I used to think of the Iraq-Afghanistan Wars as somewhat Orwellian: the braying voices of politicians committing us to endless war against unseen enemies, the constant lies and the clumsy but barefaced covering up of those lies, the imprisonment of mildly dissenting citizens for crimes the state decides the nature of in secret and at […]

So anyway, as I was passing through Brisbane last week at the end of a long journey, I caught up with a friend of mine who reads my blogs. Brisbane always seems to me to be a city where a great catastrophe has at some time taken place, a catastrophe that no one wants to […]

Most kids experience an amount of emotional turbulence on the way to adulthood, and I was no exception. And although there were aspects of my adolescence that make me cringe to this day, I could always be certain that at the end of the school day, I had a home to return to with my […]

More than ten people have been killed after Israeli forces attacked a flotilla bringing aid supplies to the besieged people of Gaza. Details are still sketchy – some sources claim twenty people are dead – but it seems that IDF commandoes stormed the vessels and then opened fire with live ammunition. The flotilla was part […]

Wikileaks has just released this footage from a US Apache helicopter killing a group of civilians in Baghdad in 2007. The clip shows the crew strafing the men from the air and then returning to kill the occupants of a van attempting to collect the wounded. The dead included two journalists from Reuters. In the […]

Actually, no. This is what a civilian massacre by Blackwater contractors in Iraq looks like.