Fighting against peace: Why US doesn’t want an end to wars

Neil Clark

The only surprising thing about the news that the US is sabotaging peace moves in Afghanistan and Pakistan is that anyone should find the news surprising.

As reported on RT, Pakistan has accused the US of sabotaging peace talks between the authorities in Islamabad and the Taliban following last Friday’s drone assassination of the Pakistani Taliban leader Hakimullah Mehsud.

The murder of Hakimullah is the murder of all efforts at peace," Pakistani Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisa said. "Brick by brick, in the last seven weeks, we tried to evolve a process by which we could bring peace to Pakistan and what have you [the US] done?"

The killing of Hakimullah Mehsud comes less than a month after the US effectively wrecked the Afghan government’s efforts to engage with the Taliban by capturing Latif Mehsud, Hakimullah’s lieutenant. Latif Mehsud was the man that the Afghan government hoped would be a go-between for peace talks with the Taliban. Afghan President Hamid Karzai was reported to have been furious about the US operation. Karzai has also said that the drone strike against Hakimullah Mehsud “took place at an unsuitable time.”

The fact is that on several important occasions in the last 30 years or so, the US has wrecked peace efforts and used its power to provoke or prolong conflicts which could have been avoided or solved without further bloodshed.


One of the truest journalists is a cartoonist armed with a penguin

John Pilger

In its bid to continue lawlessly spying on almost everyone, Britain's "intelligence" and "security" establishment has launched an assault on the Guardian. Such is the rise of the totalitarian state that the secret police enter a newspaper to witness the smashing of computer hard-drives, as happened at the Guardian, and the government, via a poodle MP, can call for the paper's prosecution for treason. As if to prove its respectability, the Guardian has sought the endorsement of notables, including Nick Clegg, Harold Evans and other specialists in faint praise.

The most effective defender of the paper is not one of these. He has shaggy dark hair and a beard - or he did when I last saw him. For more than 20 years I have turned to his work as you would reach for coffee in the morning. He is outrageous, anarchic, brilliant, sometimes inexplicable and a bit mad (not really). For those who doubt the truth is subversive and often absurd, I point them towards two pages in the Guardian, where he resides.

Only Steve Bell exposes consistently, fearlessly, the bullshit of "public life". Indeed, his characters are often drowning in or water-skiing on the stuff. "Right, that's it," says the last governor of the Bank of England, Sir Mervyn King, to Gordon Brown, then prime minister, and chancellor Alistair Darling, "heads down, tea break over!" They are up to their chins in a tank of turds.

Steve Bell is a cartoonist and a true journalist with few rivals. He is Hogarth and Swift with a touch of Peter Sellers and a sprinkling of Orwell. He is more of an English original than one of his prime targets, Margaret Thatcher, the former petit-bourgeois totem. Often using the wickedly all-seeing penguin star of his strip, "If..." he rumbled both Thatcher and her protege, Blair, early in their criminal ascendancy.

While his Guardian colleagues swooned over Blair as a mystic of the "Third Way", Steve Bell planted Thatcher's crazed eye on Blair's rictus mask. A print of that first appearance of the Thatcher/Blair eye, which he sent me, hangs in pride of place, though the gaze is disconcerting. Opening the Guardian news pages recently to find Blair boasting about his ability to absorb "the sense of pain" of others was like reading a Steve Bell cartoon.


The NSA spy scandal and the attack on press freedom

Chris Marsden

Recently released police documents on the August 18 arrest and questioning at London’s Heathrow airport of David Miranda, the domestic partner of journalist Glenn Greenwald, are a serious warning on the advanced stage of the decay of democracy in Britain and internationally.

They show that Miranda was held on blatantly trumped up terrorism charges, aiming to block reporting on the NSA spying scandal. While British, US, and European intelligence agencies have developed the mass electronic spying apparatus of a police state—as Greenwald and whistleblower Edward Snowden have revealed—the internal security forces have developed the legal and police apparatus of an authoritarian regime.

A document from the Metropolitan Police HQ at Scotland Yard, released as a result of a court action taken out by Miranda, states: “Intelligence indicates that Miranda is likely to be involved in espionage activity which has the potential to act against the interests of UK national security... Additionally the disclosure, or threat of disclosure, is designed to influence a government and is made for the purpose of promoting a political or ideological cause. This therefore falls within the definition of terrorism.”

Such remarks could easily be made by officials of any police-state dictatorship. Under such a broad definition, virtually any genuine reporting on the conduct of the state—which could embarrass or expose criminal behavior by state officials, and is written with distrust towards them—can be pursued as terrorism.


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