Showing all posts tagged Afghanistan
What’s Australia’s real role in pursuing “war on terror” in Muslim world?
Back in November I broke a story that detailed covert Australian missions across the Middle East, mostly off the books and often skirting legality. Today’s piece in the Sydney Morning Herald by Rafael Epstein appears to add important points to the role Australia is playing alongside the US and Britain in these war zones but…
The West has much to learn post Bin Laden death
My following article appears in today’s ABC’s The Drum: The triumphalism after the American targeted assassination of Osama bin Laden is a sure sign that the US is incapable of understanding the significance of the painful years since September 11. We suffered and now you must, too. “I’ve never been so excited to see the…
Obama’s Israelification of foreign policy
Killing “enemies” whenever and wherever you want. That’s the Israeli way. Leading American journalist Jeremy Scahill writes that the US President has accelerated covert methods in the last years in a futile effort to safeguard America. The opposite result is guaranteed: Both President Bush and President Obama have reserved the right for US forces to…
What a real political party does; enforce human rights norms in Palestine
Following the circus of Sydney’s Marrickville council and its (brief) embrace of Palestinian rights through BDS, major questions remain; what will it take for a major political party, such as the Greens, to place human rights at the centre of its being? What excuses will be made to avoid this? And what “red lines” will…
Not all resistance to Western occupation is terrorism
And nowhere is that clearer in Afghanistan, where the Taliban, as vile as it often is, is not the same as Al-Qaeda (or Hamas or Hizbollah or Iran). Our political and media classes have largely failed post 9/11 to even try to understand Islamism or resistance: Considering how closely tied their histories have been, the…
Bin Laden didn’t use wife as human shield (thanks White House for that)
This will help US credibility: A woman killed during the raid of Osama bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan was not his wife and was not used as a human shield by the al Qaeda leader before his death, a U.S. official said on Monday, correcting an earlier description. John Brennan, President Barack Obama’s top counter-…
Our tax dollars used to back Facebook pages urging war and liberation
How much money is spent by our governments to support the noble wars fought in our name? Michael Hastings is a leading American investigative journalist who likes nothing more than uncovering the lies and spin told by US officials to back conflicts globally. In a recent interview with US magazine Guernica, he further uncovers these…
Hold the champagne, Bin Laden’s murder doesn’t remove Western occupation of Muslim lands
Time.com’s Tony Karon, one of the most perceptive journalists in the American mainstream, writes that the US killing of Osama Bin Laden is all about symbolism and will do nothing to help the Western position in the Arab world: Before leaving for a vacation in South Africa in December of 2001, my editor asked me…
In case it wasn’t clear; Australia is America’s bitch
Really: Australia secretly worked with the United States to weaken a key international treaty to ban cluster bombs, leaked US diplomatic cables show. Despite taking a high-profile stance against cluster munitions – condemned as the cause of large numbers of civilian casualties – Australia was privately prepared to pull out of international negotiations on a…