Today, on 11 September, ABC1 and ABC Big Ideas… screens the following… (and I discuss my recent book Profits of Doom): Personal, economic, geopolitical security – this is the panel discussion from the… Melbourne Writers Festival. Who gets to make the decisions in these arenas? And why are we so damned anxious and insecure in this continuing period…
Showing all posts tagged war on terror
Beware slam dunk “intelligence” over Syria
The rush to war against Syria is gathering pace. But beware slimy politicians offering certainties (or the Zionist lobby). The truth is murky. One of the finest dissenting US journalists is Gareth Porter. His latest is essential reading (via TruthOut): Secretary of State John Kerry assured the public that the Obama administration’s summary of the…
Challenging US-led Dirty Wars
My book review appears in today’s Sydney Morning Herald: Days after the Boston marathon bombings in April, the surviving suspect, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, reportedly told authorities that he and his brother, Tamerlan, watched online the sermons of Anwar al-Awlaki, the US-born cleric who was killed by an American drone in Yemen in 2011. It was just…
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,…
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!
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…
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…
What Edward Snowden revelations say about indy journalism
An insightful feature in the New York Times magazine by Peter Maass on the role played by film-maker Laura Poitras and journalist Glenn Greenwald when discovering Edward Snowden and reporting his invaluable NSA revelations: Poitras and Greenwald… are an especially dramatic example of what outsider reporting looks like in 2013. They do not work in a…
The daily inhumanity of Guantanamo Bay
Devastating article by writer John Grisham in the New York Times: About two months ago I learned that some of my books had been banned at Guantánamo Bay. Apparently detainees were requesting them, and their lawyers were delivering them to the prison, but they were not being allowed in because of “impermissible content.” I became…