Forget the crocodile tears of Western leaders. This is about unseating a leader who opposes Western designs in the Middle East (albeit Assad is an incredibly brutal dictator). Here’s Australian intellectual Scott Burchill: How genuine is the West’s concerns about the use of chemical weapons in Syria five days ago? Not very, I suspect. … …
Showing all posts tagged United States
Journalist Amy Goodman on the hope for public media
One of the finest reporters in the world, co-host of Democracy Now!, in a long chat about media, democracy, challenging corporate elites and listening to the silences:
Corporate complicity in drone terror
British human rights group Reprieve… on an important investigation: A number of major financial institutions are investigating telecoms firm BT over its alleged involvement in the US’ covert drone warfare programme. The firms considering their investments in BT – after human rights charity Reprieve filed a complaint with the UK Government – include Standard Life, Blackrock,…
Conspiracy theory central; how the Muslim Brotherhood controls Obama
Great US indy journo Max Blumenthal loves taking on media myths, right-wing racism and bullshit. He’s his latest (via Mondoweiss): On August 22, 2013, several hundred Egyptians and Egyptian-Americans hit the streets of Washington DC to show their support for General Abdel Fatah Al-Sisi and the regime that overthrew the elected President Mohamed Morsi in…
Chelsea Manning lawyer speaks out and damns brutal US sentence
Independent journalist Alexa O’Brien, one of the only real reporters who documented the Chelsea Manning trial from the beginning, interviews Manning’s lawyer, David Coombs, on Democracy Now!
ABC Radio Brisbane on Profits of Doom
Last night I was interviewed on ABC Radio Evenings in Brisbane for a long conversation about my new book, Profits of Doom. It was a unique opportunity to discuss the complicity of Rio Tinto in human rights abuses in Bougainville, Papua New Guinea, private contractors in Afghanistan and mis-managed detention centres in Australia:
Direct call for whistle-blowers to reveal what state shamefully denies
My following article appears in today’s Guardian: Revelations of British government intrusion of legitimate media reporting of… American-led, global surveillance… is a call to arms for journalists everywhere. Australian attorney general Mark Dreyfus recently claimed that Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden… weren’t whistle-blowers… because they were “politically motivated”, and neither man exposed government wrong-doing (in fact, both did in…
“Journalism is not terrorism”
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Washington using drones to target journalists with sensitive information?
Is this the future of investigative reporting? How far would a US government (or London?) go to stop information they believed was sensitive? Great piece by Amy Davidson in the New Yorker: On Saturday night, Michael Grunwald, aTime… correspondent, deleted a tweet that he said was “dumb”; a spokesperson for the magazine noted in an e-mailed…
War in Syria exposes gross Western hypocrisy
My following piece appears in the Guardian today: Syrian president Bashar al-Assad wasn’t supposed to survive. Since the uprising began in 2011, it’s been long presumed in western political and media circles that he would be deposed or killed and that a new, more US-friendly autocrat would be installed. This hasn’t happened. We know Russia…