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SYRIA: MORALITY AND REALITY

September 4, 2013 by Kenan Malik

First, the British parliament rejects David Cameron’s demand for an immediate military strike on Syria. Then, Barack Obama, seemingly all set to bomb Syria, decides to postpone any action until it wins backing from Congress (which is by no means a foregone conclusion). The extraordinary flip-flops and u-turns over policy towards Syria on both sides of the Atlantic last week might seem to express the triumph of the democratic process over hasty belligerence. They speak also, however, to the confusion […]

Categories: International, Politics • Tags: arab spring, britain, cia, freedom struggles, imperialism, iraq, morality, syria, use, war on terror, western policy

INVASION OF PRIVACY WE SHOULD TRULY WORRY ABOUT

May 16, 2011 by Kenan Malik

Jane Mayer, author of The Dark Side, a seminal account of the CIA, extraordinary rendition and torture, has an interview in the New Yorker with Thomas Drake, a former senior executive at the National Security Agency who is about to be tried for violating the Espionage Act by leaking to a journalist secret documents about America’s covert surveillance of its own citizens. Drake, as Mayer puts it, is effectively being charged with being ‘an enemy of the state’. But it’s a state […]

Categories: Justice & Liberties, War on terror • Tags: anti-terror laws, cia, jane mayer, liberties, privacy, usa, war on terror

A REVOLT FOR WHOSE BENEFIT?

February 7, 2011 by Kenan Malik

How can Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak be eased out of office without causing too much turmoil, or without providing a political opportunity for the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood? That’s the question with which many Western leaders are now grappling. The growing consensus seems to be that what Egypt needs is, in the words of Hillary Clinton, an ‘ordered transition’ to a post-Mubarak Egypt and that vice-president Omar Suleiman is the man to manage this. The idea of an ‘ordered transition’ that […]

Categories: International, Justice & Liberties • Tags: cia, democracy, egypt, fareed zakaria, freedom struggles, hillary clinton, hosni mubarak, ian johnson, islamism, muslim brotherhood, nasser, protests, secularism, tony blair, usa, working class movements

‘HE WAS NOT SQUEAMISH, BY THE WAY’

January 30, 2011 by Kenan Malik

New Yorker’s Jane Mayer on Egypt’s new vice president Omar Suleiman: He was the CIA’s point man in Egypt for renditions—the covert program in which the CIA snatched terror suspects from around the world and returned them to Egypt and elsewhere for interrogation, often under brutal circumstances… Edward S. Walker, Jr., a former U.S. Ambassador to Egypt, described Suleiman as ‘very bright, very realistic’, adding that he was cognizant that there was a downside to ‘some of the negative things […]

Categories: War on terror • Tags: cia, egypt, jane mayer, rendition, torture, usa, war on terror