Shamus Cooke: Instead of Obama denouncing the invasion and the approaching overthrow of a democratically elected government, silence becomes a very powerful action of intentional complicity on the side of the invaders.
Would Congo Be Better Off with Nkunda?
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Georgianne Nienaber: Was Nkunda a renegade rebel, freedom fighter, dissident, murderer, saint, or savior? Truth, quote unquote, was whatever the international media and factional interests decreed.
The Risible Rise of the American Anti-War Movement
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Jonathan David Farley: The American anti-war movement failed to promote the truly left-wing voices in America and it failed to develop new ones.
Native Americans: Modern-Day al Qaeda?
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Vince Warren: It’s appalling that the Obama administration has abandoned it’s pledge to close Guantanamo. But it’s intolerable that it would invoke and distort one of the darkest moments in American history to justify its failure.
AARP’s Magazine Plays Softball in the Bush League
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Sherwood Ross: Next to the happy, smiling face of this clueless warmonger are the words: “What he regrets, what he wants next (grandkids!)” — as if Bush is some typical retiree who hadn’t started two wars over resounding global protests and brought misery and death to millions.
In Search of the Real Tea Party
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Denis Campbell: Almost all feared what looks to become the continual flip-flopping of the government every two years that will prevent a single problem from being fixed and create an even more polarized and angry electorate. Said Marilyn from Delaware, “This will be like Israel, where no one can agree and they just fight all of the time.”
Scapegoating War Crimes in Af-Pak on Drugs
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Jeremy Kuzmarov: It might not be Reefer Madness redux, but the blame being put on drugs for civilian deaths in Afghanistan today has that same air of hysteria about it.
Congolese Women and Girls Suffering the Insufferable
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Emily Spence and Brian McAfee: Heavily armed militias are trying to increase the very same kinds of turmoil that charitable groups are striving to remedy. They are doing so in order to gain control of four main minerals: tin, tantalum, tungsten, and gold that garner an estimated $180 million in revenues each year.
The Israel/Gaza Face-Off In Los Angeles
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Linda Milazzo: Monday night, in remembrance of the one-year anniversary of Israel’s Operation Cast Lead that killed 1,400 Gazans, and in solidarity with the 1,400 international peace pilgrims converging in Egypt from 42 countries for the planned Gaza Freedom March, Los Angelenos gathered in front of the Israeli Consulate for a solemn candlelight vigil.
HRW Report on Congo: Fetuses Ripped From Wombs and Children Burned
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“Continued killing and rape by all sides in eastern Congo shows that the UN Security Council needs a new approach to protect civilians,” said Anneke Van Woudenberg, senior researcher at Human Rights Watch. “The Security Council should send a group of experts to Congo to kick-start a serious civilian protection plan.”
Obama’s Contributions to a Dying Empire
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Old habits die hard, especially imperialist ones. Imperial imperatives, whether economic, geopolitical, or ideological, persist because the ruling elites are dependent on them. In order to conceal imperialist objectives, presidents and other leaders of the US political class rely on the rhetoric of national security and America’s supposed benevolent global purpose. And, so, with President [...]
Ashley Judd: Please, Population Control Is Not the Answer for Congo
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Congo’s economy is not undermined by “unregulated fertility” rates. Why do these NGO’s feel they have the right to regulate birth rates? Civil society has been destroyed by decades of war and over a hundred years of exploitation of Congo’s wealth by international interests.
US Words Thwart Middle East Peace
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So Palestinians will be watching, more closely than most Americans, the House vote on H.R. 867, condemning the Goldstone Report. If it passes, that will be one more signal to the Palestinians that the fine words they’ve heard coming from the White House may have no substance behind them.
Two GOP-Appointed Judges Shame America
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Surely, hundreds of foreign prisoners tortured in an illegal war made by the U.S., or their survivors, are supplicants entitled to a fair hearing, not non-persons to be brushed aside as judges Silberman and Kavanaugh have done this past week.
Update: OpedNews Journalist and Six Protesters Charged With Criminal Conspiracy After Arrest At “Army Experience Center”
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After her release, Biren reflected, “How can press be prevented from recording news in the making? It’s shameful. It’s anti-democracy.”
OpedNews Journalist and Six Protesters Arrested At “Army Experience Center” in Philadelphia (Updated: 9/13/09)
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Six members of various anti-war groups, including World Can’t Wait and Military Families Speak Out, and an OpedNews journalist, were arrested today at approximately 3:00pm (ET) at a protest organized to shut down The Army Experience Center, located in Franklin Mills Mall in Philadelphia.
Truckfuls of Bodies
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The ultimate step in avoiding periodic wars, which are inevitable in a system of international lawlessness, is to make statesmen responsible to law.
CIA Crucified Captive in Abu Ghraib Prison
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The Central Intelligence Agency crucified a prisoner in Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad, according to a report published in The New Yorker magazine. “A forensic examiner found that he (the prisoner) had essentially been crucified; he died from asphyxiation after having been hung by his arms, in a hood, and suffering broken ribs,” the magazine’s [...]
The United States of Euphemism
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Judging by the local newspaper that serves the rural area of Pennsylvania where I live, hunters no longer shoot and kill deer: they harvest them. “Harvest” is the latest euphemism of choice for killing, and it’s applied not just to the culling of the deer herd but also to the killing of bears, bobcats, and [...]
A Growing Sense of Anger at Obama – and Others
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I’m so angry I feel like concealing a loaded hand gun and walking into a national park. No, I’m not going postal. Once President Obama signs the new credit card law, it will be legal for anyone to march around Yellowstone packing heat just for the fun of it. Although it’s usually angry, bitter, little [...]
Tortured Reasoning and Tortured Results
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Each day the evidence piles up – highlighted by the unconvincing rants of Dick Cheney. Lawrence Wilkerson, former Chief of Staff to Colin Powell, said, “the administration authorized harsh interrogation in April and May of 2002 — well before the Justice Department had rendered any legal opinion — its principal priority for intelligence was not [...]
Suppressed Abu Ghraib Photos Published Down Under; Pentagon Has Videos of Children Screaming While Being Sodomized
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Somehow, the Sydney Morning Herald obtained some of the additional Abu Ghraib photos that the Obama administration is in US court trying to keep hidden as it fights an ACLU Freedom of Information lawsuit. Fifteen of the 60 are published on-line Saturday (Sydney time) by the newspaper. Is it because we’ve become inured to photos [...]
West Gives Rwandan Rebels, Congolese Soldiers Free Pass on Gang Rape and Murder
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Georgianne: what is happening in our mountains is indescribable and the world is watching without a word. Our soldiers are trying to deal with the situation but they have no food, no means for that. As I am writing to you right now Colonel Makenga is trying to organize his troops to stop the FDLR [...]
American Torture: No Knowledge of History, No Sense of Tragedy
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Recently in the New York Times, Scott Shane and Mark Mazzetti showed that the Bush Administration, the CIA, and the Senate and House Intelligence Committees failed to ask for any historical context before approving so-called “harsh interrogation techniques,” including waterboarding, in 2002. No one apparently knew, or wanted to know, that the U.S. had defined [...]
Geneva Convention Requirements About Prisoners
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Muddled thinking characterizes a May 6 Wall Street Journal column by Senators Lindsey Graham and John McCain about those confined in American-run prisons abroad. They reject Geneva Convention trial requirements and even military courts-martial, preferring to have Congress write new guidelines for their imprisonment and trials beyond those in the untested and possibly unconstitutional Military [...]
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More Torture, Please
Steve Hendricks: I derive immense comfort, for example, from the similarity between the pro-torture 70 percent and the 68 percent of Americans who believe “angels and demons are active in the world.” Surely many of my pro-torture countrymen just need a little more education about torture. Well, a lot more.