My following piece appears today in Crikey: I visited Villawood on Sunday”‰—”‰alongside a delegation of union leaders and Greens Senator-elect Lee Rhiannon”‰—”‰and met several asylum seekers subsequently involved in the protest that ended peacefully last night with the arrival of UNHCR officials. We spent hours conversing with men in their 20s and up from Iraq,…
Showing all posts tagged Pakistan
American priorities in Pakistan are keeping drones dry
This is pretty extraordinary (and therefore has received no mainstream media coverage). Feryal Ali Gauhar, Pakistani actress, filmmaker, writer and human rights activist, appears on Democracy Now! and reveals the real role of the US in Pakistan after the devastating floods: …But it is well known, if not acknowledged by—particularly by the state, that the…
How to spin away the Wikileaks blues
The Wikileaks revelations are a spin problem to be solved, according to the White House mouth piece, Politico: The White House is dismissing the 92,000 Afghan war reports posted by WikiLeaks as old news — but the document dump poses a potent new threat to President Barack Obama’s delicately balanced Afghanistan policy. The field reports…
How we are helping Islamists
Dissenting British historian Mark Curtis has a record of skewering the realities of his country’s foreign policy. We don’t just work with the “enemy”; we’ve become the enemy. His latest: When the London bombers struck five years ago, many people blamed the invasion of Iraq for inspiring them. But the connection between 7/7 and British…
Walid Shoebat should not be heard in Pakistan
This is weird. Pakistan is reportedly planning to massively increase its online censorship regime. Just another US-backed dictatorship wanting to shut down debate. Not much new here except one site has supposedly already been blocked, of Mr Walid Shoebat, former Palestinian militant and now rabid Zionist and anti-Islam activist. Is Pakistan seriously banning this man…
How the Pakistani client state will be forced to please its American master
Patrick Cockburn on the war inside Pakistan that will only worsen as Western pressures increase (without understanding where the anger is coming from): The Pakistani Foreign Minister, Makhdoom Qureshi, believes that what happened in New York was “blowback” for the US drone strikes in Pakistan, which he says killed 700 Pakistani civilians last year. This…
Drone pilots should hire lawyers immediately
Killing civilians from the air may be illegal. Thank you for stating the bleeding obvious: The pilots waging America’s undeclared drone war in Pakistan could be liable to criminal prosecution for “war crimes,” a prominent law professor told a Congressional panel Wednesday.
Are Western reporters also just printing Pakistani spin?
Wondering how much we really know about Pakistan’s war against “terrorism” (so writes a Pakistani journalist below)? The Pakistani army has killed at least 71 civilians in an air strike in the Khyber Agency. As news gets around, people are slowly beginning to express their shock about this incident. But no one should be surprised,…
Our good friends in Pakistan like to torture
Robert Fisk reports from Pakistan on the 8000 “disappeared” citizens during the country’s US-backed “war on terror”: There is evidence that Pakistan’s “disappeared” are moved around, between barracks and interrogation centres and underground torture facilities in different towns and cities. There are also terrible rumours – fostered, some say, by the security authorities – that…