Back in November I broke a story that detailed covert Australian missions across the Middle East, mostly off the books and often skirting legality. Today’s piece in the Sydney Morning Herald by Rafael Epstein appears to add important points to the role Australia is playing alongside the US and Britain in these war zones but…
Showing all posts tagged war on terror
The West has much to learn post Bin Laden death
My following article appears in today’s ABC’s The Drum: The triumphalism after the American targeted assassination of Osama bin Laden is a sure sign that the US is incapable of understanding the significance of the painful years since September 11. We suffered and now you must, too. “I’ve never been so excited to see the…
Pakistani elites played table tennis with OBL?
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Obama’s Israelification of foreign policy
Killing “enemies” whenever and wherever you want. That’s the Israeli way. Leading American journalist Jeremy Scahill writes that the US President has accelerated covert methods in the last years in a futile effort to safeguard America. The opposite result is guaranteed: Both President Bush and President Obama have reserved the right for US forces to…
ABCTV News24 on Bin Laden and why resistance won’t die
I appeared tonight on ABCTV News’ The Drum (video here) talking about Osama Bin Laden’s murder and its ramifications, alongside Australian Financial Review journalist David Crowe, US Studies Centre Dr Pete Hatemi (formerly in the US military post 9/11) and former CNN correspondent Michael Ware (here’s partial video of the show, mainly featuring the intrepid…
Not all resistance to Western occupation is terrorism
And nowhere is that clearer in Afghanistan, where the Taliban, as vile as it often is, is not the same as Al-Qaeda (or Hamas or Hizbollah or Iran). Our political and media classes have largely failed post 9/11 to even try to understand Islamism or resistance: Considering how closely tied their histories have been, the…
Our tax dollars used to back Facebook pages urging war and liberation
How much money is spent by our governments to support the noble wars fought in our name? Michael Hastings is a leading American investigative journalist who likes nothing more than uncovering the lies and spin told by US officials to back conflicts globally. In a recent interview with US magazine Guernica, he further uncovers these…
How many drinks is too many to party over murder of OBL?
We live in a world that celebrates cowboy “justice”. A bad man is killed and the world cheers. We really have become like the Israelis, where “targeted assassinations” are simply a fact of life and yet contribute nothing to the security of the people. In fact the opposite is true. But oh well, Osama Bin…
Spare the celebration over Bin Laden’s death; how many dead since 9/11?
What matters to the Muslim world today? The death of an old man in a Pakistani compound? Or the stirrings of Arab revolutions against the wishes of Western forces far keener to maintain the status-quo of dictatorships? Robert Fisk, a journalist who has met Bin Laden on a number of occasions, said yesterday that Bin…
The official, New York Times approved version of OBL’s death
Here it is: After years of dead ends and promising leads gone cold, the big break came last August. A trusted courier of Osama bin Laden’s whom American spies had been hunting for years was finally located in a compound 35 miles north of the Pakistani capital, close to one of the hubs of American…