Showing all posts in June 2019

Will the US need to reinstate the draft? The military establishment realise that to maintain troop levels in Iraq and throughout the world, 100,000 more men and women are required. This could be the best thing for the movement against American militarism in decades.

The following is Israeli peace group Gush Shalom’s weekly message to be published tomorrow in Haaretz: After 29 years of occupation, the last Syrian soldier has left Lebanon. The Syrians consider Lebanon part of their “historic homeland”. They thought that their occupation is “irreversible”. Now, suddenly, they were forced to leave. Many Israelis consider the…

Jonathan Steele, the Guardian’s senior foreign correspondent and Dahr Jamail, a freelance American journalist explain the significance of Fallujah and the price paid in that “hotbed” of anti-American insurgency. We still don’t know the true cost of American attacks. Casualty figures vary wildly, but thousands of civilians may have been murdered. This town, the “symbol…

Many in the mainstream media shun bloggers, content believing that by burying their head in the sand, the online revolution will simply disappear. No such luck, cultural heathens. Most bloggers have no corporate affiliation, are independently funded and can speak their mind freely, without having to toe the company line. True independence within the corporate…

Gorilla in the Room continues its essential role in discussing the unmentionable. They highlight a startling article in Haaretz by Efraim Halevy, former head of the Mossad and now Ariel Sharon’s national security advisor. In a candid piece aimed at an Israeli audience, Halevy analyses the desired future role of the US in the Middle…

Baghdad-based Patrick Cockburn writes in the UK Independent that US troops are continuing to kill Iraqis with impunity, unlikely to be prosecuted or even investigated: “We should end the immunity of US soldiers here,” says Dr Mahmoud Othman, a veteran Kurdish politician who argues that the failure to prosecute American soldiers who have killed civilians…

The Sydney Morning Herald (SMH) claims to be Australia’s finest newspaper. Interesting, therefore, that the latest circulation figures show a massive decline in readership. The weekday SMH lost 3.5% to just over 214,000 copies, while the Saturday edition shed a massive 5.4% to 352,482. There is trouble in Fairfax land. With speculation rife that management…

Union of Arab Community-Based Associations (Ittijah) has prepared a petition to the governments of the United States and the European Union calling on them not to support Israel’s “Development Plan for the Galilee and Naqab (Negev)”. The full petition can be read in English here. The petition states that Israel’s plan for “development” of these…

Are the Americans keeping a body count in Iraq? Despite denying the fact for years – and Tommy Franks, former head of US Central Command, once saying that the US army “don’t do body counts”, a requirement under the Geneva Conventions – murdered humanitarian worker Marla Ruzicka claimed in a recent essay that the US…

US-based Judicial Watch reports: “The Federal Bureau of Investigation (“FBI”) has invoked privacy right protections on behalf of al Qaeda terror leader Osama bin Laden. In a September 24, 2003 declassified “Secret” FBI report obtained by Judicial Watch, the FBI invoked Exemption 6 under FOIA law on behalf of bin Laden, which permits the government…