This is an explosive story that appears to have received no coverage in Australia. So many questions need to be asked. The privatisation of war, the targeting of so-called insurgents by Australians and the involvement of Israeli equipment: Canadian aircrew played a significant, largely unheralded role in helping Australia get its unmanned aerial vehicle program…
Showing all posts tagged Afghanistan
A disaster aka Afghanistan
The kind of letter that Western leaders need to read and appreciate. As the war in Afghanistan fails tragically, blood is on their hands for continuing to pursue imperial policies in a broken land: To the President of the United States: Mr. President, We have been engaged and working inside Afghanistan, some of us for…
Sending Afghan refugees back to their hellish land
Afghanistan is aflame, the country in ruins. So what is the Australian government doing? Sending people back there who, you can be sure, will disappear and be killed. This is all about removing a political issue from our shores, away from prying media interest. Moral bankruptcy on a grand scale: Australia and Afghanistan have finalised…
Australians in London demand immediate release of WikiLeaks founder
I just received the following information: On Monday 13th December at 4.30 pm, concerned Australian academics, artists, activists and expats will deliver a letter of demands to the Australian High Commissioner calling for the Embassy to be proactive in securing the immediate release from custody of fellow Australian citizen and founder of WikiLeaks Julian Assange.…
So this is what the Afghan war is all about
Patrick Cockburn reports in the Independent on the illusion that Western intervention is helping Afghanistan. A few people are getting amazingly rich, especially private firms in the West, but local citizens are not seeing anything. Not hard to see why the insurgency is thriving: The most extraordinary failure of the US-led coalition in Afghanistan is…
Sydney rally for Wikileaks on 14 December
Demonstration to Free Julian Assange and Defend Wikileaks – Sydney Town Hall, Tuesday 14th December, 5.30pm On Tuesday, the Westminster Magistrates’ Court will decide the outcome of Julian Assange’s bail application. Alongside global demonstrations on this day, a rally will be held in Sydney. Spokesperson Antony Loewenstein, an independent journalist and author of My Israel…
We pay drug dealers in Afghanistan
This is what the glorious “war on terror” is all about: When Hajji Juma Khan was arrested and transported to New York to face charges under a new American narco-terrorism law in 2008, federal prosecutors described him as perhaps the biggest and most dangerous drug lord in Afghanistan, a shadowy figure who had helped keep…
Scahill on why Washington and Obama are earning hatred around Islamic world
Leading US reporter Jeremy Scahill, testifying before the US House Judiciary Committee, discusses America’s secret wars in the Muslim world (something highlighted by recent Wikileaks revelations): My name is Jeremy Scahill. I am the National Security correspondent for The Nation magazine. I recently returned from a two-week unembedded reporting trip to Afghanistan. I would like…
Al Jazeera covers Sydney Wikileaks solidarity event
Al Jazeera English covered the Sydney rally for Wikileaks yesterday: Pro-WikiLeaks demonstrations have been held across Australia against the arrest of… Julian Assange, the whistleblowing website’s… founder. In Sydney, around 500 demonstrators [editor; more like 1500 people] gathered on Friday, to push for the release of Assange, who is in a British jail fighting extradition to Sweden…
Wikileaks exposes the bromance between journalists and politics
My following article appears on ABC Unleashed today: Who can now say that the WikiLeaks cables detail no new information? It was only last week that ABC TV’s 7.30 Report featured a story with supposed foreign affairs experts, including the Lowy Institute’s Michael Fullilove, who largely dismissed the significance of the document dump. Within a…