HUMAN RIGHTS & EQUALITY FOR ALL,FREEDOM & JUSTICE FOR PALESTINE, ZIMBABWE, BURMA, EVERY COUNTRY SUFFERING FROM WARS, DROUGHTS, STARVATION, MILITARY ADVENTURES, DICTATORSHIPS, POLICE STATES, RELIGIOUS OPPRESSION, HOMOPHOBIA, CENSORSHIP & OTHER OBSCENITIES.INTERNATIONAL ASYLUM SEEKER SUPPORT
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The following article is from The Age online, and is more than about time that the non-Murdoch media acted like they say on the top of their paper - Independent - always.
It now remains to be seen whether they will try and build up a campaign to force this pathetic government and its loyal opposition to get the asylum seekers out of the concentration camps on Manus, Nauru and places like the Mantra hotel in Preston, Melbourne.
Australians who have not supported those trying to get these human rights abuses ended need to reconsider how they have felt being in "lock down" because of COVID-19, and now need to have some understanding of the cruelty to which asylum seekers have been exposed for all these years and DO SOMETHING!!
Refugee activists occupy Preston hotel housing medevac detainees
Healthcare
workers have previously described the makeshift detention centre
housing more than 60 men as a "very high-risk environment" for
transmitting the coronavirus.
Eight
activists checked into three rooms at the Bell Street hotel on Monday,
and barricaded themselves into at least one of the rooms from 7.30am
Tuesday.
The protesters have also occupied the roof of the hotel
and locked themselves on as part of the demonstration. Banners have been
draped from the roof saying: "let them out" and "seven years lock-down
freedom now".
Footage from the scene shows police escorting all eight activists off the property mid-afternoon.
A
statement from the Whistleblowers, Activists and Communities Alliance
(WACA) said the demonstration aimed to draw attention to the need for
detainees to be provided with the medical care they were brought to
Australia for under the now-repealed "medevac laws".
Banners are on the roof of the hotel, saying, "let them out".Credit:WACA
"Over
the last two months of this pandemic the federal and state government
message has been 'we are all in this together'. Clearly some of us of
are more in this together than others. We are not truly together until
all, including detained asylum seekers and refugees, have their
freedom," spokesperson Gaye Demanuele said.
Last month, more than 1180 healthcare professionals signed a joint letter to the government calling for the men to be released.
"Failure
to take action to release people seeking asylum and refugees from
detention will not only put them at greater risk of infection (and
possibly death), it also risks placing a greater burden on wider
Australian society and the health care system," said the letter, drafted
by infectious diseases expert Professor David Isaacs.
More than
60 men are confined to a secure floor of the motel, which is off limits
to other guests and staffed by armed guards. While Australian Border
Force, which operates the motel's secure wing, has cancelled all outside
visits, guards come and go throughout the day.
No
detainee in immigration has tested positive to COVID-19, and a
spokesperson said the Australian Border Force was focussed on health and
safety during the pandemic.
The protesters began the demonstration about 7.30am on Tuesday.Credit:WACA
"A
range of measures have been introduced to actively manage health,
hygiene and cleaning requirements in all detention facilities. These
measures are continually reviewed in line with the current health
advice," the spokesperson said.
"All detainees continue to have ongoing access to the medical professionals located within facilities, including after hours."
Refugee activists on the roof of the Mantra hotel in Preston on Tuesday.Credit:WACA
Any detainee with flu-like symptoms are tested and quarantined, according to Border Force.
Kurdish
man Farhad Bandesh was medically evacuated from Manus Island and then
moved from the Mantra to the Melbourne Immigration and Transit
Accommodation centre (MITA).
A refugee activist barricaded in a Mantra hotel room on Tuesday.Credit:WACA"My friends [at Mantra] are really sick, mentally and physically, and the situation there is really stressful," Mr Bandesh said.
"At
the moment I think they've got good energy because of the people that
are supporting them, and we are still asking for our rights after so
many years."
He thanked the protesters, "they show we are not alone".
"All the detention centres are all the same, everyone is panicking and they are scared. They don't want to catch the COVID-19."
The roof of the Mantra in Preston.Credit:WACAActivists
have bypassed lockdown restrictions during the pandemic by walking past
Mantra and the MITA centre in protest of detention.
Walking is
considered exercise and is allowable under Victoria's lockdown rules
though protests themselves are a breach of the restrictions.
Last month, 30 people were also fined for protesting in support of refugees and asylum seekers outside the Preston hotel.
It was the head of the Australian Cyber Security Centre who finally
admitted before an Australian Parliament committee that she had
unilaterally directed and pressured CyberCon to drop myself and
an academic research professor (an Australian citizen) from the
University of Melbourne as speakers.
I viewed the extraordinary pressure exerted by the Australian Cyber
Security Centre to block me as an already-accepted speaker — a week
before the start of a high visibility public interest conference
on cybersecurity — as a most alarming and Orwellian development and a
distinct form of brazen censorship for the express purpose of outright
silencing me.
The head of the ACSC misled the committee when she said the reason
she wanted my talk canned was because of a proposal for me to
participate on a panel with Edward Snowden that never went forward.
It appears she dissembled and used the apparent floating of the idea
of a proposed Edward Snowden panel (for which I had NO prior knowledge
whatsoever) as a convenient foil and cover to justify and excuse the
barring of me as a speaker from CyberCon with the very heavy hand of her
“higher authority” as the head of the ACSC over the conference
organizers (Australian Information Security Association).
In addition, the reason she gave before the committee is not the
reason given to me when I formally followed up with the AISA organizers.
On 29 September (4 days before I departed the United States), I
received an e-mail message to contact the Board Director for AISA “as a
matter of urgency.”
In a subsequent phone call from the same AISA Board Director, I was
told that I was no longer a speaker on the conference agenda, but I
could still attend the conference as a delegate and that they
(AISA) would honor the flight and accommodations arranged for me many
months early.
I followed up formally and asked for the specific reason I was
dropped as a speaker from CyberCon. I was informed on 7 October, in an
e-mail from the Board Director of AISA, that “AISA works with
a conference partner in respect of CyberCon. Our conference partner has
determined your presentation is incongruent with the conference.”
Furthermore, this egregious canning of me as a speaker fed right into
the current debate in Australia about press freedom and whistleblowing
laws because their public interest disclosure process (their legal way
for public servants to blow the whistle) has been described as
“impenetrable” by their Federal Court.
The current debate in Australia regarding press freedom and
whistleblowing laws strikes at the heart of any country claiming it is a
democracy.
The recent raids by the Australian government against major media
outlets and whistleblowers have broken open the tension — between
openness and transparency versus secrecy and closed-door government too
often hiding itself (and its actions) away from accountability and the
public interest.
Something has to give. The debate centers on the public interest
knowing what the government is doing behind closed doors and often in
secret in the name of — and under the veil and banner of —
national security.
The dramatic 21 October Right to Know campaign — with the redacted
front pages on all major newspapers in Australia as I woke up in
Melbourne before returning to the United States that very day
— demonstrates beyond the shadows of secrecy, censorship and press
suppression that sunshine is the best antidote for a healthy and robust
democracy increasingly held hostage by the national security state.
Efforts from on high seek to justify the actions of that national
security state under the color of public safety for more and more
autocratic powers — while stoking fear and hyping the danger to society
— yet going after whistleblowers who disclose actions that clearly rise
to the level of wrongdoing, violations of law, coverup and endangering
public safety, health and the general welfare.
What is happening in Australia is most concerning to me as
fundamental democratic values and principles are increasingly under
direct attack around the world from the rise of increasing
autocratic tendencies and raw executive authorities bypassing, ignoring
and even undermining the rule of law under the exception of national
security and government fiat.
Australian public interest disclosure laws are also a mixed bag — a
conflicted patchwork with huge carve-outs for national security and
immigration. Nor do they adequately protect a whistleblower
from reprisal, retaliation or retribution.
It is quite clear that not all disclosures (even when done in the
public interest) are protected by law in Australia, and the
whistleblower is in danger of exposure as a result.
At the federal level, whistleblowers face career suicide for public
interest disclosures. And if deemed by the government to be unauthorized
disclosures, those disclosures are even considered criminal.
As it happened, my removal as a speaker from CyberCon is the first time I was ever censored anywhere.
The trend lines of increased secrecy around the world by governments
does not bode well for societies at large. History is not kind.
What I do see improving is public-interest concern regarding just how
far government can or should go. People are discussing what society
sacrifices in the name of secrecy and national security when too often
the mantra is the ends justifies the means — and government says to just
trust us, while secret power is too often unaccountable, even to
itself.
The price I paid as a whistleblower was very high. I just about lost
it all and came close to losing my liberty and freedom. I was declared
indigent by the court, am still in severe debt, have no pension as my
career and personal life were turned inside-out and upside-down because
the government treated me as a traitor for my whistleblowing on the mass
domestic surveillance program that violated the U.S. Constitution. I
also exposed 9/11 intelligence failures and subsequent coverup plus
massive multibillion-dollar fraud, waste and abuse. The government then
turned me into an insider threat and Enemy of the State and prosecuted
me as a criminal for allegedly violating the U.S. Espionage Act.
If it is left up to the government to determine what are state
secrets, then the government is perversely incentivized to declare as
state secrets any disclosures made in the press it does not like. This
thinking can only lead to more prosecutions of publishers to protect the
State. In the absence of meaningful oversight of the secret side of
government, how does the public trust its own government to operate
and function in the public interest and not for special or private
interests?
But then again, if the press is not doing its job holding government
and the public sector to account, why should they be surprised when the
public holds even the media in lower regard?
Government should earn the public’s trust and not take it for granted
or abuse that trust. The heart of democracy rests on a civil society
that it is not undermined by the very government that represents it.
Once the pillars of democracy are eroded away, it is quite difficult
to restore them. The misuse of the concept of national security — as the
primary grounds to suppress democracy, the press and the voices of
whistleblowers speaking truth to and about power — increases
authoritarian tendencies in even democratic governments.
The real danger to civil society in Australia is that these same
tendencies give rise to extralegal autocratic behavior and state control
over the institutions of democratic governance under the blanket
of national security with the excuse of protecting the state.
As I continue with this work as chair of the Whistleblowers Public
Education Campaign, I’m mindful that my efforts are only possible
because of support from so many concerned people.
In the 1980s and 1990s, Gays, Lesbians, Transgenders, HIV/AIDS people, of all genders, were being bashed, assaulted, abused in any way homophobes could work out, and murdered, at a rapid rate.
The murdered were mostly gay males as can be seen on our web pages in http://www.josken.net
The New South Wales police were complicit in some of those crimes and have never been brought to book.
In 2018, in Melbourne, women are being assaulted, abused, verbally and physically, and murdered in unprecedented numbers.
In Sydney, in the 1980s and 1990s, one of the plans for protection was to carry a whistle that was easily accessible and could mostly be held in the hand out of sight of possible attackers. This is obviously not a be-all and end-all protection, but it may well have helped save lives.
We all carried them in those days and perhaps it helped to protect us but the number of murders did reduce.
The situation as it stands is very complex and needs to start with education at a basic level while children are in their early classes at school where they need to respect other humans and not be taught that they are entitled to behave in ways threatening the safety of other human beings.
The following letter appeared in The Age newspaper on 31 AUGUST 2016, two days after a front page article in The Age (29 AUGUST 2016) under the heading $5m whistleblower bounty. This is the letter I would have liked to have sent to The Age, but because it has not published any of my letters for so long, I would have done it on my blog anyway. The letter-writer gives the names of 4 whistleblowers and what the US government has done to them, but there are so many others to add to the list, a few being Edward Snowden and Julian Assange as examples. The US government under Barack Obama has done more to harm US citizens than any other president since the earliest days of the formation of the United States after its genocide on native Americans after European invasion. And other so-called western democracies have all been just as vicious and cruel to whistleblowers. Under no circumstances are whistleblowers protected by their governments and we shouldn't anticipate any favourable changes any day soon. (Mannie De Saxe)
One-way protection
The BHP Billiton case does indeed expose "the weakness of Australia's whistleblower regime" (The Age,
29/8). However, the US is hardly a beacon for appropriate protection of
whistleblowers. In the US, one may only blow the whistle one way – to
help government bodies. After the spectacular global financial crisis,
the US were oh so magnanimous to whistleblowers, treating them to
legislation bestowing up to 30 per cent of fines resulting from their
disclosure.
But blow that whistle the other way, and look out.
Four names will illustrate my point:
1.
William Binney disclosed that NSA collected mass data on its own
citizens. The result was a raid on his home, loss of employment and a
financial deficit to the tune of $300,000.
2. Thomas Drake disclosed NSA
warrantless mass surveillance of US citizens. He was indicted and
sentenced to one year probation and community service.
3. John Kyriakou
disclosed CIA waterboarding detainees. He was indicted and sentenced to
30 months' jail.
4. Chelsea Manning disclosed the infamous "collateral
murder" footage of an Apache helicopter slaughter of at least eight
people in Baghdad, including two journalists and a young father. He was
indicted and sentenced to 35 years' jail.
