Pratap Chatterjee on Democracy Now! talks about the Wild West of military contracting in Iraq: Custer Battles had a man whose job it was was to buy guns on the black market. And he explained to me how he would go outside, you know, dressed in local clothes, buy black market guns and supply them.…
Showing all posts tagged Bush administration
Yes, Israel, America, Britain and Australia all kill civilians
A story that only Gideon Levy in Haaretz would write. Piercing and spot-on: The voice of joy, the voice of rejoicing is heard in Israel: The Americans and British have also committed for war crimes, not only us. WikiLeaks’ revelations have inflamed all our noisy propagandists: Where is Goldstone, they rejoiced, and what would he…
Why can’t the US just kill Assange (asks caring Fox man)
Welcome to the world of Rupert Murdoch, a man of principle who runs a global organisation of the highest ethical code: Leading the attack on whistleblower web site WikiLeaks, Fox News editorialist and former Bush-era US State Department official Christian Whiton said on Monday that the US should classify the proprietors of WikiLeaks as “enemy…
Back on ABC TV News24 talking Afghanistan, drugs policy and 9/11
I appeared again last night on ABC TV News 24 The Drum with former politician Kerry Chikarovski and ABC journalist Chris Uhlmann (previous appearances here). The show is available here. We discussed Australia’s role in Afghanistan and whether the country should maintain troops there. It appears that the US alliance and “national security” reasons are…
How torture was freely used in a post 9/11 moral haze
What the Bush administration stood for and remember how little Barack Obama has changed this mindset: In 2002, as the Bush administration was turning to torture and other brutal techniques for interrogating “war on terror” detainees, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz loosened rules against human experimentation, an apparent recognition of legal problems regarding the novel…
Hello my name is Barack and please don’t hate me for begging Israel on a daily basis
So, two years into the Obama administration and America is again rightly viewed as hopelessly compromised in the Middle East and a backer of Israeli apartheid, repression across the region, occupations etc etc: Approval of U.S. leadership is now similar or lower than what it was in 2008 in several of the Middle East and…
Revisiting an op-ed that raised the prospect of US crimes
What an interesting idea. The New York Times interviews Joseph Wilson, seven years after writing his incendiary column on Bush lies over Iraq.
Chilean paramilitaries protecting Aussie embassy in Baghdad
What better way to show affection for an occupied nation? Hire thugs to protect a space that only exists due to the Australian government’s desperate desire to join the Bush administration into the country in 2003: The Defence Department plans to fully privatise security at Australia’s Baghdad embassy by the end of the year, after…
Obama and Bush should dine together and share ideas about torture
The similarity between Barack Obama and George W. Bush in their prosecution of the “war on terror” is increasingly clear. Just in case it isn’t obvious how deep this illegality goes, here’s Michael Hayden, Mr. Bush’s last CIA director, talking to the Washington Times: You’ve got state secrets, targeted killings, indefinite detention, renditions, the opposition…
America, the same old torturing nation as under Bush
This is Obama’s America, siding with those who torture, use rendition and want to keep it secret: A federal appeals court on Wednesday ruled that former prisoners of the C.I.A. could not sue over their alleged torture in overseas prisons because such a lawsuit might expose secret government information. The sharply divided ruling was a…