My following article appeared in yesterday’s Guardian Comment is Free section: In a country where the government maintains a tight grip on information across all media formats, recent statements by a senior Chinese Communist party official were revealing. Wang Guoqing, a vice-minister with the cabinet’s information office, said that mobile phones and the internet were…
Showing all posts in June 2019
The enemy rules
The idea of Iran sitting down to talk to America is rather comic. The setting is Baghdad. The US is desperate for any way to reduce the violence. Iran would be fairly pleased with its massive power in the country. Good luck, diplomats. Conflicts Forum correspondent in Baghdad has posted this dispatch: One of the…
Dean Barnett’s 9/11 Generation
Whenever right wing pundits and bloggers try to make a blanket observation about their political opponents, they always get themselves into a rhetorical knot. Take… Dean Barnett for example. The strain of the “9/11 Generation” of which Barnett is a part, which is represented by the Weekly Standard and National Review Agenda of Endless War…
They “believed” the map existed: another deliberate deception exposed
When it comes to starting a diplomatic crisis or a war, truth is never an option. In spite of being treated with kid gloves by the media, the governments in Washington, London and Canberra are suffering from major credibility deficits. A parliamentary report into the ‘hostage’ crisis some months back has conceded Craig Murray’s point…
Israel’s Primal Myth: The lies about the ethnic cleansing of Palestine
An excellent article on the ethnic cleansing of Palestine by Israel. The myth goes like this: In 1948, when the Arabs attacked the newly declared state of Israel, the Arab population fled by the hundreds of thousands. They left not because of attacks by Israeli soldiers but because of the calls of their own Arab…
Blair’s cold reception
It appears that the new Middle East peace envoy is facing an uphill battle. The title awarded to Blair looks like it will be entirely meaningless. Tony Blair was told by the United States yesterday that he had no authority to tackle political negotiations between the Israelis and Palestinians as he spent his first full…
Laying down the law and then breaking it
How quickly things change. In February, 2001, the Bush State Department issued a highly critical report documenting Russia’s human rights abuses, both domestically and with regard to its treatment of foreign detainees. I found the document randomly today while searching for something else. Among the Russian moral outrages we protested: 1. Monitoring of internet traffic,…
We’re winning, we’re winning, we’re winning. Scratch all that – now we’re winning.
Since day 1, war supporters have insisted that the Bush policies were right on target, so it’s amusing now to hear the same crowd claim to have got it right today, and right when they had it wrong. Greenwald let’s the Bush enablers have it by making an illustrative example of Kit Bond. Bond yesterday:…