Apart from a few small stories (here and here), we have to rely on a Chinese government service to tell us what’s happening in our own country. Have media companies been asked not to report details about the exercise and agreed? Does the general public have a right to know what the US is planning…
Showing all posts tagged United States
Targeting the contracting leeches in the “war on terror”
Since 9/11 countless corporations are making a killing in Iraq, Afghanistan, the US and beyond. It’s a privatised dream, as the US war machine now couldn’t survive without outsourcing help (including, according to a new report, Pentagon contractors writing their own contracts). Hackers and trouble-makers Anonymous have attacked Booz Allen Hamilton (a company with quite…
How Rupert should think about Watergate and worry
One half of the Watergate investigators who hasn’t spent the last decades fawning before power, Carl Bernstein, writes in Newsweek that the current Murdoch controversy has historical reverberations: But now the empire is shaking, and there’s no telling when it will stop. My conversations with British journalists and politicians—all of them insistent on speaking anonymously…
US (nearly) declares death of terrorism but will only expand wars
So let me get this right. The US spends billions annually to fight countless wars, defend the homeland, launch drone attacks against “enemies” in at least six countries and the threat is only this? Defense Secretary Leon Panetta declared Saturday that the United States is “within reach” of “strategically defeating” Al Qaeda as a terrorist…
My Al Jazeera English interview on Murdoch’s excessive global power
As Rupert Murdoch’s empire faces unprecedented pressure in Britain over phone-hacking, criminality, ethical breaches and romancing of the political and media elites, it’s time to assess how one man and one family has amassed so much power in countless Western democracies. It should be challenged. Here’s my interview on Al Jazeera English yesterday:
Delusions of the Palestinian Authority
After decades of fruitless negotiations, we still have the sad and sorry sight of Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat saying this in the US yesterday: We are in contact with all Quartet members. All they have to do is to make the Israeli government accept a two-state solution based on ”˜67 borders with mutually agreed land…
Wikileaks contributed to the Arab Spring?
Julian Assange says it played a factor in the US being less able to back dictators in the region: So, Cablegate as a whole caused these elites that prop each other up into region within the Arab speaking countries, and, within, between Europe and these countries and between the United States and these countries, to…
Obama is a man of Wall Street and proud of it
Frank Rich, now with New York magazine and not the New York Times, unloads: What haunts the Obama administration is what still haunts the country: the stunning lack of accountability for the greed and misdeeds that brought America to its gravest financial crisis since the Great Depression. There has been no legal, moral, or financial…
Australia and Abu Ghraib; a cosy relationship
Years after this scandal exploded, we’re still receiving details on US allies being far too willing to excuse and defend abuses: Secret Defence documents obtained under freedom of information laws show an Australian officer, Major George O’Kane, was far more deeply involved in the operations of Abu Ghraib prison when terrible abuses of prisoners occurred…