Remember this next time any US official talks about accountability in other nations (via the New York Times): Attorney General… Eric H. Holder Jr.… announced Thursday that no one would be prosecuted for the deaths of a prisoner in Afghanistan in 2002 and another in Iraq in 2003, eliminating the last possibility that any criminal charges will…
Category General
Problem alert; New York Times “journalist” shared pre-publication article with CIA
Unless there is some stunningly effective explanation, which is highly unlikely, this story (via Politico) is almost the perfect example of the ever-deepening collusion and over-sharing between mainstream reporters and the intelligence services. This isn’t journalism: Newly available CIA records obtained by Judicial Watch, the conservative watchdog group, reveal that New York Times reporter Mark…
Don’t believe that Sri Lanka has become more democratic
Read here for an incredibly brave human rights worker, Ruki Fernando, explaining the reasons why Sri Lanka remains mired in despotism: This is how our society used to behave and think during the war. There were hardly any concern in the south about the Tamil victims when horrendous things were happening, because people simply wanted…
US arms the world but Iran is the threat?
The evidence is clear; Washington fuels more conflicts globally than Tehran could ever hope to do: Weapons sales by the United States tripled in 2011 to a record high, driven by major arms sales to Persian Gulf allies concerned about… Iran’s regional ambitions, according to a new study for Congress. Overseas weapons sales by the United…
Breivik both sane and deeply connected to now mainstream Islamophobic discourse
Last year I wrote a chapter on the far right and Israel in an ebook, On Utoya, on the massacre in Norway committed by Andres Breivik. With the verdict now in, one of the book’s co-editors, Tad Tietze, has written a piece in the Guardian that provides the necessary political context: There are many reasons…
America’s chronic inability/unwillingness to build stuff that lasts
Powerful indictment of Washington by Peter Van Buren in TomDispatch about the privatisation disease that sweeps the world and delivers little except profits to a group of corporations. This is what imperialism means in the 21st century: With the success of the post-World War II Marshall Plan in Europe and the economic miracle in Japan,…
BBC Persian TV interview on Israeli threats against Iran
Here’s my interview in London on BBC Persian TV on 21 August 2012 (starts at 11:26) about Iran’s relationship with Israel, Netanyahu’s threats against the Islamic Republic and the avoidance of the real issue in the Middle East; the Palestinians. I argue that an Israeli or American military strike against Iran would be disastrous and…
Feigning care for human rights while condemning Wikileaks and Ecuador
The Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald nails it: Readers of the American and British press over the past month have been inundated with righteous condemnations of Ecuador‘s poor record on press freedoms. Is this because western media outlets have suddenly developed a new-found devotion to defending civil liberties in Latin America? Please. To pose the question is…
Understanding elite hostility to Wikileaks and Julian Assange
Important column by Seumas Milne in the Guardian (a newspaper that has continually smeared Assange): Considering he made his name with the biggest leak of secret government documents in history, you might imagine there would be at least some residual concern for Julian Assange among those trading in the freedom of information business. But the…