Mission & Justice

Nick McKenzie; 22/7/08

A soldier with post-traumatic stress disorder was hospitalised after his superior officers allegedly abused and humiliated him, threatened him with jail and “treated him like a dog”. The alleged abuse - detailed in incident statements obtained by The Age - happened when Private Ted Tiessem was ordered to attend Lavarack Barracks in Townsville on July 8 to receive a revised medical assessment. His post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is the result of a truck accident in Malaysia in 1993, which left five of his colleagues dead and Private Tiessem with severe head injuries.

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Paul Daley; 29/6/08

There’s a weary saying among some top brass at Australia’s Defence headquarters at Canberra’s Russell Hill: “Defence ministers come and go. But we are here to stay.” What they actually mean is: “Defence ministers think they run us. But we run them.” … Fast forward and enter Joel Fitzgibbon, a no-bullshit former auto-electrician from Cessnock in country NSW. … Soon after being sworn in as Defence Minister, Fitzgibbon dressed down one stunned service chief when answers he demanded about the deaths of personnel were not forthcoming. The same (now former) chief got another serve when a multibillion-dollar procurement went off the rails and he couldn’t be contacted. He was on the golf course. His mobile wasn’t. Then, just before Christmas in a closed-door meeting of NATO defence ministers in the shadows of Edinburgh Castle, Fitzgibbon let fly at the organisation’s lack of coherence on Afghanistan.

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Nick Turse; 14/5/08

In April, a review of 2006 congressional financial disclosure statements by the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics found that lawmakers have as much as $196 million “invested in companies doing business with the Defense Department, earning millions since the start of the Iraq war.” An Associated Press article on the report, however, offered a caveat: “Not all the companies invested in by lawmakers are typical defense contractors. Corporations such as PepsiCo, IBM, Microsoft and Johnson & Johnson have at one point received defense-related contracts.” But the Associated Press is wrong. The fact is that corporations such as PepsiCo, IBM, Microsoft and Johnson & Johnson are, indeed, typical defense contractors. To suggest that such companies, and tens of thousands like them, receive defense-related contracts only at the odd, aberrant moment is specious at best. In 1961, Dwight D. Eisenhower, in his famous farewell address as president, warned of the “acquisition of unwarranted influence” by what he called the “military-industrial complex” in the United States.

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