Archive for June, 2010
June 29, 2010
by Tom Mellen
The CIA has defended its new $100 million (£66m) contract with a notorious mercenary outfit to protect US diplomats in Afghanistan.
In a rare television interview on Sunday, CIA director Leon Panetta confirmed that his agency had hired Xe Services – the company once known as Blackwater – to provide “protective security services” at US consulates in Herat and Mazar-i-Sharif.
Mr Panetta insisted that the US intelligence service did not have “much choice but to accept that contract” after Xe underbid other competitors “by about $26m.”
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Tags:Afghanistan, Blackwater/Xe, CIA Director Leon Panetta, war
Posted in Afghanistan, Uncategorized, USA, war | Leave a Comment »
June 28, 2010
The critically-acclaimed director discusses his upcoming documentary, “South of the Border.”
Critically-acclaimed Hollywood Director Oliver Stone dropped by our studio for a Brave New Conversation, where I spoke with him about his latest documentary South of the Border, scheduled to be released in more than 30 countries this month. South of the Border begins by exploring the role that the corporate-owned mainstream media in the U.S. and Venezuela have played in shaping American’s perspectives on South America, beginning with clips of the attempted coup on Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez. In the Brave New Conversation, Stone describes the South American press:
The press [in South America] is totally owned privately, and most of that press, unlike most Americans realize, is anti-reform. Anybody who comes along and wants to change anything is castigated in the press. Chavez is one example: They kill him every day. The press is vibrant, it’s oppositional, calls for his resignation, calls him a madman, and sometimes calls for an overthrow of the government. This is going on everyday and in America they say there’s censorship. We’re crazy; if we had a press like that, it’d be Fox News on steroids.
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Tags:Latin America, Oliver Stone, South of the Border, US interventions in Latin America
Posted in Commentary, Uncategorized, US policy, USA | Leave a Comment »
June 28, 2010
Insists His Focus Is on Winning the War
by Jason Ditz, Antiwar.com, June 27, 2010
Speaking today in the wake of the G20 Summit, President Barack Obama criticized what he called “a lot of obsession” about ending the war in Afghanistan and withdrawing some 100,000 American troops from the nation.
Obama insisted that instead of considering if and how the war will ever come to some sort of end, his “focus right now is how do we make sure that what we’re doing there is successful, given the incredible sacrifices.”
The US initially invaded Afghanistan in late 2001. The number of troops in the nation has rising precipitously since President Obama took office in 2009, inheriting a war with 30,000 troops and turning it into a war with 100,000 troops.
Obama’s comments reflect those he made earlier this week, disavowing his pledge to begin withdrawing troops from Afghanistan in July of 2011. Now President Obama says that date is just the “beginning of a transition phase” and there is no particular timeline for leaving Afghanistan.
With the war increasingly unpopular, the president presented the 2011 drawdown date as a way to make his most recent escalation more palatable. With the surge troops now deployed, the date appears to have been discarded, and those still clamoring for some sort of end to the nearly decade-long war condemned for losing sight of some ill-defined victory.
Tags:Afghanistan, Jason Ditz, President Barack Obama and war in Afghanistan
Posted in Afghanistan, President Barack Obama, Uncategorized, US policy, USA, war | Leave a Comment »
June 28, 2010
Bethlehem – Ma’an – Seven oxygen machines donated to the Palestinain Authority by a Norwegian development agency were seized by Israeli officials en route to hospitals in the West Bank and Gaza, the Ramallah-based health ministry said.
The machines, the ministry said in a Thursday statement, were confiscated by Israeli officials who claimed that the generators attached “came under the category of possible use for non-medical purposes” if they were delivered to the southern Gaza governorates.
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Tags:hospitals in the West Bank and Gaza, Israeli officials, oxygen machines confiscated
Posted in crime, Gaza, Palestinians, Uncategorized, West Bank, Zionist Israel | Leave a Comment »
June 27, 2010
Journalism has become a linguistic battleground – and when reporters use terms such ‘spike in violence’ or ‘surge’ or ‘settler’, they are playing along with a pernicious game, argues Robert Fisk
The Independent/UK, June 21, 2010
AFP / GETTY IMAGES
Botch and learn: the world’s media await the arrival of the Gaza flotilla that was stormed by the Israeli Navy
Following the latest in semantics on the news? Journalism and the Israeli government are in love again. It’s Islamic terror, Turkish terror, Hamas terror, Islamic Jihad terror, Hezbollah terror, activist terror, war on terror, Palestinian terror, Muslim terror, Iranian terror, Syrian terror, anti-Semitic terror…
But I am doing the Israelis an injustice. Their lexicon, and that of the White House – most of the time – and our reporters’ lexicon, is the same. Yes, let’s be fair to the Israelis. Their lexicon goes like this: Terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror.
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Tags:"Af-Pak" term, journalism and propaganda, journalism nd Israeli government, lanuage of terror, Robert Fisk
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June 27, 2010
By Bob Herbert, New York Times, June 25, 2010
President Obama can be applauded for his decisiveness in dispatching the chronically insubordinate Stanley McChrystal, but we are still left with a disaster of a war in Afghanistan that cannot be won and that the country as a whole will not support.
No one in official Washington is leveling with the public about what is really going on. We hear a lot about counterinsurgency, the latest hot cocktail-hour topic among the BlackBerry-thumbing crowd. But there is no evidence at all that counterinsurgency will work in Afghanistan. It’s not working now. And even if we managed to put all the proper pieces together, the fiercest counterinsurgency advocates in the military will tell you that something on the order of 10 to 15 years of hard effort would be required for this strategy to bear significant fruit.
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Tags:Bob Herbert, General McChrystal’s ouster, US and Afghanistan, war in Afghanistan
Posted in Afghanistan, Commentary, Uncategorized, US policy, war | 1 Comment »
June 26, 2010
by Stephen Lendman, Dissident Voice, June 26th, 2010
First the good.
On June 22, the International Middle East Media Center reported that the UN Human Rights Council (that established the Goldstone Commission) approved “forming an international committee to probe the deadly Israeli” Flotilla attack, massacring and injuring dozens of nonviolent activists on board. Israel’s Defense Minister Ehud Barak urged Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to shelve it, saying:
“We expressed our view that for the time being, as long as….new flotillas are in the preparation, it’s probably better to leave (an investigation) on the shelf for a certain time” – in other words, postpone it long enough to forget, letting Israel’s self-examination whitewash top officials’ culpability, a vain hope given world outrage, mushrooming toward universally branding Israel a pariah rogue state.
The Human Rights Council (HRC) said committee officials will include lawyers and international law and human rights experts, the body to present its findings in September.
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Tags:bulldozing Palestinian houses, Gaza siege, Israel a pariah rogue state, Israel and Turkey, Israel’s violations of international law, Israeli attack on aid flotilla, Stephen Lendman, Swedish Dock Workers Union and Israeli goods
Posted in Commentary, Gaza, Palestinians, Uncategorized, Zionist Israel | Leave a Comment »
June 26, 2010
Critics of the Nuclear Liability Bill Regroup
It’s a true and tested tactic. Announce an investigation. Give the public the time and space it needs to get over its outrage. The political storm will subside. The limelight will forsake the activists and their sympathizers. After that it will be back to business as usual. The waiting game has stood the ruling coalition, the Congress-led UPA, in good stead on past occasions and enabled it to tide over turbulent times. And it was expected to save the situation when a white-hot wave of indignation swept across the country in the wake of the Bhopal court’s verdict in the Union Carbide case. No doubt the political establishment believed the government could return to carrying out Washington’s diktat or fulfilling the bidding of business magnates once calm had been restored.
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Tags:Bhopal court’s verdict, Radha Surya, Union Carbide case, US response
Posted in Commentary, crime, India, Uncategorized, US policy, USA | Leave a Comment »
Peace and Justice Post 
Oliver Stone: The US Has Launched Military Interventions and Political Coups Fifty-Five Times in Latin America
June 28, 2010Critically-acclaimed Hollywood Director Oliver Stone dropped by our studio for a Brave New Conversation, where I spoke with him about his latest documentary South of the Border, scheduled to be released in more than 30 countries this month. South of the Border begins by exploring the role that the corporate-owned mainstream media in the U.S. and Venezuela have played in shaping American’s perspectives on South America, beginning with clips of the attempted coup on Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez. In the Brave New Conversation, Stone describes the South American press:
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Tags:Latin America, Oliver Stone, South of the Border, US interventions in Latin America
Posted in Commentary, Uncategorized, US policy, USA | Leave a Comment »