Via The Navy Times: The Pentagon has retained its top propaganda contractor in Afghanistan for $60 million over the next year even as the company remains under criminal investigation by the military’s inspector general and its co-owner has been suspended from receiving military contracts. The military has maintained its ties to Leonie because the company…
Showing all posts tagged Afghanistan
Watch the mining vultures start to circle Afghanistan
This was inevitable (via Reuters): Exxon Mobil Corp (XOM.N) is contemplating participation in an oil and gas tender of six blocks in northern Afghanistan, a company spokesman said on Monday. Access to the world’s oil reserves for companies like Exxon has gotten tougher in recent years as governments assert tighter control of their resources. Opportunity…
The clueless American war in Afghanistan
An extract from a new book by Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Little America: The War Within the War for Afghanistan, author of the … startling book about the disastrous Iraq invasion, Imperial Life in the Emerald City: When Richard Holbrooke became the Obama administration’s Afghanistan point man in January 2009, Summer Coish was keen to join his civilian…
#LeftTurn tackled by Socialist Alternative
The following review of #LeftTurn appears in Socialist Alternative by Tom O’Lincoln: Review:… Left Turn: political essays for the new left.Antony Loewenstein and Jeff Sparrow (eds), Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 2012 Capitalism is complicated, and so are the challenges to it. So a book like… Left Turn, offering an array of agenda-setting arguments, is bound to be…
My 2012 PEN Free Voices lecture on free speech and why it matters
The following is published today as the lead piece by ABC’s The Drum: The two-hour drive from Islamabad to Peshawar is along a surprisingly smooth road. Mud-brick homes sit amongst lush, green fields. Police checkpoints are set up routinely to stop unwanted visitors. I am asked why I want to see the troubled Pakistani town…
Drone killings; justice must be done soon
This is Barack Obama’s legacy (via the Guardian): The US policy of using aerial drones to carry out targeted killings presents a major challenge to the system of international law that has endured since the second world war, a… United Nations… investigator has said. Christof Heyns, the UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial killings, summary or arbitrary executions,…
America’s drone war is both counter-productive and brutal
My following article appears in Lebanon’s Al Akhbar: America’s drone war has countless silent victims. Since President Barack Obama massively expanded his reliance on the weapon from 2009, the number of civilians killed in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Somalia and Yemen have sky-rocketed, but we rarely hear about these murders. The Western corporate media is content rehashing…
ABCTV News24’s The Drum on refugees, #LeftTurn and Obama’s “kill list”
I appeared last night on ABC TV News24’s The Drum (video here) alongside ABC’s Stephen Long and The Australian’s… Adam Creighton. We talked about asylum seekers – I argued that keeping refugees for longer in detention will only benefit the private contractor Serco and worsen the mental health of both staff and detainees. Regarding austerity in…
America’s drone war is all about creating illusion of global power
Patrick Cockburn in the Independent: As the US and its allies ponder what to do about Syria, one suggestion advanced by the protagonists of armed intervention is to use unmanned drones to attack Syrian government targets. The proposal is a measure of the extraordinary success of the White House, CIA and Defense Department in selling…