Showing all posts tagged United States
Untangling the murky energy war between US and China
Far too often the media covers conflicts in terms of good guys and bad guys, ignoring the never-ending power dynamics over energy and oil. Fascinating piece by Pepe Escobar in Asia Times that describes who really runs the world: Beijing has clearly interpreted the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s “liberation” of Libya – now reverted into…
John Kerry’s fruitless Middle East “peace mission”
Far too many in the media get excited when yet another US official talks about restarting the “peace process”. It’s all smokes and mirrors and largely irrelevant to facts on the ground, ever-expanding Israeli occupation over Palestine. Here’s Jeff Halper, founder of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions: How do we respond to Kerry? I…
Julian Assange on fighting reach of the superpower
Typically tough piece by Julian Assange, published in the Guardian, that outlines the risks faced by every citizen around the world and why trusting state power is a fool’s game: The original cypherpunks were mostly Californian libertarians. I was from a different tradition but we all sought to protect individual freedom from state tyranny. Cryptography…
Force-feeding detainees at Guantanamo Bay is terrorism
Devastating short film that demonstrates the brutal reality for countless prisoners under the Obama administration: As Ramadan begins, more than 100 hunger-strikers in Guantánamo Bay continue their protest. More than 40 of them are being force-fed. A leaked document sets out the military instructions, or standard operating procedure, for force-feeding detainees. In this four-minute film…
Repeat after me, you have no privacy online ever
If we have discovered only one thing recently with the revelations of Edward Snowden, it’s that the US has established an all-seeing and all-hearing surveillance apparatus that knows no bounds. This investigation in the Washington Post adds to this picture: The U.S. government had a problem: Spying in the digital age required access to the…
ABCTV News24’s The Drum on asylum seekers, Wikileaks and Edward Snowden
I appeared on ABCTV News24’s The Drum on Friday night (video here). We discussed the foul use of vulnerable asylum seekers as a political tool in Australia, claiming those coming from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Sri Lanka or elsewhere are just economic refugees. The facts are the complete opposite. I strongly defended the importance of NSA…
Edward Snowden in his own words
As the saga continues, and Ecuador now claims it was a “mistake” to assume the country would help the NSA contractor, the following statement, released via Wikileaks, has appeared: One week ago I left Hong Kong after it became clear that my freedom and safety were under threat for revealing the truth. My continued liberty…