The New York Times has a moving obituary of this truly great journalist; a rare mainstream reporter who realised that the big stories aren’t about “important people but the effect of power on citizens of the world, in his case the Middle East.

During my recent visit to Papua New Guinea, I constantly heard complaints about the absurd number of Western advisers who were coming to the country telling locals how to live their lives. It’s a form of neo-colonialism. This is therefore good news:

Australia’s international aid agency says it has now saved more than $US90 million by slashing the number of advisers it employs.
The Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd has been reducing the amount of money AusAID spends on technical advisers and contractors.
The agency says more than 320 adviser positions have now been cut.
AusAID’s director general Peter Baxter says the cuts and the cap on adviser salaries have saved substantial amounts of money.
“All up a bit over $90 million so it’s a serious amount of money and we’re re-investing that money into programs that provide more direct assistance to the poor,” he said.
“So PNG, we’re cutting the most number of advisers, so we sit down with the PNG Government and say where do we allocate this, to health, education, or elsewhere.”

Matthew VanDyke fought alongside Libyan forces opposed to Gaddafi. His message when he returned to America?

It [Libya] will be a democratic, capitalist country.

Apparently that’s what freedom means:
 

I was recently interviewed for a global series about Wikileaks called Did You Have Any Idea? (part one is here):
 

American independent journalist Jeremy Scahill believes in actual reporting. Controversial idea in an age where the vast majority of corporate hacks in the MSM barely leave the office or simply receive sanctioned leaks.
He’s just returned from Yemen where he finds the Obama administration conducting a violent counter-terrorist program that is achieving little more than rallying Islamists to the cause of hating Washington. Nice work, Barack:
 
Scahill’s cover story in The Nation explains in detail the disaster unleashed by the White House:

The Obama administration was very slow to agitate for Saleh’s departure from power, in large part because of counterterrorism concerns. On January 28, Saleh arrived in New York, ostensibly for medical treatment, eliciting charges from his opponents that the United States was protecting him from the wrath of his people. For years, Saleh allowed the United States to regularly strike against AQAP in Yemen, and US Special Operations forces built up the specialized units, run by Saleh’s family members, that were widely seen as US surrogates. Saleh’s government actively conspired with US officials to cover up the US role in Yemen, at times publicly taking credit for US bombings. Even as demonstrations grew against the Saleh regime, US officials praised his government’s cooperation. “I can say today the counterterrorism cooperation with Yemen is better than it’s been during my whole tenure,” Brennan declared in September.

But US counterterrorism policy is extremely unpopular in Yemen. Whether a new government would continue the same type of counterterrorism relationship Saleh had with Washington is very much in question. In a series of interviews, Mohammed Qahtan and other leaders of the main opposition group, the Islah Party, sharply criticized US airstrikes in Yemen and the targeted killing of terrorism suspects, saying that they should have been put on trial in Yemen. Qahtan, the leader of Islah’s Muslim Brotherhood faction, charged that under Saleh, “The Yemeni government behaved in the war on terror as a contractor for the US,” adding that if Islah and its allies take control of the country, “we will not be contractors for the US, implementing what they want according to the money we receive. Our slogan is, ‘We are partners, not contractors.’”