The US is unsurprisingly worried about cyber attacks from hackers, Russia, China or even a friendly nation. The future of warfare may well be fought in a different space altogether. But this report proves how unprepared America is for the inevitable attempts to understand its inner workings. The problem lies in how hackers are viewed.…
Showing all posts tagged Russia
Sri Lanka cannot escape scrutiny over war crimes
An important editorial in the Financial Times: Last year, Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations secretary-general, commissioned a report into human rights violations in the closing months of the decades-long Sri Lankan civil war that ended in 2009. The report points to credible evidence of mass shelling of civilians and summary executions. It also concludes that…
American attempts to understand post 9/11 world muddled and criminal
The evidence, via Wikileaks, just keeps on coming: The documents also show that in the earliest years of the prison camps operation, the Pentagon permitted Chinese and Russian interrogators into the camps — information from those sessions are included in some captives’ assessments — something American defense lawyers working free-of-charge for the foreign prisoners have…
Dear TIME; are war criminals now worthy of praise?
Bless the corporate media. Here’s the 2011 TIME 100 Poll featuring Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa. Whoever wrote this blurb clearly doesn’t care about the serious war crimes allegations against his government: Since ending Sri Lanka’s 26-year-long war against the Tamil Tigers in 2009, and grabbing control over once independent institutions like commissions on human…
US on Russian justice: “lipstick on a political pig”
A brutal state assessed as such by the US, a nation not adverse to backing countries that display an authoritarian impulse in support of Washington: The trial of Russian oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky shows the Kremlin preserves a “cynical system where political enemies are eliminated with impunity”, US diplomats say in classified cables released by WikiLeaks…
Wikileaks unloads on the vestiges of our faux democracy
The UK Guardian is doing wonderful work this week, publishing a litany of information over the Wikileaks dump. Every day brings huge new revelations, leaving so many in the mainstream media simply ignoring the best bits (hello ABC Radio’s AM today, utterly shunning anything about the issues). One: WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange wanted to expose…
Finding arms deals in the strangest of places
A fascinating and murky tale of alleged arms dealer Viktor Bout who clearly was the best friend of anybody who paid, not least the US: Accused of a 15-year run as one of the world’s biggest arms traffickers, Viktor Bout is thought to be a consummate deal maker. Now his future may hang on whether…
Dying for the art of reporting in Putin’s lands
Russia in the 21st century has become a largely lawless land, where journalists are especially attacked, harassed and killed for simply do their jobs. We stand in solidarity with them: Mikhail Beketov had been warned, but would not stop writing. About dubious land deals. Crooked loans. Under-the-table hush money. All evidence, he argued in his…
As long as Israel remains an American obsession, things will decline badly
Josh Landis @ Foreign Policy thinks that Russia is looking at the Middle East with added interest and I wonder why: So long as America’s No. 1 foreign-policy goal in the region is to hurt Iran and help Israel, Russia will be drawn back into the region and a new Cold War will take shape.…