A stunning investigation by the Washington Post on what the American war in Afghanistan has supported; one of the most brutal thugs in the country: In Afghanistan, his presence was enough to cause prisoners to tremble. Hundreds in his organization’s custody were beaten, shocked with electrical currents or subjected to other abuses documented in human…
Category General
We know too little about US drone attacks
My weekly Guardian column: The news that the US had killed two Australian “militants” in a drone strike was… announced… in mid-April.… Christopher Havard… and “Muslim bin John”, who… also held… New Zealand citizenship, were allegedly killed by a CIA-led airstrike in eastern Yemen in November last year. Readers were given little concrete information, apart from a “counter-terrorism source” who claimed…
The NSA wants to spy on everything and everybody
Former head of the NSA Keith Alexander (a man who proudly designed a system, with full political backing, to spy on citizens in America and globally) is interviewed by John Oliver in a witty and revealing way; yes, he wants you to feel comfortable with mass surveillance:
Remembering historical and present war wrongs
My weekly Guardian column: The Australian government recently… successfully blocked the release… of sensitive documents that would have revealed the complicity of Indonesian forces in massive abuses during their… occupation of East Timor. Canberra directed the National Archives to refuse the request of University of NSW associate professor Clinton Fernandes to see internal Australian files on Indonesian military…
Making a killing from climate change
My following book review appeared in the Melbourne Age/Sydney Morning Herald last weekend: Windfall: The Booming Business of Global Warming… MCKENZIE FUNK… PENGUIN PRESS, $29.99 Who says global warming is bad for the world? The recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report found widespread and consequential effects on food systems and ecosystems, with detrimental ramifications…
Why the Pulitzer for the Snowden stories is a no-brainer
Yes, to all of this, by Amy Davidson in The New Yorker: Awarding the Pulitzer for public service to the… Guardian… and the Washington… Post… should go down as about the easiest call the prize committee has ever had to make. It would have been a scandal, this year, if there had been… no… Pulitzer related to the documents that Edward…
Why Wall Street thugs get away with stealing billions
One of the best investigative journalists around, Matt Taibbi, has a new book out, The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap.… He explains the how and why of successive US administrations turning a blind eye to Wall Street criminality. It’s vulture capitalism on a massive scale. Here’s Taibbi’s interview with Democracy Now!:
FBI Radio interview feature on privatised immigration detention
The issue of privatised immigration detention in Australia and globally is one subject of my book Profits of Doom. Sydney’s FBI Radio Backchat program produced a strong feature on the issue last weekend and interviewed me about it:
On racism, how to tackle it and why the state often worsens it
My weekly Guardian column: As an atheist Jew, I find it distinctly uncomfortable to defend the free speech rights of Holocaust deniers. I utterly oppose the inaccuracy, hatred and intolerance that goes with refuting the reality of Nazi crimes against Jews, gay people, Gypsies and many others. But a truly free society is one that…
What is the author's voice and where the hell is it living?
I was invited last October by the Australian Society of Authors to speak at their national congress on the role of writing, journalism and being an author. The video has just been posted (!): Much modern publishing is based on a commercial model, and has relied on authors to deliver sales and profits. Yet authors…