How we all miss the good old days? Useful idiot dictator longs for an unquestioning, clueless Washington elite to prop up his regime (not that the Obama administration is much different): Longing for the early years of the Bush administration, Afghan President Hamid Karzai has been consumed by anti-U.S. conspiracy theories, convinced American officials are…
Showing all posts tagged Afghanistan
Australia engaged in ugly business in Afghanistan
How much faith do we have in intelligence gathering in Afghanistan? Scores to be settled by locals? Frankly, somebody designated as an “enemy” by Western forces may not be anything of the sort, simply a legitimate resistance to foreign occupation. Besides, the West is in bed with a Kabul government backed and run by drug…
Australia knows Afghanistan is a mess, Wikileaks shows
No wonder so many in positions of power fear Wikileaks. What we are seeing is diplomacy and statecraft laid bare. And the results are devastating. We are lied to on a daily basis. And what of the countless corporate journalists taken on embedded trips to Afghanistan, simply “reporting” futile battles and tiny details that ignore…
The minor taste of accountability in Afghanistan
Expect these kinds of stories to happen far more often. Lawless contractors in a lawless land is a recipe for disaster: Afghan authorities arrested an employee of a British private security company this week and sentenced him to eight months in jail, the latest move in the government’s crackdown on private security firms. Global Strategies…
Iraq and Afghanistan come to American streets and homes
The future has arrived. Another installment in the stunning Washington Post series, Top Secret America called Monitoring America, on the bleeding of the “war on terror” into mainstream US life. Often privatised, mostly secret. This is the creation of a truly all-seeing police state in a so-called democracy: The months-long investigation, based on nearly 100…
ABC TV News 24 on refugees and government failures
I was invited back on ABC TV News24’s The Drum tonight with host Waleed Aly and guests Jo Stella and ABC journalist Gillian Bradford (video here). We talked mostly about domestic politics especially asylum seekers and the parlous state of refugee policy on both major sides of parliament. I argued that Labor has spent the…
Are journalists leaders or followers over war?
Lesson number one; never trust the corporate press to accurately report our illegal wars. The latest figures from the US media are depressing and reflect the unhealthy tendency to base coverage of war zones around Washington’s dictates. Obama says the Iraq war is winding down (even though the occupation continues) so we better move to…
David Hicks shows us what we became after 9/11
My following book review appeared in yesterday’s Sydney’s Sun Herald newspaper: AUTOBIOGRAPHY Guantanamo: My Journey David Hicks (William Heinemann, $49.95) Reviewed by Antony Loewenstein Almost 10 years after the Bush administration launched the ”˜”˜war on terror’’, the victims of the policy remain largely voiceless. The unknown number of civilians murdered by Western bombs have no…
Our wars are being controlled by somebody else
The massive expansion of privatised military forces since 9/11 is largely unreported. Death squads paid for by tax dollars. American journalist Tim Shorrock examines this huge expansion in the age of Obama. It’s a world that is so bloated and so reliant on endless American wars that it’s no wonder the arms and defence industries…
Just watched Pilger’s The War You Don’t See
It’s a powerful indictment of journalists keen to sell war. Many reporters and officials admit they were propagandists for conflict and occupation, defending the state to get close to power and good access. Pilger weaves devastation of Iraq/Afghanistan/Palestine with reporters who embed with the state to sell the message. Little shame there. New interview with…