The US of A. Salon’s Glenn Greenwald with a terrifying story that should concern any person who believes in the concept of free speech: One of the more extreme government abuses of the post-9/11 era targets U.S. citizens re-entering their own country, and it has received far too little attention. With no oversight or legal…
Category General
Australia sharing disaster capitalism skills with Afghanistan
Dispiriting news. Australia, apparently so proud of exploiting resources, now wants to share this knowledge with a poor nation such as Afghanistan that is open to vulture capitalists. The Australian reports: Afghanistan is looking to the Australian mining industry for instruction and investment as the war-torn nation stakes its stability and economic future on the…
Hello, we’re America and we rather love torturing people
Strong New York Times editorial against the shameful “terror” trials held by the US in the “land of the free”: The Pentagon’s prosecutors formally charged Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and four other men last week with war crimes for planning and carrying out the murder of 2,976 people on Sept. 11, 2001, and referred their case…
Australians deserve truth about Afghanistan (and media and political complicity in the mess)
Australia is ruled by craven fools, desperate to shield the public from the reality of the war in Afghanistan. We lost years ago. The Sunday Age: Australian officials have rejected an expert report critical of conditions in Afghanistan, demanding that it be rewritten to match upbeat government claims of dramatic progress and improved security. The…
Only military force will keep PNG LNG on track
The political situation in Papua New Guinea remains tortured but one thing is constant; resource exploitation. PNG’s Gary Juffa writes in a powerful Facebook post that history appears to be repeating itself and disaster capitalism must be resisted: It appears that the lessons from Bougainville have yet to be learned. In an announcement this week,…
How to leave Afghanistan, and soon
Well, that’s one view about the war in Afghanistan, by Anatol Lieven in the New York Review of Books: The attempt by US-led NATO forces in 2001 and 2002 to create a strong Pashtun alternative to the Taliban from among former Mujahedin forces failed because so many had either disgraced themselves by their oppressive policies…
When America trains a terrorist organisation and Israel joins in
How Washington supports and trains an organisation that kills civilians and the Zionist state is along for the ride. There’s a word for this; terrorism. Cracking Seymour Hersh piece in the New Yorker: From the air, the terrain of the Department of Energy’s Nevada National Security Site, with its arid high plains and remote mountain…
What privatisation does to the prisoner’s soul
The rise of privatised detention centres and prisons globally is an issue that receives far too little scrutiny in the media (yesterday’s Al Jazeera’s The Stream was a notable exception). The profit motive inevitably skews priorities. Here’s a great piece from this week’s New York Times by Thomas Gammeltoft-Hansen that asks the necessary questions: Immigration… control…
Perfect case study of NYT echoing Washington on Iran
The role of real journalists is to question every allegation made by officials of whatever stripe. If you work for the New York Times, however, you like to give anonymity to a motley collection of “American officials” to talk about allegedly malign Iranian influence on the world. Because of course Washington’s influence is so benign…
Reality and rhetoric in Afghanistan
Charles Glass in Harpers nails it: The week of March 20 was supposed to have been Afghanistan’s first without private-security companies on its soil since the American invasion of 2001. However, a few months ago, the Afghan government delayed for a second time its implementation of Presidential Decree 62, promulgated in August 2010, which called…