A revealing comment from Jeremy Scahill on Democracy Now! last week that highlights the establishment fear of fearless reporters doing their job: I wanted to also say, Amy, that after I did the story for The Nation in November 2009 talking about JSOC’s operations inside of Pakistan and the involvement of Blackwater, elite soldiers from…
Showing all posts tagged Pakistan
Why Wikileaks matters part 9753
There is SO much about Wikileaks at the moment that it’s truly hard to keep up. The following is a select selection of some of the more revealing revelations, related stories and controversies. Laurie Oakes in Sydney’s Daily Telegraph: Julia Gillard couldn’t help herself. She had to join the chorus of American hard-liners calling for…
US visiting refugee camps to further its oh so noble goals
The fusing of aid and military actions is a worrying development that threatens the independence of truly independent NGOs (and the US military isn’t part of this, sorry Barack): A US military plan to survey refugee camps and aid agencies on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, possibly to obtain targeting information for air strikes, sparked alarm among…
The key players behind attacking Iran are radical Zionists
Nice try. The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, fond of Middle East wars, argues that the latest Wikileaks documents vindicate claims that the “Arab lobby” are behind attempts to bomb Iran: Here’s a fact that might astonish Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, whose book, “The Israel Lobby,” posits the existence of a nefarious, all-powerful Jewish lobby that…
Yes, US involved in shady dealings globally and its standing is still low
Another day and more Wikileaks revelations. Who the hell is saying there’s nothing in these documents? Only people who resent light being shone on the true dealings of the US. More, please. One: Pakistan‘s president, Asif Ali Zardari, whose wife, Benazir Bhutto, was killed in a suicide bombing, has made extensive preparations in case of…
America’s real priorities (and the arms industry are very happy)
Some revealing facts from the essential War is Business blog: $10.9 billion was the value of military training and sales agreements executed in fiscal year 2000 by the Pentagon’s global arms delivery service, the Defense Security Cooperation Agency. $31.6 billion was the sum of the agency’s business in fiscal year 2010, which concluded at the…
More weapons, more profits, more death
The privatisation of war is a growing phenomenon across the world. It’s rarely examined (Jeremy Scahill is a notable and noble exception). And now here’s David Ignatius in the Washington Post on the brave new world of killing “terrorists” and not telling anybody about it: A new arsenal of drones and satellite-guided weapons is changing…
So many innocent drone victims
Remind me who the terrorists are again? New information on the Central Intelligence Agency’s campaign of drone strikes in northwest Pakistan directly contradicts the image the Barack Obama administration and the CIA have sought to establish in the news media of a program based on highly accurate targeting that is effective in disrupting al-Qaeda’s terrorist…
Musharraf and the Zionists, sitting in a London tree
Oh my. A former, US-backed dictator looking to make a comeback and some Israeli hacks wanting to get in on the action: Former Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf is stated to have shared a lunch with a couple of members of Knesset, the Israeli Parliament, at a Chinese restaurant in Kensington area of central London a…
How to source more drones for killing is a full time job
What’s the best way the US can worsen its image in the Muslim world, kill more civilians and utterly condemn itself to further defeats against a rag-tag army of Taliban fighters? More murder from the air: The U.S. military is secretly diverting aerial drones and weaponry from the Afghan battlefront to significantly expand the CIA’s…