The silent heroes who report on inept and criminal Western wars: Stringers in Afghanistan, where I am the correspondent for al-Jazeera, are the eyes and ears of the world’s media. Without them, getting a picture of what is going on outside Kabul is almost impossible for a western journalist. Most correspondents don’t often stray from…
Your friendly financial institution assists killers
Did you know that one of Australia’s major banks, ANZ, is funding companies that make cluster bombs?
Here’s what Iraqis need; iTunes
Here’s a plan. Invade a country. Destroy the infrastructure. Refuse to compensate. Remain an occupier. Computer anybody? The shipment of laptop computers that arrived in Iraq’s main seaport in February was a small but important part of the American military’s mission here to win hearts and minds. What happened afterward is a tale of good…
It is your patriotic duty to provide weapons of death to the state
The privatisation of war is an ugly business, pushed by governments keen to pursue a “war on terror” with no end in sight and virtually no accountability: The CIA is implicated in a court case in which it’s claimed it used an illegal, inaccurate software “hack” to direct secret assassination drones in central Asia. The…
Mental health cure isn’t available with a pill
My following book review appeared in yesterday’s Sydney Sun Herald: Crazy Like Us Ethan Watters Scribe, $35 About one in five adult Australians will experience mental illness at some point. In the US, about 27 per cent of people aged 18 and older suffer from a mental disorder each year. These are startling figures that…
Tutu on why we must isolate complicit Israeli universities
The moral beacon Desmond Tutu on the moral responsibility to take a stand against Israel, an apartheid state that conjures up ugly historical comparisons: ‘The temptation in our situation is to speak in muffled tones about an issue such as the right of the people of Palestine to a state of their own. We can…
The Sri Lankan Mark Regev steps right up
Welcoming (some) Tamils to Australia and Colombo’s Israel-style Canberra ambassador (aka the least credible man this side of Mark Regev’s identical brother):
Hold Western military powers to account (and the Hague beckons)
The message is clear; Western powers can’t be exempt from thorough examinations of their war crimes. Hardly a revolutionary idea and yet such plans are virtually absent from “polite” discussions: A United Nations investigation into alleged war crimes in Afghanistan should be launched to identify and prosecute individuals responsible, says a former top-ranking UN official…
Selling every public asset isn’t a pretty prospect
Praying to the privatisation religion is a global trend, largely unquestioned and hopelessly mixed in result. Here’s the latest debate in New York city: In the face of drastic cuts in the Metropolitan Transit Authority’s bus service, the Bloomberg administration recently decided to allow private vans to carry passengers along several routes in Brooklyn and…