The wonderful US independent journalist Alexa O’Brien is currently in Australia (she appeared this week at the Sydney Opera House with Julian Assange, Glenn Greenwald and others). I spoke to her at a public event in Sydney about her coverage of the Chelsea Manning trial, dissent in America, Barack Obama’s war on whistle-blowers and threats…
Showing all posts tagged terrorism
Chomsky reminds Obama that US brings instability
On the anniversary of America’s 9/11 (let’s not forget Chile in 1973), Noam Chomsky tells Democracy Now! that US President Barack Obama wilfully lies about the real role of empire: The other things that he said were not unusual, but nevertheless kind of shocking to anyone not familiar with U.S. political discourse, at least. So…
What price for real security? Melbourne Writer's Festival on Profits of Doom
Today, on 11 September, ABC1 and ABC Big Ideas… screens the following… (and I discuss my recent book Profits of Doom): Personal, economic, geopolitical security – this is the panel discussion from the… Melbourne Writers Festival. Who gets to make the decisions in these arenas? And why are we so damned anxious and insecure in this continuing period…
Beware slam dunk “intelligence” over Syria
The rush to war against Syria is gathering pace. But beware slimy politicians offering certainties (or the Zionist lobby). The truth is murky. One of the finest dissenting US journalists is Gareth Porter. His latest is essential reading (via TruthOut): Secretary of State John Kerry assured the public that the Obama administration’s summary of the…
Challenging US-led Dirty Wars
My book review appears in today’s Sydney Morning Herald: Days after the Boston marathon bombings in April, the surviving suspect, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, reportedly told authorities that he and his brother, Tamerlan, watched online the sermons of Anwar al-Awlaki, the US-born cleric who was killed by an American drone in Yemen in 2011. It was just…
Here we go again; another Western-led war in the Middle East
The Guardian’s Seumas Milne on the seemingly inevitable war against Syria: All the signs are they’re going to do it again. The attack on Syria now being planned by the US and its allies will be the ninth direct western military intervention in an Arab or Muslim country in 15 years. Depending how you cut…
On the dangers of militant atheism
One of the themes in my recent book For God’s Sake is tackling the role of extremism in all its guises, including atheism. I was interviewed this week by Jenna Price in The Canberra Times: Australian journalist and atheist Antony Loewenstein, co-author of… For God’s Sake,… says evangelical atheism, or what is now called “new atheism”, is…
Direct call for whistle-blowers to reveal what state shamefully denies
My following article appears in today’s Guardian: Revelations of British government intrusion of legitimate media reporting of… American-led, global surveillance… is a call to arms for journalists everywhere. Australian attorney general Mark Dreyfus recently claimed that Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden… weren’t whistle-blowers… because they were “politically motivated”, and neither man exposed government wrong-doing (in fact, both did in…
“Journalism is not terrorism”
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Washington using drones to target journalists with sensitive information?
Is this the future of investigative reporting? How far would a US government (or London?) go to stop information they believed was sensitive? Great piece by Amy Davidson in the New Yorker: On Saturday night, Michael Grunwald, aTime… correspondent, deleted a tweet that he said was “dumb”; a spokesperson for the magazine noted in an e-mailed…