March | 2017 | Informed Comment

2017 was so Gross we even had to relitigate Evils of Colonialism | Informed Comment
▻https://www.juancole.com/2017/12/gross-relitigate-colonialism.html

https://images.theconversation.com/files/187628/original/file-20170926-22303-kjqvfr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip

The Bengal famine of 1943 was the final British-administered #famine in India and claimed around three million lives. When Winston #Churchill was asked to stop shipping desperately needed foodstuffs out of Bengal, he said Indians were to blame for their own deaths for ‘breeding like rabbits.’

#criminel #impunité #crimes #colonialisme #Inde #Bengale

Via Karim Bitar sur twitter

WaPo: UAE Hacked Qatar to Invent Pretense for Retaliation – Mother Jones

▻http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2017/07/wapo-uae-hacked-qatar-to-invent-pretense-for-retaliation

As you know, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries have imposed a blockade on Qatar, allegedly due to concerns over Qatar’s support for various and sundry terrorist groups. The blockade began in May, after Qatar’s official news agency published incendiary remarks from Qatar’s leader, and then claimed they had been hacked:

The fake article quoted Qatar emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani as calling Iran an “Islamic power” and saying Qatar’s relations with Israel were “good” during a military ceremony.

The Qatari state television’s nightly newscast…scrolling ticker…included calling Hamas “the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people,” as well as saying Qatar had “strong relations” with Iran and the United States. “Iran represents a regional and Islamic power that cannot be ignored and it is unwise to face up against it,” the ticker read at one point. “It is a big power in the stabilization of the region.”

Hacked? Get serious. Does anyone seriously believe that—

The United Arab Emirates orchestrated the hacking of Qatari government news and social media sites in order to post incendiary false quotes attributed to Qatar’s emir, Sheikh Tamim Bin Hamad al-Thani, in late May that sparked the ongoing upheaval between Qatar and its neighbors, according to U.S. intelligence officials.

Officials became aware last week that newly analyzed information gathered by U.S. intelligence agencies confirmed that on May 23, senior members of the UAE government discussed the plan and its implementation. The officials said it remains unclear whether the UAE carried out the hacks itself or contracted to have them done.

That’s from the Washington Post. The UAE denies everything, of course.

This is a very big deal. For starters, what are the odds that the UAE did this alone? Pretty slim, I think. Saudi Arabia was almost certainly involved too. And what does President Trump do now? He’s taken the Saudi side of this dispute, but now his own intelligence agencies are telling him that other Arab countries conducted the hack as a deliberate way of giving themselves an excuse to create the blockade. In fact, he probably learned this a week ago.

Someone in the intelligence community apparently decided that (a) Trump was never going to go public with this, and (b) it really needed to become public. But who? And why?

Un élément peu commenté en France, c’est l’embauche par le New York Times d’un éditorialiste climato-sceptique. C’est très remarquable : l’un des plus grands fleurons de la presse libre du monde libre, qui se présentait comme un indispensable bastion de la résistance aux élucubrations fake-news de Trump, dès lors que la nouvelle administration américaine est ouvertement climato-sceptique, s’empresse d’embaucher un éditorialiste climat-sceptique (dans le but prétendu de présenter à ses lecteurs une plus grande diversité de point de vue).

Juan Cole, d’ailleurs, est un des rares à clairement faire le lien entre cette soudaine complaisance avec un précédent épisode de compromission qui allaient dans le sens (dangereux) de l’administration en place :
▻https://www.juancole.com/2017/04/millions-march-climate.html

Bret Stephens at the NYT is the essence of fake news.

The New York Times gave us the Iraq War with phony stories about aluminum tubes and Iraqi nuclear bomb projects, and biological weapons on bumpy Winnebagos on Iraq’s potholed roads. The paper has a lot of great and honest reporters, but a little bit of arsenic can ruin an otherwise fine meal.

Five Top Papers Run 18 Opinion Pieces Praising Syria Strikes–Zero Are Critical
▻http://fair.org/home/five-top-papers-run-18-opinion-pieces-praising-syria-strikes-zero-are-critical

Five major US newspapers—the New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today, Wall Street Journal and New York Daily News—offered no opinion space to anyone opposed to Donald Trump’s Thursday night airstrikes. By contrast, the five papers ran a total of 18 op-eds, columns or “news analysis” articles (dressed-up opinion pieces) that either praised the strikes or criticized them for not being harsh enough:

U.S.-Led Coalition Confirms Strikes Hit Mosul Site Where Civilians Died - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/25/us/politics/us-led-coalition-confirms-strikes-hit-mosul-site-where-civilians-died.html?

Où l’on constate sans surprise, au regard de l’extrême indifférence générale, que Moussoul n’est pas Alep.

The American-led military coalition in Iraq said Saturday that an initial review of recent airstrikes in Mosul, the Islamic State’s last stronghold in Iraq, had confirmed that the strikes hit a site where scores of civilians were killed.

The inquiry, military officials said, found that a building had collapsed a few days after strikes by American forces. United States officials are seeking to determine whether the airstrikes brought down the building, leaving many Iraqis dead, or the Islamic State used the strikes as an opportunity to detonate an explosive in the building.

(...)

The March 17 airstrikes — which Iraqis said had led to the deaths of possibly 200 people — could have produced among the highest civilian death tolls in an American air mission since the United States invaded Iraq in 2003.