.President Obama in the Oval Office with Thomas E. Donilon, left, the national security adviser, and John O. Brennan, his top counterterrorism adviser. (Pete Souza/The White House) The Moral Challenge of ‘Kill Lists’ by Ray McGovern In an extraordinary article in Tuesday’s New York Times, “Secret ‘Kill List’ Proves a Test of Obama’s Principles [...]
U.S. Army Soldiers from Alpha Company, 1st Battalion, 5th Infantry Regiment, 1st Brigade, 25th Infantry Division medically extract teammates to safety during exercise Talisman Sabre at Shoalwater Bay Training Area, Australia, June 28, 2007. (Photo: Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Sandra M. Palumbo / US Navy)“Kings had always been involving and impoverishing their peoples in [...]
Why Even Failed Activism Succeeds By David Swanson http://warisacrime.org/content/why-even-failed-activism-succeeds I enjoy reading histories of past activism, including memoirs by long-time activists, such as Lawrence Wittner’s new book, Working for Peace and Justice. Almost every such account includes belated discoveries of the extent to which a government was been spying on [...]
Supporters of the Catholic Workers social justice and peace movement march on Randolph Street after a protest Monday outside President Barack Obama’s national campaign headquarters at Prudential Plaza, where eight demonstrators were arrested. (José M. Osorio, Chicago Tribune / May 14, 2012) From Afghanistan to Chicago, NATO‘s Hard Sell by Roxane Assaf & Michael Lynn [...]
East Timor: a lesson in why the poorest threaten the powerful 5 April 2012 Milan Kundera’s truism, “the struggle of people against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting”, described East Timor. The day before I set out to film clandestinely there in 1993, I went to Stanfords map [...]
War Tribunal Finds Bush, Cheney Guilty of War Crimes Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal orders reparations be given to torture victims – Common Dreams staff Former US President George W Bush, his Vice-President Dick Cheney and six other members of his administration have been found guilty of war crimes by a tribunal in Malaysia. [...]
Honoring a ‘Terror War’ Architect by Ray McGovern Since even readers of the New York Times are aware of deputy national security adviser John Brennan’s open identification with torture, secret prisons and other abuses of national and international law, Fordham University’s invitation to him to give the commencement address on May 19 brought, well, shock and awe to many Fordham [...]
LAUREN BOOTH REPORTS FROM KUALA LUMPUR WAR CRIMES TRIBUNAL WEDNESDAY, MAY 9, 2012 AT 8:29AM GILAD ATZMON http://www.deliberation.info/ Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal Day 1 When authority entrusted to further truth and justice betrays that trust, two options remain: one is to throw up your hands in despair and [...]
Scott Horton Interviews Ray McGovern Scott Horton, May 07, 2012 Print This | Share This | Comment Ray McGovern, member of Veterans For Peace and former senior analyst at the CIA, discusses Russian Gen. Nikolai Makarov’s suggestion that a NATO missile-defense shield in Eastern Europe could be the target of a Russian pre-emptive strike; the [...]
Former CIA analyst Ray McGovern says the US will not stop its assassination drone strikes due to its profits for arms makers, Press TV reports. link to voice recording. Very good listening http://presstv.com/detail/240022.html “These drone strikes create more terrorists. So, the war will keep going on and the question is who profits? [...]
The President’s Private War Andrew Napolitano on drone killings: ‘What monstrous nonsense all this is’ By Andrew Napolitano May 05, 2012 “Information Clearing House” – Did you know that the United States government is using drones to kill innocent people in Pakistan? Did you know that the Pakistani government has [...]
The Empire vs. Iran (and Syria): A New World War for a New World Order? By Jooneed Khan May 02, 2012 “Rabble” – Confronted with a declining World Order it can no longer control, does the West want to re-assert its will through a new world war, which this time would be really global? [...]
Brewing a Conflict with China By Paul Craig Roberts May 01, 2012 “Information Clearing House” – Washington has pressured the Philippines, whose government it owns, into conducting joint military exercises in the South China Sea. Washington’s excuse is that China has territorial disputes with the Philippines, Indonesia, and other countries concerning island [...]
April 30, 2012 Retired analyst: Fiction fueled war By Joel PruettThe Norman Transcript NORMAN — Retired CIA analyst Ray McGovern said the war with Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. Rather, it was about misinformation and fossil fuels. The analyst, who has appeared on CNN, NewsHour and other news [...]
Washington Felons Fret Over Hanky-Panky in Cartagena by Philip Giraldi, April 26, 2012 Print This | Share This Americans are frequently most hypocritical when they are responding to a sex scandal. The tale of the sins and omissions of the Obama secret service team in Colombia is still being revealed, piece by piece. The [...]
The Obama Contradiction Weakling at Home, Imperial President Abroad By Tom Engelhardt He has few constraints (except those he’s internalized). No one can stop him or countermand his orders. He has a bevy of lawyers at his beck and call to explain the “legality” of his actions. And if he cares [...]
Few men have spent more time at the intersection of nuclear weapons and international politics than Swedish diplomat Hans Blix. As the former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and then chief United Nations weapons inspector, Blix was at the centre of events when he publicly contradicted claims from the administration of former US [...]
Below is a link to an excellent interview with Ray McGovern a former CIA analyst. He of course as a CIA employee reported directly to a President nd is an acknowledged expert in the field. Although this is only short you get a god sense of what is happening with the dissemination [...]
Torture on Trial Legal and Humane Frameworks for Opposing Torture by: David Swanson Published in the May / June 2012 Humanist http://thehumanist.org/may-june-2012/torture-on-trial-legal-and-humane-frameworks-for-opposing-torture/ Cases come in by the thousands from all over the world. A man was beaten and whipped. A woman was beaten and raped. A boy was hooded with three empty sand [...]
Land of the Un-free and Mind Controlled Just discovered this in my Draft folder – forwarding a Washington Post article acknowledging ten political atrocities which remain a dirty, unspoken secret in America. (Scroll to the bottom.) (I highly recommend this news source: WantToKnow.info, by Fred Burks.) Here’s to waking up. ~Jean “James Madison [...]
How Obama Became a Civil Libertarian‘s Nightmare Obama has expanded and fortified many of the Bush administration’s worst policies. April 18, 2012 | LIKE THIS ARTICLE ? Join our mailing list: Sign up to stay up to date on the latest headlines via email. When Barack Obama took office, he was the civil liberties communities’ [...]
AfPak: Mutiny on the Bounty By Eric Walberg – CairoKabul was cast into chaos Sunday as the Taliban began their spring offensive with attacks on US, British, German and Russian embassies, NATO headquarters, Camp Eggers, a hotel, President Karzai’s palace compound and parliament. “These are coordinated attacks that went just [...]
A few months back, I reposted here an article that I wrote 10 years ago, before the invasion of Iraq: a fictional scenario of how the Terror War would play out on the ground of the target nations — and in the minds of those sent to wage these campaigns. I was reminded of that piece by [...]
Is Peace Getting in the Way of Our War Plans? By David Swanson http://warisacrime.org/content/peace-getting-way-our-war-plans What a bizarre circumstance this is. The irrational Iranians are behaving too reasonably. The unmovable Iranians seem to be compromising too readily. This past weekend, the United States and other major nations finally spoke with Iran. In [...]
Obama Echoes Bush, Sets Plan for Polar Bear Extinction “President Obama’s proposal for these magnificent and imperiled animals is a gift to Big Oil“ – Common Dreams staff The Obama Administration issued a proposed rule yesterday that disregards the effects of greenhouse gases on polar bear habitat leading one conservation group to say that the [...]
Whistleblowers Prosecuted While War Criminals Remain Free? By RT Link to video interview with David Swanson http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article31110.htm The video also contains material about how to “extract actionable intelligence” A newly released document acquired by Wired Magazine exposes the United States Defense Department‘s torture techniques. In the 37 page report, former CIA official [...]
Chase Madar, Legal Atrocities Posted by Chase Madar at 6:20pm, April 15, 2012. [Note for TomDispatch Readers: TD has an offer for you that shouldn’t be missed. TomDispatch regular Chase Madar, who has covered Private Bradley Manning’s trials and tribulations for this site, has now produced a striking and provocative new book on his [...]
Iraq: Massacre of a Country By Felicity Arbuthnot‘How can you make a war on terror when you are actually the terrorist?’ – (Unknown.) America’s 2003 assault on Iraq, already devastated by thirteen years of sanctions, infrastructure destruction consequently unrepaired from the 1991 bombing was, in the ridiculous annals of names the [...]
Moving the global economy off its current decline-and-collapse path depends on reaching four goals: stabilizing climate, stabilizing population, eradicating poverty, and restoring the economy’s natural support systems.poverty, and restoring the economy’s natural support systems. These goals – comprising what the Earth Policy Institute calls ‘Plan B’ to save civilization – are mutually dependent. [...]
New Israel Plans to Grab More Palestinian Lands By Jean ShaoulRecently released documents show that Israel’s Civil Administration, part of the Defence Ministry, has long earmarked up to 10 percent of the West Bank for new settlements or the expansion of existing ones. This is in contravention of international law, which [...]
Perverts in Power: The Torture-Lovers Who Rule Us by Chris Floyd I. The ordeal of Fatima Bouchar, detailed by Ian Cobain in the Guardian, exemplifies the vile essence of the “Terror War” being conducted by United States and its abject satellite, Great Britain, against large swathes of the world’s population (including, increasingly, their own people). It [...]
“To forbid the use of military bases on our territory” By davidswanson - Posted on 09 April 2012 U.S. Military Bases in Germany and a Brief History of Protests Against Them By Elsa Rassbach On September 25, 2009, U.S. and NATO commanders emblematically chose Ramstein Air Base in Germany to announce the request [...]
Obama’s economic policies have failed to create jobs or a recovery because “he banked on the banks” [GALLO/GETTY] New York, NY - Back in the last Century, when Bill Clinton was running for re-election in the “permanent campaign” he, with the advice of the smarmy Dick Morris chose to co-opt Republican positions to pre-empt their using [...]
Memo: Bush Made Intel Fit Iraq Policy By WARREN P. STROBEL and JOHN WALCOTT 05/06/05 “Knight Ridder” - – WASHINGTON - A highly classified British memo, leaked in the midst of Britain’s just-concluded election campaign, indicates that President Bush decided to overthrow Iraqi President Saddam Hussein by summer 2002 and was determined to [...]
Render to Caesar, Extraordinarily by Ray McGovern Some of us pause on Good Friday to mark the torture and death of a high-value detainee rendered, extraordinarily, to Roman occupiers. Although the charges against Jesus of Nazareth were trumped up, the Romans decided to err on the safe side by going to the “dark [...]
East Timor: A Lesson in Why the Poorest Threaten the Powerful by John Pilger, April 06, 2012 Print This | Share This Milan Kundera’s truism, “the struggle of people against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting,” described East Timor. The day before I set out to film clandestinely there in 1993, I [...]
San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS) Are America’s Nukes on the Brink of Death? by Harvey Wasserman link http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/04/05-1 The only two US reactor projects now technically under construction are on the brink of death for financial reasons. If they go under, there will almost certainly be no new reactors built here. The much mythologized “nuclear renaissance” [...]
SOURCE: AP/Steve Ruark John R. Bolton, the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, speaks to the Baltimore Council on Foreign Affairs in May 2006. By Eric Alterman | April 5, 2012 link http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2012/04/ta_040512.html In a front-page story in Sunday’s New York Times dealing with the specter of corrupted pre-Iraq invasion intelligence and its potential influence on the debate over whether the [...]
Can America’s Descent Possibly Be Reversed? By Scott Lazarowitz March 30, 2012 “”LRC” – My articles for LRC have been increasingly difficult and frustrating to write. More recently I have been trying to get people to understand America’s current police state. Yes, I have received some favorable emails when my [...]
Tomgram: John Feffer, Islamophobia, Obama, and the Art of Acting Muslim Posted by John Feffer at 9:24am, March 29, 2012. [Note for TomDispatch Readers: I’ll be handing you back off to Tom shortly. If you’d like to welcome him back with a donation -- which is how we keep this site afloat -- please consider [...]
(Image: Crown)“Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power” is Rachel Maddow’s devastating and sardonic new book. Using her Rhodes Scholar intellect, Maddow takes on America’s infatuation with military power and war.“Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power” is yours with a minimum donation of $35 – or a monthly donation of $15 – to Truthout. Read [...]
The Massacre of the Afghan 17 and the Obama Cover-Up By James Petras March 27, 2012 “Information Clearing House” — The March 11 Massacre of the 17 Afghan citizens, including at least nine children and four women, raises many fundamental issues about the nature of a colonial war, the practices of a [...]
Costs of a policy of profligacy with foreign lives By HIROAKI SATO NEW YORK — In the early hours of March 11, Sunday, a U.S. soldier went on a rampage in a village in Panjway, southwest of Kandahar, Afghanistan. He went from one mud house to another, shot, stabbed, and burned 16 [...]
No matter how much evil Barack Obama actually accomplishes during his presidency, people that call themselves leftists insist on dubbing him the Lesser Evil. Not only is Obama not given proper credit for out-evil-ing George Bush, domestically and internationally, but the First Black President is awarded positive grades for his intentions versus the [...]
the glass ceiling denying Mormons the presidency.Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney speaks at the University of Chicago. (AP / Steven Senne) Voters Have Two Candidates, No Choice by Robert Scheer With Mitt Romney’s super-PAC limo now on cruise control to victory at the GOP convention, voters are left with only two reasons to vote [...]
Obama’s Afghanistan Massacre Deniers Why do liberals ignore millions of non-American war deaths? By Terry Michael March 21, 2012 “Reason“– U.S. Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales’ suspected early March murder of 16 Afghan civilians is cast by the military-industrial-congressional-media complex as the isolated madness of a single American soldier. In fact, victims [...]
First the video of United States Marines urinating on bodies of Afghans who had been killed. Then the revelation that copies of the Quran had been burned at Bagram Air Base, which also serves as an American prison camp in Afghanistan. Nearly thirty Afghans and several NATO troopsdied in the violent reaction. The [...]
on savings available to its rivals and thus was increasingly uncompetitive.(Credit: Freakingnews.com – by Mandrak) The Age of Double Standards American Airlines can declare bankruptcy and wipe away debt. But you can’t—and that’s just the beginning. by Robert Kuttner “But, Yossarian, suppose everyone felt that way.” “Then,” said Yossarian, “I’d certainly be [...]
The Unstoppable Legacy of the War on Terror Ever More and Ever Less: A New Age of Enemies by Karen Greenberg By now, you’d think we’d be entering the end of the 9/11 era. One war over in the Greater Middle East, another hurtling disastrously to its end, and the threat of [...]
Tomgram: Karen Greenberg, A New Age of Enemies Posted by Karen J. Greenberg at 5:37pm, March 18, 2012. [Note for TomDispatch Readers: Many thanks to those who have donated to this site in return for a signed, personalized copy of Michael Klare’s superb new book, The Race for What’s Left, which is the thinking [...]
