With customary passion, Robert Fisk on the real significance of the Wikleaks Iraq dump: As usual, the Arabs knew. They knew all about the mass torture, the promiscuous shooting of civilians, the outrageous use of air power against family homes, the vicious American and British mercenaries, the cemeteries of the innocent dead. All of Iraq…
Serco and G4S are peas from the same pod
In Australian political life, only the Greens are hammering away against the privatisation of detention centres: Australia’s immigration detention system is failing, and this makes the need for transparency greater than ever, according to Senator Sarah Hanson-Young. Senator Hanson-Young, Greens spokesperson on Immigration, says she is concerned at reports that immigration service provider SERCO may…
Online dissent is being crushed (and we don’t feel fine)
My 2008 book, The Blogging Revolution, documented the rise of web censorship across the world and those fighting against it. Tragically, the problem is only getting worse in Asia and rest assured many Western web multinationals are involved: Governments across south-east Asia are following China‘s authoritarian censorship of the digital world to keep political dissent…
They torture, we ignore
How we built a Western-backed, torturing nation: How the newly released US military files reveal an instruction to ignore detainee abuse by Iraqi authorities.
Of course Iran wants to challenge Washington on the streets of Iraq
Why are we surprised that Iran worked to influence events in Iraq after the 2003 invasion? Wikileaks shows the extent of Tehran’s understandable role. When America invades a country, it’s called liberation. When Iran “meddles” in Iraq’s internal affairs, it’s called terrorism.
Thank you for outsourcing and protecting our imperial wars
Private mercenaries have been integral to the “war on terror”, so much so that Western aid groups are warning the Afghan government that without them the country will miss billions of dollars in aid: More than a billion dollars worth of aid projects in Afghanistan will have to be cancelled by the end of the…
Wikileaks Iraq logs reveals democracy an after-thought (at best)
Mmm: In a telling, if not surprising finding, Der Spiegel reports that, in the 391,832 documents, the word “democracy” appears only eight times—improvised explosive devices are mentioned 146,895 times.
Washington has no clue how to resolve Israel/Palestine
Seriously, if this is the Middle East “peace process”, we’re all doomed: In perhaps the shortest round of peace negotiations in the history of their conflict, talks between the Israelis and Palestinians have ground to a halt and show little sign of resuming. Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas haven’t…
Serco discovers that detention centres are so yesterday’s market
That’s right, Serco now sees the health sector as a new area in which to profit. Clearly increased public funding on health is a controversial idea in the 21st century: The [Western Australian] State Government has named private company Serco Australia as its preferred option to provide non-clinical support services to the $2 billion Fiona…
Does Obama really want to know that his army kill innocents?
What a government with accountability would do is determine what its soldiers may have done in war and investigate. Not stonewall or ignore or deny. “Our boys”, from Britain, America and Australia, have committed countless abuses in the last ten years in the “war on terror”: The UN has called on Barack Obama to order…