Monday 30th of December 2024
Home » Blogs » John Richardson's blog

fakin' it .....

fakin' it .....

Western governments like to depict terrorism as a uniquely moral evil which democratic states do not engage in.  

But history is filled with instances in which even democratic governments have sanctioned or perpetrated acts of violence that would ordinarily be described as 'terrorist', from bombings and assassinations to black ops and 'dirty wars'.  

Consider the latest report by US journalist Seymour Hersh on the Bush administration's secret war inside Iran. According to Hersh in the New Yorker, US Special Forces are supporting a number of violent organisations in Iran, including a Sunni fundamentalist group called the Jundallah whose followers, according to one US academic, "attended the same madrassas as the Taliban and Pakistani extremists".  

These revelations follow Britain's recent removal of the National Resistance Council of Iran from its list of proscribed terrorist organisations. The Resistance Council is generally considered a front for the Mujahideen e-Khalq (MEK), an enigmatic Marxist-Islamist group based in Iraq which carried out dozens of attacks on Iran over the years with the support of Saddam.  

Double Standards Of Our ‘War On Terror’

sack the messenger...

 Karzai 'axes leader for US rebuke'
Civilians were hit during a US air raid in Nuristan on July 5, the province's governor said 

An Afghan governor who criticised a recent US air raid which killed at 15 civilians has been sacked by Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, Al Jazeera has learned.

Tamim Nuristani, governor of Nuristan province, was fired hours after telling Al Jazeera that the US raid on July 5 was poorly executed and would inflame tensions.

A woman and a child were among those killed by missiles fired by US helicopters, he said in an interview to Al Jazeera's James Bays after news of the raid broke.

A spokesman for the US-led coalition said that it had targeted fighters who had attacked a military base in the province.

But while Nuristani said that a mistake by US forces may have caused the deaths, he said the incident was "inexcusable because [the US] knew that ... civilians were leaving the area" being targeted.

"I think the president, the whole cabinet and the people of Afghanistan are getting angry and that is not helping our cause, nor the Americans or Nato. It is helping the Taliban, not us," he said in the interview.

'Investigation' call

Nuristani said there should be an independent investigation in any future incidents where civilians are killed.

"An independent commission should come; maybe human rights lawyers and the government and the coalition forces lawyers could investigate," he said in the interview with Al Jazeera after the US air-raid.

"The civilians from the local area should be included in any investigation to see what has really happened in the area."

Nuristani was fired by Karzai's office after the interview was broadcast on Al Jazeera, according to reliable sources.

sombre reflection

First al-Bashir, next ... Bush?
 By Mark Levine, Middle East historian

While there is little chance Omar al-Bashir, the Sudanese president, will ever be brought to trial following his indictment by the International Criminal Court (ICC), the charges brought against him nevertheless offer hope for anyone concerned about human rights around the world.

For Americans, however, the ICC indictment should offer a moment of sombre reflection not merely for our relative inaction with regard to years of mass murder in Sudan.

It is equally disturbing that much of the al-Bashir indictment could just as easily be applied to George Bush, the US president.