I’m currently at the Auckland Writer’s Festival. Wonderful event. Speaking to hundreds of people every day – mainly about the Middle East but also on the importance of alternative voices online – and the one message that keeps on coming up is how rarely dissenting Jewish perspectives or those critical of Israel appear in the…
Showing all posts tagged Bush administration
Americans murdering Afghans, says Seymour Hersh
The journalist who helped break the story that detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq were being tortured by their US jailers told an audience at a journalism conference last month that American soldiers are now executing prisoners in Afghanistan. New Yorker journalist Seymour Hersh also revealed that the Bush Administration had developed advanced…
We at the Israel lobby are here to help 24/7
Two revealing examples of the Zionist lobby at work, obscuring, ignoring and denying reality. Here’s Al-Jazeera’s Sherine Tadros: I recently jumped at the chance to take an all expenses paid helicopter ride over Israel and part of the West Bank. The trip was courtesy of The Israel Project (TIP) which describes itself as a non-profit,…
Why doesn’t America release innocent Gitmo prisoners?
The Obama administration is little different to the previous Bush regime: The government is failing in more and more cases to produce evidence that the men it has imprisoned at Guantanamo belong there, according to ProPublica’s latest look at the lawsuits [1] that some 100 captives have filed in federal court to seek their freedom.…
Muslims don’t like being bombed to liberation (tell the neo-cons)
Daniel Pipes can’t understand why the Obama administration is liked by more Muslims than the Bush administration. Sure, it may (mostly) be better rhetoric these days but the little matter of starting countless wars in the Middle East may have something to do with the image problem: The New York Times ran a story today,…
How the US government knew the Gitmo boys were mostly innocent all along
What was that quaint idea of trusting government officials in a time of war? Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld once declared that individuals captured by the US military in the aftermath of 9/11 and shipped off to the Guantanamo Bay prison facility represented the “worst of the worst.” During a radio interview in June…
Blair was dying to bomb the streets of Baghdad
How much more sordid can this tale become? Tony Blair‘s secret links to Gulf oil giants were revealed today as fresh details emerged of his “carte blanche” support for George Bush‘s Iraq war. The former prime minister has been in the pay of the Kuwaiti government and a South Korean oil firm for up to…
What happens when Bush destroyed the city of Fallujah? Cancer, that’s what
I’ve written over the years about the many health effects of depleted uranium in Iraq. American forces stand accused of causing a massive rise in cancer amongst the local population. Now, more questions are being asked about the Iraqi city of Fallujah, after at least two massive American attacks in the years after 2003. Al-Jazeera…
When Barack Obama goes Down Under
My following article appears in the Huffington Post: The arrival of the new American Ambassador to Australia was breathlessly welcomed by the Australia media pack in late 2009. Jeffrey Bleich, an American lawyer from California, assumed his position in Canberra and was introduced to the country through an interview on the public broadcaster ABC. After…
Friedman welcomes Iraqi democracy…glosses over the deaths
Earth to the New York Times and Thomas Friedman. Backing an invasion of Iraq requires responsibility, not more platitudes. Of course, when you’re not doing the fighting, wars seem so noble: Former President George W. Bush’s gut instinct that this region craved and needed democracy was always right. It should have and could have been…