It was not pencils and pens – let alone ideas – that left Iraq, Gaza and Afghanistan shattered and hundreds of thousands of human beings dead. Not twelve. Hundreds of thousands. All with stories, with lives, with families. Tens of millions who have lost friends, family, homes and watched their country be torn apart.
This points right at – what else – blowback. Yes, they could be Daesh/ISIS/ISIL mercenaries trained by NATO (crucially, France included) in Turkey and/or Jordan. But it might get even false-flag nastier. They could also be former or current French special forces.
Rather than ameliorating the danger, the US-led military campaign had accelerated it to the point of making an impending terrorist attack virtually inevitable.
And as for freedom of speech and expression, we need only look back to the most recent royal wedding to see how even these sacred ‘shining British values’ can be exposed as pure illusion
What frightens the Israel lobby is not my critique, but my expertise. It is impossible to spew out the usual Israeli propaganda, half-truths, distortions and lies—as retired Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz once tried to do when he and I appeared at a Columbia University event—to someone who has spent years in the Middle East reporting on the conflict. What the Israel lobby fears most are facts.
John Pilger, film-maker and award winning journalist, talks to Going Underground host Afshin Rattansi about the headline events of the year, from CIA torture to the Ukraine crisis. He says the whole tenure of the BBC coverage of the Torture report was ‘does torture work?’ Modern British history is full of torture, and the British were ‘masters’ at it.
But it’s not just Turkey. Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar and Kuwait have all been heavily implicated in the past – according to the CIA’s own classified assessments – in financing the most virulent extremist elements of the Islamist rebel groups in Syria. Yet they did this under a covert operations programme to destabilise the Assad regime that was coordinated primarily by the US and UK.
After 54 years of imposing a unilateral vicious trade and diplomatic blockade on the small Caribbean island country, the US move is significant. But not for the blithe reasons that the NY Times and other Western media outlets have presumed and would have the rest of us believe.
The U.S. aggression toward Cuba since 1959 denied the world a chance to witness what that revolution may have become. But, in reality, Cuba has never stood a chance. As far back as the American Revolution, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams announced that U.S control of Cuba was “of transcendent importance.”
So, comrades, instead of debating the minutiae of the latest torture report, instead of choosing to be surprised, instead of turning this into yet another pathetic two-party debate [sic], instead of creating Cheney memes, let’s instead do the work to see past the corporate propaganda
much of the media coverage of this issue is missing the crucial bigger picture: the deliberate rehabilitation of torture under the Obama administration, and its systematic use to manufacture false intelligence to justify endless war.
Whether she knows it or not, by pointing to Prince Harry fighting and killing the Taliban—most of whom are poor, local men from farming families—Majida crossed a red line that most career-minded journalists steer well clear of.
