First of all, here's what we have for you this week:
- Launching our Discord: A new community for Lamestream subscribers.
- Killer Grabs: Quotes from around the traps.
- Australia is sending a weapon "fundamental" to winning wars, according to US generals — By Scott Mitchell
- The Good Ones: A thrilling new series, reminiscing about the 2003 Oscars and a podcast to take your mind off things.
When we launched Lamestream 10 months ago, in the middle of Israel's devastating campaign of destruction and slaughter in Gaza, the legacy media's structural inability to report accurately and fairly had been on display for nearly two years.
Even though we report on these issues every day, it is still shocking how few lessons have been learnt when it comes to reporting on this new, illegal war on Iran, which has now extended into a horrific bombing campaign aimed at Lebanon.
The only takeaway from this is that our once respectable media institutions have no genuine desire to lift their standards, and are entirely comfortable sticking to the path of least resistance offered by deferring to the Israeli and US war machines, and refusing to antagonise the Australian government. It's a deep shame, but thankfully there are alternatives – like us.
There is no single issue that demands journalists, and their editors, get it right more than war – particularly a war that Australia has now signed up too. Today, Scott takes a closer look at Australia's military commitment to the war on Iran and whether the government's claim that we are only providing "defensive" support" actually stacks up.
Scott Mitchell
Introducing Discord!
We're always thinking about ways to grow the Lamestream community and provide more for subscribers. Today, we're excited to launch our official Discord server.
Discord is a social platform that operates like a chat room or a forum (if you're under 30 and don't know what either of those are, I'm sorry). We want it to be a hub for Lamestream supporters to interact with one another, with us, and to discuss the news, current affairs, the media, our episodes, stories and more.
You can share tips, provide feedback, and we've created channels for discussion about movies, TV and all sorts of fun things.
It's subscriber only and you can join by using this link. Please use the same email you use to sign up to Lamestream so we can verify your membership.
We're going to kick things off on Monday afternoon with an Oscars watch along and live blog, so get involved!
Killer Grabs
"I don’t know about it." – President Donald Trump, on the missile strike that hit a girl's school in Iran, killing 165 people, mainly children.
He seemed to know a lot about it when it claimed Iran blew up its own school, even going as far as to suggest they used a US-made Tomahawk missile. But when a US investigation backed up reporting from The New York Times that showed it was actually a US bomb, all of a sudden the President has no idea what it's about.
It says a lot that this incident is worse than any individual massacre of civilians by the US that occurred during the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan but has already faded into background noise.
"We made it abundantly clear that we do not support the words and phrases that were used by the terrorists prior to the Bondi massacre" – Queensland Health Minister Tim Nicholls on his government's new law that prohibits the phrase "From the river to the sea".
The problem for Tim is that there is no evidence the Bondi attackers ever used "from the river to the sea", nor is there any evidence of their involvement in any pro-Palestine action.
A spokesperson for the minister later said he "misspoke". All good I guess, except the law is still on the books and two people have already been arrested.
There’s a new and powerful weapon that the United States Air Force has been trying to get its hands on for years, and some of the most decorated officers to ever serve in the Air Force believe it’s crucial if the US is to “prevail whenever the next conflict unfolds”.
Last year, President Donald Trump’s new leadership at the Pentagon wanted to axe the entire program, but it was saved after the remarkable intervention of sixteen retired four-star generals, including four former leaders of the US Air Force.
The generals came out publicly against the Pentagon, urging Congress to overrule it, and secure the future of US air power by acquiring the weapon: Australia’s E-7 Wedgetail.
The United States still doesn’t have one of these planes, but they might now have access to its capabilities thanks to the Albanese government, which sent one to support the US and their allies in their bombing campaign against Iran this week.
The E-7 Wedgetail has been described in the Australian media humbly and as a “small contribution”, along with the 85 ADF personnel to crew and maintain it and a batch of air-to-air missiles likely to be fired by UAE aircraft.
“These are important defensive weapons,” the Prime Minister told parliament this week, using precisely the same words Defence Minister Richard Marles chose.
What Australia’s political leaders and media haven’t told the public is that the Wedgetail is “fundamental to projecting air power and winning conflicts,” according to the letter sent to Congress by some of the most decorated US Air Force commanders alive.
The truth is, it is easily the most significant contribution Australia could make to Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu’s illegal, objective-less and chaotic war on Iran. Its unique capabilities mean the Wedgetail could quite literally help tip the balance of the war, if Australia allows its powers of surveillance, targeting and command to be used by Israel and the US – and there can no longer be any doubt that is exactly what the government will do.
“Despite Mr Albanese’s diplomatic language that it will only be used for defence, the Wedgetail [...] will provide intelligence for US and Israeli air strikes,” the Herald Sun reported this week, in what was intriguingly the only mainstream report that emphasised how valuable this would be.
And it became clear that the initial request for the Wedgetail came directly from the US, even if the formal written invitation was from the UAE, after Foreign Minister Penny Wong refused to answer questions to that effect six times.
