President Obama, in his visit to China, held a “town meeting” with Chinese students in which he praised openness and lectured them on the value of freedom of information, saying that he is a “supporter of non-censorship” and that open access to information was a “source of strength.” And yet America is hardly free of censorship. Heck, the president himself has gone to court to prevent the release of photographs of US troops torturing captives in Iraq, Afghanistan and at Guantanamo.
November 16, 2009 | Filed under
Commentary |
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British authorities are investigating 33 new claims of abuse against UK troops who were stationed in Iraq.
The allegations by former Iraqi detainees include accusations of serious sexual abuse and torture, including one case in which a 16-year-old Iraqi says he was raped by two British soldiers on an army base. One of the victims has [...]
November 14, 2009 | Filed under
TPRvideo |
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Around the United States, peace groups are engaged in effective campaigns against proposed new military installations, local funding of weapons companies, and the routine destruction of the environment and of workers’ health by such companies. Activists are building better media outlets, educating young people, educating old people, keeping military testing and recruiting out of schools, and discouraging the Army from building real-weapon video arcades in shopping malls. But when it comes to stopping our wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, our citizens are less clear how to go about it.
November 8, 2009 | Filed under
Commentary |
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Political activist Noam Chomsky says that although President Obama views the Iraq invasion merely as “a mistake” or “strategic blunder,” it is, in fact, a “major crime” designed to enable America to control the Middle East oil reserves.
November 3, 2009 | Filed under
Nation |
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Country Joe McDonald said it best in his iconic “Fixin’ to Die” Rag: “Oh, it’s one, two, three, what are we fightin’ for? Don’t ask me. I don’t give a damn.” In fact, we were fighting for nothing in Vietnam. It was a war that started out because the US didn’t want the Commies to win a battle in the so-called Cold War, and even though it was on the farthest side of the world, in a poor nation of peasants, even though they had been struggling to throw off colonialism for years and we had simply become the new colonists, no president dared to admit the obvious–we had no business being there, and all the killing and dying had no point.
November 2, 2009 | Filed under
Commentary |
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How absurd is it that we have the government on the one hand pulling back from using a hollowed out mountain in Nevada to store nuclear waste because of a fear (legitimate I grant) that hundreds or thousands of years hence, some earthquake or other catastrophe could cause the stored waste to leak into the water table, while on the other hand we have this same government deliberately taking some of the most dangerous waste–the actual uranium from the used fuel rods–and putting it into bombs, shells and bullets to be splattered and burned all across the landscape?
October 20, 2009 | Filed under
Commentary |
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The horrors of the US Agent Orange defoliation campaign in Vietnam, about which I wrote on Oct. 15, could ultimately be dwarfed by the horrors caused by the depleted uranium weapons which the US began using in the 1991 Gulf War (300 tons), and which it has used much more extensively–and in more urban, populated areas–in the Iraq War and the now intensifying Afghanistan War.
October 19, 2009 | Filed under
World |
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It’s not a much of a travesty as when Henry Kissinger, a war criminal of the first order who was an architect of the latter stages of the Indochina War, and was personally responsible for the slaughter of well over a million innocent people, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973, while that war was still raging, but the awarding of the latest Nobel Peace Prize to President Barack Obama is travesty enough.
October 9, 2009 | Filed under
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Court papers filed by Obama’s Justice Department in July revealed that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney were in contact about the leak of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson, including what is described as “a confidential conversation” and “an apparent communication between the Vice President and the President.”
October 4, 2009 | Filed under
Law |
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As many will remember, we couldn’t have gotten off to a better start on winning hearts and minds when Lt. Gen. William “Jerry” Boykin, on his speaking tour of churches back in 2003, publicly and in uniform proclaimed that the so-called war on terror was really a fight between Satan and Christians.
September 21, 2009 | Filed under
Commentary |
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