Last night I saw the Oscar-nominated film, Zero Dark Thirty. It’s a brilliantly made work, brutal, passionate, eerie, exciting and compelling. It’s also a shameless piece of CIA propaganda. It opens on 9/11 and frames many of the successful and failed terror attacks since then as part of one, big al-Qaeda plot, which is dishonest.…
Showing all posts tagged United States
Still dissecting the US-led torture regime post 9/11
We are still discovering the depth and extent of the crimes committed by the Americans in Iraq post 2003. I’m proud to call journalist Mike Otterman, mentioned below, a good friend. This report by Jeff Kaye on FireDogLake: Journalist Michael Otterman, author of the excellent book,… American Torture: From the Cold War to Abu Ghraib and…
Supporting Palestine is protected by the US constitution
At a time when Palestine activism in the US is becoming more effective (and more threatening to the Zionist lobby), this initiative is welcome: The Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), in collaboration with the National Lawyers Guild (NLG), the Student Speech Working Group and other organizations, today announced the launch of the Palestine Solidarity Legal…
Memo to public broadcasters; drone program funded by drone providers ain’t kosher
The conflict of interest is so damn obvious it’s impossible to think nobody at PBS in America realised it. Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting explains: The… PBS Nova… broadcast… “Rise of the Drones”… was sponsored by drone manufacturer Lockheed Martin–a clear violation of… PBS‘s underwriting guidelines. As Kevin Gosztola reported (FireDogLake,… 1/24/13), the January 23 broadcast was a mostly upbeat look…
America’s freedom of the press? Dream on
Disturbing post from Freedom of the Press Foundation (great new group, support them) on the serious threats from the Obama administration to transparency and democracy in America: A… disturbing report in Saturday’s Washington Post describes… an FBI investigation of a large number of government officials suspected of leaking classified information to the press, engulfing an unknown group…
US military will arm and train any old thugs
Steve Coll in the New Yorker: The Pentagon has yet to meet a military in a desperately poor or hopelessly corrupt country that it does not believe it can train and equip to a professional standard. Pentagon training has in fact strengthened and stabilized professional militaries in many developing countries. Yet some of the militaries…
Ongoing Wall Street criminality is key Obama failing
Fascinating documentary by PBS Frontline that outlines the far-too-cosy relationship, along with gutlessness, between Wall Street and the Obama administration. No Wall Street executives have done jail time for the massive fraud uncovered during the global financial crisis. This is as much a scandal as Washington’s drone war in the far-reaches of the world. Unaccountable…
More on Dirty Wars and covert US wars ignored by corporate press
Jeremy Scahill and Rick Rowley speak to Huffington Post Live:
Mali shows that West understands little about failures of “war on terror”
History repeats. Leaders learn nothing or don’t want to. Countless media hacks repeat the talking points about fighting “terrorism” and ask few questions. The “war on terror” has been a catastrophic debacle from day one. If you ask the civilians who suffer under its wrath, which most reporters don’t, you’ll know that. Seumas Milne in…
