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HOLLYWOOD AND THE CIA — Film historian Ed Rampell details Hollywood’s entangled relationship with the CIA and the Pentagon; HOUSES OF THE DEAD: Nancy Kurshan exposes the cruel human rights offenses taking place inside America’s vast gulag of Control Unit Prisons; BROTHERHOOD OF SUMMER: David Macaray charts the history of the most powerful union in the US: the Baseball Players Association; TAR SANDS COME TO AMERICA: Steve Horn explains how the Keystone Pipeline debates have diverted attention from Big Oil’s other plans to transport Alberta’s oil into the US. PLUS: Jeffrey St. Clair on CONSTITUTIONAL ENTROPY; Mike Whitney on HOW THE BANKS TARGETED BLACKS; Chris Floyd on THE RISE OF BRITAIN’S TEA PARTY; Kristin Kolb on THE NEEDLE AND THE DAMAGE DONE; Kim Nicolini on the FILMS OF WILLIAM FRIEDKIN; and Lee Ballinger on POETS VS. THE ONE PERCENT.
Archives by Tag 'Pakistan'
The antics of mainstream politicians in Pakistan (or the whole of South Asia) no longer appear unique, just a more extreme version of some of their European and North American counterparts. The South Asians could, in fact, be regarded as pioneers, shamelessly and shameful...
Back in May, Pakistan went to the polls and elected members of the National Assembly and Provincial Assemblies. Nawaz Sharif’s party, the PML-N, secured a comprehensive victory in the elections.
Thus, the 63-year old steel magnate, Sharif, was recently sworn in P...
Some on the left are writing hopefully these days that perhaps President Obama has finally realized he needs to back off on his warlike posture on drones and the War on Terror. They are seeing his talk about scaling back the use of drone killing machines and of reconsider...
“Gunmen in Pakistan on Monday set ablaze five trucks carrying NATO equipment out of Afghanistan as the international military alliance winds down it combat mission there, officials said.”
-Agence France Presse, 3/1/13
There is no...
The A1 story in Sunday’s New York Times, written by...
To observe the Republicans, one would think that the U.S. military was involved in nothing more controversial than a Marine holding an umbrella for President Barack Obama while he gave a speech in the rain. Sarah Palin, one of the many darlings of the rightwing, has sta...
Undoubtedly, Pakistan is now a “democracy”, that is, the Western style democracy where the elections are held, people vote, and the people ...
Pakistan’s elections come at a key junction in the region’s geopolitics, with the public firmly opposed to the US ‘war on terror’ being conducted on Pakistani soil with no regard for its sovereignty. Pakistan’s new prime minister has a mandate to...
Alternate realities in the conflict Pakistan is waging against insurgents in its tribal areas tend to be regular affairs. Intrinsic to them is the contorted relationship the country has with the United States, three bits domestic violence to two bits political expediency....
“These people who are commonly known as leaders, view politics and religion as that crippled, lame and injured man, displaying whom our beggars normally beg for money. These so-called leaders go about carrying the carcasses of politics and religion on their ...
It was a typical Mantoesque gesture, the decision by Islamabad to hold the national elections on May 11, 2013. Mantoesque, not because they are being held at all, but because the day eerily coincides with Saadat Hasan Manto’s 101st birth anniversary, coming in the wake ...
Mumbai.
He is dead now. India was pleading for the life of a man dying in a government hospital in Pakistan. A prisoner on death row, ...
New Delhi.
A clamour is up to name Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi as the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate at India’s general election next year. His backers say he should be judged for bringing development to his state. His oppo...
The drone war may have just taken out a high value target—former President of Pakistan and Bush Administration partner in the War on Terror, Pervez Musharraf.
No, he didn’t get blown to bits by a ...
Karachi, Pakistan.
Laiq Hussain, a member of the radical Sunni group Ahle Sunnat Wal Jamaat, was riding his motorbike down a busy street in central Karachi, with a friend on the pillion, when they were ambushed. A bullet hit Hussain in the right temple: ...
A woman finds herself alone on the street in an unfamiliar neighborhood of an unfamiliar city. The people around her don’t speak her native language, and in fact, she doesn’t understand their language. She is accompanied by a 12 year old boy, Ali. She doesn’t rec...
Bina Shah has written an excellent ...
Hundreds of prisoners of the US War of Terror languish in prisons around the world, in Guantanamo and on the US mainland. Some have been there as long as 12 years some have sentences that extend beyond the span of their life; many have never been charged with a cri...
On the internet there have been photographs going round of a row of puffy-faced North Korean generals with flabby chests covered in medals. Their decorations are absurd, of course, because none of these chubbies has heard a shot fired in anger. And western propaganda m...
Drones are still hovering over the capital – figuratively, for the time being. The images generated by Eric Holder’s disquieting testimony and Rand Paul’s filibuster are lingering. They have not ignited an uproar of protest against targeted assassinations, signature...
Frogs in the marsh mud drone their old laments.
— Vergil, Georgics
It is wonderful how a new weapon can rejuvenate a word that has long been something of a dullard. The reinvigorated word is “drone.”
In days...
Believe the War on Terror has been an unmitigated disaster? Find it difficult to wrap your head around the Long War’s long list of horrors? Think the Obama administration and Congress’s willingness to wage the War indefinitely is murderous myopia? Think again: the War...
Do only American deaths matter? The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence thinks so. During last Thursday’s confirmation hearing for John O. Brennan as CIA Director the Committee’s exclusive focus was on American deaths from drones. Not one Committee member as...
Mumbai.
Everyone is singing the Kashmir tune. An all girl-band has been banned. Most of us outside and many in the state of Jammu & Kashmir, had never heard about them until this happened. The problem is not that one should refrain from opposing such c...
I personally found the president’s inaugural speech not just insipid, but disgusting. It reached its gut-churning nadir near the end where he said:
“We, the people, still believe that enduring security and lasting peace do not require perpetual war&...