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HOW MITT ROMNEY DODGED THE DRAFT — H. Bruce Franklin remembers Romney from his Stanford days and lays out exactly how he and his father ensured he would evade service in the war which, at Stanford, he was demonstrating for. Andrew Cockburn gives CounterPunchers a compelling investigation of the rise of automated warfare and of the Drones, their vast costs and constant failures. Wei Zhang assesses the social and health costs of China’s incredible GDP growth.
Archives by Tag 'NATO'
The scale of the ongoing tragedy visited on Libya by NATO and its allies is becoming horribly clearer with each passing day. Estimates of those killed so far vary, but 50,000 seems like a low estimate; indeed the British Ministry of Defence was boasting that the onslaught...
This past week the world watched while Chicago police and their allies militarized the city of Chicago as part of what was primarily a show of force. The only “terrorists” arrested in the entire operation were three men who had filmed police harassing them earlier i...
Paris
Since graveyard humor is a Serbian specialty, it seems appropriate that Serbs just played a little joke on everybody by electing a former undertaker as President.
In the May 20 runoff, affable former funeral home manager Tomislav Nikolic won s...
Do protests and marches accomplish anything? Should I go? These questions collided in my head. One friend advised against. Another said I should. My children phoned, “If you do, be careful.” I knew. I just knew. I knew I would be in Chicago.
I arriv...
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (better known as NATO) is in the news once again thanks to a NATO summit meeting in Chicago over the weekend of May 19-20 and to large public demonstrations in Chicago against this military pact.
NATO’s website defines the a...
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...
The old trope of the bomb-throwing anarchist is back in the news, with a round-up in Ohio on May 1 and the ...
Vijay Prashad’s new book, Arab Spring, Libyan Winter ...
On what is now the 17th day of our walk from Madison to Chicago, the
number 165 does not seem to encapsulate all the progress we have made.
We are 17 days and 165 miles away from the day I drove into Madison,
where news arrived that Air Force One had descended on p...
On May 14, 2012, Human Rights Watch released an important report, Unacknowledged Deaths: Civilian Casualties ...
Wondering why anyone would confront NATO’s summit in Chicago this month? A look at some of its more well-known crimes might spark some indignation.
Desecration of corpses, indiscriminate attacks, bombing of allied troops, torture of prisoners and unaccountable dr...
Tripoli, Lebanon
It would be an incautious stretch to suggest any sort of parity between Watergate and the unfolding Lutfallah II arms shipment-to-Syria drama, that each day brings more revelations. But some of what we are daily learning about the who, wha...
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...
On May 1, in a televised address from Afghanistan, President Obama said, “There will be difficult days ahead. The enormous sacrifices of our men and women are not over.”
That’s an understatement.
In fact the current US policy in the region demands of ...
The recent decision by the Taliban and one of its allies to withdraw from peace talks with Washington underlines the train wreck the U.S. is headed for in Afghanistan. Indeed, for an administration touted as sophisticated and intelligent, virtually every decision the Whit...
For several days the NATO war lords in Afghanistan have been heavily bombing the village of Mirbandao in the Helmand province of the south of Afghanistan. The Italian medical aid and anti war group called Emergency has a hospital for war casualties located in the Helmand ...
In 1876, at the so-called Battle of the Little Bighorn when U.S. Cavalry regiments attacked an Indian village along the Little Bighorn River in Wyoming, the first casualty was a ten-year old Lakota Sioux boy named Deeds. Unaware that U.S. troops were nearby planning an at...
The last twenty or so months have certainly been months of insurrection. This is perhaps no truer anywhere on earth than in the Middle East and northern Africa. Indeed, there is even a phrase describing this fact. That phrase is “the Arab Spring.” Exactly what...
Vetoed by the recent White House announcement that the 2012 G8 meetings had been moved to Camp David, the original and provocative idea of combining the G8 and the NATO summits in Chicago this May belonged to the city’s authoritarian, militaristic, and left-loathing cor...
After the end of World War II, a group of nations in the north Atlantic established NATO to impede Russian influence over the reconstruction of Europe. The result was that it facilitated the United States’ influence: according to a 2009 article by Georgetown professor D...
Ten days into the uprising in Benghazi, Libya, the United Nations’ Human Rights Council established the International Commission of Inquiry on Libya. The purpose of the Commission was to “investigate all alleged violations of international human rights law in Libya....
Nowhere in NATOland is public opposition to “humanitarian wars” more muted than in France. Only a few prominent voices were raised against last year’s assault on Libya. Today, the few who attempt to arouse opposition to Western military intervention ...
I remember during the “Libyan Revolution”; the tally of casualties resulting from Gaddafi’s crack down on protesters was being reported by the mainstream media with such a “dramatic” fervor that it hardly left the public with a moment to at least second-guess th...
Recent weeks have brought yet another sad chance to watch badly laid plans in Afghanistan go haywire. In three separate incidents, allies, most from the Afghan National Army (ANA), allegedly murdered ...
A sizeable minority has opposed the “government” – actually representatives of a crony corrupt elite – for decades, now. Members of that minority have been imprisoned in per capita numbers higher than Stalin’s Soviet Union or Mao’s China. The government sancti...