Robert Fisk gave the following speech at the Al-Jazeera annual forum in Doha a few days ago: Power and the media are not just about cosy relationships between journalists and political leaders, between editors and presidents. They are not just about the parasitic-osmotic relationship between supposedly honourable reporters and the nexus of power that runs…
Showing all posts tagged Afghanistan
Starting to look at the torture regime led by London
What Britain is now doing. Let’s not be under any illusions about a Tory Minister allegedly looking into torture by a previous government – after all, major parties in most democracies usually protect the other from serious investigations into foreign policy issues – but such events aren’t happening in the US or Australia: The judicial…
Who helps us torturing “terror suspects?” Hint: Egypt and Israel
Robert Fisk on our friends in the “war on terror”: I began my column last week with the words “We know all about Guantanamo”. I was wrong. Courtesy of the Toronto press – until a few days ago, when half of them were censored out of the drumhead courts martial that pass for “justice” in…
Believing the Obama dream: torture techniques come for free
President Barack Obama has maintained a network of torture-prisons during his “war on terror”, including a secret prison in Afghanistan. President Bush and President Obama; different Presidents, same criminality.
Americans murdering Afghans, says Seymour Hersh
The journalist who helped break the story that detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq were being tortured by their US jailers told an audience at a journalism conference last month that American soldiers are now executing prisoners in Afghanistan. New Yorker journalist Seymour Hersh also revealed that the Bush Administration had developed advanced…
Why internet censorship is a fool’s paradise
My following article is published today by the Sydney Morning Herald/Age online: We live under the illusion that governments can protect us from the evils of the world. Paedophilia, extreme violence, lessons in self-harm and suicide, race hatred and terrorism. We have every right to expect governments to monitor hate and terror sites and arrest…
A government that shuns asylum seekers deserves sanction
Last weekend Australia’s leading unions sent a letter to Prime Minister Kevin Rudd demanding a more humane response to refugees (the story is covered in today’s Sydney Morning Herald): Dear Prime Minister, We are writing to express our concern at the growing stance of indifference towards and demonisation of asylum seekers from both sides of…
Shouts of war in Australia for those noble battles
John Pilger on Australia’s infantile relationship with foreign wars: Staring at the vast military history section of the airport shop, I had a choice: the derring-do of psychopaths or scholarly tomes with their illicit devotion to the cult of organised killing. There was nothing I recognised from reporting war. Nothing on the spectacle of children’s…
How Blackwater would like to police the world
The ongoing saga over private military contractor Blackwater continues (mostly exposed by journalist Jeremy Scahill) in this exclusive report: Erik Prince, the reclusive owner of the Blackwater empire, rarely gives public speeches and when he does he attempts to ban journalists from attending and forbids recording or videotaping of his remarks. On May 5, that…
Debating Zionism’s boundaries
My following essay appears in the current edition of Jewish, American magazine Tikkun: IMPOSSIBLE PEACE: ISRAEL/PALESTINE SINCE 1989 by Mark LeVine Zed Books, 2009 THE MAKING OF MODERN ISRAEL, 1948–1967 by Leslie Stein Polity, 2009 POLITICS AND VIOLENCE IN ISRAEL/PALESTINE: DEMOCRACY VERSUS MILITARY RULE by Lev Luis Grinberg Routledge, 2009 ISRAEL AND PALESTINE: REAPPRAISALS, REVISIONS,…