So many stories and so much missed deliberately or wilfully ignored. Interesting extract from a new book, The phone hacking scandal: journalism on trial. This is by Justin Schlosberg and details how many key media outlets consistently fail to hold power to account (and no, it ain’t an accident): The performance of serious media in…
Showing all posts tagged United States
For those hoping China will be more benign super-power, think again
Reuters reports: A Chinese telecommunications equipment company has sold Iran’s largest telecom firm a powerful surveillance system capable of monitoring landline, mobile and internet communications, interviews and contract documents show. The system was part of a 98.6 million euro ($130.6 million) contract for networking equipment supplied by Shenzhen,… China-based ZTE Corp to the Telecommunication Co of…
The Al-Qaeda media plan fond of MSNBC?
Fascinating information, if true, by David Ignatius in the Washington Post: Among the last known images of Osama bin Laden is a video seized at his compound the night he was killed, which shows the al-Qaeda leader hunched before a television screen studying a video of himself. It’s testimony to bin Laden’s obsession with the…
Leading American Zionist calls for “Zionist BDS”
Something is stirring in the American, Jewish, liberal, Zionist heartland. Peter Beinart, former supporter of the Iraq war and tough Zionist, has become a very vocal and very public critic of occupying Israel. His “dream” is still to maintain so-called democratic Israel, an inherently undemocratic outcome for the countless Palestinians inside Israel, but this is…
Sri Lanka’s killing fields – unpunished war crimes
The latest in a series of stunning Channel 4 documentaries about war crimes in Sri Lanka (here’s the first part from last year):
Who loves war? Corporations (so thank you America post 9/11)
Turning a profit from war is an old story, way before September 11, 2001, but the last decade has seen an explosion of companies making a killing from countless, Washington-led wars. This recent story in USA Today is a cracking yarn and reveals how deeply problematic is vulture capitalism: As the Pentagon has sought to…
What we do to Afghans every week is terrorism
Michael Hastings: They say [the shooter] has a traumatic brain injury. But what we see on a weekly basis is”¦Afghans being killed. It happens because we have 100,000 troops in Khandahar who know that we’re leaving”¦ If he’s insane, he’s a symptom of an insane policy.
This is how Obama wants to get Wikileaks and Bradley Manning? Incompetence Inc
What a farce (via Politico): The federal government’s vigilance at preventing anything relating to… WikiLeaks… from appearing on a government computer has tripped up military prosecutors, causing them to miss important emails from the judge and defense involved in the case against an Army intelligence analyst accused of… leaking hundreds of thousands of diplomatic cables and military reports… to…
American hypocrisy on massive scale
Does anybody serious believe American officials when they talk about supporting human rights? Hillary Clinton recently said this… at a UN Secretary Council debate on the Arab Spring: … we reject any equivalence between premeditated murders by a government’s military machine and the actions of civilians under siege driven to self-defense. Such a statement requires a…