Wow. What a Guardian headline: “WikiLeaks cables: ‘Sri Lankan president responsible for massacre of Tamils’”: American diplomats believed that the Sri Lankan president, Mahinda Rajapaksa, bore responsibility for a massacre last year that is the subject of a UN war crimes inquiry, according to a leaked US cable. Lawyers for Tamil activists in Britain are…
Showing all posts tagged United States
All those private lobbyists in DC wondering if their money will come this month
Feel the fear as the political elites scramble for cover. The poor dears, having to find ways to defend behaviour by their well-paying clients: Much has been written about the State Department’s intensive effort to deal with the release of secret diplomatic cables by the website WikiLeaks, but there is also a separate, massive effort…
Sarkozy, like Gillard, Cameron et al, long to look into the eyes of US President
Just what the world needs; another Western leader desperate to be loved by America: President Nicolas Sarkozy is an unusually solid French friend of America. He is also a “mercurial” man operating in “a zone of monarch-like impunity” surrounded by advisers often too fearful to give honest counsel, according to leaked cables from the United…
How dare you look into our boys doing bad things, says US
Here are just two examples of Washington pressuring nations not to pursue investigations into alleged human rights abuses committed by the US post 9/11. Real democracy in action. One: US officials tried to influence Spanish prosecutors and government officials to head off court investigations into Guantánamo Bay torture allegations, secret CIA “extraordinary rendition” flights and…
Chomsky: Wikileaks cable show US contempt for world
Noam Chomsky on the Wikileaks cables: One of the major reasons for government secrecy is to protect the government from its own population. … So Hillary Clinton and Benjamin Netanyahu surely know of the careful polls of Arab public opinion. The Brookings Institute just a few months ago released extensive polls of what Arabs think…
US visiting refugee camps to further its oh so noble goals
The fusing of aid and military actions is a worrying development that threatens the independence of truly independent NGOs (and the US military isn’t part of this, sorry Barack): A US military plan to survey refugee camps and aid agencies on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, possibly to obtain targeting information for air strikes, sparked alarm among…
New York Times doesn’t want to upset Obama too much
Here’s Bill Keller, editor of the New York Times, showing his paper’s true stripes over Wikileaks and going to the White House to make sure they weren’t too unhappy with the released cables. Media servitude to the wrong master:
The false choice offered by US autocrats in the Middle East
A handy reminder by Nasrin Alavi in the Wikileaks dump that has been largely ignored by the corporate press (too busy covering the “embarrassment” of the US and allies): Interestingly, though, in the very same cable in which Abu Dhabi’s crown prince declared it is merely “a matter of time” before President Ahmadinejad “takes us…
We support Assange because we know the agenda of his enemies
A global battle looms and it’s clear what side we need to be on: The WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, is tonight facing growing legal problems around the world, with the US announcing that it was investigating whether he had violated its espionage laws. Assange’s details were also added to Interpol’s worldwide wanted list. Dated 30…
Yes, US involved in shady dealings globally and its standing is still low
Another day and more Wikileaks revelations. Who the hell is saying there’s nothing in these documents? Only people who resent light being shone on the true dealings of the US. More, please. One: Pakistan‘s president, Asif Ali Zardari, whose wife, Benazir Bhutto, was killed in a suicide bombing, has made extensive preparations in case of…