Laura Poitras is a remarkable American film-maker who has faced constant harassment by US officials for simply doing her job of documenting the countless abuses against innocents since 9/11. Here are two short films, made for the New York Times, that are beautiful, moving and rage-inducing. This is the true face of America in the…
Showing all posts tagged Yemen
Jeremy Scahill speaks about America’s global assassination program and Left silence
One of America’s finest journalists:
Obama’s vast, global scope of murdering “terrorists”
The Washington Post reports the largely hidden counter-terrorism policies of the Obama administration, without oversight, legal checks or balances and media scrutiny. There’s a word for this and it ain’t democracy. Part one: Over the past two years, the Obama administration has been secretly developing a new blueprint for pursuing terrorists, a next-generation targeting list…
Trying to tempt Anwar al-Awlaki with the lure of another wife
An incredible story, if true, that reveals one way Western agencies attempt to target extremist enemies of the state (apart from killing them with drones). The New York Times reports: The man with the wire-rim glasses and bushy beard, speaking calmly in American-accented English, is familiar from dozens of Web videos urging violent jihad against…
This is just what global peace needs, a greatly expanded CIA drone fleet
The Washington Post reports on the deepening of American attempts to prosecute its “war on terror” globally through the use of imprecise and legally questionable drone technology. It’s also a wonderful way to make countless new enemies: The CIA is urging the White House to approve a significant expansion of the agency’s fleet of armed…
Drone killings; justice must be done soon
This is Barack Obama’s legacy (via the Guardian): The US policy of using aerial drones to carry out targeted killings presents a major challenge to the system of international law that has endured since the second world war, a… United Nations… investigator has said. Christof Heyns, the UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial killings, summary or arbitrary executions,…
America’s drone war is both counter-productive and brutal
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…
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…