Leading Australian journalist Sally Neighbour investigates the presumed mastermind behind last week’s hotel bombings in Jakarta, Noordin Mohammed Top: Top is known not only as a master of disguise and skilled escape artist who has eluded an Indonesian police dragnet for seven years. He is also a logistical and technical mastermind and, even more troubling,…
Showing all posts tagged Afghanistan
Beating people into believing the Afghan dream
Rory Stewart writes in the London Review of Books about the illusion of bringing “democracy” to Afghanistan: When we are not presented with a dystopian vision, we are encouraged to be implausibly optimistic. ”˜There can be only one winner: democracy and a strong Afghan state,’ Gordon Brown predicted in his most recent speech on the…
The war on terror started well before 9/11
Jeremy Scahill reminds us that illegality crosses both sides of the US political divide: Members of Congress have expressed outrage over the “secret” CIA assassination program that former vice president Dick Cheney allegedly ordered concealed from Congress. But this program — and the media descriptions of it — sounds a lot like the assassination policy…
Jewish journalist would like the chance to pull the trigger
Conservative blogger Michael Totten interviews Zionist journalist and war-enabler Jeffrey Goldberg. They talk about many things, including occupation, Iraq, bombing Iran, Judaism, bombing Iran, Palestinian hatred of Israel, Hamas and the bombing of Iran. Welcome to the insulated and aggressive world of cocooned Zionism: Goldberg: And here’s the thing. Netanyahu doesn’t want to endanger the…
Obama in Cairo
My following article was published today on the popular US website Mondoweiss: Back in 2005, then US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice gave a rousing speech at Cairo’s American University. “For sixty years”, she argued, “my country, the United States, pursued stability at the expense of democracy in this region here in the Middle East…
When having an enemy is far more important
Axil of Evil, indeed: Iran supplied U.S. diplomats with the location of Taliban military units in Afghanistan after the initial bombing campaign… in the fall of 2001… failed to rout them, according to former officials in the George W. Bush administration.
A meeting of the minds
Pakistan’s finest journalist on militancy, Syed Saleem Shahzad, on the region’s dark future: The militants plan to establish a new regional alliance. In this regard, Iranian Jundullah (Army of God) leader Abdul Malik Rigi is due to meet an al-Qaeda emissary in the near future near a Pakistani Balochistan coastal town to lay the foundation…
Nobody said Washington was clever
Just another day of “oops, we did it again” by the US empire, courtesy of the New York Times: Arms sent by U.S. may be falling into Taliban hands.
Gee, our boys drop bombs well
Fair and Accuracy in Reporting explains how most of the corporate media treats murders committed by the virtuous US military: Early reports of a massive U.S. attack on civilians in western Afghanistan last week (5/5/09) hewed to a familiar corporate media formula, stressing official U.S. denials and framing the scores of dead civilians as a…