When the Saudis strike Yemen don’t expect Washington or MSM to care

The “war on terror” remains as murky as ever. Interesting post by Sheila Carapico for Middle East Research and Information Project: Senate hearings to confirm John Brennan as the Obama administration’s appointment to be director of the CIA… brought to light… a heretofore clandestine American military facility in Saudi Arabia near the kingdom’s border with Yemen. While…

So this is how the Iraq war could have started

A fascinating insight from the British mercenary Simon Mann in Vice magazine about what the Bush administration were really like; criminals on a war mission: Weren’t you also asked to help kick start the Iraq War in 2002? Yes. Someone who said he was friends with the American neocons asked me to come up with…

The real Wikileaks and Julian Assange

Amidst all the (mostly) slamming coverage that occurs in the media against Julian Assange and Wikileaks, it’s a welcome relief to read this long interview of Assange by John Keane in The Conversation: Julian Assange could be described as the… Tom Paine… of the early 21st century. Drawing strength from distress, disgusted by the hypocrisy of governments,…

Bush tortured and Obama drones; discuss

Jane Mayer in the New Yorker teases out the issues: There are some disturbing similarities between the Obama white paper and the Bush torture memos. Both use slippery legal language to parse dark government programs. Both have been deliberately hidden from public and even congressional oversight. And both involve the blurring of C.I.A. and military…

Life today in blighted Iraq

Australian film-maker David Bradbury and Australian writer and activist Donna Mulhearn are currently in Iraq witnessing the devastation that the West has bought in the last decade. Here’s a message from Bradbury in the city of Fallujah: Met two very interesting women doctors today. Dr Samira is the doctor at the frontline of birth defects…

Don’t believe a word of Obama spin over Afghan war victory

Typically astute thoughts by the Afghanistan Analysts Network’s Kate Clark on the clusterfuck that the West is leaving in the country: Obama did indeed struggle to define victory in his state of the union address (read the text here). The US mission, he said, would achieve its mission by defeating ”˜the core al-Qaeda’ by the…

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