Shameful: Hayatollah is supposed to be teaching history and geography for grades six to nine at the Kahrezak Secondary School, located 60 kilometres from Chaghcharan, the provincial centre of Ghor province in central Afghanistan . But when asked to identify Ahmad Shah Durrani, the first king of Afghanistan, the 22-year-old teacher replied with a smile…
Category General
This is what military contractors think of journalism in the US
A disturbing story that reveals the danger real journalism poses to the vulture capitalists in our “democracies”: A USA TODAY reporter and editor investigating Pentagon propaganda contractors have themselves been subjected to a propaganda campaign of sorts, waged on the Internet through a series of bogus websites. Fake Twitter and Facebook accounts have been created…
Clear intent for CIA to commit terrorism in Yemen
Just think about the ramifications of this first paragraph in a Washington Post story: The CIA is seeking authority to expand its covert drone campaign in Yemen by launching strikes against terrorism suspects even when it does not know the identities of those who could be killed, U.S. officials said.
The kindly Washington gift to dysfunctional Pakistan
Today’s Pakistan is a nation with various sources of power but the intelligence services, ISI, are who truly controls the place. Dilip Hiro writes in TomDispatch about who has been largely funding this degradation since 9/11: It is common knowledge that Pakistani judges, fearing for their lives, generally refrain from convicting high-profile jihadists with political…
First Julian Assange TV interview is with Hizbollah leader
A brave first call. Julian Assange speaks to Hassan Nasrallah and doesn’t take the position, as so much of the corporate media, that he’s one of the world’s greatest terrorists (which he clearly is not). They discuss Syria, Assad, Israel, Palestine, religion, God, technology, Wikileaks and the US. Assange could be more forceful with his…
We invaded your country and after more than 10 years we can’t even get a t-shirt?
More than 10 years occupying Afghanistan and the US remains mostly incapable of providing security to the Afghan people. That’s what you call failed imperialism. I saw it myself during my recent visit to the country, large areas where the presence of foreign troops only brings instability. A good example of this is revealed in…
Why Assange wants to host his own talk-show
I like the fact that somebody, without the typical media background, can host a program and not subscribe to the usual mainstream media obsessions:
Private militias polluting Pakistan
My following investigation is the lead story on Lebanon’s Al-Akhbar English: The past decade has seen a significant increase in foreign investments in the private security market around the Middle East. Pakistan is one of the countries that attracted the most attention in this global mercenary business. The American killing of Osama bin Laden last…
What I saw in Afghanistan researching disaster capitalism
I’ve just returned from Afghanistan where I was independently investigating the role of the war economy and vulture capitalism since 2001. I’ve never been to a country like it; Beautiful, suffering under Western occupation, Taliban attacks, deep conservatism, poverty and US-empowered warlords. I met Afghan civilians who had suffered at the hands of private mercenaries,…
Britain being transformed into an unaccountable, privatised mess
One (via Open Democracy): My post yesterday about G4S… recruiting ex-police officers to run cut-price murder investigations… [9]… ran with a rather shocking image: epaulettes emblazoned with the red, white and black G4S company logo above the words (in much smaller type): “LINCOLNSHIRE POLICE”. G4S dominant and on top, as it were. I guessed that the image (first…