Keyword: War on Terror

Massacre Caught on Tape: Tip of the Iceberg

This clip is an excerpt of an interview that Amy Goodman of Democracy Now conducted with Julian Assange, Co-founder of Wikileaks and Glenn Greenwald of the American publication, Salon.com. WikiLeaks is the whistle blowing website that releases sensitive information into the public domain. This week WikiLeaks released what has been confirmed as a valid video of American soldiers massacring innocent Iraqi civilians. Amongst those killed were two Reuters employees, which to some degree helped...

The Opium Wars in Afghanistan: Can Anyone Pacify the World's Number One Narco-State?

Picture: illuminating_911 Alfred W. McCoy - In ways that have escaped most observers, the Obama administration is now trapped in an endless cycle of drugs and death in Afghanistan from which there is neither an easy end nor an obvious exit. After a year of cautious debate and costly deployments, President Obama finally launched his new Afghan war strategy at 2:40 am on February 13, 2010, in a remote market town called Marja in southern Afghanistan's Helmand Province. As a wave of helicopters descended on Marja's outskirts spitting up...

British Comedy Satirizing US-UK Led Invasion of Iraq Gets Nominated for Oscar

"In the Loop" is a British comedy lampooning the US-UK effort to attack Iraq. The film is a satire of the Anglo-American diplomatic wrangling in the lead-up to the war. It's been nominated for an Oscar this year and despite its serious subject matter, has been described by a New York Times review as the "funniest big-screen satire in recent memory." "The short summary is that everybody betrays everybody else, that opportunism trumps idealism and that telling...

The Iraqi Oil Conundrum

Picture: Vertigogen Michael Schwartz - Energy and Power in the Middle East  How the mighty have fallen. Just a few years ago, an overconfident Bush administration expected to oust Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, pacify the country, install a compliant client government, privatize the economy, and establish Iraq as the political and military headquarters for a dominating U.S. presence in the Middle East. These successes were, in turn, expected to pave the way for ambitious goals, enshrined in the 2001 report of Vice President...

Avatar: A Humanist Call From Mt. Hollywood

Picture: rxau Gilad Atzmon - James Cameron's Anti-War Film Avatar may well be the biggest anti-war film of all time. It stands against everything the West is identified with. It is against greed and capitalism, it is against interventionism, it is against colonialism and imperialism, it is against technological orientation, it is against America and Britain. It puts Wolfowitz, Blair and Bush on trial without even mentioning their names. It enlightens the true meaning of ethics as a dynamic judgmental process rather than...

The Dark Sahara: America's War on Terror in Africa

Picture: Rachel Bunting Democracy Now - American Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, ended the South African leg of her African tour on Sunday, 09 August 2009, before jetting off to Angola and a further four African countries - the Democratic Republic of Congo, Nigeria, Liberia and Cape Verde. In light of Clinton's tour, last week Democracy Now published an interview with British anthropologist Jeremy Keenan, who talked about AFRICOM, the US military command in Africa -- an issue that's clouded the Clinton tour in many of the...