John Pilger, New Statesman, September 24: Britain’s political conference season of 2008 will be remembered as The Great Silence. Politicians have come and gone and their mouths have moved in front of large images of themselves, and they often wave at someone. There has been lots of news about each other. Adam Boulton, the political…
Showing all posts tagged Britain
As worthless as trash
A Whitehall counter-terrorism unit is targeting the BBC and other media organisations as part of a new global propaganda push designed to “taint the al-Qaida brand”, according to a secret Home Office paper seen by the Guardian. The document also shows that Whitehall counter-terrorism experts intend to exploit new media websites and outlets with a…
The Big Brother state
The average British citizen has 3,254 pieces of personal information stored about him or her every week.
How to kill those terrorist types
Wikileaks releases the UK Counter Insurgency Operations Doctrine 2007 that “details British counter-insurgency operations in a number of conflicts, including Northern Island”: In the past many terms have been used to describe those opposing the established authorities, terms such as guerrilla, revolutionary, terrorist, dissident, rebel, partisan, native and enemy all spring to mind. In order…
Target: Islam
Shahid Malik, British minister in the Department for International Development: I think most people would agree that if you ask Muslims today what do they feel like, they feel like the Jews of Europe. I don’t mean to equate that with the Holocaust but in the way that it was legitimate almost – and still…
Killing “them”
Who is really assisting the killing of the world’s Third World population? Yes, the United Kingdom: A controversial deal with Saudi Arabia catapulted Britain to the top of the world arms export league last year, as UK firms won a record …£10bn in orders from overseas, official figures show. The figure amounts to a third…
Chasing “our” friends
Reed Brody, counsel and spokesperson for Human Rights Watch in Brussels, on US-backed Chadian dictator Hissène Habré who fell from power in 1990 and is the subject of a new documentary, The Dictator Hunter: Hissène Habré was a local warlord in Chad, which is a Central African country just south of Libya. And at the…
How we prosecute “terrorists”
The “war on terror” means imprisonment, torture, extraordinary rendition, Western complicity and a travesty of justice. And Britain is involved up to its neck: A British resident who is facing the death penalty in Guantanamo Bay has made a final desperate plea to Gordon Brown to end his six-year ordeal and bring him home today.…
Defeat: Why They Lost Iraq
My following book review appeared in the Melbourne Age on April 19: On the fifth anniversary the Iraq War, The Independent’s Patrick Cockburn, the finest Western reporter in Iraq, wrote that the conflict “has been one of the most disastrous wars ever fought by Britain. It has been small but we achieved nothing . .…
Watch my double standards wobble
Welcome to the Western world’s hypocritical attitude towards human rights.