My following article appears in Lebanon’s Al Akhbar: America’s drone war has countless silent victims. Since President Barack Obama massively expanded his reliance on the weapon from 2009, the number of civilians killed in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Somalia and Yemen have sky-rocketed, but we rarely hear about these murders. The Western corporate media is content rehashing…
Showing all posts tagged war on terror
ABCTV News24’s The Drum on refugees, #LeftTurn and Obama’s “kill list”
I appeared last night on ABC TV News24’s The Drum (video here) alongside ABC’s Stephen Long and The Australian’s… Adam Creighton. We talked about asylum seekers – I argued that keeping refugees for longer in detention will only benefit the private contractor Serco and worsen the mental health of both staff and detainees. Regarding austerity in…
Is following officials into the toilet too close for reporters to go to get the “story”?
Since 9/11, and certainly long before, there’s been a dangerous tendency for many in the corporate media to be psychologically embedded with governments to report sympathetically on matters of war. It’s an issue I discuss in #LeftTurn. There’s a great column by Salon’s Glenn Greenwald in the Guardian that highlights similar questions: Over the past…
America’s drone war is all about creating illusion of global power
Patrick Cockburn in the Independent: As the US and its allies ponder what to do about Syria, one suggestion advanced by the protagonists of armed intervention is to use unmanned drones to attack Syrian government targets. The proposal is a measure of the extraordinary success of the White House, CIA and Defense Department in selling…
My #LeftTurn chapter on media complicity in war post 9/11
This appears in Crikey’s Pure Poison blog today: Following is an extract from “Media War Junkies Unite”, an essay by Antony Loewenstein from… Left Turn: Political essays for the new Left… which is edited by Loewenstein and Jeff Sparrow, and which was released last week. *** The decade since 11 September 2001 has seen a litany of…
Scahill calls out liberals for remaining largely silent over Obama’s drone murders
After last week’s New York Times feature on Obama’s “Kill List” for supposed terrorists, independent journalist Jeremy Scahill tells MSNBC that the US President has created a Minority Report style of justice: Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
Memo to media; American killing of “militants” is often not the truth
Salon’s Glenn Greenwald: Earlier this week,… The New York Times… reported… that the Obama administration, in order to conceal civilian deaths caused by their drone attacks, “counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants.”… Although I wrote at length about the… NYT”˜s various revelations,… I… wrote separately… about that specific disclosure, in order to emphasize the implications for media outlets reporting…
Obama’s “kill list” and presidential power to murder at will
Washington’s drone war is increasingly exposed as a brutal weapon with countless civilian casualties. America is expanding its use. A major piece in this week’s New York Times provides chilling details of Barack Obama’s major escalation since taking office of killing “terrorists” without any judicial or independent oversight (a new book, Kill or Capture, discusses…