Jul 8 2014 - 10:36pm
During my recent visit to Gangjeong, on Jeju Island, South Korea, where a protest community has struggled for years to block construction of a U.S. military base, conversations over delicious meals in the community kitchen were a delightful daily event. At lunchtime on my first day there I met Emily and Dongwon, a young and recently married couple, both protesters, who had met each other in Gangjeong. Emily recalled that when her parents finally travelled from Taiwan to meet her partner, they had to visit him in prison.
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Jul 7 2014 - 5:07pm
Last month the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) released a report titled “War Comes Home: The Excessive Militarization of American Policing,” shedding much-needed light on the emergence of a militarist ethos in policing across the nation.
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Jul 7 2014 - 12:48pm
Ever since the horrors of submarine warfare became a key issue during World War I, submarines have had a sinister reputation. And the building of new, immensely costly, nuclear-armed submarines by the U.S. government and others may soon raise the level of earlier anxiety to a nuclear nightmare.
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Jul 7 2014 - 9:05am
A relatively new group engaging in non-state political violence, ISIS, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, recently called for the creation of an Islamic state in Iraq and Syria and a continuation and strengthening of jihad during Ramadan, according to a video that emerged through social media. ISIS, born of Al Qaeda members in Iraq and matured in the Syrian civil war power vacuum, is so radical that Al Qaeda “disowned” it. As if its goals of coerced dominance aren’t bad enough, Al Qaeda criticized ISIS for its brutality against civilians and Muslims. Repeat: Al Qaeda criticized ISIS. For brutality.
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Jul 6 2014 - 4:34pm
By Sarah Sult
If you were to travel to Iraqi Kurdistan (which is safer than many neighborhoods of U.S. cities) you will not only see U.S flags and framed pictures of George W. Bush, you'll actually meet younger generation Kurds named "Bush."
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Jul 4 2014 - 9:33pm
Remarks at Independence from America event outside Menwith Hill "RFA" (NSA) base in Yorkshire.
http://warisacrime.org/content/celebrating-independence-america-england
First of all, thank you to Lindis Percy and everyone else involved in bringing me here, and letting me bring my son Wesley along.
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Jul 4 2014 - 10:27am
Polio, once a global scourge, was on the verge of eradication in 2012. Since that time, it has reemerged as a global public health emergency according to the World Health Organization. Why has it now spread from its final strongholds in Nigeria, Afghanistan and Pakistan to at least 10 countries spanning Asia, Africa and the Middle East? It is not because of changes in the virus or ineffective vaccines. The answer is war, and as we all know, “truth is the first casualty of war.”
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Jul 3 2014 - 9:43am
“Bun-wuk” or “Fiyah-d-wuk” are two names for a troubling phenomenon that has recently emerged in certain countries of the 15-nation Caribbean Community (CARICOM). Unless it is nipped in the bud by practical measures to address the growing difficulties associated with youth, it is bound to spread like wildfire with troubling consequences throughout the region, given the predilection for copy-cat behaviour particularly among young people.
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Jul 2 2014 - 7:29pm
By David Swanson,
Remarks in London, England, July 2, 2014.
Thank you to Bruce Kent and the Movement for the Abolition of War and to Veterans For Peace and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Thank you to the Stop the War Coalition and everyone else for helping spread the word.
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Jul 2 2014 - 9:23am
Did you know?
The first woman to be recorded in the Congressional Record -- Mildred Lewis Rutherford -- was 10 years young at the outbreak of the American War Between the States in 1861. Fifty-five years later she said in a 1916 speech: Read more
Jun 27 2014 - 11:01pm
Considering the reality American taxpayers have been paying the financial and human costs for most of the defense efforts to protect the likes of Iraq, Saudi Arabia and a few other spots in the Middle East, isn’t it time we started sending bills for services rendered? After all, in terms of just the money, we’re talking close to a few trillion dollars. There is no realistic price to cover the human sacrifices.
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Jun 27 2014 - 8:34pm
By Bert Sacks
“Those Iraqis have been fighting each other for centuries,” a friend recently said to me. I have heard this mistaken view too often.
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Jun 26 2014 - 8:24am
Human trafficking is a despicable, dehumanising and exploitative practice that is rightly described as ‘modern day slavery’. That its principal victims are women and children, who are not only stripped of their rights but also of their humanity, is a stain of disgrace on governments that fail to act to stop the perpetrators.
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Jun 25 2014 - 6:13pm
Students heading off to college for the first time or even to a new campus as a transfer are always full of questions. As an academic adviser at my university, I am happy to answer whatever a student or parent who accompanies their son or daughter might ask. Most of the questions I have been asked, however, are related to the pathway to graduation and career opportunities thereafter.
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Jun 24 2014 - 6:27am
Updated 4 years ago
Voting rights was a priority of the African-American Civil Rights Movement. The struggle to secure these rights achieved real traction and impact in the early 1960s. While the Jim Crow South was rife with voter suppression, there was no place more in need of voting reforms than Mississippi. Although black Mississippians comprised nearly 50 percent of the state’s population in 1960, less than 7 percent of its eligible black constituency was registered to vote, representing the lowest percentage in the union. In some counties, no blacks were registered to vote. Despite ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment ninety years early, terrorist tactics – from fear and intimidation to beatings and lynchings – prevented blacks from exercising their constitutional right to vote. Later, legislation in several states, i.e., the passage of state constitutional amendments beginning in 1890, severely restricted black voter participation – through measures such as poll taxes, background checks and literacy tests. By 1960, the southern black population had been politically disenfranchised for almost a century. Read more
Jun 23 2014 - 4:42pm
A new report from the Netherlands based on US Air Force firing coördinates shows that our military fired its armor-piercing munitions ¾ made of waste uranium-238 which is called “depleted uranium” or DU ¾ into civilian areas of Iraq and at Iraqi troops during the 2003 invasion and occupation, defying the US Air Force’s own legal advice that the toxic and radioactive ammunition be used only against hardened targets in compliance with the Laws of War.
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Jun 22 2014 - 8:56pm
Nothing more clearly illustrates the absurdity of murder for political ends than this moment of chaos in Iraq and Syria. Imagine spaceships of an advanced alien civilization hovering over that vast desert area and assessing the state of our human endeavors on the basis of the welter of alliances and rivalries to-ing and fro-ing below, leaving trails of blood and traumatized children.
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Jun 22 2014 - 7:05pm
June 22 marks the 73rd anniversary of Operation Barbarossa, the Nazi Germany invasion of its then ally, the Soviet Union. It was a major mistake, in my opinion, and I think Germany would have won the war in Europe. Especially if it had avoided declaring war on the U.S. after Pearl Harbor -- the second major mistake Germany made in 1941.
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Jun 20 2014 - 4:36am
This past year, my wife and I joined the Great West Virginia Diaspora: all those West Virginians who live outside of the borders of the Mountain State. Displaced!
Well, while it is true that I found work hard to get, even in the Eastern Panhandle, we don't feel that unfortunate, except for not seeing family and friends back home as often as we'd like. We have found a place that is easy for a Mountaineer to feel at home in many ways: the Low Country of South Carolina.
True, the Low Country is flat, but interestingly, you can be fooled about the lack of mountains, as the tall trees lining South Carolina's interstates shield you from seeing all that level land. So one can at least imagine that, behind that curtain of green trees, looms a big hillside the likes of which we took for granted in Preston County, WV. Read more
Jun 19 2014 - 4:50pm
People forget the extent to which Democrats, who controlled the U.S. Senate at the time, pushed for and supported the 2003 attack on Iraq. Remember them or not, theeeeeeeeeey're back!
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Jun 19 2014 - 10:44am
Iraq was saved from ignorant subhuman barbarism by a gentlewoman named Gertrude at the time that the civilized nations of the world were, in a quite advanced and sophisticated manner, slaughtering their young men in a project now called the First World War.
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Jun 19 2014 - 8:57am
On May 29the Caribbean Financial Action Task Force (CFATF) issued a public statement in which it said that it “recognises Guyana as a jurisdiction with significant AML/CFT (anti-money laundering and counter terrorism financing) deficiencies”.
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Jun 16 2014 - 12:02am
By Sandy Lyon
Will we dig up paradise to be able to try to tweet a picture of paradise? To tweet or not to tweet, that is the question of our time.
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Jun 13 2014 - 10:37pm
Few things could have spoken more shamefully of political leadership by the Republicans than the combination of responses to the release of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl and the rampant terrorism in Iraq by the ISIS.
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Jun 13 2014 - 12:20pm
Reinvade, reoccupy, and redestroy Iraq. That is the solution to the inevitable civil war that happens when the US pulls out? Will we do it until either Iraq is remade in our image or until the US economy, political environment, and culture is also destroyed?
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Jun 12 2014 - 5:13pm
The risk with any kind of binary-thinking is that there is no real room for difference. You are one or the other. The U.S. loves its binaries: black or white, man or woman, gay or straight. Such thinking misses the complexities of people, limiting us all into narrow boxes. Perhaps nowhere is binary-thinking more obvious today than in what has been called the “fat acceptance movement.”
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Jun 12 2014 - 12:12pm
Dr Franklin Johnston, a strategist, project manager and advisor to the Jamaica Minister of Education, wrote a column in the Jamaica Observer of May 30, 2014 in which he basically contended that the Caribbean Common Market and Community (CARICOM) and the Caribbean Single Market and Economy (CSME) are the constructs of “Anglophone black people” and not in the interest of Jamaica.
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Jun 11 2014 - 2:38pm
By Elliott Adams,
June 6th came once more. D-day was a long time ago and I didn't intend to make anything of it. I was surprised by the emotional turmoil I felt, by how I felt about that day in my gut. I realized that while I was born after the war was over, D-day and World War II were a real and tangible part of my childhood. It was part of my family's life, my teachers lives, my friends parent's lives. It wasn't just old men who remembered it, every adult in my youth had stories from that war. It was amputees on street corners selling pencils and people all around me still dealing with it. It was part of my life and it played a role in my enlistment for Vietnam. Of course I felt this day in my guts. Why did I think it would be otherwise?
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Jun 11 2014 - 11:36am
By Shannon Hoffman
Community organizing works. Anyone who questions that statement needn’t look further than our current US president. By leveraging the grassroots, democratic “bottom-up” approach, President Barack Obama quite literally organized his way into office. He spent a great deal of time as an organizer prior to arriving in Washington, which is still apparent in the way he conducts himself during public appearances. He has a way of speaking to “the people” as if he is actually one of the people. Charging ordinary citizens to organize and act together on his behalf during the race played a key role in him securing a place in office.
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Jun 11 2014 - 10:08am
By Robert Fantina,
A lead article on CNN today reads as follows: ‘Fellow soldiers call Bowe Bergdahl a deserter, not a hero.’
It seems that one is defining the term ‘hero’ in a rather odd way, if one can’t consider a deserter a hero. Let’s look first at what desertion from the U.S. military means, in terms of actions and possible consequences, and then more specifically at Mr. Bergdahl’s particular situation, or at least what is currently known of it. Read more
Jun 9 2014 - 4:36pm
By Eric Chitoubol
Do you think Memorial Day should be more than just a day to remember those we have lost as a nation during times of war and hatred? Or should Memorial Day be altered to reflect times of peace and rejoicing to no more lives lost and for war to be over? I believe we can and should make it a day of peace.
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Jun 9 2014 - 9:57am
In April 2014, the White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault issued a series of recommendations for college and university campuses related to responding to and preventing sexual assault. Given that one in five college-aged women endure a sexual assault, the White House is to be applauded for prioritizing this issue and for organizing the task force. But of course, it should be so simple to recommend that campuses do the right thing.
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Jun 6 2014 - 3:08pm
The Supreme Court not long ago really did determine that corporations are/were people for purposes of campaign contributions and other matters. Now, no matter how you or I might feel about that decision, it remains the law of the land. And, logic suggests, even insists, if an entity is really human, it must be subject to the laws that govern all other humans.
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Jun 6 2014 - 10:31am
A unique conference is planned in Charlottesville, Va., featuring the latest technologies for the practice of large-scale killing. The Daily Progress tells us that,
"to allow participants to speak more freely about potentially sensitive topics, the conference is closed to the media and open only to registered participants."
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Jun 5 2014 - 12:01pm
It is shameful that golden opportunities to produce more food in the Caribbean and significantly reduce the astronomically high annual food import bill of US$4.75 billion are being woefully neglected. If this misguided trend continues, the economies of many of the countries of the region will be increasingly imperilled.
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