What a stunning piece. Julian Assange writes the following review in the New York Times on the kind of mundane yet dangerous “debates” sucked up by many in the mainstream media when it comes to the supposedly liberating nature of the internet. When the corporation becomes far more powerful than the state (and they work…
Showing all posts tagged Iraq
The last thing Syria needs, or the Middle East, is more Western “engagement”
Stunning Simon Jenkins piece in The Guardian that explains why Western imperialists, of the liberal and conservative kind, just need to butt out of the Middle East: There could no more dreadful idea than to pour more armaments into the sectarian war now consuming Syria.… Yet that is precisely what Britain’s coalition government wants to do.…
Full transcript of my interview with Jeremy Scahill
Australian publication New Matilda published my interview with journalist and author Jeremy Scahill yesterday.… Our recent conversation covered many areas so I’m publishing below a full transcript of the interview conducted by phone on 15th May: Where are the main places US is using armed drones outside Yemen, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Somalia? One area that…
Our online tolerance for brutality in war
Barely a day passes when another horrific video doesn’t emerge from Syria, showing either the “rebels” or government forces engaged in some act of terrorism/death/flesh eating. The New Yorker’s Jon Lee Anderson: I first heard about the Syrian rebel who was supposed to have eaten a heart on Monday, when a friend who lives in…
Lessons in real journalism from Jeremy Scahill
The author of the New York Times best-seller Dirty Wars explains to PBS’s Tavis Smiley on what important journalism means and why it’s far too rare: Tavis:… Let me start before I get into the text, just as we’re talking about this, where it is that this commitment to being a truth-teller comes from. What in…
20th century Middle East is disappearing but what replaces it?
Astute Patrick Cockburn in Counterpunch on how the new imperial powers are intent on creating a new reality that may ignore the majority of the populations: In the aftermath of the First World War, Britain and France famously created the modern Middle East by carving up what had been the Ottoman Empire. The borders of…
What the Iraq war destroyed for average Iraqis
Riverbend was one of the most prolific and savvy Iraqi bloggers during the 2003 Iraq war. And then, she disappeared, not writing for years. On the 10th anniversary of the invasion, she’s back with a short and devastating post about her country: April 9, 2013 marks ten years since the fall of Baghdad. Ten years…
Lest we forget the pro-war hacks who backed Iraq invasion
Opposing the 2003 Iraq invasion was often a lonely journey amongst the media elites. I was writing against the travesty of the war from 2003 (here’s a piece of mine in the Sydney Morning Herald from 2004) but far too many supported the conflict out of bravado or cowardice. Here’s US reporter Chris Hedges calling…
US-trained death squads in Iraq are our legacy
A remarkable documentary, by the Guardian and BBC Arabic, on the role of US-funded death squads in Iraq via torture skills honed in Latin America during the “dirty wars“. Powerful, explicit and brutal (though there are critics), such films are essential to challenge the spurious argument that the war was anything to do with freedom…