I’m not exaggerating that much (via NBC): A confidential Justice Department memo concludes that the U.S. government can order the killing of American citizens if they are believed to be “senior operational leaders”… of al-Qaida or “an associated force” — even if there is no… intelligence… indicating they… are… engaged in an active plot to attack the U.S. The… 16-page memo,…
Showing all posts tagged al-Qaeda
Reflections on #ZeroDarkThirty
Last night I saw the Oscar-nominated film, Zero Dark Thirty. It’s a brilliantly made work, brutal, passionate, eerie, exciting and compelling. It’s also a shameless piece of CIA propaganda. It opens on 9/11 and frames many of the successful and failed terror attacks since then as part of one, big al-Qaeda plot, which is dishonest.…
Obama’s vast, global scope of murdering “terrorists”
The Washington Post reports the largely hidden counter-terrorism policies of the Obama administration, without oversight, legal checks or balances and media scrutiny. There’s a word for this and it ain’t democracy. Part one: Over the past two years, the Obama administration has been secretly developing a new blueprint for pursuing terrorists, a next-generation targeting list…
Britain as the torture-endorsing nation
Fascinating new evidence in the Guardian: Within days of the 9/11 attacks on the US, the… CIA… told British intelligence officers of its plans to abduct… al-Qaida… suspects and fly them to secret prisons where they would be systematically abused. The meeting, at the British embassy in Washington, is disclosed in… a forthcoming book by the Guardian journalist Ian Cobain.…
Just what Africa needs; a US-funded, partly privatised military force
The LA Times reveals yet another Washington-led proxy war, this time in Africa. Privatised and essentially unaccountable, this is another example of the US never learning from history. Arming and training such a force will almost inevitably blow back on the West at some point: The soldiers stood at attention, rifles at their sides, as…
Deep inside Syrian rebel territory
In a time of war, great journalists are rare. Ghaith Abdul-Ahad is a truly unique reporter. His recent dispatches from deep inside Yemen, including Al-Qaeda territory, were remarkable. Now he’s inside Syria, alongside rebel forces (his photos are here). Read him to understand what is happening inside a civil war: The column of eight rebel…
How do we define terrorism? Anybody who’s opposed to us
Medialens ask the questions most in the media aren’t: When is an act of terrorism not terrorism? When the victims are officially sanctioned state enemies. This was clear from the political and media response to the assassinations of senior ministers of the Syrian ”˜regime’. On 18 July, a… bomb attack… on the national security headquarters in Damascus…
Why Wikileaks and Julian Assange are essential for functioning of real democracy
Patrick Cockburn in the Independent is spot-on with his comments about Wikileaks. Many in the corporate media have degraded themselves with petty criticisms and jealousy: As Julian Assange evades arrest by taking refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in Knightsbridge to escape extradition to Sweden, and possibly the US, British commentators have targeted him with shrill…
America’s drone war is both counter-productive and brutal
My following article appears in Lebanon’s Al Akhbar: America’s drone war has countless silent victims. Since President Barack Obama massively expanded his reliance on the weapon from 2009, the number of civilians killed in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Somalia and Yemen have sky-rocketed, but we rarely hear about these murders. The Western corporate media is content rehashing…
America’s drone war is all about creating illusion of global power
Patrick Cockburn in the Independent: As the US and its allies ponder what to do about Syria, one suggestion advanced by the protagonists of armed intervention is to use unmanned drones to attack Syrian government targets. The proposal is a measure of the extraordinary success of the White House, CIA and Defense Department in selling…