Informed citizenship in the digital age: no excuses!

In the Western liberal democratic tradition we westerners, often too quickly, pat ourselves on our collective backs to highlight our own apparently enlightened disposition towards freedom of expression, factual honesty and commitment to democratic principles. In the digital and internet age this tendency towards the assumption of arrogant superiority over all other alternatives (past and present) is often taken as a given.

We are now subjected to more information than at any other point in human history. While the internet is a chaotic example of all that is human (the sacred and profane as it were) it has also made informed citizenship much easier than ever before. We can have almost instant access to documents via the internet if only we know where to look.

The internet is simply awash with electronic versions of refereed articles, searchable primary source archives and newspaper databases, and so on. Most organisations (both political and professional) now recognise this reality. In the United States of America, with its constitutional safeguards on freedom of information, it has seen a flood of primary source documents released by the CIA among others. These documents lay bare an embarrassing and long history of complicity in corruption, coups, human rights abuses, abuses of civil rights and sheer hypocrisy.

In the old Soviet Union, the Commissar was the chief propagandist and information specialist, i.e. the spin doctor! He or she moulded information to suit the purposes of the CCCP regime; facts were secondary to such purposes. In the West, (particularly in the USA), it was customary to criticise Soviet academics lacking the courage to criticise an oppressive Soviet regime, while lauding individuals such as Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Therefore, in the old Soviet system (and as it continues under the rule of the Communist party in China) the penalty for honesty and factual integrity was/is severe punishment, torture and death.

Why then does it seem that Western journalists and many intellectuals cannot apply the same standards to ourselves that we apply to others? This would seem to be a most basic and rudimentary standard to adopt should intellectual integrity and factual integrity be taken seriously in the West.

This is doubly true when one considers the enormous freedom intellectuals and journalists in the West have in their native countries: they won’t suffer the oppression and tyranny of the Soviet or Iranian system coming down upon them.

Case study: the internet as one agent of informed citizenship

I would like to provide just one example of how the digital age can provide us with powerful and legitimate knowledge. On September 5, 2009, Paul Kelly’s article “John Howard's covert East Timor independence plan” appeared in The Australian.

Ignoring those sections of the article only supported by various off the record interviews Kelly conducted alone with Howard and Downer (and some selective quotations from others), let me quickly move through three major points made by Kelly in this article:

1. the Howard government decided in early 1999 to covertly work for East Timor's independence;
2. the Howard-Downer strategy culminated in a determination to proceed with the August 1999 independence ballot despite growing violence; and
3. while Mr Howard and Mr Downer publicly said they preferred East Timor to stay within Indonesia, their actions were geared towards East Timorese independence.

Paul Kelly is considered to be to be one of Australia’s most experienced and preeminent journalists. First, a visit to the online dictionary; Merriam and Webster, provides us with an impartial definition:

Main Entry: journalism
Date: 1828
1 a: the collection and editing of news for presentation through the media b: the public press c: an academic study concerned with the collection and editing of news or the management of a news medium
2 a: writing designed for publication in a newspaper or magazine b: writing characterized by a direct presentation of facts or description of events without an attempt at interpretation c: writing designed to appeal to current popular taste or public interest

Now let us continue by examining the three main points made by Kelly in his article. Let me provide just two academic sources that examine the numerous primary sources (government documents, intelligence and media reports) available and then use this empirical evidence for their analysis.

A basic Google search will assist me in this effort, i.e. let’s type in “Australia, Indonesia, East Timor, Independence”. I would assume that if I were a journalist and was writing an article, or book, on this particular topic this would be a very easy way to search for important literature on the topic.

This search reveals a number of sources (as they always do), but let’s look more closely at one source which appears more than once on page one of the search results:

Clinton Fernandes, Reluctant Saviour: Australia, Indonesia and the independence of East Timor, Carlton North, Scribe Publications, 2004.

Who then is Clinton Fernandes? The Scribe homepage tells me that he is a:

… senior lecturer in strategic studies at University College, the University of New South Wales. He specialises in international relations and strategy with a focus on the 'national interest' in Australia's external relations.

So what does Fernandes’ book tell you, should you bother to read it?

First, he illustrates that the actions of Howard nor Downer did not work towards securing Timorese independence. In contrast, at almost every stage of the escalating crisis each man publicly favoured integration as the preferred outcome of the referendum. By analysing various primary sources Fernandes highlights that not only did the Howard government resist the American suggestion of peacekeepers for the independence ballot, the Australian intelligence community (AIC) were aware of TNI involvement with the pro-Integrationist militias, i.e. that potential widespread violence was a deliberate pro-Indonesian tactic. Fernandes also indicates that the original ADF military operation (Operation Spitfire) was not designed to liberate East Timor; it was originally only designed to evacuate Australian and other Western nationals from East Timor.

This would seem to be in contrast to the three major claims reported by Kelly in his article “John Howard's covert East Timor independence plan”.

But suppose a covert plan did exist.

Does this then mean that Downer and Howard clearly expected that Timorese would vote for independence? Let’s utilise another basic search term for Google; “Australian, Intelligence, East Timor”. This search is a bonanza if one knows what to look for. Let us choose this one:

Desmond Ball, Silent witness: Australian intelligence and East Timor, The Pacific Review, Vol. 14 No. 1 2001: 35–62.

Who is Desmond Ball?

He is a Professor, Strategic and Defence Studies Centre at the ANU and has had a long and distinguished career. He is one of the most respected academics in the field of strategic and intelligence studies in the country with an international reputation. Again, Ball would seem to be the type of source any journalist would be keen to consult in order to provide intellectual depth required for any article on East Timor.

What does his article “Silent Witness” say?

In what has to be one of the most comprehensive condemnations of the politicised relationship between Howard and Downer and the Australian Intelligence Community (AIC), Ball quotes from Australian intelligence estimates from late 1998 that pinpointed that the Indonesian security forces were arming militias in preparation for a potential bloodbath (pp.43-44 of the article PDF).

Here is a quote from Professor Ball’s article:

This [intelligence] was unwelcome intelligence for the government. It contradicted several of its key policy themes: that the violence was unorganized; that any ABRI involvement was limited to “rogue elements”; that neither General Wiranto nor any other senior ABRI commander was involved; and that Canberra’s special relationship with Jakarta, manifested in the myriad of defence and intelligence cooperation arrangements, would ensure that the Indonesian authorities remained both frank and responsive in their dealings with Canberra over East Timor. The government response was to deny the contradictory intelligence or to point to ambiguities and vagueness in the reporting. The Foreign Minister chose to ignore the intelligence.

The actions of Howard and Downer also downplayed at almost every turn, the widespread human rights abuses of the TNI (and their sponsored militias) and ignored the vast amounts of Australian intelligence that implicated the Indonesian military directly in the carnage. (See also Richard Tanter, Gerry van Klinken, and Desmond Ball ed., Masters of terror: Indonesia's military and violence in East Timor.)

And further from Professor Ball (p. 59 of PDF "Silent witness"):

Australia has an enormous amount of intelligence about the carnage - about the planning, sequence of orders, and the TNI and militia units and individuals involved in particular atrocities. The human intelligence (HUMINT) collected by ASIS concerns both the role of various ABRI/TNI commanders in Jakarta and the officers involved in directing the militia groups in East Timor. There is photographic intelligence showing details of massacre sites and people involved. DSD has a wealth of information, documenting the violence from the sporadic killings such as at Manutasi on 3 January 1999 and Liquica on 5 April through to the mass killings and disposal of bodies after 4 September. For example, on and around 7 September, DSD intercepted signals pointing to many East Timorese being either killed on boats or on land and their bodies then dumped at sea. Some intercepts specically indicated that “a large number of East Timorese students were killed at sea” on 7 September (see Daley 1999c; The Age 1999; Chulov 1999).

Howard and Downer publically dismissed and undermined the possibility of peacekeepers being utilised prior and during the ballot to provide security. Yet Australian intelligence was only too well aware of the violence and intimidation that was to be deployed against the East Timorese before, during and after the campaign; particularly the potential consequences of a successful vote for independence.

Let us now return to Kelly’s article: seemingly no one but John Howard, Alexander Downer (and presumably Ashton Calvert of DFAT), were privy to the so called secret independence policy. That is; not the Deptartment of Defence or the Department of Foreign Affairs or Trade (which robustly continued throughout the sorry episode to support the premise that East Timor was an integral part of Indonesia), nor was the Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS).

Can anyone really take seriously that the Australian rejection of peacekeepers was just part of a secret covert plan to secure East Timorese independence? With tens of thousands of lives displaced at the point of a gun and/or killed during the 1999 carnage, what type of insane covert plan is this?

A basic Google term search using the most straight forward digital internet technology demonstrates that Kelly’s editorial is problematic.

With our free and unfettered access to information technology (print, media and digital), there are no more excuses for not being an informed citizen who seeks out evidence that tests the validity of conclusions handed to us by our politicians, academics or journalists.

In the case of the factually flawed propaganda of the Commissar and crude state propagandists, such behaviour can at least be understood by the fact they faced imprisonment, torture and/or death. Under those circumstances it must be tempting to take the path of least resistance.

On the other hand, in 21st century Australia, one can only wonder what Paul Kelly’s excuse is?