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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'
From the ice-bound passes of the Hindu Kush to the blazing heat of the Karakum Desert, Central Asia is a sub-continent steeped in illusion. For more than two millennia conquerors have been lured by the mirage that it is a gateway to immense wealth: China to the east, Indi...
This is your brain on Obama:
Smoking Obama increases apathy and reduces empathy, regardless of race, creed or color. Now blacks, as well as whites, don’t care in the least how many dark-skinned people America kills throughout the world. Before the Obama epidemic,...
‘Before they were blind, deaf and dumb,’ exults Mark Maybury, chief scientist for the U.S. Air Force. ‘Now we’re beginning to make them to see, hear and sense.’
We know that rhetoric.
‘I became myself capable of bestowing animation upon lifeless ...
The inhuman and criminal attack by the Taliban on 14-year old Pakistani education activist, Malala Yousafzai, has been hijacked here in the United States to provide moral patina to America’s equally devastating wars in South Asia. Instead of a focus on the political con...
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In the United States, the dominant narrative about the use of drones in Pakistan is of a surgically precise and effective tool that makes the U.S. safer by enabling “targeted killing” of terrorists, with minimal downsides or collateral impacts.
This...
Six children were attacked in Afghanistan and Pakistan this past week. Three of them, teenaged girls on a school bus in Peshawar, in the tribal region of western Pakistan, were shot and gravely wounded by two Taliban gunmen who were after Malala Yousufzai, a 14-year-old g...
Mumbai.
The worst thing Imran Khan could have done to reclaim self respect is use a bunch of sympathetic foreigners to convey his legitimate stand against drone attacks. There were these gentle people going right into the rough terrain. It contrasted rathe...
First thing in the morning I’ll board the bus heading for South Waziristan. Thirty five westerners will be heading for Dehr Ismail Khan and on to the border town of Kotkai, including Clive Stafford Smith of the London based organization Reprieve, who started our def...
Last week, the Obama Administration argued in front of the First Circuit Court of Appeals that there is no official evidence we are waging drone warfare in northern Pakistan. The ACLU has sued under the Freedom of Information Act for details of the widely reported drone s...
Jab zulm-o-sitam ke koh-e giran
Rooyi ki tarah ur jayenge.
When the weighted mountains of tyranny
Will fly off like cotton whisps.
– Faiz Ahmed Faiz.
This memorandum is addressed to you. Y...
Power is self-sufficient, a replete possession, and must be maintained by whatever agency is required.
—Wole Soyinka, Climate of Fear [1]...
The overweening arrogance of the United States in conduct of its foreign relations is evident throughout the world. A morning glance at international headlines will usually light on some intriguing gobbet of Washington conceit, generally a lecture, a scolding or a spite...
Recent wars from Libya to Afghanistan and Pakistan in a region of vast natural wealth and strategic importance highlight a phenomenon as old as humanity. Iraq and Libya had oil, but their leaders were longtime foes of the United States, now the world’s lone hegemon. Sad...
Islamabad.
On November 26, 2011 in a brazen incident NATO attacked the Salala post on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border in which 24 Pakistani soldiers were killed. Pakistanis were shocked at the incident since it was unprovoked. The Government of Pakistan re...
Americans may feel more distant from war than at any time since World War II began. Certainly, a smaller percentage of us – ...
The “global war on terror” started by President George W. Bush more than a decade ago has taken a new and more sinister turn. Now we know that Barack Obama, the current president, goes through the profiles of people he wants eliminated (...
“It’s drones, baby, drones.”
- (former) United States Secretary of Defence Robert Gates, March 2011.
Unmanned U.S. aircraft now routinely fly over Afghanistan, Pakis...
The article, “Pakistan: Concubine among nations,” in the Toronto Sun by Taraq Fatah (for...
Leading up to the NATO Conference in Chicago last Friday, the U.S. was hopeful that President Zardari of Pakistan would announce the reopening of U.S. military supply routes in Pakistan, according to an article published in the Guardian of London on May 21, but their hope...
In the early fall of 1937, African American poet, Langston Hughes, arrived in Barcelona in the aftermath of an air raid that killed several dozen people. That summer, Hughes had joined a bevy of writers and artists from around the world who had convened in Spain to take...
Lahore.
It’s been a decade when the US invaded Afghanistan with the world’s most modern and well-trained military force including troops of more than 40 countries equipped with latest weaponry. After spending a large span of ten years and billions of d...
On April 19, India tested its first inter-continental ballistic missile, named Agni-V, and joined the select group of nations possessing both nuclear weapons and a delivery system capable of hitting targets across continents. Only a few days before, nuclear capable North ...
1.
I have never had the patience for long-winded novels, and much less for memoirs, but I am glad I persuaded myself to read Imran Khan’s ...
Tariq Ali is still searching for socialism with a human face. He sits on the editorial board of the New Left Review and is a regular columnist for The Guardian, CounterPunch and the London Review of Books. He compares Marx with the Prometheus of Greek mythology who stole...