Britain’s official war commemoration is certainly not a fitting tribute to victims of war. Because if it were then there would a commitment to stopping wars. But as history shows, Britain’s warmongering has proliferated over the years. That in turn is because the upper echelons of British class society use war commemorations as a cloak to hide their vile belligerence.
This is our second look at the work of Robert Stuart, concerning the BBC Panorama documentary Saving Syria’s Children. ( here for our first instalment). When did the alleged chemical attacks actually occur? Why do accounts of the timing differ so widely?
‘The War You Don’t See’ (2011) is a powerful and timely investigation into the media’s role in war, tracing the history of ’embedded’ and independent reporting from the carnage of World War One to the destruction of Hiroshima, and from the invasion of Vietnam to the current war in Afghanistan and disaster in Iraq.
The Colin Powell memorandum in preparation for the Crawford summit of April 2002 (yes, that Powell, who has undertaken some considered Pilate handwashing ever since), was more damning than most. It outlined what the British role behind justifying an imminent war with shoddy grounds would look like.
Former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton should be prosecuted for war crimes over her admission under oath that she played a part in destroying Libya, an American political commentator and journalist says.
The Erdoğan regime’s ‘hypothesis’ is that ISIS or the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) was responsible for the terrorist attack, a position echoed by all of the NATO governments and dutifully repeated by all of the Western mass media. Their most recent claim is that a Turkish member of ISIS carried out the massacre – in a ‘copy-cat action’ after his brother, blamed by the Turkish government for an earlier bombing which left 33 young pro-Kurdish activists dead in July in Suruc, on the Syrian border.
The alternative hypothesis, voiced by the majority of the Turkish opposition, is that the Erdoğan regime was directly or indirectly involved in organizing the terrorist attack or allowing it to happen.
Obama’s shift to regime-change in Syria was motivated not by concern for Syrian lives, but by the recognition that the previous strategy of engagement through pressure had failed to mould Assad into a reliable and ‘stable’ dictator.
Simultaneously, far from vindicating Russia and Iran, this investigation exposes their role in escalating Assad’s state-terrorism to protect their own narrow strategic goals.
Latest Blair revelations should serve as an urgent warning to MPs, especially Labour MPs, who are contemplating voting for war in Syria.
The video of 13 year old Palestinian Ahmed Manasrah bleeding to death on the pavement of an East Jerusalem neighborhood has been described as “shocking,” “disturbing,” and “painful to watch.” The callous verbal abuse and insults from Israelis watching the child writhe in agony are variously characterized as “heartless” and “cruel”; and indeed they are. “Die you son of a […]
The Army of Conquest, which includes “moderate” rebels, receives weapons, funding and logistical support from US-led coalition allies, especially Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey.
What does it say about the BBC that the leader of the opposition, in declaring a commitment to international law and global peace, is portrayed as a danger to the country, if not the world, with no counter-view allowed?
The media do not merely generate the political weather. They play a large part in creating the climate in which information is received and understood. A notion such as ‘electability’, to take the example at hand, is unthinkable without the media, which, in their every representation of a political leader, ask (and supply the authorities to help us decide) not only who is and is not electable, but what should be the criteria by which electability is judged.
