Trapped in the Gray Zone
- March 23, 2016
- by
- Matt
It would be good to imagine that our descendants may look back on our savage world as a bygone tragedy that has been superseded by a more enlightened era. Perhaps historians will draw lessons from our collective descent into the abyss, the way we now look back at the 1930s and the rise of fascism, because the careful study of history can always provide salutary lessons to those disposed to look for them.
They may wonder how it came to be that human beings came to believe that it was acceptable to slaughter unarmed...
The Sorrows of Mexico
- October 19, 2014
- by
- Matt
There aren’t many countries in which the discovery of a mass grave believed to be the known victims of a known massacre turns out to be the mass grave of an unknown massacre, but Mexico is one of them. Three weeks ago 43 teaching students disappeared from the town of Iguala, in the southern state...
Turkey’s False Flag
- March 30, 2014
- by
- Matt
No matter how many countries are shattered, no matter how many times the consequences of ‘humanitarian interventions’ fail to live up to their expectations, nothing seems to shake the fairytale version of Western foreign policy that is retold again and again by politicians and the media.
This week for example, the centre-left New Statesman has a...
Robert Greenwald’s ‘Unmanned’: Essential Public Service Journalism
- November 02, 2013
- by
- Matt
After various attempts, the CIA appears to have finally killed Hakimullah Mehsud, the leader of the Tehrik-I-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), in a drone strike in North Waziristan. The United States hasn’t confirmed the hit yet, though a White House spokeswoman has declared that if these reports are true, they would represent a “serious loss for...
Twilight of the General
- May 11, 2013
- by
- Matt
Guatemala is not a country that has had much to celebrate in the last half a century. In 1954, a US-backed coup overthrew the centre-left government of Jacobo Arbenz, and ushered in a thirty year period of civil war, counterinsurgency campaign and state terror in which some 200,000 people were killed, mostly by the...
President Kill
- June 05, 2012
- by
- Matt
Last week’s New York Times piece on Barack Obama’s personal involvement in approving the ‘kill list’ of targets for drone strikes has generated a lot of discussion and attention, and with good reason.
The article shines a grim light on Obama’s fervent commitment to a ‘war on terror’ that appears to have no strategic logic and...
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