Yet more fascinating insights from the recently released Wikileaks documents of Stratfor, published by Lebanon’s… Al Akhbar. One: US government officials requested that an American private security firm contact Syrian opposition figures in Turkey to see “how they can help in regime change,” the CEO of one of these firms told Stratfor in a company email…
Category General
Echoes of Breivik cloud France and race-baiting media and politicians should look in mirror
After last year’s horrific massacre in Norway by Anders Breivik, an attempt to target the Left and multiculturalism, defenders of the status-quo said it was merely the act of a lone lunatic. The book, On Utoya (I wrote a chapter about the far-right’s increasing embrace of Israel) challenged this notion. Now with a horrible shooting…
MSM ignore it but past spin, AfPak war now about face saving for America
Britain’s former ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray cuts through the lies and unloads: UK Defence Secretary Philip Hammond’s visit to Tashkent on 28 February was not covered in any UK mainstream media that I can find, which is peculiar, given the media’s obsession with covering anything to do with “Our heroes” in Afghanistan. It was…
Sri Lanka’s killing fields – unpunished war crimes
The latest in a series of stunning Channel 4 documentaries about war crimes in Sri Lanka (here’s the first part from last year):
Who loves war? Corporations (so thank you America post 9/11)
Turning a profit from war is an old story, way before September 11, 2001, but the last decade has seen an explosion of companies making a killing from countless, Washington-led wars. This recent story in USA Today is a cracking yarn and reveals how deeply problematic is vulture capitalism: As the Pentagon has sought to…
What we do to Afghans every week is terrorism
Michael Hastings: They say [the shooter] has a traumatic brain injury. But what we see on a weekly basis is”¦Afghans being killed. It happens because we have 100,000 troops in Khandahar who know that we’re leaving”¦ If he’s insane, he’s a symptom of an insane policy.
Beijing as world leader in pursuing surveillance state
Since the release of my book The Blogging Revolution (latest edition just out in India) the use by China of Western and local security firms to monitor citizens has only grown. This piece in the New York Times signals the depth of the problem: Chinese cities are rushing to construct their own surveillance systems. Chongqing,…
This is how Obama wants to get Wikileaks and Bradley Manning? Incompetence Inc
What a farce (via Politico): The federal government’s vigilance at preventing anything relating to… WikiLeaks… from appearing on a government computer has tripped up military prosecutors, causing them to miss important emails from the judge and defense involved in the case against an Army intelligence analyst accused of… leaking hundreds of thousands of diplomatic cables and military reports… to…