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Airing on Sunday nights is a new TV drama, Homeland, which explores the phenomenon of ‘sleeper cells’. Understandably, this show seeks to position itself as something other than an alarmist Bush-era program about terrorists. In this case the potential sleeper agent is a serving marine. Ultimately, however, this plot innovation is really just an elaborate [...]

Last week, comedian Stephen Colbert announced his entry into mucky world of American electoral politics with a satirical bid for nomination in the Republican South Carolina primary. In this short space of time Colbert was able to momentarily overshadow the deep banality of the Republican nomination process and cast attention on the absurd system of [...]

Amidst an increasingly nasty lead-up to the upcoming South Carolina Republican primary, yesterday saw the release of an attack ad accusing the overwhelming favorite candidate Mitt Romney of being a serial killer. If this campaign ad seems a little bit odd or over the top it is because it was released to support Stephen Colbert, [...]

Why is that so many awe-inspiring feats of engineering are so hard to separate from deliberate mass death and misery? President Obama’s recent visit to Canberra reminded me of when I first had this thought. I was doing an internship at the Royal Australian Air Force think tank, then the Aerospace Centre (now the Air [...]

Without doubt such societal efforts to bring at large war criminals to symbolic justice should become a feature of the growing demand around the world for real democracy sustained by a rule of law that does not exempt from responsibility the rich and powerful whether they are acting internally or internationally.

As I explored at length in Al Jazeera in August, a series of WikiLeaks cables relating to cluster munitions demonstrate how Australia actively sought to water down treaty text relating to ‘military interoperability’ – that is, the ability for foreign militaries to conduct joint operations.

It may be time to acknowledge that governmental lawlessness in foreign policy has become a bipartisan reality for the United States Government, and that the face in the White House or the political party in control, while not yet irrelevant, is a matter of secondary interest, at least to those who are drone targets or torture victims.

When Julia Gillard meet Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhuyono in Bali on the weekend West Papua barely got a mention. Although the text messages inside West Papua went into overdrive with the rumour that the reason Australia and the United States were stationing 2,500 U.S Marines in Darwin was to prepare for military intervention in West Papua. I told my friends in West Papua it wasn’t true, writes Jason Macleod.

I feel like I’ve become accustomed to stomaching hypocrisy. Contemporary politics is rife with it. It rarely shocks. Even when I am outraged by hypocrisy, my friends seem busy being outraged by a different hypocrisy, so we can’t get together and talk about it. I can’t remember exactly when this happened. I remember shocked at [...]

Labor caucus today voted not to amend its widely criticised Cluster Munitions Prohibition Bill to remove two loopholes that go against the spirit and intent of the international Convention on Cluster Munitions. I will be on the ABC Radio National breakfast program with Fran Kelly on Wednesday morning to discuss the Caucus vote alongside defence minister Stephen Smith.