Russia under Putin is an unforgiving place. Impunity is the name of the game. In this context, a fascinating feature in this week’s New York Times Magazine about Mikhail Khodorkovsky, once the country’s richest man, is sobering. Here’s a man who made staggering amounts of money in the post-Communist circus, seemingly had a conversion, discovered…
Showing all posts tagged Bush administration
Right’s new radicals
My following book review appears today in Sydney’s Sun Herald newspaper: Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement That Shattered the Party Max Blumenthal (Nation Books, $49.95) Reviewed by Antony Loewenstein Christian fundamentalists have taken over the Republican Party. “It’s become the party of birthers, deathers and Civil War re-enacters,” Max Blumenthal told the Los Angeles Times…
Silent but deadly US drone attacks are inspired by the Jewish state
I finally read Jane Mayer’s fascinating, recent piece in the New Yorker on Washington’s increasing reliance on Predator drones to kill “terrorists” and perceived enemies in Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere. I was struck by the constant references to Israel and the Jewish state’s influence on this insidious business: The advent of the Predator targeted-killing program…
Those rules don’t apply to Washington and Israel
Salon’s Glenn Greenwald on Benjamin Netanyahu’s definition of “war crimes”: The Prime Minister says Hamas is guilty for denying Red Cross access to prisoners: exactly what the U.S. did.
Indonesia moves a little towards America, for now
Following my recent visit to Aceh in Indonesia, this piece in today’s Washington Post is particularly interesting (though highlights the seeming inability of the American corporate media to see the world in anything other than what benefits the US): In many ways, Indonesia — a nation of 240 million people scattered across 17,000 islands —…
Wiping Persia from the map
John Bolton, neo-conservative, former George W. Bush official and Fox News contributor: So we’re at a very unhappy point — a very unhappy point — where unless Israel is prepared to use nuclear weapons against Iran’s program , Iran will have nuclear weapons in the very near future.
The ways in which America dislikes the Arabs over and over again
An important new tool that will show who really runs the Middle East and from where (hint: Tel Aviv): The Congressional Monitor Database is a powerful new research tool that contains every legislative initiative introduced in the U.S. Congress during the George W. Bush Administration (2001 through 2008) that mentions Palestine or Israel or has…
Not bombing Iran now must be killing the Israelis
Regarding this week’s reported progress between Iran and the Western powers, a salient comment: Obama WH already got more from one buffet lunch with Iran than Bush WH did in 8 years of saber-rattling.
We broke Iraq
The Iraqi shoe thrower, Muntazer al-Zaidi, eloquently explains why he committed the act: I am free. But my country is still a prisoner of war. There has been a lot of talk about the action and about the person who took it, and about the hero and the heroic act, and the symbol and the…
We can do what we want because we’re American
Scott Horton writes in the Huffington Post on yet another example of Bush era delusion: Two newly-obtained documents show how American diplomats during the Bush administration worked tenaciously to incorporate what is commonly known as the Nuremberg Defense into a new international convention addressing enforced disappearances. The rejection of the notion that government agents could…