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The war against terrorism is also a struggle for oil and regional control

By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 23rd October 2001

“Is there any man, is there any woman, let me say any child here”, Woodrow Wilson asked a year after the First World War ended, “that does not know that the seed of war in the modern world is industrial and commercial rivalry?”. In 1919, as US citizens watched a shredded Europe scraping up its own remains, the answer may well have been no. But the lessons of war never last for long.

The invasion of Afghanistan is certainly a campaign against terrorism, but it may also be a late colonial adventure. British ministers have warned MPs that opposing the war is the moral equivalent of appeasing Hitler, but in some respects our moral choices are closer to those of 1956 than those of 1938. Afghanistan is as indispensable to regional control and the transport of oil in central Asia as Egypt was in the Middle East.

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Written by enigmax on August 16, 2009 www.torrentfreak.com

A politician being touted as Britain’s next Prime Minister has been persuaded to take action to criminalize 7 million citizens following intensive industry lobbying over file-sharing. Business Secretary Lord Mandelson is in favor of introducing tough laws including Internet restrictions and fines of up to £50,000 ($83,000).

The debate on how Britain should tackle illicit file-sharing is heating up. The government has already set an utterly unrealistic target of reducing online piracy by 70% within a year. If that isn’t achieved, under the Digital Britain proposals communications regulator Ofcom would be given extra powers to take degenerative action against the functionality of a user’s Internet connection.

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President Obama’s comments follow initial statements from other officials in his administration Friday who said the Department of Defense and the FBI had no jurisdiction over the mass killing by a US-backed warlord, General Abdul Rashid Dostum. A Pentagon spokesman told the Associated Press, “There is no indication that US military forces were there, or involved, or had any knowledge of this, so there was not a full investigation conducted because there was no evidence that there was anything from a DoD perspective to investigate.”

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