Sweden is not an independent nation: Karl Rove’s help for Sweden as it assists the Obama administration’s prosecution against WikiLeaks could be the latest example of the adage, “Politics makes strange bedfellows.” Rove has advised Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt for the past two years after resigning as Bush White House political advisor in mid-2007.…
Showing all posts tagged Bush administration
This is how America treats people with a conscience
The alleged Wikileaks leaker Bradley Manning is being tortured while in US custody. Home of the free, indeed: The last time Bradley Manning saw the world outside of a jail, most Americans had never heard of WikiLeaks. On Friday, Manning, the man whose alleged unauthorized release of hundreds of thousands of classified documents put the…
The dirty footprints of Chalabi via Wikileaks
The role of Iraqi exile Ahmed Chalabi has fascinated me for years. The corporate press used him as a key source over Iraq’s alleged WMDs. Oops. Wikileaks delivers a little more: For Iraq-watchers, a tiny but enticing tidbit surfaced in a WikiLeaks cable from February 2004, 11 months after the U.S.-led invasion. It involved Ahmad…
The Left and the Right in Australia are (mostly) united behind Wikileaks
Wikileaks is bringing together some strange coalitions in Australia, individuals with different political views who recognise Julian Assange as a man who has dared challenge the establishment in ways rarely, if ever, seen. Of course the powerful hate him. But truths aren’t so easily dismissed. Only those who care so deeply about maintaining society’s status-quo…
Wikileaks exposes the bromance between journalists and politics
My following article appears on ABC Unleashed today: Who can now say that the WikiLeaks cables detail no new information? It was only last week that ABC TV’s 7.30 Report featured a story with supposed foreign affairs experts, including the Lowy Institute’s Michael Fullilove, who largely dismissed the significance of the document dump. Within a…
Has Wikileaks been spun?
Take this with caution – the people saying it are your run-of-the-mill US elite types who love a good, covert US war – but interesting thought: My powder is dry on the interesting subject that Zbigniew Brzezinski raised on PBS NewsHour. He suggested that in this enormous Wikileaks data dump of largely trivial cables, there…
Where’s the media guts over Wikileaks?
My following article appears on ABC Unleashed today: The rolling revelations of the WikiLeaks US embassy cables will continue for months but equally interesting is the reaction of the global media. Many in the British media establishment, not given advance look at the documents, fumed against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and repeated government spin that…
Bush and Obama see “terrorists” in the same way
Salon’s Glenn Greenwald spoke this week at the University of Wisconsin on “Civil Liberties and Terrorism in the Age of Obama”. Suffice to say anybody on the Left who thinks Barack Obama is radically different to George W. Bush needs to get their head read: Glenn Greenwald on civil liberties and terrorism after Obama from…
Those WMDs must be somewhere safe, reflected Bush
Causing mass carnage in Iraq? Oh, that was a shame: Former US President George W Bush still has “a sickening feeling” about the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, US media report. The revelation comes in his memoir, “Decision Points”, to be published next week. He also reveals that he temporarily considered…
Prosecuting a child at Gitmo and calling it justice
Obama’s America: Everything about the last week’s events at Guantánamo has been deeply disturbing. On Monday, in defiance of international obligations requiring the rehabilitation of child prisoners, the US government — under President Obama — fulfilled the deepest wishes of the Bush administration, and persuaded Omar Khadr, the Canadian citizen who was just 15 years…