The real cost of outsourcing asylum seeker care is more pain

How unsurprising. Shocking cases of mistreatment in Britain’s detention system, most of which are run by private companies, such as Serco. But let’s not have a robust debate about whether multinationals should be managing people coming from torture and trauma: Millions of pounds in compensation is being paid to migrants who have been traumatised after…

How we rely on local journalists to show our stupidity

The silent heroes who report on inept and criminal Western wars: Stringers in Afghanistan, where I am the correspondent for al-Jazeera, are the eyes and ears of the world’s media. Without them, getting a picture of what is going on outside Kabul is almost impossible for a western journalist. Most correspondents don’t often stray from…

Here’s what Iraqis need; iTunes

Here’s a plan. Invade a country. Destroy the infrastructure. Refuse to compensate. Remain an occupier. Computer anybody? The shipment of laptop computers that arrived in Iraq’s main seaport in February was a small but important part of the American military’s mission here to win hearts and minds. What happened afterward is a tale of good…

It is your patriotic duty to provide weapons of death to the state

The privatisation of war is an ugly business, pushed by governments keen to pursue a “war on terror” with no end in sight and virtually no accountability: The CIA is implicated in a court case in which it’s claimed it used an illegal, inaccurate software “hack” to direct secret assassination drones in central Asia. The…

Mental health cure isn’t available with a pill

My following book review appeared in yesterday’s Sydney Sun Herald: Crazy Like Us Ethan Watters Scribe, $35 About one in five adult Australians will experience mental illness at some point. In the US, about 27 per cent of people aged 18 and older suffer from a mental disorder each year. These are startling figures that…

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