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“If a man has an apartment stacked to the ceiling with newspapers we call him crazy. If a woman has a trailer house full of cats we call her nuts. But when people pathologically hoard so much cash that they impoverish the entire nation, we put them on the cover of Fortune magazine and pretend that they are role models.”
-– B. Lester
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 | War News: DC Appeals Court Rejects CIA's Secrecy Claims |
In ACLU's Targeted Killing FOIA Lawsuit
Court Rules that CIA Cannot Deny "Interest" in Drone Program
From: aclu.org
WASHINGTON – A federal appeals court ruled today that the Central Intelligence Agency cannot deny its "intelligence interest" in the targeted killing program and refuse to respond to Freedom of Information Act requests about the program while officials continue to make public statements about it.
"This is an important victory. It requires the government to retire the absurd claim that the CIA's interest in the targeted killing program is a secret, and it will make it more difficult for the government to deflect questions about the program's scope and legal basis," said ACLU Deputy Legal Director Jameel Jaffer, who argued the case before a three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit Appeals Court in September. "It also means that the CIA will have to explain what records it is withholding, and on what grounds it is withholding them." ...
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Posted by Blue1moon on Friday, March 15 @ 19:56:34 EDT (148 reads)
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| War News: Our Endless State of War |
As long as it's fought by other people on someone else's soil, Americans can live with perpetual conflict.
By William A. Collins
When will wartime
Ever end?
Always seems
Around the bend.
Combat's different today than when your grandfather earned his medals. Armies no longer advance and retreat along battle lines. Tanks no longer maneuver. Fleets don't engage. We're past all that.
The United States already dominates most parts of the world that don't belong to other major nations. Domination, however, doesn't mean we're in full control. And many citizens of those places insist on misbehaving.
This misbehavior takes various forms: shooting at our soldiers, burning our property, attacking our surrogates, and other hostile acts. Washington responds to these disturbances with our troops, drones, mercenaries, and Special Forces. And we keep building still more military bases, because having 1,000 of them overseas is apparently not enough. ...
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Posted by Blue1moon on Monday, November 26 @ 19:52:45 EST (229 reads)
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| War News: Fall 1941: Pearl Harbor and The Wars of Corporate America |
 By Dr. Jacques R. Pauwels, Global Research
Myth: The US was forced to declare war on Japan after a totally unexpected Japanese attack on the American naval base in Hawaii on December 7, 1941. On account of Japan’s alliance with Nazi Germany, this aggression automatically brought the US into the war against Germany.
Reality: The Roosevelt administration had been eager for some time to wage war against Japan and sought to unleash such a war by means of the institution of an oil embargo and other provocations. Having deciphered Japanese codes, Washington knew a Japanese fleet was on its way to Pearl Harbor, but welcomed the attack since a Japanese aggression would make it possible to “sell” the war to the overwhelmingly anti-war American public.
An attack by Japan, as opposed to an American attack on Japan, was also supposed to avoid a declaration of war by Japan’s ally, Germany, which was treaty-bound to help only if Japan was attacked. However, for reasons which have nothing to do with Japan or the US but everything with the failure of Germany’s “lightning war” against the Soviet Union, Hitler himself declared war on the US a few days after Pearl Harbor, on December 11, 1941. ...
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Posted by Blue1moon on Tuesday, October 30 @ 20:18:53 EDT (264 reads)
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| War News: Silence of the Drones |
 By Ray McGovern
Several friends of mine are among the 35 American activists assembling in Pakistan in recent days in an effort to seek ground truth on the impact of U.S. drone strikes on civilians there. I will be holding them and their Pakistani hosts and co-travelers in the Light, as my Quaker friends like to say, and will now try to do my part in what follows to put this dangerous journey in perspective.
The American group, organized by Code Pink Women for Peace, is meeting this week with a wide swath of Pakistanis, including representatives of the various political parties. Today, former U.S. diplomat and Army Col. Ann Wright was scheduled to address the Institute of Strategic Studies, Pakistan’s largest think tank, which advises the Foreign Office.
Similar events are scheduled in Islamabad until the weekend, when hundreds of Pakistanis will join the Americans in a caravan of cars and vans on the six-hour drive from Islamabad to Waziristan in the northwest, where the drones do most of their killing and maiming.
As I said good-bye to two of my friends late last week, their backpacks seemed extraordinarily heavy. ...
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Posted by Blue1moon on Monday, October 01 @ 21:06:40 EDT (211 reads)
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| War News: 2,000+ Dead, Suicides Skyrocketing –These are Not Just Numbers! |
 From: United For Peace and Justice, unitedforpeace.org
Marine Cpl. Taylor J. Baune, of Andover, MN died June 13, 2012. Taylor represents the 2,000 U.S. military fatality in Afghanistan in support of Operation Enduring Freedom.
Taylor Buane, 21, is much more than a number. He is the husband of his high school sweetheart Colleen Buane, 20. They were married three short months before his death. He was on his first tour of duty and his enlistment was up at the end of year. Those who loved Taylor will never again be the same.
Remember too, in the first 155 days of 2012, 154 active duty U.S. troops took their own lives - an increase of 18% over 2011 – the highest rate since 9/11.
Unfortunately the tragic milestone of 2,000 dead and the skyrocketing suicide rate have gone relatively unnoticed by just about everyone. ...
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Posted by Blue1moon on Thursday, June 28 @ 22:26:14 EDT (713 reads)
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| War News: The State of the Military-Industrial Complex Is Strong |
 If weapons orders get diverted, so do campaign contributions.
By William A. Collins
War may dwindle,
Peace may grow;
But weapons makers
Never slow.
What can you do with a bunch of used generals? If you keep them active, they need new assignments. These can be expensive. But if you let them retire with fat pensions, they'll go to work for arms producers, lobbying for more weapons and more wars. Either way citizens pay through the nose.
Congress is even more costly. Seemingly sensible lawmakers turn to Jell-O when weapons contracts are at stake. In my tiny state of Connecticut, we happen to make nuclear submarines, the blunderbusses of modern warfare. Their main job seems to be running onto reefs and colliding with fishing boats. We have too many now, but we can't stop making them because jobs and profits (and elections) will be lost. ...
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Posted by Blue1moon on Thursday, May 24 @ 23:00:25 EDT (186 reads)
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| War News: House Fails To Pass Amendment Scaling Back NDAA |
 Indefinite Detention Provisions
From: American Civil LibertiesUnion, aclu.org
WASHINGTON – An amendment that would have explicitly banned indefinite detention in the United States and repealed a controversial section of last year’s National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) was voted down by the House of Representatives today. The final vote was 182-237.
Today’s amendment, introduced by lead sponsors Reps. Adam Smith (D-Wash.) and Justin Amash (R-Mich.), was offered on this year’s NDAA. It was supported by a broad coalition of groups, which ranged from the ACLU to the Gun Owners of America to the United Methodist Church.
The vote for the Smith-Amash amendment was bipartisan, with 19 Republican members backing the amendment. ...
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Posted by Blue1moon on Friday, May 18 @ 21:39:24 EDT (204 reads)
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| War News: Washington's Strange Nuclear Bedfellows |
The United States, as the world's undisputed nuclear weapons superpower, should finally ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.
By Michael McCarthy
Indonesia ratified the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) late last year. As the most recent nation to pledge to halt nuclear weapons testing and agree to global monitoring to ensure compliance with that promise, it brought the total number of signatories to 157.
Almost all the world's governments have agreed to take this first solid step towards eliminating the terrible threat of nuclear warfare. If you don't test these weapons, they're much more difficult to develop, build, and rely on.
As Washington threatens to go to war to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear bomb, you'd think we'd be card-carrying members of the CTBT club, along with Israel. Not so.
Although the United Nations approved the treaty more than 15 years ago, our own government hasn't signed on yet. ...
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Posted by Blue1moon on Friday, March 30 @ 21:55:22 EDT (191 reads)
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| War News: Greening the Pentagon |
If we want to build up a green manufacturing economy, we should directly invest in it, not plow more money into military spending.
By Mike Prokosch
The U.S. military is going green. Don't take it from me. "[T]he Department of Defense…the world's largest consumer of energy, will make one of the largest commitments to clean energy in history," President Barack Obama declared in this year's State of theUnion address.
This is welcome news. Oil powers everything from carrier-based aircraft to remote bases in Afghanistan. Since our military is the world's biggest fossil fuel guzzler, anything that curbs its insatiable appetite for oil will slow the deadly warming of our planet and save lives in more ways than one.
It's also good news for the green tech industry. Aside from Tang, the Internet, and a handful of other examples, military research rarely spins off new civilian technologies. But renewable energy is likely to prove a big exception. The Pentagon wants to make its remote Afghan outposts energy-independent so it can stop trucking oil through hundreds of miles of hostile territory. The Defense Department's research dollars and bulk purchases of photovoltaic panels and lightweight solar-storage batteries could cheapen the building blocks of a civilian clean energy economy. ...
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Posted by Blue1moon on Wednesday, March 28 @ 22:00:37 EDT (208 reads)
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| War News: Take the Iran Pledge of Resistance |
On the anniversary of Shock and Awe in Iraq, it's time to stop the next war now
From: United For Peace and Justice, unitedforpeace.org
The Iran Pledge of Resistance (IPOR) is a UFPJ initiated coordinated grassroots campaign to build an emergency response network capable of preempting any escalated U.S. intervention in Iran or the Middle East.
Over the past few months there has been escalating talk about the possibility of a U.S. war with Iran. Israel, the U.S.’s closest ally in the region, is threatening attacks which could pull us into war. President Obama and the Republican presidential candidates are saying that “all options are on the table” to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon. This is despite the fact that top U.S. intelligence officials have made consistent statements that Iran does not have a nuclear weapons program nor is there proof they intend to establish one.
Let’s stop this war before it starts.
On Feb 15, 2003 millions of people marched against war in Iraq. What if millions of us again join together to say no to war, but this time organize a mass horizontal direct action network? ...
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Posted by Blue1moon on Tuesday, March 20 @ 19:13:20 EDT (254 reads)
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| War News: War, Occupation, and Massacre |
By Rosemarie Jackowski
The latest massacre in Afghanistan is just one more in a long history of US atrocities. Most of these acts by US troops go unnoticed - hardly rating a mention on the nightly news. Why has this news report broken through the wall of silence? And why is there a media reaction to it? The media has ignored so many other atrocities.
When interviewed by Leslie Stahl on CBS, Sixty Minutes (May 12, 1996), Secretary of State Madeleine Albright stated that the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children were worth it. There was hardly a ripple of concern about Albright's statement. Maybe it is just luck and timing that caused the news about the Afghan massacre to be reported, but there is no doubt that it soon will be replaced with news about which celebrity is sleeping with someone else's spouse, or the latest misadventures of some other celebrity who probably has not read a book in years.
Those not familiar with military training might be surprised by the latest slaughter of civilians. Others know that one of the main goals of military training is to eliminate any taboo against killing. Military training is designed not only to kill the enemy, but also to kill the conscience. Parents and new recruits take notice! ...
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Posted by Blue1moon on Wednesday, March 14 @ 20:16:35 EDT (194 reads)
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| War News: Iraq Takes It Personally |
By Donald Kaul
Iraq is a gift that keeps on giving.
We kicked out their murderous dictator for them, helped them institute democracy, poured hundreds of millions of dollarsinto their recovery, and tried our best to interrupt their civil war. Then we left — or at least our combat troops did.
You would think they'd be grateful, wouldn't you? I'm not talking about an end-of-World-War-II scene with young women throwing flowers at our soldiers as they departed. Not necessarily.
But maybe a thank you would be appropriate. A salute or two wouldn't hurt.
What do we get instead? Snarls. Insults. Cries of "Don't let the door hit you on the way out" (which is terrifying in Arabic).
Now word comes that we're being forced to cut our planned diplomatic presence in post-war Iraq by some 50 percent and counting. It turns out that the Iraqis don't want us there.
After all we did for them. Why, just the bombing of their cities alone would have cost them billions if they'd had to do it themselves. ...
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Posted by Blue1moon on Wednesday, March 07 @ 16:45:04 EST (184 reads)
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| War News: New Weasel Word on Iran Nukes |
By Robert Parry, consortiumnews.com
What can one say when the Washington Post’s neoconservative editorial writers more correctly describe the U.S. and Israeli assessments on Iran’s nuclear program than does a news story in the New York Times? In a Wednesday morning surprise, a Washington Post editorial got the nuances, more or less, right in stating: “U.S. and Israeli officials share an assessment that, though Iran is building up nuclear capability, it has not taken decisive steps toward building a bomb.”
You could still say the Post is hyping things a bit, skewing the wording in an anti-Iranian direction, but the sentence is essentially correct on where U.S. and Israeli intelligence judgments stand, that Iran has NOT made a decision to build a nuclear bomb.
But then there’s the New York Times. It continues to mislead its readers, albeit with a new weasel word inserted to avoid being accused of completely misstating the facts. In a news article on Wednesday, the Times reported that “the United States, Europe and Israel have all called [Iran’s nuclear] program a cover for Iranian efforts to develop nuclear weapons capability, an accusation that Iran denies.”
The key weasel word now is “capability,” which is a very elastic concept since any work on nuclear research for peaceful purposes, such as low-level enrichment of uranium, could theoretically be used toward a weapons “capability.” (The word also appeared in the Post editorial.) ...
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Posted by Blue1moon on Friday, February 17 @ 19:15:41 EST (190 reads)
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| War News: Bradley Manning to be arraigned at Fort Meade Feb. 23rd |
Court martial expected in early May.
By the Bradley Manning Support Network.
The US Army last week scheduled a formal arraignment hearing for PFC Bradley Manning, the accused WikiLeaks whistle-blower. The arraignment is scheduled for 1:00 PM EST, February 23, 2012 at Fort Meade, Maryland, just northeast of Washington DC. While the hearing itself is expected to be brief, PFC Manning is expected to be present, and the proceedings are open to the media and public. Washington DC area supporters of the Support Network are encouraged to attend the arraignment.
Bradley’s show trial will begin in earnest with this arraignment. This proceeding will set the dates for a series of hearings on pre-trial motions likely to occur in March and April. Finally, the arraignment will set the date for the full court-martial—which we currently expect to begin in early May. ...
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Posted by Blue1moon on Tuesday, February 14 @ 19:31:48 EST (179 reads)
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| War News: The Anti-Empire Report - January 2012 |
by William Blum, www.killinghope.org
Iraq. Began with big lies. Ending with big lies. Never forget.
"Most people don't understand what they have been part of here," said Command Sgt. Major Ron Kelley as he and other American troops prepared to leave Iraq in mid-December. "We have done a great thing as a nation. We freed a people and gave their country back to them."
"It is pretty exciting," said another young American soldier in Iraq. "We are going down in the history books, you might say." (Washington Post, December 18, 2011)
Ah yes, the history books, the multi-volume leather-bound set of "The Greatest Destructions of One Country by Another." The newest volume can relate, with numerous graphic photos, how the modern, educated, advanced nation of Iraq was reduced to a quasi failed state; how the Americans, beginning in 1991, bombed for 12 years, with one dubious excuse or another; then invaded, then occupied, overthrew the government, tortured without inhibition, killed wantonly, ... how the people of that unhappy land lost everything — their homes, their schools, their electricity, their clean water, their environment, their neighborhoods, their mosques, their archaeology, their jobs, their careers, their professionals, their state-run enterprises, their physical health, their mental health, their health care, their welfare state, their women's rights, their religious tolerance, their safety, their security, their children, their parents, their past, their present, their future, their lives ... More than half the population either dead, wounded, traumatized, in prison, internally displaced, or in foreign exile ... The air, soil, water, blood, and genes drenched with depleted uranium ... the most awful birth defects ... unexploded cluster bombs lying anywhere in wait for children to pick them up ... a river of blood running alongside the Euphrates and Tigris ... through a country that may never be put back together again. ...
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Posted by Blue1moon on Tuesday, January 03 @ 18:26:56 EST (251 reads)
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