Seymour Hersh wants to take on power and be challenged on it

Leading American investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, an enemy of sedentary reporters and lying governments, speaks to the New Statesman: Is it always a journalist’s duty to report the truth, even if it may damage innocents? I’m a total First Amendment Jeffersonian. It’s their job to keep it secret and my job to find it out…

The ghost of Bill Gates in the shadow of helping the Communist Party

My book The Blogging Revolution thoroughly examines the complicity of Western multinationals such as Google, Microsoft and Yahoo in assisting online censorship in oppressive regimes. Nicholas Kristof in his blog on the New York Times discovers how shocking this situation has become. Lesson for the day; never trust the word of corporate executives (especially when…

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…

Settlements aren’t really colonies, says the Washington Post

Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting on the continuing ability of the US corporate press to evade telling the truth about the Middle East: The big news out of the Middle East yesterday was the Israeli government’s decision to approve an expansion of… the Gilo settlement near Jerusalem. The White House’s muddled position on settlement expansion has…

Chomsky on our inability to see Middle East hypocrisy

Guernica: You cite a story in the New York Times where “the reviewer,” you write, “constitutional lawyer Noah Feldman, described Osama [bin Laden]’s descent to greater and greater evil over the years, finally reaching the absolute lower depths, when ”˜he put forth the perverse claim that since the United States is a democracy, all citizens…

Organising mass violence and Australia laps it up

Australian academic and writer Scott Burchill is one of the more astute commentators in the country. His latest missive is spot-on (see below). Why do we allow generals and men in uniform to keep on telling us that wars are noble and important? Jim Molan (ex-Australian military) is regularly in blogs and in the papers…

Why can’t Iraqis appreciate the wholesome, corporate invasion?

Spot the issue with this New York Times story: Iraq’s Baghdad Trade Fair ended Tuesday, six years and a trillion dollars after the American invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein, and one country was conspicuously absent. That would be the country that spent a trillion dollars — on the invasion and occupation, but also on training…

Blackwater are essential to keep the Arab kill ratio up

The ongoing case of the US private military contractor Blackwater – covered extensively on this site here and here – continues. Note the seeming inability (or unwillingness, probably) of the US establishment to stop using an outfit charged with serious cases of murder and mismanagement: In the aftermath of the 2007 Nisour Square massacre in…

Israel is falling apart; most Jews don’t want to know

Finally, the Americans are starting to tire of the Middle East conflict (even if they blame both sides for the impasse, oblivious to the clear power imbalance between Israelis and Palestinians). Here’s Thomas Friedman in the New York Times: Today, the Arabs, Israel and the Palestinians are clearly not feeling enough pain to do anything…

Carter urges justice over Gaza

Jimmy Carter in the New York Times writes on the Goldstone report: The Goldstone committee examined closely the cause of deaths of the 1,387 Palestinians who perished, and the degree of damage to the various areas. The conclusion was that the civilian areas were targeted and the devastation was deliberate. Again, the criticism of Israel…

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