2009 Nobel Peace Prize committee for a "hideous display of cynical politics". Stuart Rees, director of the Sydney Peace Foundation in Australia, questioned the award. "Perhaps the Nobel organisation wants to give him a magic wand. I think the guy is full of promise, but I don't think the promise has been realised yet particularly in regards the Middle East." In Asia and the Middle East: Afghanistan, President Hamid Karzai said that Obama was the "appropriate" person to win the Nobel Peace Prize. "His hard work and his new vision on global relations, his will and efforts for creating friendly and good relations at
2017 Nobel Peace Prize won and must never be fought." Welcoming the implications of the Peace Prize announcement in an interview with RT, "whistleblower" William McNeilly defended his WikiLeaked report in 2015 that claimed Trident nuclear programme safety and security failures and that sparked nuclear-deterrent debates in the UK the same year. New Zealand's Green Party Spokesperson for Social Development, MP Jan Logie, said that "Our Pacific Ocean and its peoples have suffered the terrible effects of nuclear explosions and today we acknowledge the survivors of nuclear weapons use and testing. This Nobel Prize honours them." Aging survivors of the 1945 Hiroshima and Nagasaki