.”

The organisation’s report makes ugly reading. Over 90% of children between 6 to 23 months along with pregnant and breastfeeding women face “severe food poverty”, with the food supplied being “of the lowest nutritional value and from two or fewer food groups.” At least 90% of children under the age of 5 are burdened with one or more infectious diseases, while 70% have suffered from diarrhoea over the previous two weeks. Safe and clean water, already a problem during the 16-year blockade, is now in even shorter supply, with 81% of households having access to less than one litre per person per day.

Reduced to such conditions of monumental and raw desperation, hellish scenes of Palestinians swarming around aid convoys were bound to manifest. On February 29, Gaza City witnessed one such instance, along with a lethal response from Israeli troops. In the ensuing violence, some 112 people were killed, adding to a Palestinian death toll that has already passed 30,000. While admitting to opening fire on the crowd, the IDF did not miss a chance to paint their victims as disorderly savages, with “dozens” being “killed and injured from pushing, trampling and being run over by the trucks.” The acting director of Al-Awda Hospital, Dr. Mohammed Salha, in noting the admission of some 161 wounded patients, suggested that gun fire had played its relevant role, given that most of those admitted suffered from gunshot wounds.

If Israel’s intention had been to demonstrate some good will in averting any insinuation that genocide was taking place, let alone a systematic policy of collective punishment against the Palestinian population, little evidence of it has been shown. If anything, the suspicions voiced by South Africa and other critics aghast at the sheer ferocity of the campaign are starting to seem utter plausible in their horror.

The silly will make print and leave bursts of digital traces; the idiots will make history, if only in small print. One such figure is the shortest serving UK Prime Minister in living memory, the woeful, joke-packed figure of Liz Truss who lasted a mere 50 disastrous days in office. She was even bettered by a satirical, dressed-up lettuce, filmed in anticipation of her brief, calamitous end.

With such a blotted record, the vacuous, inane Truss felt that her experiences were worthy of recounting to the Conservative Political Action Conference, held at National Harbor, Maryland between February 22 and 24. The gathering, conducted since the 1970s and organised by the American Conservative Union, has become something of a mandatory calendar event for US conservative activists. Those from other countries have also tried to make a splash – keeping Truss company was the demagogic voice of Brexit, Nigel Farage, arguably the most influential British politician not to hold a seat in Parliament.

A self-believer of towering insensibility, Truss oversaw during her flashpoint stint in office mind boggling budgetary decisions. On winning the Tory ballot after the fall of Boris Johnson in 2022, she promised £30 billion in tax cuts via an emergency budget, reversing the rise in National Insurance and a range of energy-price guarantees. That these tax cuts – eventually amounting to £45 billion – were primarily skewed to benefit those at the higher end of the scale did not bother her. “The people at the top of the income distribution pay more tax – so inevitably, when you cut taxes you tend to benefit the people who are more likely to pay tax.” What logic; what reasoning.

With figures of such incompetence, responsibility for failure is always attributed to someone, or something else. In Truss’s case, blame initially lay with fellow comic villain and Chancellor of the Exchequer, Kwasi Kwarteng, with whom she had taken a wrecking ball to the UK economy and the British pound. With Kwarteng, she had previously authored a dotty pamphlet “Britannia Unchained”, warning that Britain should not emulate the economic model of southern European countries, saddled with poor productivity and growth, along with hefty and inefficient public services.

The Economist tasted the irony of it all, seeing Trussonomics as typical of “Britaly”, a country “of political instability, low growth and subordination to bond markets.” A further irony was that the horrified market reaction to Truss suggested her inability to understand the very forces she prefers unleashed over the wickedness of big government and bureaucratic interference. Live by the free market; die by the free market.

What, then, to tell her New World colleagues? At first blush, nothing new. In April 2023, she had already made it across the Atlantic to speak to the Heritage Foundation, where she gave the Margaret Thatcher Freedom Lecture. Monumental failure can undergo changes in transatlantic journey, and the conservative think tank omitted mentioning her spell of prime ministerial lunacy, impressed, instead, by her “long-standing” advocacy “for limited government, low taxes, and freedom, both at home and the UK and around the world.”

The speech was barbed, resentful and absurd, an attempt to channel a politician she resembles in no serious respect, bar certain Little England prejudices, with a smattering of superficially similar economic beliefs. Truss complained of “coordinated resistance from inside the Conservative Party”, “the British corporate establishment”, “the IMF [International Monetary Fund] and even from President Biden.” She grumbled of “a new kind of economic model” that was taking hold in the UK and US, “one that’s focused on redistributionism, on stagnation and on the imbuing of woke culture into our businesses.” Seen from another perspective, this “anti-growth movement”, to use Truss’s daft terminology, had been responsible for her demise.

In her CPAC display, we see an attempt to flatter Donald Trump, drawing from the well of Deep State rhetoric, and various scripted points about insecurity, immigration, terrorism, gender, “wokenomics”, “the power of the left and the power of those bureaucracies.” There are also some head-scratching remarks that lent a cartoonish feel to the mad bat: “you can’t triangulate with terrorists, you can’t compromise with communists, you have to fight for what you believe in.”

The speech is not entirely nonsensical, though Truss misses the significance of any pertinent observations. “What has happened in Britain over the past 30 years is power that used to be in the hands of politicians has been moved to quangos and bureaucrats and lawyers so what you find is a democratically elected government actually unable to enact policies.” While the estrangement of the elected from the elector, aided and abetted by unelected bureaucracies, is hard to deny, Truss is merely implying that an unaccountable dictatorship would surely be far better and representative.

To demonstrate the point, Truss raged against the Office of Budget Responsibility and the Bank of England who “sought to undermine the policies.” Again, the IMF, along with Biden, featured as targets. Again, ignorance of the free market and her ruin by its very dictates, was proudly displayed.

Decoding the Truss basket case of beliefs yields this question: Why were there such impediments to my mad realisation? It was far better, she proposed, to get “a bigger bazooka in order to be able to deliver. And I think we have got to challenge the institutions themselves.” A challenge is a good thing, but best bring a well thought out policy with you when going into battle.

If only we could say that Peter Dutton, Australia’s federal opposition leader and curator of bigoted leanings, was unusual in assuming that granting humanitarian visas to Palestinians might be problematic. But both he, and his skew-eyed spokesman on home affairs, James Patterson, have concluded that votes are in the offing. Refugees may be accepted from the Ukrainian-Russian War, as long as they are Ukrainian, but anything so much as a whiff of a Palestinian fleeing the Israel-Hamas conflict is bound to be concerning. Ukrainians are noble victims; the latter might be terrorist sympathisers or Hamas militants.

This view started being floated in November last year, when Dutton began warning the public that visitor visas for Palestinians could result in a calamity. (At that point, 860 visas had been issued to Palestinians.) “The inadequacy of these checks could result in a catastrophic outcome in our country,” he foamed. “Taking people out of a war zone without conducting the checks, particularly those that are available to us in the US, is reckless.”

No concern was voiced about the possibility that Israelis, who had also been offered 1,793 visas, might pose a problem to the heavenly idyll of Australian security. It is also worth mentioning that Dutton, when home affairs minister, approved over 500 visas a week to Syrians fleeing the civil war. Ditto the granting of 5,000 visas to Afghans the month the Taliban resumed control of Kabul in the aftermath of retreating Western armies.

Dutton’s arithmetic is that of the typical copper: simple, direct, amateurish. Among the Palestinians, “one person, or could be 10 people, I don’t know” might be of concern. His concerns are feverishly listed: “Have interviews been conducted, do we know people’s ideologies, do we know their interest in the west, why they want to come to Australia.” This template would be applicable to every group of visitors or migrants seeking to come to Australia at any one point. No one is likely to say on their visa application: “I come to see your new country and hope to commit atrocities.”

Given the number of conflict zones on Planet Earth, Dutton was offering an obtuse statement calculated to boost flagging popularity. It was also timed within a matter of hours after the declaration of a four-day ceasefire in Gaza. While proving, at times, sketchy in her role as Home Affairs Minister, Clare O’Neil was close to the mark in stating that, “Dutton is a reckless politician who will do and say anything to score political points – even if it puts the national security of Australians at risk.”

But Dutton did not want to be dismissed as a paranoid former police officer who sees criminals everywhere and innocence as a constipated afterthought. “The prime minister here needs to hit the pause button – I’m not saying people shouldn’t come at some point – but people should come when all the checks are conducted.”

Again, a strange sentiment, given that visa applicants tend to face a series of tests that are more demanding than most when seeking to visit the Down Under Paradise where perfection is assumed. “If a visa applicant is assessed as posing a risk to the health, safety or good order of the Australian community, their visa may be considered for refusal,” were the dull words of a government spokesperson.

With the arrival of irregular migrants on the shores of Western Australia this month, cockeyed bigotry again assumed its role on the podium of Australian politics. Seeking to tie the arrivals as connected with shoddy security credentials, the opposition fanned out the implications of granting up to 2,000 visas for Palestinians, a fact seen as particularly galling to the shadow home affairs minister. “In the middle of an unprecedented antisemitism crisis, the government should be taking much greater care in granting visas to people from a war zone run by a terrorist organisation,” bleated Patterson. “How can they possibly assure themselves there is not one Hamas supporter among them? And how will it help social cohesion if they manage to slip through?”

By this logic, no one should ever leave a war zone, an area of devastation, a territory blighted by terror. You just might be a regime supporter, a sympathiser, despite suffering possible harm, even death. But there is an inadvertent slant coming through in Patterson’s mangled world view: Palestinians, having been maimed, murdered and traumatised, might wish to take out their grievance on a foreign power, possibly one sympathetic to Israel. Ignore the survival imperative, the desire to find, rather than abandon, security; focus, instead, on the motivation for vengeance. Even this view suffers for one obvious point: those wishing to avenge their families and friends are bound to wish to stay in Gaza and the West Bank, rather than flee and plot from afar.

With the current arrivals from Gaza – some 340 or so have managed to drip themselves from the Palestinian territories – the bedwetting fantasies of terror being induced by the opposition seem absurd and callous. But absurdity is a proven calculus for electoral success – at least sometimes.

On February 21, the Royal Courts of Justice hosted a second day of carnivalesque mockery regarding the appeal by lawyers representing an ill Julian Assange, whose publishing efforts are being impugned by the United States as having compromised the identities of informants while damaging national security. Extradition awaits, only being postponed by rearguard actions such as what has just been concluded at the High Court.

How, then, to justify the 18 charges being levelled against the WikiLeaks founder under the US Espionage Act of 1917, an instrument not just vile but antiquated in its effort to stomp on political discussion and expression?

Justice Jeremy Johnson and Dame Victoria Sharp got the bien pensant treatment of the national security state, dressed in robes, and tediously inclined. Prosaic arguments were recycled like stale, oppressive air. According to Clair Dobbin KC, there was “no immunity for journalists to break the law” and that the US constitutional First Amendment protecting the press would never confer it. This had an undergraduate obviousness to it; no one in this case has ever asserted such cavalierly brutal freedom in releasing classified material, a point that Mark Summers KC, representing Assange, was happy to point out.

Yet again, the Svengali argument, gingered with seduction, was run before a British court. Assange, assuming all the powers of manipulation, cultivated and corrupted the disclosers, “soliciting” them to pilfer classified government materials. With limping repetition, Dobbin insisted that WikiLeaks had been responsible for revealing “the unredacted names of the sources who provided information to the United States,” many of whom “lived in war zones or in repressive regimes”. In exposing the names of Afghans, Iraqis, journalists, religious figures, human rights dissidents and political dissidents, the publisher had “created a grave and immediate risk that innocent people would suffer serious physical harm or arbitrary detention.”

The battering did not stop there. “There were really profound consequences, beyond the real human cost and to the broader ability to the US to gather evidence from human sources as well.” Dobbin’s proof of these contentions is thin, vague and causally absent: the arrest of one Ethiopian journalist following the leak; unspecified “others” disappeared. She even admitted the fact that “it cannot be proven that their disappearance was a result of being outed.” This was certainly a point pounced upon by Summers.

The previous publication by Cryptome of all the documents, or the careless publication of the key to the encrypted file with the unredacted cables by journalists from The Guardian in a book on WikiLeaks, did not convince Dobbin. Assange was “responsible for the publications of the unredacted documents whether published by others or WikiLeaks.” There was no mention, either, that Assange had been alarmed by The Guardian faux pas and had contacted the US State Department of this fact. Summers, in his contribution, duly reminded the court of the publisher’s frantic efforts while also reasoning that the harm caused had been “unintended, unforeseen and unwanted” by him.

With this selective, prejudicial angle made clear, Dobbin’s words became those of a disgruntled empire caught with its pants down when harming and despoiling others. “What the appellant is accused of is really at the upper end of the spectrum of gravity,” she submitted, attracting “no public interest whatsoever”. Conveniently, calculatingly, any reference to the enormous, weighty revelations of WikiLeaks of torture, renditions, war crimes, surveillance, to name but a few, was avoided. Emphasis was placed, instead, upon the “usefulness” of the material WikiLeaks had published: to the Taliban, and Osama bin Laden.

This is a dubious point given the Pentagon’s own assertions to the contrary in a 2011 report dealing with the significance of the disclosure of military and diplomatic documents by WikiLeaks. On the Iraq War logs and State Department cables, the report concluded “with high confidence that disclosure of the Iraq data set will have no direct personal impact on current and former US leadership in Iraq.” On the Afghanistan war log releases, the authors also found that they would not result in “significant impact” to US operations, though did claim that this was potentially damaging to “intelligence sources, informants, and the Afghan population,” and intelligence collection efforts by the US and NATO.

Summers appropriately rebutted the contention about harm by suggesting that Assange had opposed, in the highest traditions of journalism, “war crimes”, a consideration that had to be measured against unverified assertions of harm.

On this point, the prosecution found itself in knots, given that a balancing act of harm and freedom of expression is warranted under Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights. When asked by Justice Johnson whether prosecuting a journalist in the UK, when in possession of “information of very serious wrongdoing by an intelligence agency [had] incited an employee of that agency to provide information… [which] was then published in a very careful way” was compatible with the right to freedom of expression, Dobbin conceded to there being no “straightforward answer.”

When pressed by Justice Johnson as to whether she accepted the idea that the “statutory offence”, not any “scope for a balancing exercise” was what counted, Dobbin had to concede that a “proportionality assessment” would normally arise when publishers were prosecuted under section 5 of the UK Official Secrets Act. Prosecutions would only take place if one “knowingly published” information known “to be damaging.”

Any half-informed student of the US Espionage Act knows that strict liability under the statute negates any need to undertake a balancing assessment. All that matters is that the individual had “reason to believe that the information is to be used to the injury of the US,” often proved by the mere fact that the information published was classified to begin with.

Dobbin then switched gears. Having initially advertised the view that journalists could never be entirely immune from criminal prosecution, she added more egg to the pudding on the reasons why Assange was not a journalist. Her view of the journalist being a bland, obedient transmitter of received, establishment wisdom was all too clear. Assange had gone “beyond the acts of a journalist who is merely gathering information”. He had, for instance, agreed with Chelsea Manning on March 8, 2010 to attempt cracking a password hash that would have given her access to the secure and classified Department of Defense account. Doing so meant using a false identity to facilitate further pilfering of classified documents.

This was yet another fiction. Manning’s court martial had revealed the redundancy of having to crack a password hash as she already had administrator access to the system. Why then bother with the conspiratorial circus?

The corollary of this is that the prosecution’s reliance on fabricated testimony, notably from former WikiLeaks volunteer, convicted paedophile and FBI tittle-tattler Sigurdur ‘Siggi’ Thordarson. In June 2021, the Icelandic newspaper Stundin, now publishing under the name Heimildin, revealed that Assange had “never asked him to hack or to access phone recordings of [Iceland’s] MPs.” He also had not “received some files from a third party who claimed to have recorded MPs and had offered to share them with Assange without having any idea what they actually contained.” Thordarson never went through the relevant files, nor verified whether they had audio recordings as claimed by the third-party source. The allegation that Assange instructed him to access computers in order to unearth such recordings was roundly rejected.

The legal team representing the US attempted to convince the court that suggestions of “bad faith” by the defence on the part of such figures as lead prosecutor Gordon Kromberg had to be discounted. “The starting position must be, as it always is in these cases, the fundamental assumption of good faith on the part of those states with which the United Kingdom has long-standing extradition relationships,” asserted Dobbin. “The US is one of the most long-standing partners of the UK.”

This had a jarring quality to it, given that nothing in Washington’s approach to Assange – the surveillance sponsored by the Central Intelligence Agency via Spanish security firm UC Global, the contemplation of abduction and assassination by intelligence officials, the after-the-fact concoction of assurances to assure easier extradition to the US – has been anything but one of bad faith.

Summers countered by refuting any suggestions that “Mr Kronberg is a lying individual or that he is personally not carrying out his prosecutorial duties in good faith. The prosecution and extradition here is a decision taken way above his head.” This was a matter of “state retaliation ordered from the very top”; one could not “focus on the sheep and ignore the shepherd.”

Things did not get better for the prosecuting side on what would happen once Assange was extradited. Would he, for instance, be protected by the free press amendment under US law? Former CIA director Mike Pompeo had suggested that Assange’s Australian citizenship barred him from protections afforded by the First Amendment. Dobbin was not sure, but insisted that there was insufficient evidence to suggest that nationality would prejudice Assange in any trial. Justice Johnson was sharp: “the test isn’t that he would be prejudiced. It is that he might be prejudiced on the grounds of his nationality.” This was hard to square with the UK Extradition Act prohibiting extradition where a person “might be prejudiced at his trial or punished, detained, or restricted in his personal liberty” on account of nationality.

Given existing US legal practice, Assange also faced the risk of the death penalty, something that extradition arrangements would bar. Ben Watson KC, representing the UK Home Secretary, had to concede to the court that there was nothing preventing any amendment by US prosecutors to the current list of charges that could result in a death sentence.

If he does not succeed in this appeal, Assange may well request an intervention of the European Court of Human Rights for a stay of proceedings under Rule 39. Like many European institutions so loathed by the governments of post-Brexit Britain, it offers the prospect of relief provided that there are “exceptional circumstances” and an instance “where there is an imminent risk of irreparable harm.”

The sickening irony of that whole proviso is that irreparable harm is being inflicted on Assange in prison, where the UK prison system fulfils the role of the punishing US gaoler. Speed will be of the essence; and the government of Rishi Sunak may well quickly bundle the publisher onto a transatlantic flight. If so, the founder of WikiLeaks will go the way of other prestigious and wronged political prisoners who sought to expand minds rather than narrow them.

On February 20, it was clear that things were not going to be made easy for Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder who infuriated the US imperium, the national security establishment, and a stable of journalists upset that he had cut their ill-tended lawns. He was too ill to attend what may well be the final appeal against his extradition from the United Kingdom to the United States. Were he to be sent to the US, he faces a possible sentence amounting to 175 years arising from 18 venally cobbled charges, 17 spliced from that archaic horror, the Espionage Act of 1917.

The appeal to the High Court, comprising Justice Jeremy Johnson and Dame Victoria Sharp, challenges the extradition order by the Home Secretary and the conclusions of District Judge Vanessa Baraitser who, despite ordering his release on risks posed to him on mental health grounds, fundamentally agreed with the prosecution. He was, Varaitser scorned, not a true journalist. (Absurdly, it would seem for the judge, journalists never publish leaked information.) He had exposed the identities of informants. He had engaged in attempts to hack computer systems. In June 2023, High Court justice, Jonathan Swift, thought it inappropriate to rehear the substantive arguments of the trial case made by defence.

Assange’s attorneys had informed the court that he simply could not attend in person, though it would hardly have mattered. His absence from the courtroom was decorous in its own way; he could avoid being displayed like a caged specimen reviled for his publishing feats. The proceedings would be conducted in the manner of appropriate panto, with dress and procedure to boot.

Unfortunately, as things chugged along, the two judges were seemingly ill versed in the field they were adjudicating. Their ignorance was telling on, for instance, the views of Mark Pompeo, whose bilious reaction to WikiLeaks when director of the Central Intelligence Agency involved rejecting the protections of the First Amendment of the US Constitution to non-US citizens. (That view is also held by the US prosecutors.) Such a perspective, argued Assange’s legal team, was a clear violation of Article 10 of the European Convention of Human Rights.

They were also surprised to be informed that further charges could be added to the indictment on his arrival to the United States, including those carrying the death penalty. To this could be added other enlightening surprises for the judicial bench: the fact that rules of admissibility might be altered to consider material illegally obtained, for instance, through surveillance; that Assange might also be sentenced for an offence he was never actually tried for.

Examples of espionage case law were submitted as precedents to buttress the defence, with Edward Fitzgerald KC calling espionage a “pure political offence” which barred extradition in treaties Britain had signed with 158 nation states.

The case of David Shayler, who had been in the employ of the British domestic intelligence service MI5, saw the former employee prosecuted for passing classified documents to The Mail on Sunday in 1997 under the Official Secrets Act. These included the names of various agents, that the agency kept dossiers on various UK politicians, including Labour ministers, and that the British foreign intelligence service, MI6, had conceived of a plan to assassinate Libya’s Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. When the UK made its extradition request to the French authorities, they received a clear answer from the Cour d’Appel: the offence charged was found to be political in nature.

Mark Summers KC also emphasised the point that the “prosecution was motivated to punish and inhibit the exposure of American state-level crimes”, ample evidence of which was adduced during the extradition trial, yet ignored by both Baraitser and Swift. Baraitser brazenly ignored evidence of discussions by US intelligence officials about a plot to kill or abduct Assange.

For Summers, chronology was telling: the initial absence of any prosecution effort by the Obama administration, despite empanelling a grand jury to investigate WikiLeaks; the announcement by the International Criminal Court that it would be investigating potential crimes committed by US combatants in Afghanistan in 2016, thereby lending gravity to Assange’s disclosures; and the desire to kill or seek the publisher’s extradition after the release of the Vault 7 files detailing various espionage tools of the CIA.

With Pompeo’s apoplectic declaration that WikiLeaks was a hostile, non-state intelligence service, the avenue was open for a covert targeting of Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. The duly hatched rendition plan led to the prosecution, which proved “selective” in avoiding, for instance, the targeting of newspaper outlets such as Freitag, or the website Cryptome. In Summer’s view, “This is not a government acting on good faith pursuing a legal path.”

When it came to discussing the leaks, the judges revealed a deep-welled obliviousness about what Assange and WikiLeaks had actually done in releasing the US State Department cables. For one thing, the old nonsense that the unredacted, or poorly redacted material had resulted in damage was skirted over, not to mention the fact that Assange had himself insisted on a firm redaction policy. No inquiry has ever shown proof that harm came to any US informant, a central contention of the US Department of Justice. Nor was it evident to the judges that the publication of the cables had first taken place in Cryptome, once it was discovered that reporters from The Guardian had injudiciously revealed the password to the unredacted files in their publication.

Two other points also emerged in the defence submission: the whistleblower angle, and that of foreseeability. Consider, Summers argued hypothetically, the situation where Chelsea Manning, whose invaluable disclosures WikiLeaks published, had been considered by the European Court of Human Rights. The European Union’s whistleblower regime, he contended, would have considered the effect of harm done by violating an undertaking of confidentiality with the exposure of abuses of state power. Manning would have likely escaped conviction, while Assange, having not even signed any confidentiality agreements, would have had even better prospects for acquittal.

The issue of foreseeability, outlined in Article 7 of the ECHR, arose because Assange, his team further contends, could not have known that publishing the cables would have triggered a lawsuit under the Espionage Act. That said, a grand jury had refused to indict the Chicago Times in 1942 for publishing an article citing US naval knowledge of Japanese plans to attack Midway Island. Then came the Pentagon Papers case in 1971. While Summers correctly notes that, “The New York Times was never prosecuted,” this was not for want for trying: a grand jury was empanelled with the purpose of indicting the Times reporter Neil Sheehan for his role in receiving classified government material. Once revelations of government tapping of whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg was revealed, the case collapsed. All that said, Article 7 could provide a further ground for barring extradition.

February 21 gave lawyers for the US the chance to reiterate the various, deeply flawed assertions about Assange’s publication activities connected with Cablegate (the “exposing informants” argument), his supposedly non-journalistic activities and the integrity of diplomatic assurances about his welfare were he to be extradited. The stage for the obscene was duly set.

The imaginative faculties of standard Australian politicians retreat to some strange, deathly place on certain issues. In that wasteland, they are often unrecoverable. Like juveniles demanding instant reward, these representatives find complexity hideous, troubling, discomforting. Focus on the prospect of immediate electoral gain, the crude punch, the bruising, the hurt. That, in sum, is Canberra’s policy towards refugees.

With this month’s appearance of 39 asylum seekers on some of the most remote shorelines on the planet in Western Australia, the customary wells of hysteria were again being tapped for political gain. “Here we go again,” lamented the Tasmanian Greens Senator Nick McKim. “A boat arrives with desperate refugees who need our help and we’re suddenly in a ‘political crisis’ because the media said so.”

One desperate politician was opposition leader Peter Dutton, who wondered how these dangerous subversives could have ever arrived undetected in the first place. “The government has all sorts of problems,” he crowed. “It’s clear that they don’t have the same surveillance in place that we had when we were in government.”

Dutton found it “inconceivable a boat of this size, carrying 40-plus people, could make it to the mainland without there being any detection.” The insinuation is hard to ignore: the Labor government permitted the arrival to take place.

The 2022-3 Australia Border Force annual report had noted a reduction of “maritime patrol days” by 6% and aerial patrols by 14%, the result of vessel maintenance, personnel shortages and logistical difficulties when operating in remote parts off the coast. Overall budgetary costs for the ABF have also been adjusted to account for the fact that the 2022-3 budget was, as Home Affairs department chief finance officer Stephanie Cargill explained in May year, “overspent”.

The ABF chief, Michael Outram, has even gone so far as to reproach Dutton for his assessment about funding cuts, which deceptively, even mendaciously suggest belt tightening on the part of the Albanese government. “Border Force funding is currently the highest it’s been since its establishment in 2015 and in the last year, the ABF has received additional funding totalling hundreds of millions of dollars, to support maritime and land based operations.”

All in all, there has hardly been a softening of the brutal policy that presumptively and prematurely judges undocumented naval arrivals as unworthy. As the ABF statement on the arrivals notes with customary severity, “Australia’s tough border protection policies means that no one who travels unauthorised by boat will ever be allowed to settle permanently in Australia. The only way to travel to Australia is legally, with an Australian visa.”

The dubious rationale for maintaining the policy, formally known as Operation Sovereign Borders, is still very much in place. “Australia,” the ABF continues to explain, “remains committed to protecting its borders, stamping out people smuggling and preventing vulnerable people from risking their lives on futile journeys. The people smuggling business model is built on the exploitation of information and selling lies to vulnerable people who will give up everything to risk their lives at sea.”

Rear Admiral Brett Sonter, who leads Operation Sovereign Borders, had also stated that nothing has changed. “The mission of Operation Sovereign Borders remains the same today as it was when it was established in 2013: protect Australia’s borders, combat people smuggling in our region, and importantly, prevent people from risking their lives at sea.” To suggest otherwise would create an “alternative narrative” susceptible to exploitation “by criminal people smugglers to deceive potential irregular immigrants and convince them to risk their lives and travel to Australia by boat.”

This became a point of contention for Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, who decided to give Dutton a parliamentary scalding by suggesting that his opponents were “just full of nonsense, and they should stop being a cheer squad for people, encouraging people smuggling.”

Such “business models”, as they are derisively and demagogically called, are the natural consequence of a yearning to flee. It is a yearning that is being globally punished, notably by wealthier states less than keen to accept asylum seekers. Canberra’s savage approach to the problem – non-settlement in Australia of those eventually found to be refugees and detaining individuals in concentration camps in the Pacific – has become the envy of border protection fetishists. The British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, for instance, dreams of an Australia-styled solution that will involve “turning the boats back” and deporting asylum seekers to Rwanda. Unfortunately for him, and most fortunately for humanitarians, an army of lawyers and judges have frustrated his vision.

The border fetishists also make a crucial omission. The people smugglers, who are of all stripes of opportunism and exploitation rather than some monolithic bloc, are merely facilitating the provisions of the United Nations Refugee Convention. All who arrive should not be discriminated against on the basis of how they arrive or their backgrounds – the articles of the Convention state as much – yet Australia’s border policy remains persistently cruel and defiant. Whenever a boat appears with a small cargo full of desperate individuals who make it to land, the fantasies of invasion, unwarranted intrusion and unwanted infiltration catch alight. It was high time they were snuffed out.

He was sweet and well meaning, but he was old. He was hazy. His memory was poor. Doddering, confused, the self-proclaimed leader of the Free World seemed ready to check into a retirement village. That, at least, is the thick insinuation of the Special Counsel’s report on President Joe Biden’s mishandling of classified documents when vice president during the Obama administration.

The findings of the Special Counsel Robert Hur were not punitive. But they were laceratingly wounding. It seemed to resemble more of a nurse’s assessment of whether you need an upgrade in aged-care treatment, a bolstering of services for a person in declining years. (“Have you lost your mind, dear?”)

During the course of the investigation, things did not get better. “In his interview with our office, Mr. Biden’s memory was worse. He did not remember when he was vice president, forgetting on the first day of the interview when his term ended (‘if it was 2013 – when did I stop being Vice President?’), and forgetting on the second day of the interview when his term began (‘in 2009, am I still Vice President?’).”

At an ill-tempered press conference, Biden insisted that his memory was “fine”, that Hur should never have asked such questions as whether the president could recall when his son died and that he was “well meaning. And I’m an elderly man. And I know what the hell I’m doing. I’ve been president – I put this country back on its feet.”

The picture is not a good one. But then again, when was it? Prior to coming to power, Biden already had a bookshelf list of bungles, gaffes and misjudgements. The only question looming behind was the degree of intent behind them. In 1987, he notoriously plagiarised much of a speech by the then leader of the British Labor Party, Neil Kinnock and, to show he was on a hot streak, generously decorated his academic record from Syracuse Law School. Despite describing this as “much ado about nothing,” he withdrew from the contest for the Democratic presidential nomination that September.

His campaign team, terrified that he might verbally snare himself leading up to the 2020 election, tried their best to insulate him from penetrative public scrutiny. This was very much aided by the ravages and restrictions of the pandemic, which afforded him the perfect excuse to operate in conditions of masked isolation.

As commander-in-chief matters have only worsened. Figures, for example, were airily revised – a million dead US residents and citizens from the ravages of COVID-19 became the somewhat reduced figure of “over 100”. World leaders dead or alive were swapped in Biden’s memory channel – a flattering form of death revival, and a denigration of the living. Biden, for instance, confused the current French president, Emmanuel Macron, with the late François Mitterrand before a campaign rally in Las Vegas.

His geographical recall was not too good either. “Right after I was elected, I went to a G7 meeting in southern England. And I sat down and said, ‘America is back!’ and Mitterrand from Germany – I mean France – looked at me and said, ‘How long are you back for?’”

In terms of wars, he has remarked that Russia’s Vladimir Putin was “losing the war in Iraq”, which would have surprised the Russians, Ukrainians and everybody else. More could have been made by the Republicans about this in Congress, but then again, their aged warriors are hardly endowed with brainbox memories of sound recall or cognition either.

Other mishaps could cause titters of amusement – the harmless, dotty chap who muddles the facts, lighting up pub conversation. During his April visit to Ireland last year, light entertainment was caused by his confusion between the terroristic Black and Tan enforcers during the Irish War of Independence (1919-21) and the All Blacks, New Zealand’s fabled rugby team. The remarks were made in Louth in the context of speaking about a former rugby player and distant cousin Rob Kearney. “He beat the hell out of the Black and Tans,” an admiring Biden recalled.

The more significant, and dangerous problem is that a decaying, eroding memory can become the perfect pretext of making appalling policy even as it is forgotten, a form of erasure as things are being done. Policies long pursued and understood can be given the heave-ho. Biden’s belligerence over the Taiwan question, and whether a war over the province with China would be worthwhile, is a case in point.

Biden’s opponent does not, oddly enough, have that problem. Donald Trump, even at 77-years of age, has a habit of transmuting inability to faux talent. One never knows whether his confusions are intentional in their malice or genuine acts of indifference or imbecility. (He very intentionally forgot the existence of WikiLeaks after the 2016 election, despite lauding the organisation’s press achievements prior.) More recently, competing Republican contender Nikki Haley got switched with Democrat veteran Nancy Pelosi. Petulant, hysterical, and stubbornly adolescent, he has a form of counterfeit youth on his side, the child in rompers who always screams even after downing the milk. When he errs, he is not only forgiven but given candied approval by his understanding supporters.

What matters now is the sense that the errors and lapses have arisen because of Biden’s age, the causal attribution to worn memory that renders the ruling magistrate enfeebled and vulnerable to overthrow. The campaign trail till November 2024 will be long and vicious, and Biden’s team may well have to reprise their role as quarantine specialists for their leader. In the meantime, best consult the RAND Corporation study about the risks posed by dementia afflicting the US imperium’s aged security and intelligence community. It promises to only get worse.

There are few surprises regarding the final episode of Nemesis, the three-part account on how the Australian Liberal Party, in partnership with the dozy Nationals, psychotically and convulsively disembowelled themselves from the time Tony Abbott won office in 2013. Over the muddy gore and violence concluding the tenures of Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull, one plotter rose, knife bloodied and brimming with confidence: Scott Morrison. As always, he claims to have done so without a trace. That, dear readers, is the way of all advertising men.

The inconspicuous rise of Morrison heralded a bankrupt political culture, one of smeary gloss, smug grabs on complex issues, the insufferable slogan, the intelligence shaving brochure, the simplifying statement about worlds complex and abstract. No political environment can, nor should ever eschew the simple message, but Morrisons’s minute, unimaginative cosmos – that of the advertising man with his swill bucket sloshing away – had little to merit it.

With such a stunted Weltanschauung, Morrison’s misdeeds proved vast in spread and stench, the result of what former cabinet minister and creep-in-chief Christopher Pyne understatedly called a “lack of humility”. The makers of Nemesis could only dip their feet in the waters of his blighted stewardship. It would have taken several immersions alone to cover the despoiling of public life marked by stacking the Fair Work Commission and Administrative Appeals Tribunal with appointments friendly to the Coalition or the so-called “rorts” affairs, of which there were many cloacal instances of corruption.

While the library of Australian politics is shelf-heavy with misused funds to advance the fortunes of the party in government, the Morrison government proved exemplary. In the lead-up to the 2019 election, Nationals Senator Bridget McKenzie’s office was the happy recipient of $100 million worth of community sport infrastructure grants. Their destination was exclusively towards marginal seats, best typified by the mock presentation by Georgina Downer to the South Australian Yankalilla bowling club of a $127,373 grant. The novelty cheque from the Liberal candidate for Mayo was scorned by sitting member and independent Rebekha Sharkie at the time as unrivalled in its crassness and desperation.

Much the same story was repeated in the so-called “car parks rorts” affair, which saw hundreds of millions of dollars directed towards 47 car parks, largely located in the top 20 marginal seats selected by staffers working for the then infrastructure minister, Alan Tudge. The decision making by the staffers left the Department of Infrastructure a mere spectator to policy.

By 2022, Morrison’s crooked form on the issue of grants was complete and immortal. The Australian National Audit Office, when examining the Building Better Regions Fund (BBRF), found that “65 per cent of IP [infrastructure project] stream applications approved for funding were not those assessed as being the most meritorious in the assessment process.”

Other matters covered in the series finale continue to look baffling and uncomfortable. Authoritarian paranoia made its ugly appearance in Morrison’s decision to appoint himself, unbeknownst to his fellow ministers, to the departments of health, finance, treasury, home affairs and resources during the COVID-19 crisis. Despite the ravages of the pandemic and the risks of debility to his cabinet, there was no reason for doing so.

Excruciating clumsiness stood out with his handling of sexual assault allegations made by Liberal staffer Brittany Higgins (“Jenny [Morrison’s wife] and I spoke last night and she said to me, you have to think about this as a father”) while his abominable treatment of Christine Holgate, which resulted in the removal of Australia Post’s most successful CEO for approving Cartier watches for select staff, suggested what came to known as the government’s “woman problem”. The Nationals leader, David Littleproud, could only draw the obvious conclusion: “[W]omen had lost faith in us because we didn’t handle those situations well. That was the real beginning, where Australians stopped listening, but particularly women stopped listening.”

Gross indifference over his clandestine family trip to Hawaii as Australia scorched and smouldered before furious bush fires, one which he hoped the then-Nationals leader Michael McCormack could keep mum about, suggested Morrison’s lack of maturity. “It looked as if there had been lies told to the [press] gallery,” Liberal Senator Andrew Bragg admitted. Liberal MP Russell Broadbent preferred to be “gobsmacked” about the whole affair.

On the issue of the AUKUS security pact between the US, UK and Australia, Morrison nails his colours firmly to the mast as a dangerously deluded pioneer. It was he, and only he, that suggested the submarine agreement with France’s Naval Group for twelve diesel-powered attack submarines be scratched in favour of a nuclear-propulsion option.

Given the incurably mendacious nature of the man, claims to having a monopoly on AUKUS must be regarded with caution. For one thing, it has since come to light that the Australian businessman Anthony Pratt already had former US President Donald Trump’s ear on the subject of nuclear-powered submarines when they met at the Mar-a-Lago club in April 2021. Pratt then allegedly shared the details of the discussion with three former Australian prime ministers, 10 Australian officials, 11 of Pratt’s employees and six journalists. The announcement of AUKUS only took place on September 15, 2021, suggesting a filtering of ideas through the Australian-US security apparatus. Trump may have left office by then, but the lingering interests of the US military industrial complex had not.

Morrison’s unspeakable treatment of the French president, Emmanuel Macron, proved diabolically amateurish and spiteful. To have dinner with the head of state of another country even as plans to terminate an agreement worth A$90 billion is underfoot, suggests some form of arrested mental development. “You don’t cancel a $90 billion contract and the other party is happy,” he merely shrugged. In any case, he did not want to see Macron deploy “the entire French diplomatic corps and [kill] the deal.” This was, in his mind, “the best” of decisions, “one that others had never sought to successfully undertake.”

If the best decision of an administration involves the renting of a country’s autonomy, the surrendering of land and facilities to be used by a nuclear-armed, clumsy goliath, the conversion of an entire state to the status of a garrisoned, forward defence base to police rivals, including a power with whom you have no historical animosity with, one is coming very close to confusing patriotic innovation and self-interest with treason.