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HOLLYWOOD AND THE CIA — Film historian Ed Rampell details Hollywood’s entangled relationship with the CIA and the Pentagon; HOUSES OF THE DEAD: Nancy Kurshan exposes the cruel human rights offenses taking place inside America’s vast gulag of Control Unit Prisons; BROTHERHOOD OF SUMMER: David Macaray charts the history of the most powerful union in the US: the Baseball Players Association; TAR SANDS COME TO AMERICA: Steve Horn explains how the Keystone Pipeline debates have diverted attention from Big Oil’s other plans to transport Alberta’s oil into the US. PLUS: Jeffrey St. Clair on CONSTITUTIONAL ENTROPY; Mike Whitney on HOW THE BANKS TARGETED BLACKS; Chris Floyd on THE RISE OF BRITAIN’S TEA PARTY; Kristin Kolb on THE NEEDLE AND THE DAMAGE DONE; Kim Nicolini on the FILMS OF WILLIAM FRIEDKIN; and Lee Ballinger on POETS VS. THE ONE PERCENT.
Archives by Tag 'Afghanistan'
In a New York Times (NYT) opinion piece, Jimmy Carter opens with: “The United States is abandoning its role as the global champion of human rights.”
I read these words and focus on the present tense of “is”. And I think: When was this country e...
The “global war on terror” started by President George W. Bush more than a decade ago has taken a new and more sinister turn. Now we know that Barack Obama, the current president, goes through the profiles of people he wants eliminated (...
The headline was alarming: “Almost half of New Vets seek Disability.” According to the May 28 Associated Press story, 45% of the 1.6 million veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are seeking some kind of compensation for war injuries, more than dou...
If we can forget, for a moment, the hundreds of thousands of Afghans and Iraqis who have been killed, and the suicide-a-day in 2012 for U.S. servicemen and women, let’s turn to one NATO ally – the UK.
This week, in the unlikely setting of a London room, off Pic...
“It’s drones, baby, drones.”
- (former) United States Secretary of Defence Robert Gates, March 2011.
Unmanned U.S. aircraft now routinely fly over Afghanistan, Pakis...
As the US and its allies ponder what to do about Syria, one suggestion advanced by the protagonists of armed intervention is to use unmanned drones to attack Syrian government targets. The proposal is a measure of the extraordinary success of the White House, CIA and Defe...
In the early days of the ‘War on Terror,’ US General Tommy Franks declared, “We don’t do body counts.” He was referring, of course, to the dead of Afghanistan. That the names of 9/11 victims have been appropriately written in stone, only makes it doubly striki...
I have no animosity towards people who supported and voted for President Obama. Well maybe a little, but only because I know your energy could have been put to better use. But if you vote, then given the options available, which is insanity or maybe slightly less insanity...
Kabul.
Once I did put my hood on, Omar motioned for me to push back some loose strands of hair still visible outside my hooded sweatshirt. Long-haired men, though a typical sight in some regions of Afghanistan, are apparently not very common in Kabul. Cove...
The storm washed through last Friday afternoon. All was still and, then, I looked out the balcony doors to see tree leaves wet and undulating. I was reminded of ocean waves. Wind rushed rain across the greenery with feverish lapping. “It’s symmetry,” I said ...
With respect to the Sudeten German problem my patience is now exhausted! I have made Mr Benes an offer, which contains nothing but the realization of what he himself assured us would be done. The decision is in his hands! Peace or war!
Adolf Hitler, Ber...
On the last day of summer, ten hours before fall …
… my grandfather took me out to the wall.”
Kabul.
When we arrived at the museum, two legless men wheeled themselves...
Here in Afghanistan, the United States is spending $2 billion dollars a week on war under the guise of improving Afghanistan. In Chicago at the NATO summit, Hillary Clinton, Madeline Albright and several influential female leaders came together and publicly claimed an Ame...
Nothing is more firmly burned into my mind than the images from hours upon hours spent counseling soldiers and listening to servicemen and servicewomen tell story after devastating story of their experiences over in the desert and how their lives are forever changed in co...
The Joint Force will be prepared to confront and defeat aggression anywhere in the world
- Leon Panetta, ‘Sustaining U.S. Global Leadership’, Jan 5, 2012
Empires huff and pu...
In the war fever being ramped up against Syria, there is broad public indignation over the massacre of more than 100 civilians in the town of Houla last weekend.
Would that the U.S. diplomatic corps and the commercial press were equally outraged over our own milita...
America today lives with a cultivated sense of victimhood. That is the legacy of 9/11. It fills us with anxieties. It warps our self-image. It distorts our foreign relations. It is self-perpetuating. Yet we need it. Too many benefit – politically or materially ...
Kabul.
One thing true we can say about war is that truth is its greatest casualty.
I am a volunteer teacher. Four years ago I responded to a call from then candidate Barack Obama for a new kind of soldier to wage peace, one without a uniform, withou...
Kabul.
Here in Kabul, Voices co-coordinator Buddy Bell and I are guests at the home of the Afghan Peace Volunteers, (APV), where we’ve gotten to know four young boys who are being tutored by the Volunteers in the afternoons, having “retired” from the...
John Kerry, back before he was a pompous windsurfing Senate apologist for American empire, back when he wore his hair long and was part of a movement of returned US military veterans speaking out against the continuation of the Vietnam War, famously asked the members of t...
We are ordinary Afghans wishing for peace, and we have eyes and ears and feelings of love and despair, so please read on.
The Washington Post, in reporting the recent signing of the “U.S. Afghan Enduring Strategic Partner...
“This is not a reflection of who we are or what we stand for.”
– Jeff Gearhart, Wall-Mart general counsel, on the firm’s Mexico bribery
[Torture] “is not the norm.”
– Mike Pannek, Abu Ghraib prison warden.
“T...
John Brennan, President Obama’s chief adviser on counter-terrorism, has again put on public display two unfortunate facts: (1) that the White House has no clue as to how to counter terrorism; and (2) (in Brennan’s words) “the unfortunate fact that to save many innoc...
The optics surrounding the Barack Obama administration’s “Enduring Strategic Partnership” agreement with Afghanistan and the Memorandums of Understanding accompanying it emphasise transition to Afghan responsibility and an end to U.S. war.
But the...
Lahore.
It’s been a decade when the US invaded Afghanistan with the world’s most modern and well-trained military force including troops of more than 40 countries equipped with latest weaponry. After spending a large span of ten years and billions of d...