My latest New Matilda column is about the myth of “humanitarian intervention”: Last week’s Australian withdrawal of combat troops from Iraq saw a flurry of establishment commentary on the rights and wrongs of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s decision. Former Foreign Minister Alexander Downer wrote that, “despite the problems” in the war-torn country, “Australians should be…
Showing all posts tagged Afghanistan
Hiding the killing
Several soldiers who have returned from combat zones talk with the American News Project about what they say is the widespread practice of using “drop weapons” to cover up the killing of innocent civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan:
How much guilt can one country handle?
Clive Stafford Smith, attorney, Democracy Now!: …According to the most recent official figures, the United States is currently holding 27,000 secret prisoners around the world…
As the wheels start to fall off
The Islamic Republic may soon be targeted by the Bush administration: There is considerable speculation and buzz in Washington today suggesting that the National Security Council has agreed in principle to proceed with plans to attack an Iranian al-Qods-run camp that is believed to be training Iraqi militants. The camp that will be targeted is…
The changing of the guard
Robert Fisk in the London Independent on the current crisis in Lebanon: Another American humiliation. The Shia gunmen who drove past my apartment in west Beirut yesterday afternoon were hooting their horns, making V-signs, leaning out of the windows of SUVs with their rifles in the air, proving to the Muslims of the capital that…
Hope (in the form of freedom bombs)
Raw Story provides necessary context to the latest missive from US Vice President Dick Cheney: George W. Bush has made the world a more hopeful place. This from Vice President Dick Cheney, who spoke to a crowd of Oklahoma Republicans Friday evening. “When the history is written, it will be said this is a safer…
A family affair
My latest New Matilda column is about the Bin Laden family and its influence in the world: The Western world still understands little about the motivations behind the September 11, 2001 attacks nearly seven years after the fact. American journalist Steve Coll, a Pulitzer Prize winner, foreign correspondent, Washington Post managing editor and contributor to…
Israel meet Iraq
US Vice President Dick Cheney issues a typically bellicose pronouncement about the “war on terror”: An ideological struggle is underway and in that struggle we can be confident we are doing the right thing. We are confronting the violence, protecting the innocent, liberating the oppressed, and aiding the rise of freedom and democracy as America…
How can we sell your botched war?
The New York Times features a stunning report in today’s edition, on the Pentagon’s manipulation of information about the “war on terror”: In the summer of 2005, the Bush administration confronted a fresh wave of criticism over Guantánamo Bay. The detention center had just been branded “the gulag of our times” by Amnesty International, there…