My weekly column for the Guardian appears today: The ABC TV Lateline interview with Kurt Campbell, former US assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs, was… cordial, even reverential. It was conducted in the middle of March this year, more than a month after Campbell had left the state department. Interviewer Emma Alberici…
Showing all posts tagged United States
The fallacy of Clinton-backed "support" in Haiti
When I visited Haiti last year I investigated the reality of industrial parks and how they largely shafted locals. I cover it in Profits of Doom. A new report (via Common Dreams) reveals the fallacy of this Western elite pushed scheme: Haiti’s Caracol Industrial Park—the U.S. State Department and Clinton Foundation pet project to deliver…
Unquestioning aid is worst kind of support for the world
My following article appears today in ABC Religion and Ethics: Cholera is killing Haitian men, women and children. For three years the United Nations has refused to take full responsibility for its Nepalese peace-keepers bringing the deadly disease to a nation they were tasked to protect. More than 8,300 people have died and more than…
US mass surveillance in the Pacific
Here’s my weekly Guardian column published today: What if China was beating the US at its own super-power game in the Pacific and we didn’t even notice? While Washington distracts itself with… shutdown shenanigans… and failed attempts to control the situation in the Middle East, president Obama’s “pivot to Asia”… looks increasingly shaky. Beijing is… quietly filling the gap,…
On the fallacies, toughness, bias and challenges of war journalism
Reporting from a conflict zone is messy and complicated, rarely as smooth as journalists try to convey. Britain’s Patrick Cockburn, writer for The Independent, is one of the finest chroniclers of post 9/11 madness. His essay in Counterpunch outlines what we should know: The four wars fought in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria over the…
How BDS against fossil fuel companies grows in power
Interesting results and instructive of how similar tactics are increasingly used by critics of Israel through the BDS movement. The Guardian reports: A campaign to persuade investors to take their money out of the fossil fuel sector is growing faster than any previous divestment campaign and could cause significant damage to coal, oil and gas…
What happens when you cross mad Zionists, Rwanda's Paul Kagame and Elie Wiesel?
Whole lotta mess. Here’s a great The Real News report by Max Blumenthal and Alex Kane about a recent event in New York (background here and here):
Glenn Greenwald challenges puerile pro-government BBC questioning
The Guardian reporter shows how it’s done. Note how virtually every BBC “question” could have been written by the British government in relation to intelligence and Edward Snowden. Welcome to mainstream journalism (just as bad as this infamous interview with Julian Assange in 2012):
3AW Melbourne radio interview on Profits of Doom
3AW is one of Melbourne’s biggest radio stations. I was interviewed by… Alan-Pearsall last weekend on his overnight program about my new book, Profits of Doom, and we mostly discussed privatised detention centres for refugees and war contracting in Afghanistan: