Following two weeks of intriguing interviews, this week’s episode of The World Tomorrow features… Moncef Marzouki. The role of democracy in post-dictatorships is raised and how to transform a nation after years living under repression. The fact that such a man is rarely seen or heard in the Western media shames us all, considering Tunisia was…
Wikileaks
Wikileaks is one of the biggest and most important stories in the world, challenging governments and journalists alike. I’ve been writing extensively about the group since 2006, featured an exclusive interview in 2008 with founder Julian Assange and examined the myriad of issues around the website. Assange himself asked me in the early days whether I wanted to be on the group’s board to vet incoming leaks and determine their veracity before publishing. I agreed but unfortunately this never eventuated.
War business in Afghanistan
My following investigation is published by Lebanon’s Al Akhbar: Since the US invasion in 2001, Afghanistan has seen multiple private armies take control of the country’s security sector. The private security compound was on the outskirts of Kabul. Situated along the road to Jalalabad on a… notorious strip of highway, the landscape was industrial with sun-drenched…
Assange interviews two culture warriors for 2nd TV interview
After last week’s interview with the Hizbollah leader, Julian Assange returns to his series The World Tomorrow with philosopher Slavoj Zizek and hardliner conservative David Horowitz. It’s all rather chaotic but fascinating nonetheless:
First Julian Assange TV interview is with Hizbollah leader
A brave first call. Julian Assange speaks to Hassan Nasrallah and doesn’t take the position, as so much of the corporate media, that he’s one of the world’s greatest terrorists (which he clearly is not). They discuss Syria, Assad, Israel, Palestine, religion, God, technology, Wikileaks and the US. Assange could be more forceful with his…
Why Assange wants to host his own talk-show
I like the fact that somebody, without the typical media background, can host a program and not subscribe to the usual mainstream media obsessions:
Hello America, my name is Australia and we’d love to help you isolate Wikileaks
Is there anything Canberra won’t do to please its Washington masters (hint: no)? New Matilda reveals just the latest episode: As Julian Assange tilts at the Senate, new laws have been passed that will make it harder for organisations like Wikileaks to operate legally – and there are more to come, writes Matthew da Silva…
What serious media would have reported about Wikileaks (but did not)
So many stories and so much missed deliberately or wilfully ignored. Interesting extract from a new book, The phone hacking scandal: journalism on trial. This is by Justin Schlosberg and details how many key media outlets consistently fail to hold power to account (and no, it ain’t an accident): The performance of serious media in…
What our media don’t tell us about the Middle East
Yet more fascinating insights from the recently released Wikileaks documents of Stratfor, published by Lebanon’s… Al Akhbar. One: US government officials requested that an American private security firm contact Syrian opposition figures in Turkey to see “how they can help in regime change,” the CEO of one of these firms told Stratfor in a company email…
This is how Obama wants to get Wikileaks and Bradley Manning? Incompetence Inc
What a farce (via Politico): The federal government’s vigilance at preventing anything relating to… WikiLeaks… from appearing on a government computer has tripped up military prosecutors, causing them to miss important emails from the judge and defense involved in the case against an Army intelligence analyst accused of… leaking hundreds of thousands of diplomatic cables and military reports… to…
Just how close is Google to the US government?
Newly released documents from Wikileaks suggest that the internet giant has an agenda rather different to just a very fast search engine (via Al Akhbar): Top Google execs, including the company’s CEO and one of Barack Obama’s major presidential campaign donors Eric Schmidt, informed the intelligence agency Stratfor about Google’s activities and internal communication regarding…