Vondsten 30 juli 2010

Ik kom bij mijn geblader van web naar web vaak interessante en leuke posts tegen. Enkelen daarvan komen terecht in de Zijdelinks log van Geen Commentaar, anderen tweet ik (of niet)


Roger Cohen: The Forgotten American Een ontroerend portret van Furkan Dogan, de enige Amerikaan die is vermoord door Israelische commando's, onderweg naar Gaza met hulpgoederen. Waarom is niemand in Amerika hierover verontwaardigd?

Eric Alterman: Journalism's Age of Shame Na 40 jaar drammen door rechts dat de media links zijn, zijn die het zelf ook gaan geloven. Bang om van door rechts van bias te worden beschuldigd nemen ze een gepatenteerde leugenaar als Andrew Breitbard serieus. Feiten doen er niet meer toe.

Brian Cloughley (op Informed Comment): Against a Rush to Judgment: Pakistan and the Afghan Taliban. De Pakistaanse geheime dienst, de ISI wordt er van beschuldigd samen te werken met de Taliban. Cloughley over de rol van de ISI en andere geheime diensten in Afghanistan:

Mind you, the CIA team in Afghanistan is, to put it kindly, amateur,with the magnet of massive money attracting people who tell them what they want to hear. The Brits are much poorer and comparatively tiny in presence, and in product tend to condescend to their allied spooks, but have proved easy to penetrate to the extent that the Pakistanis have quiet giggles about some of their operatives and operations. The Indians try hard, but – in spite of what the Pakistanis say – are almost entirely without influence in Afghanistan, although they fund a badly-run training camp in Nimroz for a gang of moronic malcontents who call themselves the Baloch National Army.A musical about Afghanistan’s all-singing, all-dancing, international spook drama could be titled the Zigzag Follies.

Paul Krugman: Tax Cut Truthiness

part of the key to how Republicans can believe that returning to the Bush agenda is exactly what we need: they’ve invented themselves an alternate history in which wonderful things happened under Bush

Beelden van dit alternatieve universum:






Jay Rosen: The Afghanistan War Logs Released by Wikileaks, the World's First Stateless News Organization Wat is er bijzonder aan lekken bij Wikileaks? Lekken in de pers is van alle tijden (nou ja, sinds 1770).

The way it worked then is essentially the same as it works today. There’s a bitter dispute in Parliament and people line up on one side or the other. Unable or unwilling to accept defeat, the losing faction decides to widen the battlefield by leaking confidential information, thus bringing the force of public opinion into play. It’s a risky maneuver, of course, but the calculation is that fighting it out in public may alter the balance of forces and lead to a re-decision.