This Act has upset our lefty patriotic journalists. They think that they should have the right to decide what intelligence terrorists should be privy to, just as the New York Slimes does — no matter how much it would damage the War on Terror and put at risk the lives of their fellow citizens. This is why Cameron Stewart told The Fifth Estate that

There have been a raft of changes which aren’t entirely user friendly...

Not “user friendly”! One would think this patriot was talking about a difficult computer program instead of action stopping terrorists from murdering Australians. New York is bombed, so is London, Madrid and Bali. Every day sadistic terrorists do to Jews what they would like to do the rest of us and all he can say is that these changes are not “user friendly”. They are not supposed to be. The New York Slimes’ betrayal of the NSA spying program demonstrates how treacherous lefty journalists can be. And I don’t consider Stewart to be any different.

Let’s go back a few years, shall we, to when Murdoch’s Australian gave details of a US intelligence report (18 January 1999) revealing that pro-Soviet organisations that worked to sabotage the Western alliance by attempting to neutralise Australia and destroy its military links with the US had been spied on.

Naturally, those who were part of the Soviet offensive against Australia’s national security were outraged, or so they claimed. For years Soviet fronts like the CICD (Campaign for International Cooperation and Disarmament) and the PND (People for Nuclear Disarmament) worked to close down the Nurrungar and Watsonia bases. Nurrungar was a US listening base and was absolutely essential in preventing a sneak Soviet nuclear attack against the US.

Professor Ball admitted that “There’s only one place in the world that tells the Americans that their homeland in under missile attack, and that’s Nurrungar”. And this is why the Soviets were desperate to close it down. If they had succeeded it would have made the US immediately vulnerable to a first strike and emboldened Moscow’s totalitarian thugs.

Yet Peter Garrett, ‘peace activist’,' anti-nuclear activist, pop singer and former member of the Nuclear Disarmament Party (he is not a ALP MP) claimed these movements did not represent a threat to American interests in Australia. Those American interests, however, involved keeping us free from Soviet aggression. But then these ‘peace activists’ had always adopted a peculiarly sanguine attitude toward the Soviets, invariably blaming America for international tension and excusing if not actually justifying Soviet aggression, no matter how many it killed.

The Greens Senator Margaret Lees complained that the government saw the ‘peace activists’ as the real enemy. Maybe it had good reason. Lees was coordinator of the PND. In its previous incarnation it had been the AICD (Association for International Co-operation and Disarmament) which was a front organisation for the Communist Party of Australia. In July 1984 Sam Goldbloom was elected to the PND council — and that says it all.

Goldbloom was closely connected with the WPC (World Peace Council), attending its 1980 World Parties for Peace in Sofia, Bulgaria. The WPC was organised and run by Moscow’s International Department under the control of Boris Ponomarev. Just in case the reader is not getting the message, the WPC stated: “The World Peace Council is an instrument of Soviet foreign policy (WPC’s Foreign Affairs Note, April 1982)”. As if to ram home the point, Goldbloom was invited to Moscow in the ‘80s to be awarded a medal for his contribution to Soviet imperialism — oops, I meant world peace.

John Zubrycki, another of Murdoch’s brilliant investigative journalists, quoted Helen Caldicott as calling the “report deeply worrying”, further stating that “We’re sycophantic towards the US. We do whatever they want us to do”. Now this is the same Caldicott who claimed:

Free enterprise really means rich people get richer. And they have the freedom to exploit and psychologically rape their fellow human beings in the process....Capitalism is destroying the earth. Cuba is a wonderful country. What Castro’s done is superb.

This is the same Caldicott who brazenly toed the Brezhnev line and on one of her visits to Moscow wrote in Pravda that the US was planning war against the peace-loving Soviets. This is what this ‘peace activist’ had to say about the totalitarian Soviet state:

The Russians are OK to work with...The US has many military bases around the world, whereas Russia does not”. (Berkshire Eagle, Pittsfield, Mass., 27 Aug. 1981).

The US has 200 major military bases in 45 nations. The USSR has none...Russia is surrounded by hostile nations with nuclear weapons. And America is surrounded by none. I don’t know why they're not going mad. (U.S. Catholic, December 1981).

At the time of spouting this pro-Soviet propaganda Moscow had military bases in Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria and Outer Mongolia, not to mention countries like Cuba, Vietnam, South Yemen, etc., that were providing safe anchorages for the Soviet navy.

And then there were the little matters of the crushing of the 1953 East Berlin workers’ uprising, the 1956 invasion of Hungary, the building of the Berlin Wall and the invasion of Afghanistan. Let us also recall those political prisoners who were being tortured in asylums by KGB doctors while Caldicott was happily telling the world that Moscow's thugs “are OK to work with . . .”

Yet despite her shocking record as a pro-Soviet toady Zubrycki went out of his way to withhold these facts from his readers in order to convey the impression that Caldicott was merely an independent activist with no ideological ties to the Soviet Union.

In September 1989 hundreds of peace-loving thugs stormed the Nurrungar base with the aim of destroying its vital link in the democracies’ defence network.* The real irony here is that as the assault was taking place the Soviet empire was rapidly disintegrating. When the communist state finally collapsed, freeing its people from more that 70 years of totalitarian oppression, I bet a friend that the world’s so-called peace movements would now quickly and quietly disappear from the global stage. And so they did — until the liberation of Iraq brought this scum back on the streets

No matter what the likes of Lees or Caldicott might claim, these peace movements were part of a complex network of organisations whose ultimate point of origin, usually through the WPC, was the Moscow-based International Department. Readers can now decide for themselves who the real enemy was. But one question does need to be asked: Why did our media refuse to report any of this?

Cameron Stewart, the same creep who now has the gall to complain about ASIO, John Zubrycki and Robert Garran did what they could to inflate this document into a full-scale anti-American intelligence scandal.

Yet each one of them refused to even allude to these organisations’ Soviet links. Once again — why? Stewart gave us a clue with his suggestion that the base may have been part of “the US’s nuclear war-making plans — a claim which alone justifies the questions that have been raised about Nurrungar’s role”.

Note how Stewart slyly shifted to the pro-Soviet accusation that Nurrungar was part of an American first strike plan. But should we be surprised by Stewart and Zubrycki’s bigoted reporting when journalists from the same paper write sympathetic articles on die-hard Stalinists?

Left-wing ideology and its knee-jerk anti-Americanism is so deeply embedded in journalistic leftwing groupthink that I have given up all hope of Australian journalism regaining any serious degree of integrity or public trust. And I am far from being alone in holding this dismal opinion.

When he was The Australian’s New York correspondent Stewart lied about US unions, the pro-life movement, American Christians, South American dictatorships, the Chicago riots of 1968, the 1968 Tet Offensive, and even church burnings. Try as I can, I cannot recall Stewart writing a single favourable comment about America, though he did defend — surprise, surprise — President Clinton, exculpating him on the grounds that he was a victim of “his genes”.

The media, Abu Ghraib and the forgotten massacres

*This would be like the 1930s Soviet-run peace movement organising an attack on Britain’s radar defences.

Gerard Jackson is Brookes’ economics editor