The Washington Post recently published this fascinating report on Washington’s huge reliance on private contractors in Africa for a range of unaccountable tasks. 21st century war: Four small, white passenger planes sit outside a hangar here under a blazing sun, with no exterior markings save for U.S. registration numbers painted on the tails. A few…
Showing all posts tagged terrorism
Come to the West Bank and shoot Ayrab “terrorists”
Celebrating colonisation, demonising Arabs and making money in the process? Welcome to Israel 2012 (via Ynet): Like a frozen turkey plunged into boiling oil, a group of American tourists descend from an air-conditioned van into the scorching heat of the West Bank. Flashing smiles all around, they march into Caliber 3, a local shooting range.…
America’s drone war is both counter-productive and brutal
My following article appears in Lebanon’s Al Akhbar: America’s drone war has countless silent victims. Since President Barack Obama massively expanded his reliance on the weapon from 2009, the number of civilians killed in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Somalia and Yemen have sky-rocketed, but we rarely hear about these murders. The Western corporate media is content rehashing…
America’s drone war is all about creating illusion of global power
Patrick Cockburn in the Independent: As the US and its allies ponder what to do about Syria, one suggestion advanced by the protagonists of armed intervention is to use unmanned drones to attack Syrian government targets. The proposal is a measure of the extraordinary success of the White House, CIA and Defense Department in selling…
Terrorism won’t eat your babies quite yet
This: Today, the National Counter Terrorism Center (NCTC) released its… 2011 Report on Terrorism. The report offers the U.S. government’s best statistical analysis of terrorism trends through its Worldwide Incidents Tracking System (WITS), which compiles and vets open-source information about terrorism—defined by… U.S. law… as “premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine…
My #LeftTurn chapter on media complicity in war post 9/11
This appears in Crikey’s Pure Poison blog today: Following is an extract from “Media War Junkies Unite”, an essay by Antony Loewenstein from… Left Turn: Political essays for the new Left… which is edited by Loewenstein and Jeff Sparrow, and which was released last week. *** The decade since 11 September 2001 has seen a litany of…
Scahill calls out liberals for remaining largely silent over Obama’s drone murders
After last week’s New York Times feature on Obama’s “Kill List” for supposed terrorists, independent journalist Jeremy Scahill tells MSNBC that the US President has created a Minority Report style of justice: Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
Memo to media; American killing of “militants” is often not the truth
Salon’s Glenn Greenwald: Earlier this week,… The New York Times… reported… that the Obama administration, in order to conceal civilian deaths caused by their drone attacks, “counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants.”… Although I wrote at length about the… NYT”˜s various revelations,… I… wrote separately… about that specific disclosure, in order to emphasize the implications for media outlets reporting…
