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,…
Showing all posts tagged Afghanistan
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…
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…
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…
Who believes that NATO won’t continue terrorising Afghanistan for years to come?
Despite much of the media coverage recently that suggested America and its Western allies would largely leave by the end of 2014, Thomas Ruttig from The Afghanistan Analysts Network – I spent time with this valuable NGO while in Kabul in April – offers the reality: When President Barack Obama stated at last weekend’s NATO…
Talking about war without celebrating war
It’s a tough call on mainstream, corporate TV. And so rare. This segment, Up With Chris Hayes on MSNBC, is an interesting attempt. Even talking about the immorality of US-led wars is a concept almost absent from so-called polite debate: Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
What real war coverage should look like
This is remarkable. Returned US army vets giving back their medals of honour near this week’s NATO conference in Chicago. Powerful, poignant and the kind of voices almost never heard in the mainstream media. Much easier and safer to interview generals (hello ABC TV’s 7.30 last night) about a war in Afghanistan that they’ve ruined…